It's always possible that "Intellegent Design" doesn't fit with Mormon theology. As a Mormon I can't possibly support this particular ideology of intelligent design, other than the title. Mormons do not believe in an ex-nihilo creation, but rather a more newtonic creation where matter was organized by God. In this framework, (despite what many orthodox Mormons think), there is plenty of room for scientific explainations for how this may have occurred, including evolution. I can say with certainty that the Mormon church does not have a position on evolution itself. The only thing that is taught is simply that there is a relationship between God in heaven and men and women on earth who are his children. That's a pretty broad statement and certainly doesn't have anything to say about how God might have created things, even, say Adam and Eve. So if a Mormon tells you his church doesn't believe in evolution, he's misinformed. This doesn't imply that evolution is taught by the church as doctrine though.
I don't believe this bill dying has anything to do with Evangelicals either, given the fact that Mormons and Evangelicals have a very different undertanding of how things came into existance. It *does* have a lot to do with separation of church and state and not just because of uncomfortable folks who aren't of the LDS (Mormon) faith either. Most LDS people who are involved with politics are very concerned about this and would be just as uncomfortable about a bill pushing some Mormon commandment as a law (unless such a commandment happens to also be a "natural" law, such as murder) as any secular humanist or what have you.
As a Mormon (who also lives in Utah), I would have to say that the overriding principle that is most significant to the LDS faith is the idea of individual freedom to choose how to act and believe, and taking responsibility for such things. I think teaching the scientific method and how to be analytical, and then being taught the current scientific ideas and trends is important to be taught in school. After that you can believe what you want.
So if I was a Canadian living in Canada, and am forced to pay this tax, then copying music cds for personal use should be perfectly legitimate, since I've already payed for the music with each blank disk. That's always the problem with this kind of tax. It is implicit acknowledgement and condonement of the behavior that the tax was intended to curb. Especially in this case where the tax is largely going to a non-governmental body. So if the canadian music industry association tries to bring civil suits against end users for supposed piracy, I hope the courts would recognize this. So maybe Canadians should welcome this tax as it opens the way to legalized music sharing. Of course that is just a pipe dream.
As the article mentioned, Swing is a very good, advanced toolkit with some advantages over SWT. A project called SwingWT is an implementation of Swing using SWT, giving you a much faster GUI that looks and feels more native. So you can do all your development and initial testing with pure Swing, then swich the UI classes to SwingWT for a native look and feel on the hosts that support SWT. Seems like an interesting idea to me.
If they are going to ban wi-fi for health concerns they need to ban cell phones. I think an average student who has a phone glued to his or her ear (as is the case on most campuses in America) gets exposed to quite a bit more microwaves than wi-fi. Most good-sized campuses probably even have cell phone towers on-campus or right next to campus to handle the load.
Seeing as AIGLX has the support of NVidia, I think in the long run the AIGLX method is the better way to go. No sense requiring yet another server and driver architecture. I think that Smirl was right: Xgl is more of a short-term stop-gap solution, rather than a long-term architecture solution.
Not only does it make the desktop easier on the eyes, these rendering enhancements also increase usability, and allow for all sorts of new UI enhancements. Just being able to drag a window without causing a bunch of redraws is long overdue. The ability to do nice transparent, on-screen displays to show a variety of types of information will open up a lot of possibilities. Even shadows, as eye candy as they are, help the eye distinguish between windows in a very simple way. Things like live thumbnails (in a pager) are also big advancements for the linux desktop. So yes. It's so much more than just eye candy.
I'm sure years ago when twm was in vogue, other window managers that drew nicer-looking borders around the apps were considered just eye candy and of little use. But how many of us would really love to use twm on a daily basis (well maybe if it was freedesktop-compliant!).
Just because in your mind (and in many other people's minds) Rumsfeld has been discredited (hey I don't like him either), making a broad, sweeping generalization is a little foolish.
Its also the birthplace of jewish extremism and christian extremism. So what? The Horn of Africa was the birthplace of christian and jewish extremism? That'a new one. I think you've misread my statement.
By breaking my statements down sentence by sentence instead of paragraph by paragraph, you are taking them out of context. For example my statement about how America has lost the moral high-ground. I was asking it in a much greater sence. Ask any jihadi what America is guilty of and they will mention far more than just the terrible things perpetrated in Iraq. They point to our decadent society, our dishonesty in everyday life, the sex and violence we promote in media and entertainment. They point at the cartoons. All of these things are what they are claiming war against. Iraq is merely an excuse; a focal point.
If you're going to argue my points, please argue against them in context.
Jihad has everything to do with Iraq. The same forces (IE extremism) that caused 9/11 are now working in Iraq, thanks to America. Had America not entered Iraq these forces would have continued to work in the other countries. Among the goals of these groups include the goal of destroying whole countries and trying to establish islamic law. Along the way, hundreds of thousands if not millions have perished in other countries. If you don't believe me, read up on what really happened in Somalia and the Horn of Africa during the 1990s. Even to this day these same groups (of which Bin Laden played a huge role in the 90s) still wreak their havoc on civillian populations in Sudan. Frankly the insurgents in Iraq are pretty tame by comparison. However they've already demonstrated their brutality and they don't hesitate to kill fellow muslims.
America's merely being in Iraq brought these already existant forces in Arab society to action. True Iraq didn't have many extremists (well except for the Sunnis) before the fall of Saddam. But Saddam's regime left a very fertile ground for the seeds of extremism which poured into the country. An amazing piece of investigative reporting can be found in today's NY Times Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/iraq.ht ml?8hpib
There have been atrocities committed by the Americans (just in the interest of disclosure I am a US citizen living in the US). These people must be punished. Looking at the entire region, and from first-hand accounts out of Iraq during the first year in Iraq, the attrocities and bloodshed committed by insurgents and islamic facist jihadi from Africa to the middle east, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the Saddam regime, the scale of these things committed by muslims against muslims and other people is pretty mind-bobbling.
A fascinating look at the whole situation came out in 1998 in a book called "Bin Laden: The man who declared war on America." Even if only a fraction of the book can be substantiated now, years after the fact, it is pretty sobering.
Sorry to break it to you, but Jihad started long before America was involved with either Afghanistan or Iraq. And if you think a hasty withdrawal from even the entire region will end all the problems you have your head in the sand my friend. Surely the cartoon row made that clear.
You're very first comment about "WARNING: This never happens" has discredited pretty much everything you had to say. As did your comment "you hide it well."
I definitely meant to imply that "talk to them" means also show them. But from the outset their propaganda machine has spun everything we have ever done as being evil. How are you going to counter that?
I agree completely that our policies have really accelerated a problem that was already increasing. I'd rather bring this issue to a head now than wait another 10 years for another 9/11. If you believe that we caused it in its entirety then it is you who has fallen victim to their propaganda (which is okay; I've already established that propaganda itself isn't good or bad). I also agree that much of these problems come from oil. Except that it's not western greed of oil itself that is causing the problem; oil merely makes it much worse. If the middle east had no oil, there'd still be problems with islamic facism, terrorism, and extremism. It's just that it would never have left the region because they'd essentially merely be another eastern-horn-Africa (which, but the way, is the birthplace of Islamic extremism). And certainly leaving the middle east to implode on itself would be a viable option if it wasn't for the oil.
Has America lost the moral highground? Maybe. In what sense? In the sense of something being right and something being wrong? If so, then what position do you want us to take? If we have lost the moral high-ground, how do we get it back? Just withdraw from Iraq? In that case there's still the issue of our evil capitalist system (money, sex, power). This disparity will still cause problems.
So the issues are not as easy as you want them to be.
After reading the headline I immediately had the thought 1984 pass through my mind. Slashdot is good at promoting that kind of thought. Then I went and read the article. And you know what? Rumsfeld is right. In many respects we in the west are losing the war of ideas with facist islam. I think it is very cynical and one-sided to call what Rumsfeld is talking about "propaganda" while conveniently neglecting to recognize that these islamofacists such as Al Qeada and similar groups in Iraq are already recognizing the tremendous power of propaganda and are using it on us. Do we recognize this? If we truly value our western society, free and open as it is, patriot act notwithstanding, then we should be very alarmed that somehow more and more people are becoming convinced of these other points of view that directly threaten our very way of life. If anything the cartoon stuff should illustrate that clearly. While I think the cartoons were in very poor taste, the fact that a few radical imams and clerics have managed to stir up a couple hundred million people over a simple drawing should be setting off some huge warning bells in our minds.
So how do we convince others that our way is better? We're going to have to talk to them. And that is the very definition of propaganda. Even Slashdot is really propaganda. It's not a bad thing; it's just the free expression of ideas with the intent to convince others of these ideas' legitimacy (trolls and OS religious zealots notwithstanding). I'm surprised that people on slashdot would bash Rumsfeld for saying these things since ensuring a free expression of all ideas is supported by almost all slashdotters!
So For those that don't care to read the article, Rumsfeld is merely saying that these people, who have sworn to destroy the west if they can, are using propaganda much more effectively than we are. We need to be better arguers (hint to all americans: western-style logic does not apply to the Middle East), and come up with better ways to help people see that having a totalitarian, facist, Islamic state is *not* going to bring about any benefit to them in terms of people or religion.
While I have huge problems with our current administration, I do understand the Middle East, and I recognize that some things have to be done. I greatly fear what will happen as these aberations of Islam continue to spread. As we can see from the Denmark fiasco, it's not just America that is being targeted. Islam is at a cross-roads. Maybe we can influence the cooler Islamic heads to bring back the original, peaceful meaning of Islam. That is what Rumsfeld is talking about.
Am I the only one who finds OS X's user interface to be just as inconsistant as any other current Linux desktop UI? Here's a number of my pet-peeves that seriously affect my efficiency in OS X:
Inconsistant PageUp/PageDown use. Some programs move the cursor, some just move the screen. Very annoying when only the page moves. Now if all aps standardized even on the annoying behavior at least we'd be consistant.
Home/End keys. If you understand the logic, it's not bad. Command-left_arrow and command-right_arrow do the trick. But if you go in and change your OS X keybindings to restore normal windows/linux home/end behavior, you only get very spotty coverage with some apps honoring the keybindings, some not.
Click to focus a window absorbs that click. But not always. Depends on the app. Really slows you down if you use dual-monitors and have lots of windows spread between them.
Scroll wheel can only affect a focused windows. This means you can't have your browser slightly underneath your program editor and scroll up and down through API docs without clicking away from the editor window. This one is pretty close to being a show-stopper for me. Combined with the previous problem with the focus these leads to some serious impedence of work. In essence the UI fails in this aspect because it doesn't get out of the way and let you work. Instead it is in your face.
So I just laugh whenever people talk about one UI (be it Windows or Gnome or KDE or OS X) being so much more consistant and usable than any other UI.
To each his own. I love Gnome as well as OS X's interface. The two desktops share some similarities and characteristics. Both just get out of the way and let me work. KDE seems to be much more in my face.
So. to summarise: KDE sucks compared to Gnome if you really want a desktop that will just bugger off into the background and not wrestle with you.
Remember when Corel "ported" Wordperfect to Linux? They used wine and it was a miserable failure. However Corel's attempt failed where google might succeed as maybe google won't make the same mistakes.
Corel forked wine to add some custom features they needed that head wine didn't have (fonts and printing, for example). This fork proved their undoing. It was never synced back to the head branch and soon died, orphaning their version of wine. Further glibc advances broke wine with every release, effectively preventing corel's wine from running on anything newer than RH 7.
As long as google doesn't do the same thing, we'll probably be okay.
C++/CLI seems to be a (standardized) proprietary extension to the C++ language that allows it to interface well with the rest of the.Net architecture. It's not a huge departure from the core language by any means, at least not enough of one to require a complete name change.
Actually if you use any of the more powerful aspects of C++ you'll know that no, C++.net is *not* C++. For instance, as far as I know, C++.net only supports single inheritance whereas C++ supports multiple inheritance.
The biggest problem, though, is the inclusion of the garbage collector. Because of this there is the introduced semantic of "finalizing" an object which is very different from the default C++ behavior. Many C++ programmers rely on what is called "guaranteed destruction semantics." What this means is that the moment an object goes out of scope or is deleted with the delete operator, we are guaranteed that the destructor is called and the object is destroyed. In C++.net, the object may or may not be destroyed when you think it is. This seems like a minor thing, but in reality it can be quite major. This introduces subtle changes in a program's behavior. Sure these things can be programmed around in C++.net, but that is just one more evidence that C++.net is *not* C++.
Now it is possible that all of these issues have been addressed. If so, then C++.net is just a C++ compiler that targets the MS virtual machine. But this didn't appear to be the case when I last examined the issue. If this remains unsolved, I can only imagine the chaos that would ensue when clueless end-users (programmers) try to build some hunk of C++ code written by a professional C++ developer and have it compile, but behave incorrectly. Definitely not a desired situation for C++ developers of code that is to be used by others.
Imagine GPL Java under committeee control. Then one day, not to far distant, some member decides to fork the GPL Java because he/she has some other idea. Before long, there are 18 types of Java than are not all multi-platform and can't run the same code. Kind of defeats the purpose doesn't it
You mean like how there are so many incompatible versions of the linux kernel and so many incompatible versions of the Mono.NET environment? I don't think you'd have to worry much. It is in the entire Java community's best interests to keep things together, so I doubt you'd see major splitting. There are many reasons to not license Java under the GPL, but this is one of the least of them.
Actually OpenVPN does require the tun/tap interface, which is supplied by another opensource driver that creates a virtual device. So it very much will be affected.
The problem is that most users that will be affected by BS's actions aren't necessarily direct customers of BS. They may be Qwest, or Comcast users. Since BS runs some major backbone connections, these users will have traffic running across BS's connection to google and thus will still be affected. Even still, BS is still being paid on the consumer side. BS sells bandwidth to the downstream ISPs. So hitting, say, google for extortion money is still just padding their income both ways.
Actually if you read the article, you'll find that it would be impossible for wine to have this exact problem that he describes unless wine developers knew the secret key that triggered this behavior. It's not just a matter of a callback. It's a special trigger that instead of performing a callback, starts executing arbitrary code, not just calling some callback routine that is a script. I think he's talking about binary code execution. Wine definitely is not vulnerable in this way, the other WMF problem notwithstanding.
But that's not important anyway. I think Mono is just another framework that can be used to develope slick apps on Linux. Having compatibility with apps written for.NET is just a fringe benefit. As we all know, MS is apt to change apis and break mono's compatibility on a whim. Even when they do, though, Mono is still incredibly useful to the Linux community.
I think that Mono, Java, Python, Perl, C, and C++ will all be very useful languages and environments, all deeply integrated with GTK, Gnome, QT, KDE, etc, bringing us many useful apps. I'm not opposed to these bytecode languages and runtimes, and also interpreted scripting languages such as Python making C and C++ less and less relevant for pure application development. At some point I can see objects running in very dissimilar runtime environments instantiating and calling other objects. Right now one of the coolest features of Mono is the inclusion of IKVM, allowing Java apps to run in the.NET runtime and transparently call into both Java JAR libraries and Mono libraries.
So in short, I don't care in the least about being able to run MS.NET binaries on linux. However running cool apps like beagle I do care very much about.
I think when most people say Linux runs on anything, they don't mean Fedora Core, or any particular distro. Microsoft's tests are flawed because they assume we mean that Fedora Core 4, or Ubuntu with a nice full GUI desktop setup will run on anything. When I think about Linux running on anything I think about Linux running on my Linksys WRT54GS router, or Linux running on cell phones. We're talking the full linux kernel, with a stripped down environment. I doubt Windows XP (even without the GUI) would run on a cell phone. The XP-embedded kernel might, but not the normal kernel. Linux's strengths lie in it's modularity; the kernel can be stripped down and run in minimal environments, all using the exact same code base, with the same kernel APIs used everywhere.
So it seems that Microsoft is deliberately confusing the issues here. A modern Gnome or KDE desktop on Linux no better or worse than Windows XP on 10 year old hardware with a full GUI desktop. But can Windows XP run on a 20-year-old 386 at all? Linux can. And while a Gnome desktop might now, X11 with a GUI of some kind certainly can. That's what we mean when we say linux can run on older hardware. Furthermore, much about Linux that enables compatibility stretching back 30 years doesn't really have anything to do with Linux itself either. For example, I can connect a Gnome desktop remotely to a 30-year old Unix mainframe and run X11 programs completely seamlessly. I could even fire up a 20-year old unix workstation running X11 and connect to a brand-new gnome desktop running on FC4 somewhere and expect it to work at least.
Further, Linux seems to be able to adapt much quicker to new platforms than Microsoft. The 32-bit to 64-bit jump was made years ago with Linux, with no major kernel API changes. Compare this to Windows which has Win16, Win32, and now Win64, with major changes in between, requiring some interesting hacks to preserve backwards compatibility. Linux, thanks to its Unix heritage, has always thought about things like making x-bit clean (where x is 32, 64, or whatever) and dealing with things like endianness. Linux isn't perfect; if there are issues with moving between 32 and 64 bits, or moving between little and big endian, they are bugs that need to be fixed. Microsoft has never expended much effort to think about such issues, as near as I can tell, since they thrive on the Wintel monopoly. Getting Windows endian-clean, for example, just isn't a priority.
Most europeans won't ever have this kind of problem with privacy and information selling. In Europe you can just go to the kiosk, buy a sim chip, buy some prepaid sim minutes, all without ID or a credit card. Use the phone for a few days, then toss the sim chip and put in a new one if you're paranoid. Thanks to our greedy, monopolistic telecom corporations over here, you get locked into 2-year contracts and have to give the company all kinds of private information upon sign-up including social security number.
Even more of a non-starter is the lack of support for nvidia's video chipsets. This means no power management. No sleep, no screen dim. My PB 12" will be sticking with Panther for now.
Yup that would alter the environment too. In this case you're adding massive amounts of the energy to the Earth's natural systems from an outside source that wouldn't have been inserted into the system normally (ie you're taking energy that wouldn't have hit the earth and transferring it there). Although you may be thinking that this is pure electrical energy and has nothing to do with the environment, energy cannot be destroyed or created but only transferred. This electrical energy is disappated into the Earth's natural systems in the form of heat and even in (minute) changes to the Earth's orbital, rotational, and geothermal energy. To say nothing of the greater environmental energy systems at work beyond our earth.
Basic physics dictates that no matter what we do energy-wise, it will affect the Earth. It's a matter of what changes we consider appropriate.
No, even photovoltaic solar panels aren't passive. They prevent energy that would reaching the ground from doing so, altering the energy balance there. In short there is no form of energy that we can extract from nature that doesn't alter in some way (large or small) the natural energy flows and balance in nature.
Slashdot Mirror
It's always possible that "Intellegent Design" doesn't fit with Mormon theology. As a Mormon I can't possibly support this particular ideology of intelligent design, other than the title. Mormons do not believe in an ex-nihilo creation, but rather a more newtonic creation where matter was organized by God. In this framework, (despite what many orthodox Mormons think), there is plenty of room for scientific explainations for how this may have occurred, including evolution. I can say with certainty that the Mormon church does not have a position on evolution itself. The only thing that is taught is simply that there is a relationship between God in heaven and men and women on earth who are his children. That's a pretty broad statement and certainly doesn't have anything to say about how God might have created things, even, say Adam and Eve. So if a Mormon tells you his church doesn't believe in evolution, he's misinformed. This doesn't imply that evolution is taught by the church as doctrine though.
I don't believe this bill dying has anything to do with Evangelicals either, given the fact that Mormons and Evangelicals have a very different undertanding of how things came into existance. It *does* have a lot to do with separation of church and state and not just because of uncomfortable folks who aren't of the LDS (Mormon) faith either. Most LDS people who are involved with politics are very concerned about this and would be just as uncomfortable about a bill pushing some Mormon commandment as a law (unless such a commandment happens to also be a "natural" law, such as murder) as any secular humanist or what have you.
As a Mormon (who also lives in Utah), I would have to say that the overriding principle that is most significant to the LDS faith is the idea of individual freedom to choose how to act and believe, and taking responsibility for such things. I think teaching the scientific method and how to be analytical, and then being taught the current scientific ideas and trends is important to be taught in school. After that you can believe what you want.
So if I was a Canadian living in Canada, and am forced to pay this tax, then copying music cds for personal use should be perfectly legitimate, since I've already payed for the music with each blank disk. That's always the problem with this kind of tax. It is implicit acknowledgement and condonement of the behavior that the tax was intended to curb. Especially in this case where the tax is largely going to a non-governmental body. So if the canadian music industry association tries to bring civil suits against end users for supposed piracy, I hope the courts would recognize this. So maybe Canadians should welcome this tax as it opens the way to legalized music sharing. Of course that is just a pipe dream.
As the article mentioned, Swing is a very good, advanced toolkit with some advantages over SWT. A project called SwingWT is an implementation of Swing using SWT, giving you a much faster GUI that looks and feels more native. So you can do all your development and initial testing with pure Swing, then swich the UI classes to SwingWT for a native look and feel on the hosts that support SWT. Seems like an interesting idea to me.
Exactly what in the story is a lie? While his blog may or may not be relevant to slashdotters, saying it's full of lies is just silly.
If they are going to ban wi-fi for health concerns they need to ban cell phones. I think an average student who has a phone glued to his or her ear (as is the case on most campuses in America) gets exposed to quite a bit more microwaves than wi-fi. Most good-sized campuses probably even have cell phone towers on-campus or right next to campus to handle the load.
Seeing as AIGLX has the support of NVidia, I think in the long run the AIGLX method is the better way to go. No sense requiring yet another server and driver architecture. I think that Smirl was right: Xgl is more of a short-term stop-gap solution, rather than a long-term architecture solution.
Not only does it make the desktop easier on the eyes, these rendering enhancements also increase usability, and allow for all sorts of new UI enhancements. Just being able to drag a window without causing a bunch of redraws is long overdue. The ability to do nice transparent, on-screen displays to show a variety of types of information will open up a lot of possibilities. Even shadows, as eye candy as they are, help the eye distinguish between windows in a very simple way. Things like live thumbnails (in a pager) are also big advancements for the linux desktop. So yes. It's so much more than just eye candy.
I'm sure years ago when twm was in vogue, other window managers that drew nicer-looking borders around the apps were considered just eye candy and of little use. But how many of us would really love to use twm on a daily basis (well maybe if it was freedesktop-compliant!).
Just because in your mind (and in many other people's minds) Rumsfeld has been discredited (hey I don't like him either), making a broad, sweeping generalization is a little foolish.
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Its also the birthplace of jewish extremism and christian extremism. So what?
The Horn of Africa was the birthplace of christian and jewish extremism? That'a new one. I think you've misread my statement.
By breaking my statements down sentence by sentence instead of paragraph by paragraph, you are taking them out of context. For example my statement about how America has lost the moral high-ground. I was asking it in a much greater sence. Ask any jihadi what America is guilty of and they will mention far more than just the terrible things perpetrated in Iraq. They point to our decadent society, our dishonesty in everyday life, the sex and violence we promote in media and entertainment. They point at the cartoons. All of these things are what they are claiming war against. Iraq is merely an excuse; a focal point.
If you're going to argue my points, please argue against them in context.
Jihad has everything to do with Iraq. The same forces (IE extremism) that caused 9/11 are now working in Iraq, thanks to America. Had America not entered Iraq these forces would have continued to work in the other countries. Among the goals of these groups include the goal of destroying whole countries and trying to establish islamic law. Along the way, hundreds of thousands if not millions have perished in other countries. If you don't believe me, read up on what really happened in Somalia and the Horn of Africa during the 1990s. Even to this day these same groups (of which Bin Laden played a huge role in the 90s) still wreak their havoc on civillian populations in Sudan. Frankly the insurgents in Iraq are pretty tame by comparison. However they've already demonstrated their brutality and they don't hesitate to kill fellow muslims.
America's merely being in Iraq brought these already existant forces in Arab society to action. True Iraq didn't have many extremists (well except for the Sunnis) before the fall of Saddam. But Saddam's regime left a very fertile ground for the seeds of extremism which poured into the country. An amazing piece of investigative reporting can be found in today's NY Times Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/iraq.h
There have been atrocities committed by the Americans (just in the interest of disclosure I am a US citizen living in the US). These people must be punished. Looking at the entire region, and from first-hand accounts out of Iraq during the first year in Iraq, the attrocities and bloodshed committed by insurgents and islamic facist jihadi from Africa to the middle east, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the Saddam regime, the scale of these things committed by muslims against muslims and other people is pretty mind-bobbling.
A fascinating look at the whole situation came out in 1998 in a book called "Bin Laden: The man who declared war on America." Even if only a fraction of the book can be substantiated now, years after the fact, it is pretty sobering.
Sorry to break it to you, but Jihad started long before America was involved with either Afghanistan or Iraq. And if you think a hasty withdrawal from even the entire region will end all the problems you have your head in the sand my friend. Surely the cartoon row made that clear.
You're very first comment about "WARNING: This never happens" has discredited pretty much everything you had to say. As did your comment "you hide it well."
I definitely meant to imply that "talk to them" means also show them. But from the outset their propaganda machine has spun everything we have ever done as being evil. How are you going to counter that?
I agree completely that our policies have really accelerated a problem that was already increasing. I'd rather bring this issue to a head now than wait another 10 years for another 9/11. If you believe that we caused it in its entirety then it is you who has fallen victim to their propaganda (which is okay; I've already established that propaganda itself isn't good or bad). I also agree that much of these problems come from oil. Except that it's not western greed of oil itself that is causing the problem; oil merely makes it much worse. If the middle east had no oil, there'd still be problems with islamic facism, terrorism, and extremism. It's just that it would never have left the region because they'd essentially merely be another eastern-horn-Africa (which, but the way, is the birthplace of Islamic extremism). And certainly leaving the middle east to implode on itself would be a viable option if it wasn't for the oil.
Has America lost the moral highground? Maybe. In what sense? In the sense of something being right and something being wrong? If so, then what position do you want us to take? If we have lost the moral high-ground, how do we get it back? Just withdraw from Iraq? In that case there's still the issue of our evil capitalist system (money, sex, power). This disparity will still cause problems.
So the issues are not as easy as you want them to be.
After reading the headline I immediately had the thought 1984 pass through my mind. Slashdot is good at promoting that kind of thought. Then I went and read the article. And you know what? Rumsfeld is right. In many respects we in the west are losing the war of ideas with facist islam. I think it is very cynical and one-sided to call what Rumsfeld is talking about "propaganda" while conveniently neglecting to recognize that these islamofacists such as Al Qeada and similar groups in Iraq are already recognizing the tremendous power of propaganda and are using it on us. Do we recognize this? If we truly value our western society, free and open as it is, patriot act notwithstanding, then we should be very alarmed that somehow more and more people are becoming convinced of these other points of view that directly threaten our very way of life. If anything the cartoon stuff should illustrate that clearly. While I think the cartoons were in very poor taste, the fact that a few radical imams and clerics have managed to stir up a couple hundred million people over a simple drawing should be setting off some huge warning bells in our minds.
So how do we convince others that our way is better? We're going to have to talk to them. And that is the very definition of propaganda. Even Slashdot is really propaganda. It's not a bad thing; it's just the free expression of ideas with the intent to convince others of these ideas' legitimacy (trolls and OS religious zealots notwithstanding). I'm surprised that people on slashdot would bash Rumsfeld for saying these things since ensuring a free expression of all ideas is supported by almost all slashdotters!
So For those that don't care to read the article, Rumsfeld is merely saying that these people, who have sworn to destroy the west if they can, are using propaganda much more effectively than we are. We need to be better arguers (hint to all americans: western-style logic does not apply to the Middle East), and come up with better ways to help people see that having a totalitarian, facist, Islamic state is *not* going to bring about any benefit to them in terms of people or religion.
While I have huge problems with our current administration, I do understand the Middle East, and I recognize that some things have to be done. I greatly fear what will happen as these aberations of Islam continue to spread. As we can see from the Denmark fiasco, it's not just America that is being targeted. Islam is at a cross-roads. Maybe we can influence the cooler Islamic heads to bring back the original, peaceful meaning of Islam. That is what Rumsfeld is talking about.
So I just laugh whenever people talk about one UI (be it Windows or Gnome or KDE or OS X) being so much more consistant and usable than any other UI.
To each his own. I love Gnome as well as OS X's interface. The two desktops share some similarities and characteristics. Both just get out of the way and let me work. KDE seems to be much more in my face.
So. to summarise: KDE sucks compared to Gnome if you really want a desktop that will just bugger off into the background and not wrestle with you.
Remember when Corel "ported" Wordperfect to Linux? They used wine and it was a miserable failure. However Corel's attempt failed where google might succeed as maybe google won't make the same mistakes.
Corel forked wine to add some custom features they needed that head wine didn't have (fonts and printing, for example). This fork proved their undoing. It was never synced back to the head branch and soon died, orphaning their version of wine. Further glibc advances broke wine with every release, effectively preventing corel's wine from running on anything newer than RH 7.
As long as google doesn't do the same thing, we'll probably be okay.
Actually if you use any of the more powerful aspects of C++ you'll know that no, C++.net is *not* C++. For instance, as far as I know, C++.net only supports single inheritance whereas C++ supports multiple inheritance.
The biggest problem, though, is the inclusion of the garbage collector. Because of this there is the introduced semantic of "finalizing" an object which is very different from the default C++ behavior. Many C++ programmers rely on what is called "guaranteed destruction semantics." What this means is that the moment an object goes out of scope or is deleted with the delete operator, we are guaranteed that the destructor is called and the object is destroyed. In C++.net, the object may or may not be destroyed when you think it is. This seems like a minor thing, but in reality it can be quite major. This introduces subtle changes in a program's behavior. Sure these things can be programmed around in C++.net, but that is just one more evidence that C++.net is *not* C++.
Now it is possible that all of these issues have been addressed. If so, then C++.net is just a C++ compiler that targets the MS virtual machine. But this didn't appear to be the case when I last examined the issue. If this remains unsolved, I can only imagine the chaos that would ensue when clueless end-users (programmers) try to build some hunk of C++ code written by a professional C++ developer and have it compile, but behave incorrectly. Definitely not a desired situation for C++ developers of code that is to be used by others.
You mean like how there are so many incompatible versions of the linux kernel and so many incompatible versions of the Mono
Actually OpenVPN does require the tun/tap interface, which is supplied by another opensource driver that creates a virtual device. So it very much will be affected.
The problem is that most users that will be affected by BS's actions aren't necessarily direct customers of BS. They may be Qwest, or Comcast users. Since BS runs some major backbone connections, these users will have traffic running across BS's connection to google and thus will still be affected. Even still, BS is still being paid on the consumer side. BS sells bandwidth to the downstream ISPs. So hitting, say, google for extortion money is still just padding their income both ways.
Actually if you read the article, you'll find that it would be impossible for wine to have this exact problem that he describes unless wine developers knew the secret key that triggered this behavior. It's not just a matter of a callback. It's a special trigger that instead of performing a callback, starts executing arbitrary code, not just calling some callback routine that is a script. I think he's talking about binary code execution. Wine definitely is not vulnerable in this way, the other WMF problem notwithstanding.
Actually Sparc laptops have been around for years: http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/html/
From what I can gather they had horrible battery life and probably ran quite hot, since the Sparc chip has never been a mobile processor.
But that's not important anyway. I think Mono is just another framework that can be used to develope slick apps on Linux. Having compatibility with apps written for .NET is just a fringe benefit. As we all know, MS is apt to change apis and break mono's compatibility on a whim. Even when they do, though, Mono is still incredibly useful to the Linux community.
.NET runtime and transparently call into both Java JAR libraries and Mono libraries.
.NET binaries on linux. However running cool apps like beagle I do care very much about.
I think that Mono, Java, Python, Perl, C, and C++ will all be very useful languages and environments, all deeply integrated with GTK, Gnome, QT, KDE, etc, bringing us many useful apps. I'm not opposed to these bytecode languages and runtimes, and also interpreted scripting languages such as Python making C and C++ less and less relevant for pure application development. At some point I can see objects running in very dissimilar runtime environments instantiating and calling other objects. Right now one of the coolest features of Mono is the inclusion of IKVM, allowing Java apps to run in the
So in short, I don't care in the least about being able to run MS
I think when most people say Linux runs on anything, they don't mean Fedora Core, or any particular distro. Microsoft's tests are flawed because they assume we mean that Fedora Core 4, or Ubuntu with a nice full GUI desktop setup will run on anything. When I think about Linux running on anything I think about Linux running on my Linksys WRT54GS router, or Linux running on cell phones. We're talking the full linux kernel, with a stripped down environment. I doubt Windows XP (even without the GUI) would run on a cell phone. The XP-embedded kernel might, but not the normal kernel. Linux's strengths lie in it's modularity; the kernel can be stripped down and run in minimal environments, all using the exact same code base, with the same kernel APIs used everywhere.
So it seems that Microsoft is deliberately confusing the issues here. A modern Gnome or KDE desktop on Linux no better or worse than Windows XP on 10 year old hardware with a full GUI desktop. But can Windows XP run on a 20-year-old 386 at all? Linux can. And while a Gnome desktop might now, X11 with a GUI of some kind certainly can. That's what we mean when we say linux can run on older hardware. Furthermore, much about Linux that enables compatibility stretching back 30 years doesn't really have anything to do with Linux itself either. For example, I can connect a Gnome desktop remotely to a 30-year old Unix mainframe and run X11 programs completely seamlessly. I could even fire up a 20-year old unix workstation running X11 and connect to a brand-new gnome desktop running on FC4 somewhere and expect it to work at least.
Further, Linux seems to be able to adapt much quicker to new platforms than Microsoft. The 32-bit to 64-bit jump was made years ago with Linux, with no major kernel API changes. Compare this to Windows which has Win16, Win32, and now Win64, with major changes in between, requiring some interesting hacks to preserve backwards compatibility. Linux, thanks to its Unix heritage, has always thought about things like making x-bit clean (where x is 32, 64, or whatever) and dealing with things like endianness. Linux isn't perfect; if there are issues with moving between 32 and 64 bits, or moving between little and big endian, they are bugs that need to be fixed. Microsoft has never expended much effort to think about such issues, as near as I can tell, since they thrive on the Wintel monopoly. Getting Windows endian-clean, for example, just isn't a priority.
Most europeans won't ever have this kind of problem with privacy and information selling. In Europe you can just go to the kiosk, buy a sim chip, buy some prepaid sim minutes, all without ID or a credit card. Use the phone for a few days, then toss the sim chip and put in a new one if you're paranoid. Thanks to our greedy, monopolistic telecom corporations over here, you get locked into 2-year contracts and have to give the company all kinds of private information upon sign-up including social security number.
Even more of a non-starter is the lack of support for nvidia's video chipsets. This means no power management. No sleep, no screen dim. My PB 12" will be sticking with Panther for now.
Yup that would alter the environment too. In this case you're adding massive amounts of the energy to the Earth's natural systems from an outside source that wouldn't have been inserted into the system normally (ie you're taking energy that wouldn't have hit the earth and transferring it there). Although you may be thinking that this is pure electrical energy and has nothing to do with the environment, energy cannot be destroyed or created but only transferred. This electrical energy is disappated into the Earth's natural systems in the form of heat and even in (minute) changes to the Earth's orbital, rotational, and geothermal energy. To say nothing of the greater environmental energy systems at work beyond our earth.
Basic physics dictates that no matter what we do energy-wise, it will affect the Earth. It's a matter of what changes we consider appropriate.
No, even photovoltaic solar panels aren't passive. They prevent energy that would reaching the ground from doing so, altering the energy balance there. In short there is no form of energy that we can extract from nature that doesn't alter in some way (large or small) the natural energy flows and balance in nature.