Tack on to this the extension to the copyright period for most works approaching 90 years...
Keep going. Where the author is a human rather than a corporation, it's life + 70 years. With the average lifespan increasing, it's not unreasonable to expect that a 20 year old author today would live to 110, in fact that's probably conservative. 110 - 20 + 70 = 160 years. Average age of first time mothers now is 30, so that's 5 generations away. So a kid born today will have great, great, great grand-children who will still not be able to freely copy a children's book written now, assuming the extension goes ahead.
Now Howard's daughter was recently married, so say she has a kid now. It will be Howard's great, great, great, great, great grand-children that will still be unable to freely copy that children's book written today.
Do you think that descendant child will give two shakes of a rat's arse what marginal free trade benefits we got a century and a half before he was born? Not bloody likely.
When legislators extend the term of copyright significantly past the death of the author, they are selling out a future that they won't even be living in. Does anybody think they even have the right to do that?
It has a lot to do with Bush, beacuse the American government sucks in large part due to him.
Of course - in the American system the president is the government, at least as we understand it. (In the Westminster system the term "government" refers to the executive. The judiciary and the legislature are part of the State, but not part of the government).
If we make it illegal to send someone an email without their express consent, then email might as well be dead.
This is the most idiotic argument against spam laws I have ever seen. There is not one single proposal that has ever sought to ban the sending of all email without express consent. There has always been something more involved. Usually the "more" is either that the email was sent in bulk, that it was sent for advertising purposes or that there was other fraudulent conduct.
In that case, they should have sued Monsanto for contaminating their seeds with unusable seeds.
The did sue Monsanto for contaminating the seeds. The cases were either separately filed or had been split by the Court because one was a federal issue and the other a provincial issue, so the same court couldn't hear both. The contamination case then had to be suspended because the Court wouldn't be able to figure out what the damages were without knowing the outcome of the federal case.
Now that the federal case has reached its ultimate conclusion, the provincial case dealing with the contamination starts up again. This is not the last we have heard of the legal wrangles between Schmeiser and Monsanto.
As the judgement said "appeal... allowed in part".
The Court ruled that yes, Schmeiser infringed the patent, but no, Monsanto couldn't get their account of profits because there were no profits attributable to the infringement. This is a win for Schmeiser, and is exactly what I would have expected. Monsanto got a symbolic victory only.
On the question of infringement, the Court was almost evenly divided, which fairly well reflects the nature of the legal issues involved.
As for the screwed-up state of the law, this is a matter for the Canadian Parliament.
It's easy to dismiss DCC as a flawed protocol. Sure it has its shortcomings, but remember, it was designed before the internet started to become firewalled to death.
It was also designed when Internet pipes were a lot thinner and far more overloaded than they are today. One major university in Sydney (UTS) had a 48kbit pipe for the entire campus. The network was also a lot less reliable - dropped packets were commonplace. When sending a file at full speed over this kind of network, you had a greater risk of timeouts in the network aborting the connection.
There was also the issue that back then the Internet was an entirely academic network, and a lot of the people running it did not approve of the IRC protocol.
The file transfer facility was also only a sideline. The primary purpose of IRC networks back then was <horror>chat</horror>. If you're sitting around chatting anyway you can afford to wait a while for your file transfer to complete.
When you're dealing with overloaded pipes, and trying to fly below the radar, and speed is not considered important, throttling your file transfer well below capacity by requiring and waiting for acknowledgements seems like a pretty good idea.
There was even a facility in IRCII where you could reduce the packet size if your connection was dodgy enough.
Also the way the protocol worked, it was a matter for implementers to decide whether the sender would wait for the acknowledgements at all. A sender could shove the entire file down the pipe if it wanted. The acknowledgement was in the form of the number of bytes the recipient had read. The recipient had no idea what the size of the packet was (and had no reason to care). If the sender transmitted without regard to acknowledgements, it looked no different to a file transfer where the packet size was the size of the file.
The protocol was designed for its day, but that was what, 1991? The net has changed so that perhaps some of the design decisions are no longer appropriate, but that doesn't make the protocol flawed - just out of date. Most of the other protocols have been updated since then too. RFC822 became RFC2822. RFC821 became RFC2821. I think FTP had resume capabilities added too. The IRC protocol itself seems to have been updated every other week. It's about bloody time the IRC client developers got together to update DCC as well, but that doesn't reflect on DCC's design at the time, merely on changing needs.
I also think the complaint that the original protocol was "not extensible" is amusing since their DCC2 protocol is precisely an extension to and compatible with the original DCC protocol.
when it said 'appropriately-sized for the 4" action figures' I took that to mean it was to scale.
Me too. I thought "damn, where would he fit that thing?". The listing mentions it has one of Darth Vader's chambers too, which means it must have been meant to be a Super Star Destroyer, which is 12.8km long. A 4" action figure is a 1:18 scale, so this would require the model to be 711m long, or about twice the length of the largest aircraft carrier in the world (costing $4.5billion).
Now that would be an impressive feat of modelling, but at a huge cost. I guess Billy G has a new project for when he retires. Or maybe he's waiting until his wealth grows to the $26trillion odd that would be required for a 1:1 scale model.
If "ice age" is used to refer to long, generally cool, intervals during which glaciers advance and retreat, we are still in one today. Our modern climate represents a very short, warm period between glacial advances.
The second sentence would seem to contradict the first. The first says we're in a cold period. The second says we're in a warm period.
However, as a number of people have pointed out, there's absolutely zero evidence that this is due to human activity.
It is entirely incorrect to say that there is zero evidence, that this is due to human activity. We know that human activity increases the proportions of certain gases in the atmosphere. We know that the properties of some of these gases give rise to a warming effect. We have mechanisms, reasonably believed to be reliable, which show that warming has increased more rapidly at the times when humans radically increased emissions of these gases. The first two show a rational link. The third is circumstantial, but circumstantial evidence is still evidence, and this is particularly compelling circumstantial evidence. There are other things, but such was the nature of your statement that I only needed to show one thing that constituted such evidence to prove your statement false - I have shown three.
These things clearly are evidence that human activity is affecting climate. Now you might give less weight to the evidence. You might think there is contrary evidence. But a position that there is zero evidence is not even arguable.
It could very well be natural...,
The word "could" is very appropriate here, since this is quite speculative, especially without identifying a natural cause. But even if this weren't mere speculation, even if it did turn out that warming was entirely due to natural causes, that wouldn't negate the status of these other things as evidence at the present time.
as was the case in human history for both the 'little ice age' and period of abnormal warming during the previous millennium which allowed the Norse to colonize the southern tip of Greenland.
Changes concentrating on northern Europe, which is affected by Atlantic ocean currents. These are special cases that have much to say about the local climate at the time, but little to say about the global climate. There are even theories, based on evidence suggesting that northern European climate runs against global cycles due to the way those currents operate.
Hell, it could just be due to a tiny increase in our sun's thermal output.
Once again, speculative. You need to make measurements, make calculations, and write it up.
Now if you were to argue that there is no conclusive proof you might have a more arguable position. Then again, I have no conclusive proof that you aren't a figment of my imagination. Arguing that there is no conclusive proof of something is easy except in the case of abstract mathematical and logical concepts, since aside from abstract mathematical and logical constructs there is always an observational issue that affects the probabilities in a negative way.
On the other hand, there is the question of what the decisions of nations should be based on. Now you might have a different view, but in my view the decisions of nations can only be based on conclusions reasonably inferred from all of the best available evidence at the time. Now different people can form different view about that. Even reasonable people can form different views about that. But it is evidence that has a role to play there, not speculation.
It seems to me that the balance of informed expert scientific opinion is that the most reasonable conclusion to draw from the best available evidence is that the climate is changing due to increased human activity. Based on my reviews of such argument and evidence, patchy as it may be since I cannot afford to devote as much time as would be necessary to make a comprehensive assessment, I would agree with the view represented by the balance of informed expert scientific opinion that the evidence better supports the conclusion that the climate is in fact changing due to human activity.
The most disturbing thing in your argument, however, is the unstated conclusion you would seem to want to draw that it is inappropriate to
Far better to investigate if the Senator (or his family) has any financial interest in, or has recieved any gifts from technology companies involved in the roll-out,
This isn't nearly the problem in Australia that it is in the US. US Senators are basically the property of one corporation or another. Australian ones are actually mostly susceptible to reasoned argument.
or whether or not the Senator has affiliations to fringe religious organisations,
Somebody else has already indicated that Harradine is a Roman Catholic. A cult, perhaps, but not a fringe one.
or what the Senators past behaviour has been in any way related the supression of human rights.
Harradine is nothing more nor less than a cantankerous old bugger who thinks all these teenagers with their long hair and rock music need to be given a traditional moral education and the occasional spanking, and perhaps made to undertake military service. Like any cantankerous old bugger, he's somewhat set in his ways and no longer capable of altering his views.
The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties is not a Senate committee - it is a "joint" committee, meaning it has members from both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Joint Committee's submissions period is over (finished on the 13th). Submissions made to that Committee now are unlikely to be considered at all.
There is also an ad-hoc Senate committee for the FTA. Its submissions period ends on the 30th. This is where you can make submissions now. Since it is the Senate that will ultimately decide whether the FTA requirements are implemented, that is where the submissions can have the greatest effect. The Joint Committee's report is most likely to be a rubber stamp.
The home desktop, especially if games are needed, will be the last niche conquered by Linux and it will take a very long time.
Actually, not as long as you might think. Running WINE off CVS you can run a lot of Windows games now without modification - the most surprising for me was Unreal Tournament, which ran out of the box. For others, there are native Linux engines. Doom and Quake, no problem, just apt-get install the appropriate package.
Between Wine and native versions,eight of the 17 games I was playing under Windows (9 of 18 if you count Nethack) are currently working for me under Windows. One is this -><- close, and about three of them are probably able to work but require some obscure configuration change I haven't taken the time to figure out yet.
When somebody fixes WINE for one game, typically a whole bunch of others will start working too, so progress can be rapid. I anticipate having almost all of my old Windows games work under WINE by this time next year. There's even work going on to get copy protection schemes (notably Safedisc) working (not bypassed, actually operational) under WINE.
The biggest difficulty with Linux gaming is that the games often require obscure settings to get them going, and it can be hard to figure out what those settings are. I haven't yet found a single web site that catalogs the games well and provides clear instructions on how to get them working. This applies to both Windows games running under WINE, and native ports.
You've really gone to some lengths to try to paint the posts as something other than pressure not to do the things. Among other things you seem to want to:
Subsitute what you think people really meant in place of what they actually say. I see no justification for doing this - especially when the expressions are available to express what you contend they meant to say. Even if they did mean to say the other thing, what they did say is what is seen, and it is this on which they will be judged. Indeed absent compelling contrary and specific evidence, it is the only thing on which they can be judged. It does no good, and is not justified, to label what they said as mere exaggeration or hyperbole unless the original speaker comes out and says something to indicate that this is the case. Especially when others must judge by what they see.
Reduce the coverage of the concept "religious dogmatism" in the field of software so that it covers no ground. Based on your description of some things that are not religious dogmatism I have substantial difficulty seeing what you might think is religious dogmatism.
Do both at once - if we are allowed, without additional evidence, to label a statement as hyperbole to bring it out of the domain of religion, then presumably there is no religious dogmatism that could not be excused by relabelling it as hyperbole.
Such gymnastics don't change the reality.
Also, might I ask what operating system you're using the GIMP on?
Linux for the past year or so, Windows before that.
Why is that totally unacceptable? If you won't accept possible alternatives, doesn't that make you as religiously pro-MDI as you say these people are against it? Can you say definitively that "Nothing but MDI will do" until you've actually tried the alternatives they're suggesting?
I have tried all the available alternatives. As for the others, the fact of the matter is that they're not quite the same in terms of what they allow you to do. It seems that each is a response to one specific feature you can get out of MDI rather than the set of features as a whole. Because each individual suggestion tends to deal with an individual potential benefit of MDI (and yes, there are such things) without dealing with the others, the individual suggestions are unable to be combined into a coherent whole offering the same set of benefits.
It remains true that for some people, undertaking some tasks, MDI is appropriate and useful. That doesn't mean it's useful for everybody and all tasks. By the same token the fact that some people can't relate to it or find it inconvenient doesn't automatically mean that it's difficult or inconvenient for everybody.
In any case, the religion comes into it when you go beyond saying, "this is what I prefer", and traverse into "this is what you should prefer, and if you don't, you're wrong," even if you add "and here's why." Inability to accept the validity (as opposed to mere existence) of a contrary preference is a hallmark of religion. Framing the bigotry in structured argument does not change its nature.
Take the title of this thread - selected by one of the anti-MDI crowd: MDI Not a Solution. Clearly for some it is for some people. Some people don't find any of the things that the anti-MDI crowd thinks are disadvantages to be a problem. The statement "MDI Not a Solution" is therefore wrong, although this is a frequent defect in statements expressed in absolute terms. Now you might like to infer that they did not mean what they said. But this is not the logical thing to do without some compelling evidence of a contrary intention.
The subject clearly demonstrates dogma. Let's look at the opinions regarding MDI in my original post:
the reality is, some people with experience with all four ways of doing this find MDI easier and more convenient.
I still find the lack of MDI on Linux annoying in the extreme, and the alternatives less tha
they're saying, "MDI isn't more useful for me." Saying otherwise is misinterpreting them.
I don't know what messages you were reading, but it obviously wasn't the ones I was. The posts were not saying "I won't implement this" - they were saying "don't implement this, because it's wrong", and "even if you implement this, it probably won't be added at all, so you'd better discuss it on the mailing list before you waste your time".
Well, since you lke MDI so much, perhaps you should write MDI interfaces to all your favorite applications. After all, it's very easy to totally restructure the GUI of a program to a different interface model.
I would, but I do have higher priority things to contribute to at the moment. You appear to have assumed I don't spend time contributing to free software. The assumption is poor. But I tend to contribute in areas where my particular specialist skills return the greatest reward for the community. These are usually things where there's only a handful of people with the right skill combinations.
That's not a religious argument. It's just and argument of practicality.
If you look at the arguments actually involved, you'll find that's not the case. Another poster helpfully linked to the GIMP project's discussion on this. Note comments 6, 11, 13, 15, 21, 26, and 28, which actually try to tell people not to implement it.
Yes, I think you and the other people who responded to my original message have adequately proved my point. (Yes, I know you said you use Windows and MDI, but you effectively take the same position as developers who refuse to provide an MDI option).
The fact remains that I (and others), find MDI convenient and useful, but open source developers almost universally feel they know "better" and refuse to provide it even as an option.
All the academic posturing and arguments in the world are meaningless when the reality is that some people find MDI a more convenient way to do certain tasks.
This is the problem with religious blindness. Telling people they have to (or must not) do things a particular way or accept things in a particular way because "we know it's better", when in fact it's really a matter of preference. I have a preference for MDI for some tasks. Image editing is one. Mail reading is another (I really miss Eudora for this reason alone - it's the only feature Eudora had that KMail doesn't that I care about).
At least one person tried to tell me that I don't even know what I want. Another tried telling me that "you can do this with...", but in reality it's not quite the same.
I am perfectly capable of deciding for myself what I want and what works for me.
I misread it as "Lawrence Lessig Elected to EFF Board of Directors". I let rip a cheer as I imagined the EFF having somebody among their board who is capable of rational discussion. Alas it was not to be.
I'm wondering what this adds to the FSF. Sure, Larry's a good fit, but I don't see that he's better value to the FSF on their board than he is off their board acting as a third party commentator. The FSF already has a capable lawyer on the board. If it was the availability of an additional opinion they needed, they could have just asked as necessary.
Of course Larry's probably not a good fit to the EFF board, for exactly the same reason as he would be a valuable addition to that board.
OSS is not about freedom, it's about capitalism in it's truest form.
Actually, OSS is almost smack bang in the middle of Marxism. It's just that not enough people from disciplines other than coding are on board yet to make it fully functional.
5) Religious blindness... Blatently wrong, at least for a significant population of the community. Quite of few recent articles soundly debunk this.
I agree with all points in the original article. I also agree with your indications of where the solution lies to (1)-(4). However I can't agree that there isn't a significant problem of religious blindness.
As just one example, take the issue of the MDI interface. Mentioning the lack of MDI as an issue on/. is likely to result in your karma being wacked with a chainsaw. But the reality is, some people with experience with all four ways of doing this find MDI easier and more convenient. Yet open source projects consistently refuse to add MDI as an option.
The four ways are, of course:
MDI
SDI, one desktop
SDI, multiple desktops used to segregate windows.
Tabs.
I for one have experience with all these approaches, yet I still find the lack of MDI on Linux annoying in the extreme, and the alternatives less than convenient. Especially in the Gimp. The lack of MDI there really shits me.
Unless you actually need it, in which case you need it and not many alternatives will do.
However most Ciscos are installed at site gateway (at the edges of the network, not hubs), because that's what the NSP said to use (or sold as a result of an agreement that's probably in breach of competition laws).
Also you are sadly mistaken if you think a general purpose OS and generic CPU have more routing or switching power then the ASICs in just about any specialized router.
Dollar for dollar, you're going to be getting better hardware performance from systems based on the generic stuff when you have the premium pricing that Cisco charges. As for operating system performance - that can be fixed.
Seriously, Cisco equipment is at least 3 to 8 times as expensive as the alternatives, and IOS is basically a proprietary operating system.
Give me a rack mounted Linux server with one PCI LAN card and an ethernet interface any day. A hundred times the flexibility, no vendor lock-in, a fraction of the price. More memory, more power.
Being a frog in the world's largest pot, you might not think so. But from outside your country, where we do not have a history of routine fingerprinting of people who are not even suspects in a crime, this is a major deal. If my wife wasn't American, there would be no way I would be going to the US at all now. As it is I'm not happy that she insists I accompany her on visits.
Most people don't realise the value of privacy until they have suffered some consequence of its violation. Your time for this will come.
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Keep going. Where the author is a human rather than a corporation, it's life + 70 years. With the average lifespan increasing, it's not unreasonable to expect that a 20 year old author today would live to 110, in fact that's probably conservative. 110 - 20 + 70 = 160 years. Average age of first time mothers now is 30, so that's 5 generations away. So a kid born today will have great, great, great grand-children who will still not be able to freely copy a children's book written now, assuming the extension goes ahead.
Now Howard's daughter was recently married, so say she has a kid now. It will be Howard's great, great, great, great, great grand-children that will still be unable to freely copy that children's book written today.
Do you think that descendant child will give two shakes of a rat's arse what marginal free trade benefits we got a century and a half before he was born? Not bloody likely.
When legislators extend the term of copyright significantly past the death of the author, they are selling out a future that they won't even be living in. Does anybody think they even have the right to do that?
Of course - in the American system the president is the government, at least as we understand it. (In the Westminster system the term "government" refers to the executive. The judiciary and the legislature are part of the State, but not part of the government).
This is the most idiotic argument against spam laws I have ever seen. There is not one single proposal that has ever sought to ban the sending of all email without express consent. There has always been something more involved. Usually the "more" is either that the email was sent in bulk, that it was sent for advertising purposes or that there was other fraudulent conduct.
The AC was right.
The did sue Monsanto for contaminating the seeds. The cases were either separately filed or had been split by the Court because one was a federal issue and the other a provincial issue, so the same court couldn't hear both. The contamination case then had to be suspended because the Court wouldn't be able to figure out what the damages were without knowing the outcome of the federal case.
Now that the federal case has reached its ultimate conclusion, the provincial case dealing with the contamination starts up again. This is not the last we have heard of the legal wrangles between Schmeiser and Monsanto.
The Court ruled that yes, Schmeiser infringed the patent, but no, Monsanto couldn't get their account of profits because there were no profits attributable to the infringement. This is a win for Schmeiser, and is exactly what I would have expected. Monsanto got a symbolic victory only.
On the question of infringement, the Court was almost evenly divided, which fairly well reflects the nature of the legal issues involved.
As for the screwed-up state of the law, this is a matter for the Canadian Parliament.
It was also designed when Internet pipes were a lot thinner and far more overloaded than they are today. One major university in Sydney (UTS) had a 48kbit pipe for the entire campus. The network was also a lot less reliable - dropped packets were commonplace. When sending a file at full speed over this kind of network, you had a greater risk of timeouts in the network aborting the connection.
There was also the issue that back then the Internet was an entirely academic network, and a lot of the people running it did not approve of the IRC protocol.
The file transfer facility was also only a sideline. The primary purpose of IRC networks back then was <horror>chat</horror>. If you're sitting around chatting anyway you can afford to wait a while for your file transfer to complete.
When you're dealing with overloaded pipes, and trying to fly below the radar, and speed is not considered important, throttling your file transfer well below capacity by requiring and waiting for acknowledgements seems like a pretty good idea.
There was even a facility in IRCII where you could reduce the packet size if your connection was dodgy enough.
Also the way the protocol worked, it was a matter for implementers to decide whether the sender would wait for the acknowledgements at all. A sender could shove the entire file down the pipe if it wanted. The acknowledgement was in the form of the number of bytes the recipient had read. The recipient had no idea what the size of the packet was (and had no reason to care). If the sender transmitted without regard to acknowledgements, it looked no different to a file transfer where the packet size was the size of the file.
The protocol was designed for its day, but that was what, 1991? The net has changed so that perhaps some of the design decisions are no longer appropriate, but that doesn't make the protocol flawed - just out of date. Most of the other protocols have been updated since then too. RFC822 became RFC2822. RFC821 became RFC2821. I think FTP had resume capabilities added too. The IRC protocol itself seems to have been updated every other week. It's about bloody time the IRC client developers got together to update DCC as well, but that doesn't reflect on DCC's design at the time, merely on changing needs.
I also think the complaint that the original protocol was "not extensible" is amusing since their DCC2 protocol is precisely an extension to and compatible with the original DCC protocol.
Me too. I thought "damn, where would he fit that thing?". The listing mentions it has one of Darth Vader's chambers too, which means it must have been meant to be a Super Star Destroyer, which is 12.8km long. A 4" action figure is a 1:18 scale, so this would require the model to be 711m long, or about twice the length of the largest aircraft carrier in the world (costing $4.5billion).
Now that would be an impressive feat of modelling, but at a huge cost. I guess Billy G has a new project for when he retires. Or maybe he's waiting until his wealth grows to the $26trillion odd that would be required for a 1:1 scale model.
The second sentence would seem to contradict the first. The first says we're in a cold period. The second says we're in a warm period.
The Old South certainly used to think so. Except of course when they had to sacrifice the lifestyle they gained from their exploitative conduct.
It is entirely incorrect to say that there is zero evidence, that this is due to human activity. We know that human activity increases the proportions of certain gases in the atmosphere. We know that the properties of some of these gases give rise to a warming effect. We have mechanisms, reasonably believed to be reliable, which show that warming has increased more rapidly at the times when humans radically increased emissions of these gases. The first two show a rational link. The third is circumstantial, but circumstantial evidence is still evidence, and this is particularly compelling circumstantial evidence. There are other things, but such was the nature of your statement that I only needed to show one thing that constituted such evidence to prove your statement false - I have shown three.
These things clearly are evidence that human activity is affecting climate. Now you might give less weight to the evidence. You might think there is contrary evidence. But a position that there is zero evidence is not even arguable.
It could very well be natural...,
The word "could" is very appropriate here, since this is quite speculative, especially without identifying a natural cause. But even if this weren't mere speculation, even if it did turn out that warming was entirely due to natural causes, that wouldn't negate the status of these other things as evidence at the present time.
as was the case in human history for both the 'little ice age' and period of abnormal warming during the previous millennium which allowed the Norse to colonize the southern tip of Greenland.
Changes concentrating on northern Europe, which is affected by Atlantic ocean currents. These are special cases that have much to say about the local climate at the time, but little to say about the global climate. There are even theories, based on evidence suggesting that northern European climate runs against global cycles due to the way those currents operate.
Hell, it could just be due to a tiny increase in our sun's thermal output.
Once again, speculative. You need to make measurements, make calculations, and write it up.
Now if you were to argue that there is no conclusive proof you might have a more arguable position. Then again, I have no conclusive proof that you aren't a figment of my imagination. Arguing that there is no conclusive proof of something is easy except in the case of abstract mathematical and logical concepts, since aside from abstract mathematical and logical constructs there is always an observational issue that affects the probabilities in a negative way.
On the other hand, there is the question of what the decisions of nations should be based on. Now you might have a different view, but in my view the decisions of nations can only be based on conclusions reasonably inferred from all of the best available evidence at the time. Now different people can form different view about that. Even reasonable people can form different views about that. But it is evidence that has a role to play there, not speculation.
It seems to me that the balance of informed expert scientific opinion is that the most reasonable conclusion to draw from the best available evidence is that the climate is changing due to increased human activity. Based on my reviews of such argument and evidence, patchy as it may be since I cannot afford to devote as much time as would be necessary to make a comprehensive assessment, I would agree with the view represented by the balance of informed expert scientific opinion that the evidence better supports the conclusion that the climate is in fact changing due to human activity.
The most disturbing thing in your argument, however, is the unstated conclusion you would seem to want to draw that it is inappropriate to
This isn't nearly the problem in Australia that it is in the US. US Senators are basically the property of one corporation or another. Australian ones are actually mostly susceptible to reasoned argument.
or whether or not the Senator has affiliations to fringe religious organisations,
Somebody else has already indicated that Harradine is a Roman Catholic. A cult, perhaps, but not a fringe one.
or what the Senators past behaviour has been in any way related the supression of human rights.
Harradine is nothing more nor less than a cantankerous old bugger who thinks all these teenagers with their long hair and rock music need to be given a traditional moral education and the occasional spanking, and perhaps made to undertake military service. Like any cantankerous old bugger, he's somewhat set in his ways and no longer capable of altering his views.
There is also an ad-hoc Senate committee for the FTA. Its submissions period ends on the 30th. This is where you can make submissions now. Since it is the Senate that will ultimately decide whether the FTA requirements are implemented, that is where the submissions can have the greatest effect. The Joint Committee's report is most likely to be a rubber stamp.
Actually, not as long as you might think. Running WINE off CVS you can run a lot of Windows games now without modification - the most surprising for me was Unreal Tournament, which ran out of the box. For others, there are native Linux engines. Doom and Quake, no problem, just apt-get install the appropriate package.
Between Wine and native versions,eight of the 17 games I was playing under Windows (9 of 18 if you count Nethack) are currently working for me under Windows. One is this -><- close, and about three of them are probably able to work but require some obscure configuration change I haven't taken the time to figure out yet.
When somebody fixes WINE for one game, typically a whole bunch of others will start working too, so progress can be rapid. I anticipate having almost all of my old Windows games work under WINE by this time next year. There's even work going on to get copy protection schemes (notably Safedisc) working (not bypassed, actually operational) under WINE.
The biggest difficulty with Linux gaming is that the games often require obscure settings to get them going, and it can be hard to figure out what those settings are. I haven't yet found a single web site that catalogs the games well and provides clear instructions on how to get them working. This applies to both Windows games running under WINE, and native ports.
Such gymnastics don't change the reality.
Also, might I ask what operating system you're using the GIMP on?
Linux for the past year or so, Windows before that.
Why is that totally unacceptable? If you won't accept possible alternatives, doesn't that make you as religiously pro-MDI as you say these people are against it? Can you say definitively that "Nothing but MDI will do" until you've actually tried the alternatives they're suggesting?
I have tried all the available alternatives. As for the others, the fact of the matter is that they're not quite the same in terms of what they allow you to do. It seems that each is a response to one specific feature you can get out of MDI rather than the set of features as a whole. Because each individual suggestion tends to deal with an individual potential benefit of MDI (and yes, there are such things) without dealing with the others, the individual suggestions are unable to be combined into a coherent whole offering the same set of benefits.
It remains true that for some people, undertaking some tasks, MDI is appropriate and useful. That doesn't mean it's useful for everybody and all tasks. By the same token the fact that some people can't relate to it or find it inconvenient doesn't automatically mean that it's difficult or inconvenient for everybody.
In any case, the religion comes into it when you go beyond saying, "this is what I prefer", and traverse into "this is what you should prefer, and if you don't, you're wrong," even if you add "and here's why." Inability to accept the validity (as opposed to mere existence) of a contrary preference is a hallmark of religion. Framing the bigotry in structured argument does not change its nature.
Take the title of this thread - selected by one of the anti-MDI crowd: MDI Not a Solution. Clearly for some it is for some people. Some people don't find any of the things that the anti-MDI crowd thinks are disadvantages to be a problem. The statement "MDI Not a Solution" is therefore wrong, although this is a frequent defect in statements expressed in absolute terms. Now you might like to infer that they did not mean what they said. But this is not the logical thing to do without some compelling evidence of a contrary intention.
The subject clearly demonstrates dogma. Let's look at the opinions regarding MDI in my original post:
the reality is, some people with experience with all four ways of doing this find MDI easier and more convenient.
I still find the lack of MDI on Linux annoying in the extreme, and the alternatives less tha
I don't know what messages you were reading, but it obviously wasn't the ones I was. The posts were not saying "I won't implement this" - they were saying "don't implement this, because it's wrong", and "even if you implement this, it probably won't be added at all, so you'd better discuss it on the mailing list before you waste your time".
That is a big part of the religious problem.
I would, but I do have higher priority things to contribute to at the moment. You appear to have assumed I don't spend time contributing to free software. The assumption is poor. But I tend to contribute in areas where my particular specialist skills return the greatest reward for the community. These are usually things where there's only a handful of people with the right skill combinations.
That's not a religious argument. It's just and argument of practicality.
If you look at the arguments actually involved, you'll find that's not the case. Another poster helpfully linked to the GIMP project's discussion on this. Note comments 6, 11, 13, 15, 21, 26, and 28, which actually try to tell people not to implement it.
Yes, I think you and the other people who responded to my original message have adequately proved my point. (Yes, I know you said you use Windows and MDI, but you effectively take the same position as developers who refuse to provide an MDI option).
The fact remains that I (and others), find MDI convenient and useful, but open source developers almost universally feel they know "better" and refuse to provide it even as an option.
All the academic posturing and arguments in the world are meaningless when the reality is that some people find MDI a more convenient way to do certain tasks.
This is the problem with religious blindness. Telling people they have to (or must not) do things a particular way or accept things in a particular way because "we know it's better", when in fact it's really a matter of preference. I have a preference for MDI for some tasks. Image editing is one. Mail reading is another (I really miss Eudora for this reason alone - it's the only feature Eudora had that KMail doesn't that I care about).
At least one person tried to tell me that I don't even know what I want. Another tried telling me that "you can do this with...", but in reality it's not quite the same.
I am perfectly capable of deciding for myself what I want and what works for me.
Then he needs to get off it, because he obviously hasn't done any good there.
I'm wondering what this adds to the FSF. Sure, Larry's a good fit, but I don't see that he's better value to the FSF on their board than he is off their board acting as a third party commentator. The FSF already has a capable lawyer on the board. If it was the availability of an additional opinion they needed, they could have just asked as necessary.
Of course Larry's probably not a good fit to the EFF board, for exactly the same reason as he would be a valuable addition to that board.
Actually, OSS is almost smack bang in the middle of Marxism. It's just that not enough people from disciplines other than coding are on board yet to make it fully functional.
I agree with all points in the original article. I also agree with your indications of where the solution lies to (1)-(4). However I can't agree that there isn't a significant problem of religious blindness.
As just one example, take the issue of the MDI interface. Mentioning the lack of MDI as an issue on /. is likely to result in your karma being wacked with a chainsaw. But the reality is, some people with experience with all four ways of doing this find MDI easier and more convenient. Yet open source projects consistently refuse to add MDI as an option.
The four ways are, of course:
I for one have experience with all these approaches, yet I still find the lack of MDI on Linux annoying in the extreme, and the alternatives less than convenient. Especially in the Gimp. The lack of MDI there really shits me.
However most Ciscos are installed at site gateway (at the edges of the network, not hubs), because that's what the NSP said to use (or sold as a result of an agreement that's probably in breach of competition laws).
Also you are sadly mistaken if you think a general purpose OS and generic CPU have more routing or switching power then the ASICs in just about any specialized router.
Dollar for dollar, you're going to be getting better hardware performance from systems based on the generic stuff when you have the premium pricing that Cisco charges. As for operating system performance - that can be fixed.
All the more reason not to use Cisco.
Seriously, Cisco equipment is at least 3 to 8 times as expensive as the alternatives, and IOS is basically a proprietary operating system.
Give me a rack mounted Linux server with one PCI LAN card and an ethernet interface any day. A hundred times the flexibility, no vendor lock-in, a fraction of the price. More memory, more power.
There's really no excuse for using Cisco anymore.
Enforcing this rule for the ".us" domain name is to be required as part of the proposed US-Australia Free Trade Agrement - Chapter 17, Article 17.3
Being a frog in the world's largest pot, you might not think so. But from outside your country, where we do not have a history of routine fingerprinting of people who are not even suspects in a crime, this is a major deal. If my wife wasn't American, there would be no way I would be going to the US at all now. As it is I'm not happy that she insists I accompany her on visits.
Most people don't realise the value of privacy until they have suffered some consequence of its violation. Your time for this will come.