The example that Eric Schmidt stated to the New York Times was that Tim Berners Lee should have been given a Nobel Prize, but the Nobel community doesn't consider computer science to be in the same spectrum as other traditional life or physic sciences. I think both Tim is without question worthy of a Nobel, and there's a strong case for Linus as well, but it's questionable whether either has the political clout to win.
Comp sci isn't considered science by the Nobel committee, but that's entirely beside the point. What Torvalds has done is organize an international community to produce a product, a product that enriches millions of lives, based on a very unconventional model (namely, giving it away). What Berners did was science: he didn't build the web, he proved the model, wrote the proof (in the form of a browser and server) and let it take off from there. For the record, I think Berners-Lee's contribution to the world has been greater than Linus' and he deserves many honors, but he also falls on the other side of the Nobel criteria. While both deserve a Nobel in Computer Science (once the committee gets around to adding one in 202X) Torvalds specifically deserves one for Peace, for building and sustaining an international community that benefits millions and contributes to international understanding.
For that matter...I'm working on version 6.0 of the linux kernel, which will not only end hunger, but make fusion-based power a reality and cure cancer. Who's gonna nominate me?
Sorry, those are different departments. But I'll nominate you for economics, physics and physiology/medicine, if you want.
The Werlé-Lauber effect sounds like something physics students would have to memorize an equation for.
I think in a few years there will be an equation by that name that sociology or journalism students will have to memorize, relating the number of attempts made to suppress information, to the speed with which said information spreads.
The idea, the concept behind crime&punishment, is that you paid your dues after you are released from prison. Especially in the case of murder these people are examined to determine if they're still a threat for humanity. If they are, they don't go free.
If you don't want to give these people a chance to reintegrate into society, why bother releasing them at all?
Actually, the concept behind "Crime and Punishment" was that the real punishment was spiritual and Raskolnikov suffered it the whole time while trying to dodge his temporal punishment, then realized he had to serve out his entire temporal punishment including prison, banishment, forced labor AND permanent loss of reputation, in order to atone for what he'd done and end his spiritual punishment.
But I'm guessing you never read it.
Don't forget trade secrets or industrial design rights, which are none of the above. They all have similar characteristics (in that they are property, that is possessable, tradeable, and legally enforceable, but are not physical entities) and so can all be called IP. No need to confuse the issue.
So to sum it up this woman is a professional liar who is pretending that some anonymous stranger implying her son is homosexual is a big issue.
The only thing that is 'deeply disturbing' is this woman's attitude and the fact that she doesn't have anything better to do.
No, the thing that is 'deeply disturbing' is that the court is letting her get away with it. If she isn't suing, or "hasn't decided to sue yet", then getting his information only serves the purpose of harassment. If the post in question was truly not protected free speech, there should be a legal case (whether civil or criminal) prior to discovery. This sets a dangerous precedent for anyone wishing to criticize politicians anonymously.
...will my karma improve?
No, seriously though...I upgraded this past weekend and it is awesome...aside from a couple really dumb mistakes I made. But now that everything is fixed, it runs like a dream. Smoothest OS I've used so far, with the gnome-do dock mode it reminds me of mac OS X except that it doesn't penalize me for having minimum RAM installed by seizing up every 5 minutes.
Two pieces of advice:
Don't leave Firefox open while upgrading and then walk away, and
Do replace the open source JRE with the Sun one (unless you absolutely can't handle an EULA).
Also, the default pinyin IME for IBus sucks, (no context-based autoselection) but just search synaptic for the other one in there and it works great.
Empathy is much cooler than Pidgin, IBus is smoother than SCIM, booting takes about half the time, pretty near everything runs faster, and for some reason my laptop now gets 50% longer battery life.
I challenge you to name one Austrian economist who predicted our current economic crisis. In fact, the free-marketeers who worship Friedman (I know that's Chicago school, not Austrian, but bear with me) ignored the potential for the current crisis while Keynesians like Krugman, in point of fact, predicted it. And Keynesianism hasn't been mainstream (in the US) for decades, so I don't know where you're getting the idea to say "the more mainstream Keynesians". The trend has been to trust markets more and more, and the very deregulation that the Greenspans and Bernankes of the world championed created the crisis on a fundamental level. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?_r=1 is one of many good articles on this subject)
Besides which, Austrian economics claims to deduce all of economics a priori, which fundamentally contradicts your premise that it takes account of human behavior. Human behavior is known a posteriori from observing humans. If some "a priori" deduction about human behavior contradicts empirical observation of human behavior, then we must conclude the a priori deduction describes not human behavior but some abstract concept of how a human ought to behave. Likewise, Austrian school economics is powerless to describe a real economy, because when it contradicts empirical observation, it says, in essence, "fie upon empirical observation!", but by doing so, describes not a real economy but an abstract conception of how economies should behave
>mrcaseyj wrote: >> >>> C3ntaur wrote: >>> I invite anyone who claims CO2 is not a pollutant to sit in a room full of it for 10 minutes. >> >> I invite anyone who claims pure water is not a pollutant to sit in a room full of it for 10 minutes. > > I invite anyone who claims pure oxygen is not a pollutant to sit in a room full of it for 10 minutes
I invite anyone who claims pure vacuum is not a pollutant to sit in a room full of it for 10 minutes.
And *I* invite anyone who claims pure/. spam is not a pollutant to sit in a room full of it for 10 minutes.
And not really because of the cult thing, just because it's come to imply in tech lingo that the product is overrated.
It also implies that people who buy into it are stupid. In this case, you must be stupid to think Ubuntu is good. Funny, I must be damn stupid 'cause I've installed about a dozen distros over the past decade and I prefer Ubuntu...now how could such an experienced techie fall for such an obvious scam?
if you run gnu/Linux, and you want more people to run gnu/Linux or less people to run Windoze, for whatever reason, how does it benefit you to rip on a distro you don't care for, when you know damn well it works better than your favored distro for many people whose needs differ from your own? Doesn't that fragment and defeat the movement? If you cause fewer people to use Linux because the other distros are inaccessible and Ubuntu is for crazy Kool-aid drinkers, then there is less demand for new drivers for Linux (which benefit everybody), new commercial software for Linux, game development for Linux, wine development, etc., etc., etc....
So there must be a really good, overriding reason, why less people using Linux is somehow GOOD for open source and Linux, as long as those people would have been using the "wrong" distro, and I'd really like to know what that reason is.
It's really Gore's fault. Gore also knew the faults of the US voting system and did what he did anyway. If millions of morons hadn't voted for Gore we would have had 8 years of President Nader.
In a more serious vein, if Gore hadn't (just like Kerry) been so good at saying things that will turn into bad sound bytes, or been so boring in his speaking manner, or tried to distance himself from Clinton at a time when Clinton was both very popular and the only reason anyone cared about Gore, he would have won easily. It's his fault the contest was anywhere near close enough for Bush to steal.
I can't speak for all of the Linux community, but I can speak for myself. I want to see a future where people have more freedom in how they use their computers, and this freedom is often threatened by big corporations (particularly microsoft) which control both the software itself and the rights to use this software. These are real issues which really affect people's lives, even though it is often not obvious.
I will say right up front I do not take the Richard Stallman line that all software must be 100% free 100% of the time, and if not we should not use it. This is simply not pragmatic, for reasons economic, political, and technical. However, I DO think software freedom is important. How many times have companies tried to claim things such as the right to tell users what they're not allowed to do with their software? Or tell users that they now own the users' data (think facebook)? Or tell other companies they are forced to pay for software they don't actually buy (microsoft to OEMs)? Or give government agencies tools to spy on customers (Windows NSA backdoor)? Or promised to deliver the votes of a county using its voting equipment to the company's favored candidate (Diebold in Ohio, 2004)? I am a law student, and these issues are rarely brought up in law school because most lawyers are not terribly computer-savvy, but these types of issues are huge in all other areas of law. If a power company tried to tell customers they weren't allowed to use the grid for, say, powering video recording equipment (because the same company owned a TV station and feared competition) or recharging vibrators (because it offended the power company's morals) the legal community would be up in arms, the case would go to court, and the company would be barred from imposing such constraints. Yet software companies do equivalent things on a regular basis. Not to mention sending massive lobbies to Washington to influence federal policy. For me the bottom line is, the more we use Linux, the less control Microsoft and its ilk are able to exercise over society.
So yes, I think a future with much greater Linux desktop share is worth working for. Notice that I say much greater; I do not aim for 100%. As you say, everyone having their favorite is important, and it IS all about choice. So nobody should be coerced into using Linux, but I *do* weigh in with my opinion of why it is better when the topic arises. Of course, the community DOES need to address many usability issues, and does need to consider desktop users important; IMHO these technical and documentation tasks are more important than proselytizing to the uninitiated. The community also needs to be brutally honest about what Linux can and cannot do. I will never tell anybody that Linux is easier to use than Windows for all types of tasks on all types of computers. However, in complete honesty, I find it easier to use for about 90% of my tasks. YMMV. I have also been using Linux for 10 years now, and have seen configuration go from a nigh-impossible, monumental undertaking to most things working out of the box. On my first Linux box I had to recompile the kernel just to get sound working; the last 6 times I have installed Ubuntu, on Dell and Gateway notebooks, sound, wifi, printing, webcams and basically all other hardware Just Worked (TM) on the first try. Last year I installed Xubuntu on my Dad's decade-old laptop, because his Windows install was so virus-ridden he could never get any work done (and resisted all my attempts to fix it). Now it's true that when synaptic tells him something is broken and he needs to "sudo dpkg blah-blah" on the command line he has to call me, but this has happened exactly once in the last year, which is less than the times he had to call me with Windows issues he found incomprehensible. So I think Linux truly is a better choice now for many average users, we will (and must) continue to make it work even better and for more users, and a world with more free software is worth fighting for.
I don't think dropping links to Amazon will be big enough to make them stop this policy. However, we can certainly turn it to our advantage. According to Amazon's policy page (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200277420&qid=1239590370&sr=2-1) Amazon prohibits "Listings for items that promote racism, hatred, or religious intolerance" which is a fair description of every book by Anne "we should invade their countries and convert them to Christianity" Coulter, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and others of their ilk.
"Amazon encourages sellers to report listings that violate our policies or any applicable law by using our Contact Us form. Select "Report a Community Rules Violation" and be sure to include all relevant information so we can conduct a thorough investigation."
If enough of us report these bestselling bigots they're sure to make the offensive list too. This has two beneficial effects: first, people will have a harder time stumbling upon these hate-filled volumes, and second, these authors will complain to Amazon and (hopefully) get the policy lifted.
So there I was showing off compiz to my classmates, and the hot, busty redhead actually said, "Ubuntu? That's linux for newbs." Funny thing is, I'm pretty sure she's a Windows user. Guess it goes to show women pay attention to which *NIX you use.
That may be true. I think I stopped posting on/. when we were dating. Now we're married and I post again.
What's next, are you gonna tell us your girlfriend is also a Linux geek who can set up an encrypted Debian-based RAID cluster while having sex with you in her very own basement? Riiiight.
No, but I did convert her from Windows to Unbuntu...that's gotta count for something...
I was showing off compiz to my classmates on my laptop, and the hot busty redhead actually told me, "Ubuntu? That's linux for newbs." Funny thing is, I'm pretty sure she was a windows user. I guess it goes to show women pay attention to how manly your *NIX is.
Slashdot Mirror
The example that Eric Schmidt stated to the New York Times was that Tim Berners Lee should have been given a Nobel Prize, but the Nobel community doesn't consider computer science to be in the same spectrum as other traditional life or physic sciences. I think both Tim is without question worthy of a Nobel, and there's a strong case for Linus as well, but it's questionable whether either has the political clout to win.
Comp sci isn't considered science by the Nobel committee, but that's entirely beside the point. What Torvalds has done is organize an international community to produce a product, a product that enriches millions of lives, based on a very unconventional model (namely, giving it away). What Berners did was science: he didn't build the web, he proved the model, wrote the proof (in the form of a browser and server) and let it take off from there. For the record, I think Berners-Lee's contribution to the world has been greater than Linus' and he deserves many honors, but he also falls on the other side of the Nobel criteria. While both deserve a Nobel in Computer Science (once the committee gets around to adding one in 202X) Torvalds specifically deserves one for Peace, for building and sustaining an international community that benefits millions and contributes to international understanding.
Technically true, but you're forgetting Linus' herring genocide of 1997.
But those were all red herrings!
Since Obama got one for not being George W. Bush, Linus should get one for not being Theo de Raadt.
Or how about for not being Bill Gates? That's worth *two* nobels, and Linus does it better than anyone!
For that matter...I'm working on version 6.0 of the linux kernel, which will not only end hunger, but make fusion-based power a reality and cure cancer. Who's gonna nominate me?
Sorry, those are different departments. But I'll nominate you for economics, physics and physiology/medicine, if you want.
The Werlé-Lauber effect sounds like something physics students would have to memorize an equation for.
I think in a few years there will be an equation by that name that sociology or journalism students will have to memorize, relating the number of attempts made to suppress information, to the speed with which said information spreads.
The idea, the concept behind crime&punishment, is that you paid your dues after you are released from prison. Especially in the case of murder these people are examined to determine if they're still a threat for humanity. If they are, they don't go free.
If you don't want to give these people a chance to reintegrate into society, why bother releasing them at all?
Actually, the concept behind "Crime and Punishment" was that the real punishment was spiritual and Raskolnikov suffered it the whole time while trying to dodge his temporal punishment, then realized he had to serve out his entire temporal punishment including prison, banishment, forced labor AND permanent loss of reputation, in order to atone for what he'd done and end his spiritual punishment. But I'm guessing you never read it.
Don't forget trade secrets or industrial design rights, which are none of the above. They all have similar characteristics (in that they are property, that is possessable, tradeable, and legally enforceable, but are not physical entities) and so can all be called IP. No need to confuse the issue.
So to sum it up this woman is a professional liar who is pretending that some anonymous stranger implying her son is homosexual is a big issue.
The only thing that is 'deeply disturbing' is this woman's attitude and the fact that she doesn't have anything better to do.
No, the thing that is 'deeply disturbing' is that the court is letting her get away with it. If she isn't suing, or "hasn't decided to sue yet", then getting his information only serves the purpose of harassment. If the post in question was truly not protected free speech, there should be a legal case (whether civil or criminal) prior to discovery. This sets a dangerous precedent for anyone wishing to criticize politicians anonymously.
...will my karma improve? No, seriously though...I upgraded this past weekend and it is awesome...aside from a couple really dumb mistakes I made. But now that everything is fixed, it runs like a dream. Smoothest OS I've used so far, with the gnome-do dock mode it reminds me of mac OS X except that it doesn't penalize me for having minimum RAM installed by seizing up every 5 minutes. Two pieces of advice: Don't leave Firefox open while upgrading and then walk away, and Do replace the open source JRE with the Sun one (unless you absolutely can't handle an EULA). Also, the default pinyin IME for IBus sucks, (no context-based autoselection) but just search synaptic for the other one in there and it works great. Empathy is much cooler than Pidgin, IBus is smoother than SCIM, booting takes about half the time, pretty near everything runs faster, and for some reason my laptop now gets 50% longer battery life.
That's what you call working flawlessly? That there was a bug? In the unstable branch?
Clearly 2014 is not yet the year of Linux on the desktop.
Dow Chemical Rolling Our Solar Shingles Next Year
I hope I'm included in "our"...I want my solar shingles rolled!
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Because there's still no cure for cancer.
I challenge you to name one Austrian economist who predicted our current economic crisis. In fact, the free-marketeers who worship Friedman (I know that's Chicago school, not Austrian, but bear with me) ignored the potential for the current crisis while Keynesians like Krugman, in point of fact, predicted it. And Keynesianism hasn't been mainstream (in the US) for decades, so I don't know where you're getting the idea to say "the more mainstream Keynesians". The trend has been to trust markets more and more, and the very deregulation that the Greenspans and Bernankes of the world championed created the crisis on a fundamental level.
( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?_r=1 is one of many good articles on this subject)
Besides which, Austrian economics claims to deduce all of economics a priori, which fundamentally contradicts your premise that it takes account of human behavior. Human behavior is known a posteriori from observing humans. If some "a priori" deduction about human behavior contradicts empirical observation of human behavior, then we must conclude the a priori deduction describes not human behavior but some abstract concept of how a human ought to behave. Likewise, Austrian school economics is powerless to describe a real economy, because when it contradicts empirical observation, it says, in essence, "fie upon empirical observation!", but by doing so, describes not a real economy but an abstract conception of how economies should behave
sofar wrote:
>mrcaseyj wrote:
>>
>>> C3ntaur wrote:
>>> I invite anyone who claims CO2 is not a pollutant to sit in a room full of it for 10 minutes.
>>
>> I invite anyone who claims pure water is not a pollutant to sit in a room full of it for 10 minutes.
>
> I invite anyone who claims pure oxygen is not a pollutant to sit in a room full of it for 10 minutes
I invite anyone who claims pure vacuum is not a pollutant to sit in a room full of it for 10 minutes.
And *I* invite anyone who claims pure /. spam is not a pollutant to sit in a room full of it for 10 minutes.
Crysknives are nice because you can dual-wield them with an artifact.
And not really because of the cult thing, just because it's come to imply in tech lingo that the product is overrated.
It also implies that people who buy into it are stupid. In this case, you must be stupid to think Ubuntu is good. Funny, I must be damn stupid 'cause I've installed about a dozen distros over the past decade and I prefer Ubuntu...now how could such an experienced techie fall for such an obvious scam?
if you run gnu/Linux, and you want more people to run gnu/Linux or less people to run Windoze, for whatever reason, how does it benefit you to rip on a distro you don't care for, when you know damn well it works better than your favored distro for many people whose needs differ from your own? Doesn't that fragment and defeat the movement? If you cause fewer people to use Linux because the other distros are inaccessible and Ubuntu is for crazy Kool-aid drinkers, then there is less demand for new drivers for Linux (which benefit everybody), new commercial software for Linux, game development for Linux, wine development, etc., etc., etc....
So there must be a really good, overriding reason, why less people using Linux is somehow GOOD for open source and Linux, as long as those people would have been using the "wrong" distro, and I'd really like to know what that reason is.
It's really Gore's fault. Gore also knew the faults of the US voting system and did what he did anyway. If millions of morons hadn't voted for Gore we would have had 8 years of President Nader.
In a more serious vein, if Gore hadn't (just like Kerry) been so good at saying things that will turn into bad sound bytes, or been so boring in his speaking manner, or tried to distance himself from Clinton at a time when Clinton was both very popular and the only reason anyone cared about Gore, he would have won easily. It's his fault the contest was anywhere near close enough for Bush to steal.
I can't speak for all of the Linux community, but I can speak for myself. I want to see a future where people have more freedom in how they use their computers, and this freedom is often threatened by big corporations (particularly microsoft) which control both the software itself and the rights to use this software. These are real issues which really affect people's lives, even though it is often not obvious.
I will say right up front I do not take the Richard Stallman line that all software must be 100% free 100% of the time, and if not we should not use it. This is simply not pragmatic, for reasons economic, political, and technical. However, I DO think software freedom is important. How many times have companies tried to claim things such as the right to tell users what they're not allowed to do with their software? Or tell users that they now own the users' data (think facebook)? Or tell other companies they are forced to pay for software they don't actually buy (microsoft to OEMs)? Or give government agencies tools to spy on customers (Windows NSA backdoor)? Or promised to deliver the votes of a county using its voting equipment to the company's favored candidate (Diebold in Ohio, 2004)? I am a law student, and these issues are rarely brought up in law school because most lawyers are not terribly computer-savvy, but these types of issues are huge in all other areas of law. If a power company tried to tell customers they weren't allowed to use the grid for, say, powering video recording equipment (because the same company owned a TV station and feared competition) or recharging vibrators (because it offended the power company's morals) the legal community would be up in arms, the case would go to court, and the company would be barred from imposing such constraints. Yet software companies do equivalent things on a regular basis. Not to mention sending massive lobbies to Washington to influence federal policy. For me the bottom line is, the more we use Linux, the less control Microsoft and its ilk are able to exercise over society.
So yes, I think a future with much greater Linux desktop share is worth working for. Notice that I say much greater; I do not aim for 100%. As you say, everyone having their favorite is important, and it IS all about choice. So nobody should be coerced into using Linux, but I *do* weigh in with my opinion of why it is better when the topic arises. Of course, the community DOES need to address many usability issues, and does need to consider desktop users important; IMHO these technical and documentation tasks are more important than proselytizing to the uninitiated. The community also needs to be brutally honest about what Linux can and cannot do. I will never tell anybody that Linux is easier to use than Windows for all types of tasks on all types of computers. However, in complete honesty, I find it easier to use for about 90% of my tasks. YMMV. I have also been using Linux for 10 years now, and have seen configuration go from a nigh-impossible, monumental undertaking to most things working out of the box. On my first Linux box I had to recompile the kernel just to get sound working; the last 6 times I have installed Ubuntu, on Dell and Gateway notebooks, sound, wifi, printing, webcams and basically all other hardware Just Worked (TM) on the first try. Last year I installed Xubuntu on my Dad's decade-old laptop, because his Windows install was so virus-ridden he could never get any work done (and resisted all my attempts to fix it). Now it's true that when synaptic tells him something is broken and he needs to "sudo dpkg blah-blah" on the command line he has to call me, but this has happened exactly once in the last year, which is less than the times he had to call me with Windows issues he found incomprehensible. So I think Linux truly is a better choice now for many average users, we will (and must) continue to make it work even better and for more users, and a world with more free software is worth fighting for.
"Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
Man, remember back in '96 when we all got SPARCstations? Those were the days.
Now that Minix 3 is here, Linus can take his monolithic kernel and stuff it! Microkernels are the wave of the future, man!
I don't think dropping links to Amazon will be big enough to make them stop this policy. However, we can certainly turn it to our advantage. According to Amazon's policy page (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200277420&qid=1239590370&sr=2-1) Amazon prohibits "Listings for items that promote racism, hatred, or religious intolerance" which is a fair description of every book by Anne "we should invade their countries and convert them to Christianity" Coulter, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and others of their ilk.
"Amazon encourages sellers to report listings that violate our policies or any applicable law by using our Contact Us form. Select "Report a Community Rules Violation" and be sure to include all relevant information so we can conduct a thorough investigation."
If enough of us report these bestselling bigots they're sure to make the offensive list too. This has two beneficial effects: first, people will have a harder time stumbling upon these hate-filled volumes, and second, these authors will complain to Amazon and (hopefully) get the policy lifted.
So there I was showing off compiz to my classmates, and the hot, busty redhead actually said, "Ubuntu? That's linux for newbs." Funny thing is, I'm pretty sure she's a Windows user. Guess it goes to show women pay attention to which *NIX you use.
NOBODY ON SLASHDOT HAS A GIRLFRIEND.
That may be true. I think I stopped posting on /. when we were dating. Now we're married and I post again.
What's next, are you gonna tell us your girlfriend is also a Linux geek who can set up an encrypted Debian-based RAID cluster while having sex with you in her very own basement? Riiiight.
No, but I did convert her from Windows to Unbuntu...that's gotta count for something...
I was showing off compiz to my classmates on my laptop, and the hot busty redhead actually told me, "Ubuntu? That's linux for newbs." Funny thing is, I'm pretty sure she was a windows user. I guess it goes to show women pay attention to how manly your *NIX is.