I'd guess that atheists and agnostics will pick less religous themed wrapping paper more often. This year I wrapped gifts with yellow, purple, green and silver striped paper. None of this is supposed to be perfect of course. But as long as you have a statistically significant trend, you can do better than random guessing which is all you can really ask.
Redefining your time horizon after the fact allows you avoid cognitive dissonance when you're proven wrong. The Iraq war was supposed to be a short term affair. Imminent threat from Saddam Hussein, in and out in "I doubt" 6 months. The neo cons never thought it would be an operation on the scale of decades, any attempt to give them the benefit of the "long view" is revisionist history.
The neocons weren't crazy or evil. They were just proud and stupid and flat out wrong.
As well, there is a time horizon issue. What we call "beliefs" are often really general principles that predict long-term outcomes. These principles often produce short-term damages, which are then thrown in the believer's face as evidence that his principles are wrong. But that's usually just a disagreement over time horizons. Just look at the arguments for and against the Iraq occupation.
?
The Iraq war was sold to the American people on the basis that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the US. They were wrong on the short term, there was simply no reason to believe (besides the paranoid fantasies of neoconservatives) that Saddam Hussein was preparing any sort of attack. They were wrong on the long term too, 9 years of war cost us more in lives and treasure than the 9/11 attacks.
There is no reasonable difference of opinion when it comes to the Iraq war. The hawks were simply power hungry, vengeful, and completely uninterested in realistic appraisals of the situation. The anti-war crowd were right then, and they have been proven correct about what a long, painful, and pointless struggle the neocons chose for us.
Only if the elections are free and fair, and the citizens well informed. Modern elections are a tool for manufacturing consent, not an assay of voter sentiment. Our choice of government is about as free as your choice of card during a magic trick.
The risk of terrorism is simply not severe enough to warrant that level of investment in security. We will save more lives focusing on clean drinking water, renewable energy, and public health and welfare in general. It would be a lot cheaper too.
If the TSA is ineffective, don't be surprised. It's not intended to be effective. It's intended to be profitable for well connected individuals and corporations. It is quite plainly a fraud on the American people.
It might go away for 90% of users, but 90% of users don't do real work on their computers. The rest of us who rely on computers as tools will continue to use the desktop in some form.
We could have had the same argument 20 years ago with regard to the GUI. The CLI went away for most users. But for those who want the most power possible it still makes sense to learn and use the CLI. The CLI hasn't gone away in 20 years, and it hasn't been surpassed. The same will hold true for the desktop.
The death of the desktop is nothing but futurism at this point. Nobody has come up with a better interface for doing real work. Sure, there are some limited use cases where the desktop is overkill. But until I can collect data, analyze the data, present the data, write up a paper about the data with a cell phone(i.e. never), the standard desktop is not going away. Even if that means hooking up a keyboard and display to your mobile device.
Is the amount of customization literally unbeatable, or just unbeatable by your typical wm? I ask, because there's a whole family of tiling window managers that are configured in anything from C to Haskell.
It seems like which language you want to use to configure the wm is the only differentiating feature between tiling wms. This makes it hard to compare and contrast the actual capabilities of these wms, since you have to know a dozen programming languages to really be able to put each one through its paces.
If only desktop environments would stick to the desktop and leave any non-gui related features to be implemented at other levels. Then we could use whatever virtual file system we want on any desktop, or without any desktop at all.
Desktop environments run directly counter to the "do one thing, and do it well" philosphy that has served UNIX for so many years. Is it any surprise that they're a clusterfuck?
If you want a nice light GTK based file manager, I've found emelfm2 to be excellent. The shell will always be the best file manager, but a commander style file manager does come in handy occasionally.
Whatever conservativism means in modern America, Gingrich is it. He would describe himself as conservative, his allied would describe themselves as conservatives, and his opposition describes him as conservative. He lead the 1994 Republican revolution that put conservatives back in power in the US. If Gingrich isn't conservative, you're going to have to rewrite almost 20 years of political history. If your particular political persuasion isn't compatible with Gingrich's, you need to find a less overloaded term for it.
Does it really matter? You pretty much have to mix libraries already on a desktop Linux system. If you want the best file manager, Krusader, you have to load KDE libs. If you want the best spread sheet, Gnumeric, you have to load Gnome libs. Thankfully RAM is cheap and this is not a real obstacle in practice.
Easy. If they succesfully implemented a permanent surveillance system at the border, they wouldn't be able to award further contracts to their cronies.
Everything about government makes more sense if you assume that graft is its primary function.
I know who he is. I actually read his book Racing the Beam. Fantastic book. The only thing I really want to know is when we can expect the NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis to get the same treatment.
So I really liked his work as a video game historian. As a video game theorist, I'm not so sure. Take his book/game "a slow year". Supposedly a blending of video gaming and poetry, in an attempt to make an artistic video game. But honestly, video games need poetry about as much as a fish needs a bicycle. It's like he took all the fun out of video gaming and replaced it with pretentious posturing from the art world, and then he slapped a $500 price tag on it. This isn't progress. My view is that Yar's Revenge is a more beautiful and more profound work of art by far. The best examples of video game art will be those that excel at doing what video games do best.
So yeah, I know who the guy is. And I have things to say about his work, but they don't fit nicely into the "Ask Slashdot" formula. Feel free to edit this appropriately if it gets submitted to Ian.
In case it wasn't clear, (I guess it wasn't), my point wasn't that great evil justifies lesser evil. It's that our response to evil should be proportional to its magnitude.
I listed three bad things, and compared them to another bad thing. If you are reading "justification" into this, that's entirely your own preoccupation.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd guess that atheists and agnostics will pick less religous themed wrapping paper more often. This year I wrapped gifts with yellow, purple, green and silver striped paper. None of this is supposed to be perfect of course. But as long as you have a statistically significant trend, you can do better than random guessing which is all you can really ask.
Redefining your time horizon after the fact allows you avoid cognitive dissonance when you're proven wrong. The Iraq war was supposed to be a short term affair. Imminent threat from Saddam Hussein, in and out in "I doubt" 6 months. The neo cons never thought it would be an operation on the scale of decades, any attempt to give them the benefit of the "long view" is revisionist history.
The neocons weren't crazy or evil. They were just proud and stupid and flat out wrong.
As well, there is a time horizon issue. What we call "beliefs" are often really general principles that predict long-term outcomes. These principles often produce short-term damages, which are then thrown in the believer's face as evidence that his principles are wrong. But that's usually just a disagreement over time horizons. Just look at the arguments for and against the Iraq occupation.
?
The Iraq war was sold to the American people on the basis that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the US. They were wrong on the short term, there was simply no reason to believe (besides the paranoid fantasies of neoconservatives) that Saddam Hussein was preparing any sort of attack. They were wrong on the long term too, 9 years of war cost us more in lives and treasure than the 9/11 attacks.
There is no reasonable difference of opinion when it comes to the Iraq war. The hawks were simply power hungry, vengeful, and completely uninterested in realistic appraisals of the situation. The anti-war crowd were right then, and they have been proven correct about what a long, painful, and pointless struggle the neocons chose for us.
Only if the elections are free and fair, and the citizens well informed. Modern elections are a tool for manufacturing consent, not an assay of voter sentiment. Our choice of government is about as free as your choice of card during a magic trick.
The risk of terrorism is simply not severe enough to warrant that level of investment in security. We will save more lives focusing on clean drinking water, renewable energy, and public health and welfare in general. It would be a lot cheaper too.
If the TSA is ineffective, don't be surprised. It's not intended to be effective. It's intended to be profitable for well connected individuals and corporations. It is quite plainly a fraud on the American people.
It might go away for 90% of users, but 90% of users don't do real work on their computers. The rest of us who rely on computers as tools will continue to use the desktop in some form.
We could have had the same argument 20 years ago with regard to the GUI. The CLI went away for most users. But for those who want the most power possible it still makes sense to learn and use the CLI. The CLI hasn't gone away in 20 years, and it hasn't been surpassed. The same will hold true for the desktop.
The death of the desktop is nothing but futurism at this point. Nobody has come up with a better interface for doing real work. Sure, there are some limited use cases where the desktop is overkill. But until I can collect data, analyze the data, present the data, write up a paper about the data with a cell phone(i.e. never), the standard desktop is not going away. Even if that means hooking up a keyboard and display to your mobile device.
Hear, hear!
udiskie - automount usb drives and things
Doesn't udev handle that?
Is the amount of customization literally unbeatable, or just unbeatable by your typical wm? I ask, because there's a whole family of tiling window managers that are configured in anything from C to Haskell.
It seems like which language you want to use to configure the wm is the only differentiating feature between tiling wms. This makes it hard to compare and contrast the actual capabilities of these wms, since you have to know a dozen programming languages to really be able to put each one through its paces.
If only desktop environments would stick to the desktop and leave any non-gui related features to be implemented at other levels. Then we could use whatever virtual file system we want on any desktop, or without any desktop at all.
Desktop environments run directly counter to the "do one thing, and do it well" philosphy that has served UNIX for so many years. Is it any surprise that they're a clusterfuck?
Hush. Those idiots finance the advance of technology.
Using a custom desktop is not about being lightweight. It's about customizing your workflow.
If you want a nice light GTK based file manager, I've found emelfm2 to be excellent. The shell will always be the best file manager, but a commander style file manager does come in handy occasionally.
It's against the rules of acquisition.
The phrase "A rising tide lifts all boats" is absolutely true.
Except when it's not. During a "jobless recovery" for instance.
The question isn't how big the drop is compared to the bucket. It's what we get in return for our money.
I don't think me or any other taxpayer is going to be hurt too badly if you take less money away.
Taking less money means you either have to borrow more, or cut services. Either of those options is bad for America.
They even have chibi particles now.
Whatever conservativism means in modern America, Gingrich is it. He would describe himself as conservative, his allied would describe themselves as conservatives, and his opposition describes him as conservative. He lead the 1994 Republican revolution that put conservatives back in power in the US. If Gingrich isn't conservative, you're going to have to rewrite almost 20 years of political history. If your particular political persuasion isn't compatible with Gingrich's, you need to find a less overloaded term for it.
Does it really matter? You pretty much have to mix libraries already on a desktop Linux system. If you want the best file manager, Krusader, you have to load KDE libs. If you want the best spread sheet, Gnumeric, you have to load Gnome libs. Thankfully RAM is cheap and this is not a real obstacle in practice.
Easy. If they succesfully implemented a permanent surveillance system at the border, they wouldn't be able to award further contracts to their cronies.
Everything about government makes more sense if you assume that graft is its primary function.
I know who he is. I actually read his book Racing the Beam. Fantastic book. The only thing I really want to know is when we can expect the NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis to get the same treatment.
So I really liked his work as a video game historian. As a video game theorist, I'm not so sure. Take his book/game "a slow year". Supposedly a blending of video gaming and poetry, in an attempt to make an artistic video game. But honestly, video games need poetry about as much as a fish needs a bicycle. It's like he took all the fun out of video gaming and replaced it with pretentious posturing from the art world, and then he slapped a $500 price tag on it. This isn't progress. My view is that Yar's Revenge is a more beautiful and more profound work of art by far. The best examples of video game art will be those that excel at doing what video games do best.
So yeah, I know who the guy is. And I have things to say about his work, but they don't fit nicely into the "Ask Slashdot" formula. Feel free to edit this appropriately if it gets submitted to Ian.
In case it wasn't clear, (I guess it wasn't), my point wasn't that great evil justifies lesser evil. It's that our response to evil should be proportional to its magnitude.
I listed three bad things, and compared them to another bad thing. If you are reading "justification" into this, that's entirely your own preoccupation.