I picked one example; there are others. He had problems with feminists, for example, and with the people who fought for the civil liberties of the people whose religious and moral views he disagreed with. Civil liberties which he himself, as a white male, enjoyed but was unwilling to grant to other humans. I am not picking on "one very small thing" but rather on a major problem with the man's character and moral fabric. He was not merely saying things to "warn" people, he was attempting to change the politics of the country in favor of his fundamentalist religious views, to the detriment of people with other views.
I personally don't choose to respond to his death with comments like the one about Satan, but I think that if you believe those comments somehow cross a line that Falwell himself didn't cross many times, you're wrong. There's more to obscenity than simply dirty words.
I'm glad you didn't write "forgiving", because that would have been truly insulting. The whole problem with Falwell was that he was by no means a forgiving person - he wished to impose his own hateful sense of "morals" on others who didn't share them. A true Christian is more tolerant of the beliefs of others.
Jerry Falwell chose to attack people, such as gays and lesbians, who had done nothing to him, and whose sin in his eyes was their very existence. Those attacks were unprovoked, un-Christian acts of aggression, which had a very real impact on people's lives. Someone who claims to be a Christian who indulges in such attacks is a hypocrite at best.
You may disagree with my assessment of these facts, in which case you're perfectly free to accord Falwell as much respect as you want. I, however, believe that the world is a better place without such people.
So how do you handle extensions? You know, someone calls you, and you want to say, "Honey, pick up an extension." so you can talk together. Do you just 3-way the call?
If you RTFA, you'd notice that the headline on PhysOrg.com is "Cluster spacecraft makes a shocking discovery", and that they're making a pun on the term "bow shock". But hey, this is/., and you're just being typically dumb. Your best bet is to pretend that you were just trolling.
Are you defending what these teachers did? The fact that students are equipped to handle something doesn't mean that teachers should do it to them. Most humans can survive a lot, including rape and torture, but that doesn't mean we let teachers rape and torture students. The fact that people actually go through worse situations elsewhere in the world is irrelevant for the same reasons. The point here is that the teachers chose to inflict this on the students.
A lot depends on the facts of the case, however. But if I were involved with that school, as a parent or local taxpayer, and if it is true that some students believed that their lives were endangered by shooters who were deliberately trying to kill people (which is at odds with the somewhat suspect school board version of the story), then I would take any action necessary to ensure that all teachers directly involved were fired, since they would have demonstrated that they do not have sufficient understanding of their role as teachers to remain employed as such.
Then again, I don't live in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and this is part of the reason why.
Ask him about the purpose of the mesh in the protective coating, described in the article ("Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top.") That seems to be what caused all the concern.
If you RTFA (a lot to ask, I know) it seems that the contractors were concerned about the coating used to cover the poppy, which is "a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red colour from rubbing off." One contractor reported that "Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top."
It's presumably the wire-like mesh, only visible under a microscope, that "looked like nano-technology". Not the poppy at all. The comment that the coin appeared to be "filled with something man-made" may mean that the coating covers the entire face of the coin; I haven't seen one, perhaps someone familiar with the coins could comment.
So merely googling the coins wouldn't necessarily have explained anything, unless there's a description somewhere of the coating and the presence of a mesh.
So when did things change with Fedora? I used Red Hat on both workstations and servers since '98, as well as Fedora up to FC4, but dumped it all for Debian because I got tired of dealing with Fedora's limitations and problems, particularly with package management. I've found package management on Debian much smoother.
Re 64-bit, I've been running 64-bit Debian since early 2005, and it had been around for a while when I started using it - I'm guessing you're referring to it having been late to appear in stable, but up until recently (4.1) everything's late to appear in stable, which is a good thing for many server admins, including me. Fedora didn't have anything that even approximated stable when I was using it: it always seemed like you had to upgrade to the next version to fix problems, but the new version had its own problems, so it was never anything like as stable as Debian, especially for servers.
I don't think the grandparent said anything about "evil". He seemed to be talking more about inevitably increasing global competition. Rather than "payback", it might be better to think in terms of "karma", in the Buddhist sense (not the Slashdot sense).
Anyhow, the notion of "good" that you implicitly describe is a purely relative one. You're saying you did everything that your own culture expected of you, and excelled at it (compared to many others who fail in various ways). That doesn't insulate you from being accused of being "evil" by someone who doesn't share those values; for example, someone who is anti-military. Global media and the internet confuses things because suddenly you have people encountering views that they were never previously exposed to directly.
The bottom line is that you shouldn't take accusations of "evil" personally, or even seriously, unless (a) you agree with them, or (b) it's coming from people in your own culture who share your values. Even if you're interested in expanding your perspective and understanding how other people with different values think, it doesn't mean you have to accept their judgement of evil.
You have that backwards. Buy IBM stock now, sell when you think the bump has almost played out. Play your part in screwing with people's lives anonymously through capitalism.
When I need to get to Europe from New York, I take the subway to a special terminal that connects me to a train that shoots under the Atlantic at thousands of miles per hour in a vacuum.
That brings back memories: I saw a variation of this idea in an Encyclopaedia Britannica annual special edition book, which I think was from the late '70s. I just googled for it and found a description on this page:
Physicists told symposium attendees of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that trains consisting of 200 cars would rocket passengers across the country underground at speeds of up to 14,000mph. The "subway cars" would be large vacuum tubes and would ride a wave of magnetic fields in a manner similar to surfboards riding waves. The fare would be about $1 a minute (there would never be any delays) and one main line with two feeder lines was proposed - from New York to Los Angeles via Dallas, with feeder lines from Chicago and Cleveland. The trip from New York to Los Angeles was estimated at 54 minutes costing $54, running at about 6,000mph, such that people's weight would not increase at the higher speed.
There was only one stop in Dallas because the cars were supposed to accelerate continuously until they reached the point where they had to start braking for their next stop. If there were more stops, the trains couldn't have gone as fast without acceleration being uncomfortably high.
It would be kind of fun (for a while) to be able to commute from New York to LA...
But after having said all that: it still seems fair to ask why core infrastructure isn't better protected against ordinary accidents, much less sabotage.
No, it isn't fair. The Internet2 is an experimental network, and I'd certainly vote against spending money on sabotage-proofing it at this point.
It was not comforting to learn that the explosion of a single tanker could bring down one of the approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Life has infinite risks. It's impossible to guard against all of them. The cost of explosion-proofing all approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge to the necessary degree cannot be justified by the amortized cost of such an event. Not that hysterical voters might not approve such a thing anyway...
If a nuke took out the Longfellow Bridge, Internet2 users in Boston wouldn't be complaining about their network connection to NYC, or doing much of anything else. The internet is only designed to route around damage at larger-than-blast-radius scales, and the affected area was actually quite small by those standards.
You know what this means, then: homeless people, and other sources of minor disturbance, are actually a much greater threat to the stability of the Internet than previously realized.
Clearly, we need Homeland Security to round up all the homeless people (included that bearded guy who lives in an office at MIT) and ship them off to Guantanamo. Only then will the Internet be safe.
To spearhead this operation, we will need effective, competent, no-nonsense leadership, someone who has the necessary experience in cleaning up homeless people without provoking a political fuss. Luckily, the perfect candidate just happens to be available: vote Giuliani in '08!
Slashdot Mirror
I picked one example; there are others. He had problems with feminists, for example, and with the people who fought for the civil liberties of the people whose religious and moral views he disagreed with. Civil liberties which he himself, as a white male, enjoyed but was unwilling to grant to other humans. I am not picking on "one very small thing" but rather on a major problem with the man's character and moral fabric. He was not merely saying things to "warn" people, he was attempting to change the politics of the country in favor of his fundamentalist religious views, to the detriment of people with other views.
I personally don't choose to respond to his death with comments like the one about Satan, but I think that if you believe those comments somehow cross a line that Falwell himself didn't cross many times, you're wrong. There's more to obscenity than simply dirty words.
Jerry Falwell chose to attack people, such as gays and lesbians, who had done nothing to him, and whose sin in his eyes was their very existence. Those attacks were unprovoked, un-Christian acts of aggression, which had a very real impact on people's lives. Someone who claims to be a Christian who indulges in such attacks is a hypocrite at best.
You may disagree with my assessment of these facts, in which case you're perfectly free to accord Falwell as much respect as you want. I, however, believe that the world is a better place without such people.
You show respect to people who deserve respect. Jerry Falwell was not such a person. His death does not change that.
If you RTFA, you'd notice that the headline on PhysOrg.com is "Cluster spacecraft makes a shocking discovery", and that they're making a pun on the term "bow shock". But hey, this is /., and you're just being typically dumb. Your best bet is to pretend that you were just trolling.
Are you defending what these teachers did? The fact that students are equipped to handle something doesn't mean that teachers should do it to them. Most humans can survive a lot, including rape and torture, but that doesn't mean we let teachers rape and torture students. The fact that people actually go through worse situations elsewhere in the world is irrelevant for the same reasons. The point here is that the teachers chose to inflict this on the students.
A lot depends on the facts of the case, however. But if I were involved with that school, as a parent or local taxpayer, and if it is true that some students believed that their lives were endangered by shooters who were deliberately trying to kill people (which is at odds with the somewhat suspect school board version of the story), then I would take any action necessary to ensure that all teachers directly involved were fired, since they would have demonstrated that they do not have sufficient understanding of their role as teachers to remain employed as such.
Then again, I don't live in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and this is part of the reason why.
The other half of the story is that this happened in a place called Murfreesboro, Tennessee...
100 nodes by 2011? That's like, 25 whole nodes every year between now and then! How are they going to manage such a massive feat of engineering?
n/t
I really want to know where you guys get all this free beer. Where I live, beer costs money!
Ask him about the purpose of the mesh in the protective coating, described in the article ("Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top.") That seems to be what caused all the concern.
If you RTFA (a lot to ask, I know) it seems that the contractors were concerned about the coating used to cover the poppy, which is "a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red colour from rubbing off." One contractor reported that "Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top."
It's presumably the wire-like mesh, only visible under a microscope, that "looked like nano-technology". Not the poppy at all. The comment that the coin appeared to be "filled with something man-made" may mean that the coating covers the entire face of the coin; I haven't seen one, perhaps someone familiar with the coins could comment.
So merely googling the coins wouldn't necessarily have explained anything, unless there's a description somewhere of the coating and the presence of a mesh.
So when did things change with Fedora? I used Red Hat on both workstations and servers since '98, as well as Fedora up to FC4, but dumped it all for Debian because I got tired of dealing with Fedora's limitations and problems, particularly with package management. I've found package management on Debian much smoother.
Re 64-bit, I've been running 64-bit Debian since early 2005, and it had been around for a while when I started using it - I'm guessing you're referring to it having been late to appear in stable, but up until recently (4.1) everything's late to appear in stable, which is a good thing for many server admins, including me. Fedora didn't have anything that even approximated stable when I was using it: it always seemed like you had to upgrade to the next version to fix problems, but the new version had its own problems, so it was never anything like as stable as Debian, especially for servers.
I don't think the grandparent said anything about "evil". He seemed to be talking more about inevitably increasing global competition. Rather than "payback", it might be better to think in terms of "karma", in the Buddhist sense (not the Slashdot sense).
Anyhow, the notion of "good" that you implicitly describe is a purely relative one. You're saying you did everything that your own culture expected of you, and excelled at it (compared to many others who fail in various ways). That doesn't insulate you from being accused of being "evil" by someone who doesn't share those values; for example, someone who is anti-military. Global media and the internet confuses things because suddenly you have people encountering views that they were never previously exposed to directly.
The bottom line is that you shouldn't take accusations of "evil" personally, or even seriously, unless (a) you agree with them, or (b) it's coming from people in your own culture who share your values. Even if you're interested in expanding your perspective and understanding how other people with different values think, it doesn't mean you have to accept their judgement of evil.
Er, your "bounty" link is to an article from 1997 - the runup to the dotcom boom. Things have changed just a tad since then.
The site in your sig (http://c0d3h4x0r.spaces.live.com/) gives an "XML parsing error: syntax error" in Firefox 1.5, reported at line 3, Column 49.
You have that backwards. Buy IBM stock now, sell when you think the bump has almost played out. Play your part in screwing with people's lives anonymously through capitalism.
It would be kind of fun (for a while) to be able to commute from New York to LA...
Dude, the least you could have done was include a couple of search terms in that link!
...Congress is dying.
Yeah, except when it comes to disrupting cables, Neal Stephenson is the cable guy.
Clearly, we need Homeland Security to round up all the homeless people (included that bearded guy who lives in an office at MIT) and ship them off to Guantanamo. Only then will the Internet be safe.
To spearhead this operation, we will need effective, competent, no-nonsense leadership, someone who has the necessary experience in cleaning up homeless people without provoking a political fuss. Luckily, the perfect candidate just happens to be available: vote Giuliani in '08!