Uh, no, you have a couple of things mixed up. Xgl/AIGLX is the part that goes into X11 and provides the hardware accelerated 3D functions. Compiz/Beryl is a compositing window manager that actually does the effects. Every window manager has access to the 3D stuff, but they each individually have to implement their own effects. Early in the game it was attempted to separate the compositing manager from the window manager, but there were problems doing this (mostly performance, I think). So now everybody agrees that you have to integrate the two. I think the GP is right. As soon as Metacity, KWin, and whatever the XFCE WM is implement their own compositing effects, Compiz/Beryl will be an obsolete experiment. Personally, I'm holding out for Metacity. I've played around with Compiz/Beryl, and I like it, but I think it can be trimmed down quite a bit, and some major usability studies have to be done to make things like the wobbly windows less annoying.
Well, as another poster already said, it would be best if untrusted applications (like web browsers) were run as a different user from your main account. The only way it could access your data would be to require a password for privilege escalation. Unfortunately I don't know of any OS that does this. SELinux is neat, but I'm not sure it can do this without being overly restrictive.
Anyway, I think the bigger issue, though, is that root is bad. Not just for multi-user systems. The reason being because most malicious attacks are not aimed at running "rm -rf ~". They can, but that is not really in the interest of most of the people writing these exploits. They are interested in installing spyware, malware, and rootkits...all of which require root/administrator privileges. Other things too, like getting into the system logs and messing with memory owned by other processes, that help a cracker find and take advantage of exploits also require elevated privileges. So if your exploitable program simply runs as an unprivileged user you can get rid of a lot of these problems. It won't get rid of all problems, but it would help significantly.
Will I have hardware accelerated 3D video from my NVidia card without having to spend an hour doing Google searches for the proper procedure and drivers, and then spending another hour trying to find ones that actually, you know, WORK?
Ummm...have you actually used a linux distro in the last three years? Every major distribution has packages for the nvidia drivers, and has had them for at least several years (some, like gentoo, even longer). If they aren't installed by default, they are usually trivial to install. You can use the nvidia installer on their website, but that is a lot harder to use and less likely to work the first time. Learn how to use your distributions package management software. Yes, that thing called learning...usually needed when you are trying out something new, like an entirely different operating system that does not and will not work exactly like Windows.
The network-manager gains zeroconf support in this release, but there's still no WPA options in the network-manager. I thought that was coming in this release? I have network-manager-gnome installed, but it doesn't look anything like this.
Hmmm, not sure what you mean by this because zeroconf isn't related to network-manager as far as I know. Anyway, your network-manager applet should look just like your screenshot. Are you sure you are running the applet? Type nm-applet at the terminal. Ubuntu ships another wireless applet with the same icon, but it isn't the network-manager applet. So make sure you are actually running the network-manager applet. And WPA configuration has been there for at least a year, so you should be able to see it unless there are driver issues with your wireless card.
Thanks for pointing that out, but I don't believe it for one second. Radiation is radiation. Matter is matter. I know what the article says, but unless they have developed some sort of magical anti-matter beam, this does not solve the problem of selectivity. You can already narrow the exposure radius with standard chemotherapy. And with radioisotopic dyes, you can target to specific areas in the body (ex: thyroid). Yet another means to generate radiation that kills cells does nothing to advance the selectivity that has already been achieved.
I'm sorry, I'm a big proponent of science research, but this is absolutely the stupidest idea I have ever heard. Not only is anti-matter one of the most (if not the most) expensive substances on the planet, but we already have plenty of toxic compounds that kill cells just fine. The real problem isn't toxicity, it is selectivity. How do you kill cancer cells without killing the entire organism?
The hard sciences have been stepping in to get a share of the biomedical research money by declaring their research relevant to cancer, disease, bioterrorism, etc...for a while (and most are fairly legitimate claims), but this is really ridiculous. I think the high-energy folks really need to look elsewhere for applications (and hence, public relevance) to justify asking for more research money.
Mixing non-DRM music into iTunes does nothing to solve Apple's problem, it only complicates matters. Apple would have to update the iTunes software so it could download songs and skip encryption and key storage for non-DRM tracks.
Apple would also have to rework its servers to manage purchased tracks without dealing with keys. It would also have to update the iPod to manage purchased track syncing without trying to use keys. It would then need to spend time making sure all those changes didn't introduce bugs or exploitable vulnerabilities in FairPlay.
The rest of the article was good (actually, I didn't know about FairKeys), but this last argument about why drm-free content can't be sold through iTMS is rubbish. It would be trivially easy to have iTunes not encrypt songs flagged as "no-DRM." PyMusique does exactly that with all of the songs, so iTunes should be able to do it as well. And there wouldn't have to be any updates to the iPod. An unencumbered AAC from iTMS would be just like every other unencumbered file that the iPod can already play.
I do agree, though, that Apple probably just doesn't care about the drm-free ideology. It isn't worth it to them to distinguish between RIAA labels that require drm and independent labels that don't. When they get the ok to not use drm, they'll happily take it out of the system, but until then they aren't going to put any more work into it than absolutely necessary.
If a government organization could obtain positive results, it would mean they couldn't ask for more money.
What the hell are you talking about? Government funding organizations want to fund working research projects. They don't want to fund something that isn't going anywhere. If a project gets good, interesting results, it will continue to get funding as long as there is enough money to go around. That and researchers don't want to keep working on a non-working project because it doesn't help with publications and tenure.
I personally know so many college-educated Ph.Ds and all who are constantly trying to get grants so they don't have to go into the "real world" that it disgusts me.
What is this "real world" you speak of? Research science is very much the real world. There is probably more competition for research grant money in academia than anywhere else. It's just that research grant proposals get vetted by other scientists instead of consumers buying products. Not all science is applied science. Corporations do not fund basic research. Besides, why should they. It is far more efficient for them to pay taxes (along with everybody else) and have a portion of that tax money go to basic research that they benefit from, rather than independently fund their own basic research programs, which would cost a lot more money and lead to a lot of duplication of effort.
It doesn't matter if you are trying to prohibit drinking alcohol or paying someone else for sexual favors, prohibition doesn't work -- all it does
I hardly think that comparison qualifies. I just don't see somebody walking downtown to make a shady deal on 4th avenue for an incandescent light bulb. It would cost a hell of a lot more than just buying a CFL in the store.
All of the problems you mention with CFLs have been resolved: they are dimmable, fit into all light fixtures, they don't buzz, they don't flicker, and the light is a nice soft white (you can get filters to adjust the spectrum if you want).
I'm not sure I think the ban is a good idea, but I don't think it is all that bad either.
Autopackage, one of the recent efforts of developers to standardize packaging in GNU/Linux has not been very successful
I always thought Autopackage was a neat idea and a good solution for software projects that wanted to distribute binaries, but didn't want to make 10 different versions for every major revision of every distribution. The major problem I had with Autopackage, though, was integration with the distribution packages. It wouldn't satisfy dependencies with what was already installed, and once a package was installed if it was, say, a library, it in turn couldn't satisfy the dependencies of a distribution package. I know integration with the distribution package management system was planned, but it didn't make it into 1.0, and I think that was a major barrier to its adoption.
CNR is interesting, but I'm not sure why it is considered better than, say, Synaptic, other than that it has a mechanism for paying for commercial software (and maybe it makes it a little easier to find some packages). From what I have read, it seems like it is just a nice frontend on the distributions package management system with a link to some commercial repositories. So I don't see how that can really "solve the problem" of package management on linux.
I just said it was one of the major reasons religion was created and has endured for so long.
Yes, I know that is what you said, and you are wrong. Attempts to "explain the unexplainable" with religion (i.e: God did it) are, at best, a side product of a superstitious and ignorant period of human history. Prior to Christianity, people simply referred to the unexplainable as supernatural and magical. When Christianity came about, God came into the equation. People superposed their supernatural beliefs onto God. But that is not what Christianity teaches, and it is not why it was created. Superstition arises from ignorance, not from religion.
Absolutely nothing is outside of science's realm, because science can cover everything and anything that we can percieve.
That statement doesn't make any sense and doesn't have anything to do with what I said. Science is the study of the natural world. Religion is not. More importantly, science is a tool for understanding and manipulating the world around us, and religion is a social construct. Suggesting that the existence of science nullifies the need for religion is just as absurd as suggesting that visual art nullifies the need for music.
Religous people are frightened by the Theory of Evolution because it allows for the possibility that there are no Supreme Beings.
Once again with the banal generalities...certain sects of Christianity choose to refute evolutionary theory because they don't understand it, don't understand the Bible, and because they are politically motivated and/or manipulated. Extending our treatment of "religious people" beyond these groups reveals, in fact, that most followers of religion do not feel threatened in any way by scientific advancements.
And, as I said before, the Theory of Evolution has absolutely nothing to do with God. It doesn't suggest or deny the existence of God in any way. People try to use it for this purpose, but it is logically impossible to use a scientific theory to describe a concept that has no substantive presence in the natural world.
You cannot truly prove or disprove anything with 100% certainty. The last 2 weeks of your life might just be an elaborate dream, so you cannot prove that anything you have done recently actually happened. All you can do is have a certain level of certainty.
I have a 99.999999999999999999999% certainty that my hair color is red. I could be scizophrenic and just cannot accept that it is actually blonde, but I am fairly certain that I am sane and that my hair is red. Of course I am not 100% certain.
These examples don't make any sense. You are taking subjective labels (dream, red, schizophrenic) and by declaring them subjective saying that they are subjective. That is completely circular logic and a waste of time anyway because subjective labels are exactly that, subjective. The words "prove" and "disprove" don't mean anything without a context. In the context of science, you form models to describe the natural world based on known observations. You can absolutely disprove any scientific model with the appropriate observation. You cannot prove any given model, although the lack of any contradictory evidence over a long period of time does tend to convey a certain level of certainty among the scientific community. It is a simple rule, really: don't assume your model is incorrect until you have a good reason to. Outside of science, proving and disproving becomes a logical exercise and doesn't have any real bearing on the natural world.
Having a working hypothesis and then theory about how and why humans created early religions goes a long way to disproving that God exists.
No, not really. Acknowledging that religion is a social construct does not nullify the existence of God. It is a way of rationalizing disbelief in God, but that is all. It can also be used to rationalize a belief in and search after God.
Using the scientific method is valid in any discussion.
You have obviously never studied any philosophy. The scientific method is valid when you are trying to answer scientific questions. Not every question that can be asked is a scientific question, and therefore the scientific method is not always the right tool.
The basic connection is that evolution helps create a "natural" world where God is not needed.
Statements like this (and there are a lot of them here, I'm just picking on this one) are the reason why this whole evolution discussion is such a problem. Look people, the scientific Theory of Evolution has absolutely nothing to do with God. This is the problem with politicized debates of scientific principles. People take pieces of ideas and try to use them to rationalize their own ideas. The process of evolution is a scientific model describing (using known observable evidence) the appearance of closely related yet genetically distinct species in ecosystems for which many have special physiological adaptations. Notice how I made no mention of God. You cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. That is why religion is not science, and science cannot be used to refute religion.
One of the fundamental reason why people "need" their faith in a god is because it explains the unexplainable.
Wow, thanks for that terse summary. It is good to know that the entire human construct of religion, which has existed in some form in every society for thousands of years, can be summarized in one line of Western, eurocentric, pseudo-Christian philosophy. Now try actually learning something about religion. I suggest looking into Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and some of the Native American religions. Religion is far more complicated than "it explains the unexplainable", which, by the way, it doesn't (see comment about division between science and religion above).
If you are atheist, fine, that is your choice. Just be intelligent about it, and don't drag science into your religious or anti-religious arguments.
Interesting question. Is VMWare going to check your Windows version (Vista Home vs. Vista Business) before letting you run it in a virtual machine? After all, it's against the license if you are running Home. This sounds like a backroom deal to me. VMWare has never cared about licenses before. Yeah, sure, they say use only a legally licensed copy of Windows, but they don't try to stop you from downloading an illegal copy and using it in a virtual machine (I'm not even sure they could if they wanted to).
Futurama misquotes aside, plants don't separate oxygen from carbon. They reduce carbon dioxide to create glucose and in the process, oxidize water to produce oxygen, and it is a very energy intensive process. If chemists knew how to do this kind of chemistry we would be all over it. Reconstructing the entire photosynthetic pathway in a test tube is no easy thing either.
Hmmm...this is a promising development. It'll be nice to have a convenient way of obtaining commercial software. My question, though, is how this will integrate with the package management system. I don't know much about CNR in Linspire. Are the programs distributed as.debs, or is the package tracking done separately (or not at all)? In other words, if I use CNR to install StarOffice, will it show up in Synaptic when I browse through my installed.debs?
Ummm...Vista Enterprise is exactly that, intended for large organizations. You have to get it through the Software Assurance program which is a lot more expensive, in total, than Vista Ultimate.
As opposed to just putting Vista itself on BT for a billion of your close personal friends? I don't see your point...like most software companies, Microsoft doesn't want multiple instances of Vista running on the same machine. They haven't cared in the past, but now they want to charge for the privilege.
If they got patent X from some company, which they incorporate into their binary driver, they couldn't open source their driver without removing that piece of code first.
Why, exactly, would that be? Where in patent law does it say you can't distribute licensed code? You do know there are mp3 patents, and there are a lot of open source libraries that implement the codec, right?
Just so you know, patent law says you must pay a license to use certain "ideas" (ex: mp3, wma, aac). It does not say anything about whether the resulting code needs to be open or closed source.
Well, Debian has always had a minimal network-based install. Just checking the Debian page...it appears to be up to 180 MB now. It used to be around 75 MB, but it's growing--mostly because the installer is becoming a lot more sophisticated than it used to be. Gentoo also has a minimal cd coming in at about 120 MB.
Fedora, when it was Red Hat, used to have an installer you could boot off of a floppy and then do a network install, but I don't think they have that anymore. Ubuntu never really bothered with a minimal cd because they went the live cd route. I agree, I think it would be better if everything could be download once over the network, but there is some merit to the live cd approach. And there are still a lot of people out there without broadband connections, so they really need to have everything on media. As for the updates, that's going to happen no matter what. The only way to have a stable distribution that you release is to freeze the packages. If you start rolling in updates you no longer have a stable distribution.
Oh, right, because everytime I install Red Hat or Suse or Ubuntu I have to compile everything myself. WTF?
Having source available makes it easier to support architectures that aren't "officially supported." It isn't necessary to have the source to support multiple architectures. You just have to compile a binary for every architecture you want to support, which is what every linux distribution currently does. It is also what Microsoft did/does with Windows to support multiple architectures (ia64, alpha, AMD64). The reason Microsoft currently supports x86 and x86-64 only is because it takes extra effort to support multiple architectures, and they have decided the market isn't great enough to make it worthwhile. The recent rewrites of DirectX and incorporation of trusted computing probably have something to do with it as well.
Note the question is "Is Ubuntu a contender for the enterprise linux desktop?" Your average home desktop is quite a different beast. That said, I agree number 1) is stupid. The reason is really political, but now that cdrtools has been forked by Debian hopefully this will get fixed. No argument with 2) because Mono is still pretty immature, but 5) is a little subjective. If you mean you can walk into Best Buy and grab random software off the shelf and have it work with Windows, you are right. But Debian has a lot of software available. Chances are, if you have a software need, you can find something in the Debian repositories that will do the job. Of course, if what you really need is Photoshop (i.e: you are a professional graphic designer) then Gimp won't do the job, so not everybody will have all of their software needs satisfied by free software.
Re:It's too early to discount Oracle/MS/Novell
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My point is this. RedHat is too expensive for what you get.
Correction...from what it sounds like you are saying, Red Hat is too expensive for what you need. You are buying support, but not using it. You are not using the functionality of the software you are buying. You are getting a hell of a lot...you're just not using it. If you don't need the support, don't pay for it. Seriously, try CentOS. For companies that actually use all of the stuff that Red Hat sells, though, I would say they are getting a pretty good deal. Comparable support packages from Microsoft are $$$$.
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Uh, no, you have a couple of things mixed up. Xgl/AIGLX is the part that goes into X11 and provides the hardware accelerated 3D functions. Compiz/Beryl is a compositing window manager that actually does the effects. Every window manager has access to the 3D stuff, but they each individually have to implement their own effects. Early in the game it was attempted to separate the compositing manager from the window manager, but there were problems doing this (mostly performance, I think). So now everybody agrees that you have to integrate the two. I think the GP is right. As soon as Metacity, KWin, and whatever the XFCE WM is implement their own compositing effects, Compiz/Beryl will be an obsolete experiment. Personally, I'm holding out for Metacity. I've played around with Compiz/Beryl, and I like it, but I think it can be trimmed down quite a bit, and some major usability studies have to be done to make things like the wobbly windows less annoying.
Well, as another poster already said, it would be best if untrusted applications (like web browsers) were run as a different user from your main account. The only way it could access your data would be to require a password for privilege escalation. Unfortunately I don't know of any OS that does this. SELinux is neat, but I'm not sure it can do this without being overly restrictive.
Anyway, I think the bigger issue, though, is that root is bad. Not just for multi-user systems. The reason being because most malicious attacks are not aimed at running "rm -rf ~". They can, but that is not really in the interest of most of the people writing these exploits. They are interested in installing spyware, malware, and rootkits...all of which require root/administrator privileges. Other things too, like getting into the system logs and messing with memory owned by other processes, that help a cracker find and take advantage of exploits also require elevated privileges. So if your exploitable program simply runs as an unprivileged user you can get rid of a lot of these problems. It won't get rid of all problems, but it would help significantly.
Will I have hardware accelerated 3D video from my NVidia card without having to spend an hour doing Google searches for the proper procedure and drivers, and then spending another hour trying to find ones that actually, you know, WORK?
Ummm...have you actually used a linux distro in the last three years? Every major distribution has packages for the nvidia drivers, and has had them for at least several years (some, like gentoo, even longer). If they aren't installed by default, they are usually trivial to install. You can use the nvidia installer on their website, but that is a lot harder to use and less likely to work the first time. Learn how to use your distributions package management software. Yes, that thing called learning...usually needed when you are trying out something new, like an entirely different operating system that does not and will not work exactly like Windows.
The network-manager gains zeroconf support in this release, but there's still no WPA options in the network-manager. I thought that was coming in this release? I have network-manager-gnome installed, but it doesn't look anything like this.
Hmmm, not sure what you mean by this because zeroconf isn't related to network-manager as far as I know. Anyway, your network-manager applet should look just like your screenshot. Are you sure you are running the applet? Type nm-applet at the terminal. Ubuntu ships another wireless applet with the same icon, but it isn't the network-manager applet. So make sure you are actually running the network-manager applet. And WPA configuration has been there for at least a year, so you should be able to see it unless there are driver issues with your wireless card.
Thanks for pointing that out, but I don't believe it for one second. Radiation is radiation. Matter is matter. I know what the article says, but unless they have developed some sort of magical anti-matter beam, this does not solve the problem of selectivity. You can already narrow the exposure radius with standard chemotherapy. And with radioisotopic dyes, you can target to specific areas in the body (ex: thyroid). Yet another means to generate radiation that kills cells does nothing to advance the selectivity that has already been achieved.
I'm sorry, I'm a big proponent of science research, but this is absolutely the stupidest idea I have ever heard. Not only is anti-matter one of the most (if not the most) expensive substances on the planet, but we already have plenty of toxic compounds that kill cells just fine. The real problem isn't toxicity, it is selectivity. How do you kill cancer cells without killing the entire organism?
The hard sciences have been stepping in to get a share of the biomedical research money by declaring their research relevant to cancer, disease, bioterrorism, etc...for a while (and most are fairly legitimate claims), but this is really ridiculous. I think the high-energy folks really need to look elsewhere for applications (and hence, public relevance) to justify asking for more research money.
Mixing non-DRM music into iTunes does nothing to solve Apple's problem, it only complicates matters. Apple would have to update the iTunes software so it could download songs and skip encryption and key storage for non-DRM tracks.
Apple would also have to rework its servers to manage purchased tracks without dealing with keys. It would also have to update the iPod to manage purchased track syncing without trying to use keys. It would then need to spend time making sure all those changes didn't introduce bugs or exploitable vulnerabilities in FairPlay.
The rest of the article was good (actually, I didn't know about FairKeys), but this last argument about why drm-free content can't be sold through iTMS is rubbish. It would be trivially easy to have iTunes not encrypt songs flagged as "no-DRM." PyMusique does exactly that with all of the songs, so iTunes should be able to do it as well. And there wouldn't have to be any updates to the iPod. An unencumbered AAC from iTMS would be just like every other unencumbered file that the iPod can already play.
I do agree, though, that Apple probably just doesn't care about the drm-free ideology. It isn't worth it to them to distinguish between RIAA labels that require drm and independent labels that don't. When they get the ok to not use drm, they'll happily take it out of the system, but until then they aren't going to put any more work into it than absolutely necessary.
If a government organization could obtain positive results, it would mean they couldn't ask for more money.
What the hell are you talking about? Government funding organizations want to fund working research projects. They don't want to fund something that isn't going anywhere. If a project gets good, interesting results, it will continue to get funding as long as there is enough money to go around. That and researchers don't want to keep working on a non-working project because it doesn't help with publications and tenure.
I personally know so many college-educated Ph.Ds and all who are constantly trying to get grants so they don't have to go into the "real world" that it disgusts me.
What is this "real world" you speak of? Research science is very much the real world. There is probably more competition for research grant money in academia than anywhere else. It's just that research grant proposals get vetted by other scientists instead of consumers buying products. Not all science is applied science. Corporations do not fund basic research. Besides, why should they. It is far more efficient for them to pay taxes (along with everybody else) and have a portion of that tax money go to basic research that they benefit from, rather than independently fund their own basic research programs, which would cost a lot more money and lead to a lot of duplication of effort.
It doesn't matter if you are trying to prohibit drinking alcohol or paying someone else for sexual favors, prohibition doesn't work -- all it does
I hardly think that comparison qualifies. I just don't see somebody walking downtown to make a shady deal on 4th avenue for an incandescent light bulb. It would cost a hell of a lot more than just buying a CFL in the store.
All of the problems you mention with CFLs have been resolved: they are dimmable, fit into all light fixtures, they don't buzz, they don't flicker, and the light is a nice soft white (you can get filters to adjust the spectrum if you want).
I'm not sure I think the ban is a good idea, but I don't think it is all that bad either.
Autopackage, one of the recent efforts of developers to standardize packaging in GNU/Linux has not been very successful
I always thought Autopackage was a neat idea and a good solution for software projects that wanted to distribute binaries, but didn't want to make 10 different versions for every major revision of every distribution. The major problem I had with Autopackage, though, was integration with the distribution packages. It wouldn't satisfy dependencies with what was already installed, and once a package was installed if it was, say, a library, it in turn couldn't satisfy the dependencies of a distribution package. I know integration with the distribution package management system was planned, but it didn't make it into 1.0, and I think that was a major barrier to its adoption.
CNR is interesting, but I'm not sure why it is considered better than, say, Synaptic, other than that it has a mechanism for paying for commercial software (and maybe it makes it a little easier to find some packages). From what I have read, it seems like it is just a nice frontend on the distributions package management system with a link to some commercial repositories. So I don't see how that can really "solve the problem" of package management on linux.
I just said it was one of the major reasons religion was created and has endured for so long.
Yes, I know that is what you said, and you are wrong. Attempts to "explain the unexplainable" with religion (i.e: God did it) are, at best, a side product of a superstitious and ignorant period of human history. Prior to Christianity, people simply referred to the unexplainable as supernatural and magical. When Christianity came about, God came into the equation. People superposed their supernatural beliefs onto God. But that is not what Christianity teaches, and it is not why it was created. Superstition arises from ignorance, not from religion.
Absolutely nothing is outside of science's realm, because science can cover everything and anything that we can percieve.
That statement doesn't make any sense and doesn't have anything to do with what I said. Science is the study of the natural world. Religion is not. More importantly, science is a tool for understanding and manipulating the world around us, and religion is a social construct. Suggesting that the existence of science nullifies the need for religion is just as absurd as suggesting that visual art nullifies the need for music.
Religous people are frightened by the Theory of Evolution because it allows for the possibility that there are no Supreme Beings.
Once again with the banal generalities...certain sects of Christianity choose to refute evolutionary theory because they don't understand it, don't understand the Bible, and because they are politically motivated and/or manipulated. Extending our treatment of "religious people" beyond these groups reveals, in fact, that most followers of religion do not feel threatened in any way by scientific advancements.
And, as I said before, the Theory of Evolution has absolutely nothing to do with God. It doesn't suggest or deny the existence of God in any way. People try to use it for this purpose, but it is logically impossible to use a scientific theory to describe a concept that has no substantive presence in the natural world.
You cannot truly prove or disprove anything with 100% certainty. The last 2 weeks of your life might just be an elaborate dream, so you cannot prove that anything you have done recently actually happened. All you can do is have a certain level of certainty.
I have a 99.999999999999999999999% certainty that my hair color is red. I could be scizophrenic and just cannot accept that it is actually blonde, but I am fairly certain that I am sane and that my hair is red. Of course I am not 100% certain.
These examples don't make any sense. You are taking subjective labels (dream, red, schizophrenic) and by declaring them subjective saying that they are subjective. That is completely circular logic and a waste of time anyway because subjective labels are exactly that, subjective. The words "prove" and "disprove" don't mean anything without a context. In the context of science, you form models to describe the natural world based on known observations. You can absolutely disprove any scientific model with the appropriate observation. You cannot prove any given model, although the lack of any contradictory evidence over a long period of time does tend to convey a certain level of certainty among the scientific community. It is a simple rule, really: don't assume your model is incorrect until you have a good reason to. Outside of science, proving and disproving becomes a logical exercise and doesn't have any real bearing on the natural world.
Having a working hypothesis and then theory about how and why humans created early religions goes a long way to disproving that God exists.
No, not really. Acknowledging that religion is a social construct does not nullify the existence of God. It is a way of rationalizing disbelief in God, but that is all. It can also be used to rationalize a belief in and search after God.
Using the scientific method is valid in any discussion.
You have obviously never studied any philosophy. The scientific method is valid when you are trying to answer scientific questions. Not every question that can be asked is a scientific question, and therefore the scientific method is not always the right tool.
The basic connection is that evolution helps create a "natural" world where God is not needed.
Statements like this (and there are a lot of them here, I'm just picking on this one) are the reason why this whole evolution discussion is such a problem. Look people, the scientific Theory of Evolution has absolutely nothing to do with God. This is the problem with politicized debates of scientific principles. People take pieces of ideas and try to use them to rationalize their own ideas. The process of evolution is a scientific model describing (using known observable evidence) the appearance of closely related yet genetically distinct species in ecosystems for which many have special physiological adaptations. Notice how I made no mention of God. You cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. That is why religion is not science, and science cannot be used to refute religion.
One of the fundamental reason why people "need" their faith in a god is because it explains the unexplainable.
Wow, thanks for that terse summary. It is good to know that the entire human construct of religion, which has existed in some form in every society for thousands of years, can be summarized in one line of Western, eurocentric, pseudo-Christian philosophy. Now try actually learning something about religion. I suggest looking into Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and some of the Native American religions. Religion is far more complicated than "it explains the unexplainable", which, by the way, it doesn't (see comment about division between science and religion above).
If you are atheist, fine, that is your choice. Just be intelligent about it, and don't drag science into your religious or anti-religious arguments.
Right. And just like anybody can waltz in and ask for your medical records now, they'll be able to get it much easier with an RFID chip. Sheesh!
Interesting question. Is VMWare going to check your Windows version (Vista Home vs. Vista Business) before letting you run it in a virtual machine? After all, it's against the license if you are running Home. This sounds like a backroom deal to me. VMWare has never cared about licenses before. Yeah, sure, they say use only a legally licensed copy of Windows, but they don't try to stop you from downloading an illegal copy and using it in a virtual machine (I'm not even sure they could if they wanted to).
Plants don't work that way! Good night!
Futurama misquotes aside, plants don't separate oxygen from carbon. They reduce carbon dioxide to create glucose and in the process, oxidize water to produce oxygen, and it is a very energy intensive process. If chemists knew how to do this kind of chemistry we would be all over it. Reconstructing the entire photosynthetic pathway in a test tube is no easy thing either.
Hmmm...this is a promising development. It'll be nice to have a convenient way of obtaining commercial software. My question, though, is how this will integrate with the package management system. I don't know much about CNR in Linspire. Are the programs distributed as .debs, or is the package tracking done separately (or not at all)? In other words, if I use CNR to install StarOffice, will it show up in Synaptic when I browse through my installed .debs?
Ummm...Vista Enterprise is exactly that, intended for large organizations. You have to get it through the Software Assurance program which is a lot more expensive, in total, than Vista Ultimate.
Apple: You may never, under any circumstances, on any hardware, at any time, for any reason, ever run OS X under virtualization. Period.
Where does it say that in the OS X license agreement? I only see restrictions pertaining to Apple hardware, not virtual machines.
Microsoft: We want more money to let you run Vista under virtualization.
Make that twice as expensive to run Vista inside another OS. Vista Ultimate costs about $400 compared to Premium which is about $250.
As opposed to just putting Vista itself on BT for a billion of your close personal friends? I don't see your point...like most software companies, Microsoft doesn't want multiple instances of Vista running on the same machine. They haven't cared in the past, but now they want to charge for the privilege.
You can type "yahoo" directly into the address bar and it will go straight to http://www.yahoo.com./
If they got patent X from some company, which they incorporate into their binary driver, they couldn't open source their driver without removing that piece of code first.
Why, exactly, would that be? Where in patent law does it say you can't distribute licensed code? You do know there are mp3 patents, and there are a lot of open source libraries that implement the codec, right?
Just so you know, patent law says you must pay a license to use certain "ideas" (ex: mp3, wma, aac). It does not say anything about whether the resulting code needs to be open or closed source.
Well, Debian has always had a minimal network-based install. Just checking the Debian page...it appears to be up to 180 MB now. It used to be around 75 MB, but it's growing--mostly because the installer is becoming a lot more sophisticated than it used to be. Gentoo also has a minimal cd coming in at about 120 MB.
Fedora, when it was Red Hat, used to have an installer you could boot off of a floppy and then do a network install, but I don't think they have that anymore. Ubuntu never really bothered with a minimal cd because they went the live cd route. I agree, I think it would be better if everything could be download once over the network, but there is some merit to the live cd approach. And there are still a lot of people out there without broadband connections, so they really need to have everything on media. As for the updates, that's going to happen no matter what. The only way to have a stable distribution that you release is to freeze the packages. If you start rolling in updates you no longer have a stable distribution.
Oh, right, because everytime I install Red Hat or Suse or Ubuntu I have to compile everything myself. WTF?
Having source available makes it easier to support architectures that aren't "officially supported." It isn't necessary to have the source to support multiple architectures. You just have to compile a binary for every architecture you want to support, which is what every linux distribution currently does. It is also what Microsoft did/does with Windows to support multiple architectures (ia64, alpha, AMD64). The reason Microsoft currently supports x86 and x86-64 only is because it takes extra effort to support multiple architectures, and they have decided the market isn't great enough to make it worthwhile. The recent rewrites of DirectX and incorporation of trusted computing probably have something to do with it as well.
Note the question is "Is Ubuntu a contender for the enterprise linux desktop?" Your average home desktop is quite a different beast. That said, I agree number 1) is stupid. The reason is really political, but now that cdrtools has been forked by Debian hopefully this will get fixed. No argument with 2) because Mono is still pretty immature, but 5) is a little subjective. If you mean you can walk into Best Buy and grab random software off the shelf and have it work with Windows, you are right. But Debian has a lot of software available. Chances are, if you have a software need, you can find something in the Debian repositories that will do the job. Of course, if what you really need is Photoshop (i.e: you are a professional graphic designer) then Gimp won't do the job, so not everybody will have all of their software needs satisfied by free software.
My point is this. RedHat is too expensive for what you get.
Correction...from what it sounds like you are saying, Red Hat is too expensive for what you need. You are buying support, but not using it. You are not using the functionality of the software you are buying. You are getting a hell of a lot...you're just not using it. If you don't need the support, don't pay for it. Seriously, try CentOS. For companies that actually use all of the stuff that Red Hat sells, though, I would say they are getting a pretty good deal. Comparable support packages from Microsoft are $$$$.