Oh, I agree to an extent - there's really nothing meaningful we can say with any certainty about how the universe came into being. OTOH, we have quite a bit of evidence about what happened right after the bit we can observe came into being, so any theories about it all need to try to explain the extant evidence.
So not every story we can come up with has equal likelihood, or deserves to be taken seriously. The flying spaghetti monster is designed to illustrate that point. In particular, stories made up back when human understanding of the universe was incredibly primitive don't seem like a very good source of information, except about primitive aspects of our minds which still, unfortunately, haunt us today.
BTW, a nice thought experiment is to contemplate the idea of nothing for a while. Philosophically, the "existence" of absolutely nothing is hardly more tricky than the existence of something. My Pratchettian response is that nothing sat around for a while, but found it increasingly difficult to stay nothing. So it decided to experiment with something, anything, and BAM! Trillions of years of pent-up nothingness was suddenly let loose, and nothing (sic) was going to stop it from having some fun, baby!!
I have. It's a book of stories written by ignorant and superstitious people who lived in a time when fantasies about an omnipotent father figure seemed plausible and even attractive, because no-one at the time knew any better. Not sure what excuse modern day followers of the book have... maybe "We've always done it that way" ??
I've never seen Gentoo being used in a business setting. I suspect that the characteristics which attract people to Gentoo don't lead to success in the business world. What's the ROI on that mythical extra performance?
I've seen plenty of Red Hat and to a lesser extent, Debian, used in businesses, on servers.
I don't see much Suse, but then I'm not in Europe. That may change with Novell's involvement now.
No Ubuntu, but then Ubuntu hasn't been focusing on servers.
If we have been using it that long, perhaps I have a valid DCMA copyright claim against National Lampoon?
You can't copyright the use of a phrase or term. You could trademark it, but trademarks are limited in scope, and large retail stores and amusement parks are different fields. Both could get registered trademarks on the same name, in theory. Finally, National Lampoon, as comedy, is protected by fair use. So all in all, your legal claims amount to naught, even if there were a law called the "DCMA".;)
Re:Not the problem OpenID is trying to solve
on
The Case for OpenID
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· Score: 1
Not sure what you have in mind about poems: most poems are pure content which can be marked up structurally and given almost any presentation. Some presentations will be prettier than others, and will also affect mood and so forth, but the fact remains that content, structure, and presentation have clear distinctions which can be easily drawn in such cases. In some cases, the poem's author may impose a particular presentation, but that's still a separately identifiable property of the poem.
When it comes to film or other really rich media then sure, the lines are not so sharp. But films aren't made with text markup! You can't cut and paste text from a film, you can't reformat it much for different browsers or display devices, etc. etc.
BTW, separating content from presentation doesn't mean that there's no connection between the two. Obviously, there's a connection, and that goes a long way towards explaining the naming issue you mention. However, the point is to allow things that can be separated, to be represented separately, to allow mixing and matching, and to help the computer in dealing with the material.
The biggest problem with the HTML/CSS world is that most of the people working with it don't have the necessary understanding to really do it right, so they rely on rules that someone else has handed down, which are then followed slavishly, often to the point of stupidity. Anyone capable of figuring this stuff out correctly themselves isn't going to stay in front-end web development for long, since there are greener pastures for someone like that.
I have to agree with the other responder to your message. When people talk about "web standards", they mean something quite specific, namely the stuff coming out of e.g. the W3C. That stuff tends to be very stable, and in fact based on what you've said, you ought to appreciate it, because it doesn't change all the time and it makes the job of cross-browser development easier.
OTOH, when you write "People adopt stuff like this as if it were a standard", you're not talking about "web standards". You're talking about what's cool or popular. So all your messages in this thread are essentially offtopic.
And whether you believe "web standards" is an oxymoron or not, doesn't affect the fact that an entire industry gets a great deal of value out of them. For now, you should probably just treat it as something which you'll understand better when you're a little older and wiser.
You probably meant "why Linux will never succeed on the desktop". It's worth keeping in mind that Linux succeeded commercially a long time ago. IBM isn't backing Linux for fun.
Whether Linux ever succeeds on the desktop doesn't really have much to do with indivduals like the one you responded to. It has much more to do with whether large companies ever find a reason to promote desktop Linux and support it properly. For example, Walmart tried to use Linux to reduce their PC unit cost. The chances of something like that succeeding on a large scale grow better every day.
Re:Not the problem OpenID is trying to solve
on
The Case for OpenID
·
· Score: 1
It's more useful to allow people to do things like make comments on many blogs (LJ, MySpace, DeadJournal, Blogger, whatever) using one blog account
And guess what, that's exactly what spammers want to be able to do. So by offering this apparent convenience, OpenID simplifies things for spammers and creates a problem which someone is going to have to address, soon.
You're confused. There's barely a web page left in the world that relies on Java - that was a late-90s marketing-driven fad that went nowhere, and has since been replaced by Flash, in the hearts and minds of marketing people. You're probably thinking of Javascript, which despite the name similarity has nothing to do with Java.
If you want to know why Java gets used in a lot of other places these days, ask yourself why nspluginviewer crashes so much. The answer is that it's written in C++ (and C), which are cantankerous obsolete languages whose main characteristic is that programs written in them crash. So while you're busy theorizing to yourself about Java, remember to curse to yourself about that crash-happy C shit.
There are four times more people living and working in New York City alone than in the entire nation of Kuwait. There are some reasons for laws to be different.
There's no "right" to cellphone communication. If someone disrupts the signal, you'd have to prove it's them, interfering with a regulated part of the radio spectrum. The dispute is then between them and the FCC, and has nothing to do with your rights.
You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics claim.
You may succeed in silencing one man. But a howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done.
Whether any of this bothers Putin is irrelevant, the point is how Litvinenko saw it.
As for KGB/FSB not hiring the mentally unbalanced, they only care about the mental state of their agents while they're employed by the FSB. Read a bit about Litvinenko's background (e.g. here or in this obituary), and a few things stand out: he was very angry about how he was ejected from the FSB, he spent 9 months in a "remand center" before being acquitted of his alleged crimes, and then went into exile in England. That kind of thing has a strong effect on anyone's mental state. He's been a vocal critic of the FSB and Putin since being in exile in England, and is notoriously paranoid. Of course, it's possible that the FSB has been harrassing him, but if you really think about it, wouldn't they either just kill him efficiently if they really cared, or forget about him?
One very plausible explanation of Litvinenko's behavior is that he was unwilling to let go of his previous lifestyle, and had a strong need to remain "important" and involved in the kind of work he had been forcibly ejected from, as well as a need to try to correct what he saw as injustices in his home country. The sheer mental pressure of his paranoia (justified or not) combined with a taste for the dramatic and a desire to be "proved right" could have led to him taking his own life in this way.
Try to put yourself in the position of someone who has fought his way to the top of Russia's secret service only to be ejected without honor and exiled from your own home country, left to fret in irrelevance in another country. Combine with that the concern that an agency notorious for its theatric brutality against its enemies might be after you. Litvinenko clearly was not the kind of person able to put such things out of his mind and move on. His previous lifestyle and treacherous bosses loomed large in his mind. By striking back, as he would have seen it (by his own statements), he would have been able to take a kind of control back from the fear that was ruling his life.
Then again, I could just be an FSB agent assigned to Slashdot to sow FUD. In which case, argue with me at your peril!;)
The solution is to try to teach people exactly what radiation is
Ha ha ha. This is where someone should reply with one of those forms which reads "your solutions won't work because... [x] It requires teaching people stuff".
Someone needs to read "The Dummies Guide to Political Correctness". The comment didn't apply to all people in a particular race, so it wasn't racist, it was an ethnic slur.
Ethnic slurs have a higher potential for comedic value than racism.
What's interesting about this is that it means that almost anyone could have committed the crime, not just people with close associations to governments with access to nuclear material. Even Litvinenko himself could have done it to embarrass Putin et al, if he were sufficiently mentally unbalanced, which isn't that far-fetched for an ex-KGB spy.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I agree to an extent - there's really nothing meaningful we can say with any certainty about how the universe came into being. OTOH, we have quite a bit of evidence about what happened right after the bit we can observe came into being, so any theories about it all need to try to explain the extant evidence.
So not every story we can come up with has equal likelihood, or deserves to be taken seriously. The flying spaghetti monster is designed to illustrate that point. In particular, stories made up back when human understanding of the universe was incredibly primitive don't seem like a very good source of information, except about primitive aspects of our minds which still, unfortunately, haunt us today.
BTW, a nice thought experiment is to contemplate the idea of nothing for a while. Philosophically, the "existence" of absolutely nothing is hardly more tricky than the existence of something. My Pratchettian response is that nothing sat around for a while, but found it increasingly difficult to stay nothing. So it decided to experiment with something, anything, and BAM! Trillions of years of pent-up nothingness was suddenly let loose, and nothing (sic) was going to stop it from having some fun, baby!!
Mmmm... moderator crack...
I've never seen Gentoo being used in a business setting. I suspect that the characteristics which attract people to Gentoo don't lead to success in the business world. What's the ROI on that mythical extra performance?
I've seen plenty of Red Hat and to a lesser extent, Debian, used in businesses, on servers.
I don't see much Suse, but then I'm not in Europe. That may change with Novell's involvement now.
No Ubuntu, but then Ubuntu hasn't been focusing on servers.
Oh, I spotted the humor alright. I guess lame attempts at ironic critique of humor are even harder to spot, though.
And they wonder why economists aren't the life of the party...
I was talking about blog spam, not email spam.
Not sure what you have in mind about poems: most poems are pure content which can be marked up structurally and given almost any presentation. Some presentations will be prettier than others, and will also affect mood and so forth, but the fact remains that content, structure, and presentation have clear distinctions which can be easily drawn in such cases. In some cases, the poem's author may impose a particular presentation, but that's still a separately identifiable property of the poem.
When it comes to film or other really rich media then sure, the lines are not so sharp. But films aren't made with text markup! You can't cut and paste text from a film, you can't reformat it much for different browsers or display devices, etc. etc.
BTW, separating content from presentation doesn't mean that there's no connection between the two. Obviously, there's a connection, and that goes a long way towards explaining the naming issue you mention. However, the point is to allow things that can be separated, to be represented separately, to allow mixing and matching, and to help the computer in dealing with the material.
The biggest problem with the HTML/CSS world is that most of the people working with it don't have the necessary understanding to really do it right, so they rely on rules that someone else has handed down, which are then followed slavishly, often to the point of stupidity. Anyone capable of figuring this stuff out correctly themselves isn't going to stay in front-end web development for long, since there are greener pastures for someone like that.
I have to agree with the other responder to your message. When people talk about "web standards", they mean something quite specific, namely the stuff coming out of e.g. the W3C. That stuff tends to be very stable, and in fact based on what you've said, you ought to appreciate it, because it doesn't change all the time and it makes the job of cross-browser development easier.
OTOH, when you write "People adopt stuff like this as if it were a standard", you're not talking about "web standards". You're talking about what's cool or popular. So all your messages in this thread are essentially offtopic.
And whether you believe "web standards" is an oxymoron or not, doesn't affect the fact that an entire industry gets a great deal of value out of them. For now, you should probably just treat it as something which you'll understand better when you're a little older and wiser.
You probably meant "why Linux will never succeed on the desktop". It's worth keeping in mind that Linux succeeded commercially a long time ago. IBM isn't backing Linux for fun.
Whether Linux ever succeeds on the desktop doesn't really have much to do with indivduals like the one you responded to. It has much more to do with whether large companies ever find a reason to promote desktop Linux and support it properly. For example, Walmart tried to use Linux to reduce their PC unit cost. The chances of something like that succeeding on a large scale grow better every day.
You're confused. There's barely a web page left in the world that relies on Java - that was a late-90s marketing-driven fad that went nowhere, and has since been replaced by Flash, in the hearts and minds of marketing people. You're probably thinking of Javascript, which despite the name similarity has nothing to do with Java.
If you want to know why Java gets used in a lot of other places these days, ask yourself why nspluginviewer crashes so much. The answer is that it's written in C++ (and C), which are cantankerous obsolete languages whose main characteristic is that programs written in them crash. So while you're busy theorizing to yourself about Java, remember to curse to yourself about that crash-happy C shit.
Boy, am I glad I've been wearing a tinfoil hat all this time!
There are four times more people living and working in New York City alone than in the entire nation of Kuwait. There are some reasons for laws to be different.
The same is true in civilized parts of the United States, so it's not actually necessary to move countries.
There's no "right" to cellphone communication. If someone disrupts the signal, you'd have to prove it's them, interfering with a regulated part of the radio spectrum. The dispute is then between them and the FCC, and has nothing to do with your rights.
Have you read about Litvinenko's final statement? Quote:
Whether any of this bothers Putin is irrelevant, the point is how Litvinenko saw it.
As for KGB/FSB not hiring the mentally unbalanced, they only care about the mental state of their agents while they're employed by the FSB. Read a bit about Litvinenko's background (e.g. here or in this obituary), and a few things stand out: he was very angry about how he was ejected from the FSB, he spent 9 months in a "remand center" before being acquitted of his alleged crimes, and then went into exile in England. That kind of thing has a strong effect on anyone's mental state. He's been a vocal critic of the FSB and Putin since being in exile in England, and is notoriously paranoid. Of course, it's possible that the FSB has been harrassing him, but if you really think about it, wouldn't they either just kill him efficiently if they really cared, or forget about him?
One very plausible explanation of Litvinenko's behavior is that he was unwilling to let go of his previous lifestyle, and had a strong need to remain "important" and involved in the kind of work he had been forcibly ejected from, as well as a need to try to correct what he saw as injustices in his home country. The sheer mental pressure of his paranoia (justified or not) combined with a taste for the dramatic and a desire to be "proved right" could have led to him taking his own life in this way.
Try to put yourself in the position of someone who has fought his way to the top of Russia's secret service only to be ejected without honor and exiled from your own home country, left to fret in irrelevance in another country. Combine with that the concern that an agency notorious for its theatric brutality against its enemies might be after you. Litvinenko clearly was not the kind of person able to put such things out of his mind and move on. His previous lifestyle and treacherous bosses loomed large in his mind. By striking back, as he would have seen it (by his own statements), he would have been able to take a kind of control back from the fear that was ruling his life.
Then again, I could just be an FSB agent assigned to Slashdot to sow FUD. In which case, argue with me at your peril! ;)
Someone needs to read "The Dummies Guide to Political Correctness". The comment didn't apply to all people in a particular race, so it wasn't racist, it was an ethnic slur.
Ethnic slurs have a higher potential for comedic value than racism.
What's interesting about this is that it means that almost anyone could have committed the crime, not just people with close associations to governments with access to nuclear material. Even Litvinenko himself could have done it to embarrass Putin et al, if he were sufficiently mentally unbalanced, which isn't that far-fetched for an ex-KGB spy.
Well, sure, as long as it's boiled[*] or fried in batter! (And w'out any of that funny-flavored rice or wasabi, mind you.)
[*] Me gran calls it "poached"