Apart from the unnecessary Reformation-era rhetoric and Catholic bashing, there are a number of historical fallacies in your post. Prevent the Bible from being printed? The first book off Gutenberg's press was the Bible. A Catholic Bible. Prevent it from being translated in English? There was a bunch of awful non-Catholic English translations before the respectable and beautiful King James Version. But then we have this minor detail that the Catholic Duoay Rheims version predated the KJV by a couple of years. Be thankful that there is a Bible at all: without those Catholic monks hand-copying those manuscripts all through the centuries, there would have been no Bible to print.
Then there is Latin. In medieval Europe, most people were illiterate. The few who could read, could read Latin. Europe had a universal language. The value of a printed English translation was doubtful. But literate Europe insisted on reenacting their Babel, splintering themselves along nationalist and language barriers. Good going, guys.
Yeah, I know about the disk space (typically ~300MB), but how much memory does it need? IMHO, reviews of large software packages would be more useful if they included the RAM footprint of the running program(s). We would then have some idea -- beyond the subjective "it feels like" evaluations -- of the footprint. Would someone like to share his output of "top"? That would be much appreciated.
Help... I am having trouble reconciling the Mozilla hype to what I have experienced so far with Netscape 6 pr 1. I downloaded the Linux binary. So this is supposed to be the lean, mean, HTML-crunching machine. Posts on slashdot gush about how fast it renders. Well, it is not lean: according to top, it starts up at over 20MB and climbs up from there. This is about twice Netscape 4.72's footprint, and 3-4 times KDE's kfm footprint. It is not fast either. In fact, it is absolutely the slowest browser I have seen on any platform apart from Emacs's w3-mode.
This is not some problem inherent in Linux, since the Opera preview (when it is not crashing) is small and very speedy. And please, enough with the "debugging information" or "it is beta" excuses. This is supposed to be a public preview to impress consumers. And it is hard to imagine any kind of optimization that will give the 300% speedup this browser will need to be competitive with other browsers, even on Linux.
Am I missing a "--run-this-fast" switch or something? Is this sluggishness limited to the Linux version? I am running this on a P166 64MB.
Lots to respond to here. First, if you expect bounced messages from ORBS, you can always filter them out (the ORBS web site even tells you how). Second, ORBS does not test daily: it has not checked my hub for months. Third, I don't much mind the 17 messages (I receive rejected messages anyway) as I do having my hub hijacked by a spammer to send thousands of message if the jerk had got to my hub before ORBS did. Fourth, if your MTA crashes from unremarkable, nonmalicious, fully documented SMTP requests, then it is too buggy and fragile to be on the Internet. You should be grateful to ORBS for pointing that out, and fix it. Don't be lazy: I fixed mine.
I manage a mail hub that was probed by ORBS. They provided the service of informing me of the security hole, for which I am grateful. Thanks to them, I secured my server against spam relaying.
Besides the obvious desire to provoke, why would you call their probes an "attack"? From my mail logs, I see that their probes take up very little resources. There were not that many requests, and there were pauses between them. They test using legitimate SMTP requests, and they are entitled to do so once you put your SMTP server on the net. There is a big difference between a handful of probes that result in perhaps a single relayed mail, and a spammer pounding on your unsecured server with thousands of requests for relayed email. I would rather have ORBS test my server any day.
See their site for details. They do not randomly test sites, but only test when a suspected unsecured site is nominated by someone. Their probing serves, as you say, to "talk to the host accused". The admin has a whole month to secure the thing if it is found insecure, before it is publicly listed.
Summary: Ericsson I888 World cellphone (rented), IBMNet ISP account, 3Com Palm IIIx with irenhance, web and email software.
Don't write off that GSM phone of yours yet. You can rent (or buy) an Ericsson I888 from Omnipoint and stuff your SIM into it (their I888s are not SP-locked). You can also get an IBMNet (now attglobal.net) account which has dialup points all over the world.
I used that solution the last time I went on vacation. I loaded the appropriate software into my Palm IIIx and was set to go. The I888 has a builtin modem and an IR port, so I could use it with my Palm without a cable. I noted the appropriate IBMNet access numbers. In short, I checked my email in airports in Boston, New York, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Frankfurt with the same hardware and Internet account (it was a very long trip). You would want to watch those roaming charges.
Does anyone have some idea of whether Mandrake 7 (the real one, not the beta) is better than its predecessors in the bugginess department? I like Mandrake for a number of reasons, but the last one was disappointingly buggy. For example, the floppy tape driver was broken, XEmacs' info-mode and gdb-mode were FUBAR-ed, the glibc reference went AWOL, an X server was miscompiled and IBM's JDK did not work. I would hope that this version is less buggy, as I am reluctant to go through that pain again.
That is an interesting way to define away offense. Well, of course "it's a comedy" and "done in a joking manner": that is how ridicule works. Does an insult cease to be offensive when done with a grin? Hey, now all those jokes that we now label sexist, racist, anti-semitic and homophobic are suddenly inoffensive: after all, they are done "in a joking manner". Ridicule exists to offend. From my reading, it does not look like you believe there is such a thing as ridicule or mocking.
I am all for intelligent dialog and debate. The British public debates and writings from early this century, for example, demonstrate a remarkable degree of civil, intelligent discourse and even good humor. This movie, by contrast, is a mess of crude, sophomoric gags. I would be worried if people make their decisions religious based on toilet humor. Criticism often illuminates: ridicule only obscures. Let's see... a director made the movie because he became "disenchanted with the Catholic Church", and throws in a pile of "dick jokes" that mock many of the things Catholics hold sacred... and you don't think he wanted to offend Catholics? Even Playboy magazine remarked that "If members of the Catholic League don't picket this one, they're comatose". A look at the reviews at
should make it obvious that folks consider this movie offensive to Catholics ... and many of them seem to be happy about that. I don't know what you have in mind being "officials in the Catholic Church", as if laypeople do not count. The only "officials" I have in mind have better things to do than to watch and review such movies.
Have you gone shopping before? A carton of milk sits with a whole bunch of other cartons, virtually identical, with some differing in labels and price tags. To pick one off the shelf is something done with casual abandon: after all, one is as good as another, and they are all milk, aren't they? You can even get a generic store brand. Catholicism -- like many religions -- is not that kind of choice. It makes assertions of truth that conflicts with other religions, making religious indifference unworkable. A generic, sentimental sense of religiousity is no substitute. Reject the politically incorrect aspects of Catholicism -- dogma, authority, morality etc -- and it ceases to be Catholicism. So to talk vaguely about "the whole point of religion" and that "it's all about faith" as in your earlier response is really quite irrelevant.
I think Smith's quote I had in my original post should be self-explanatory. He made the film because he "had become disenchanted with the Catholic Church". Disgruntled Catholics or ex-Catholics often regard the Church as some sort of enemy or target of ridicule. For some reason, they are the ones supported by Hollywood.
I think you do not completely understand what Catholicism entails. It is not just a vague sense of religiousity, warm fuzzy feelings or some vague feeling that is supposed to be called "faith". One doesn't "get a religion" as if picking something off the shelf. The Catholic Church -- like many religions -- makes very specific claims of truth, often incompatible with other religions. The usual objects of ridicule -- authority and dogmas -- are integral parts of Catholicism.
What typically happens is that politically incorrect aspects of Catholicism takes a beating. Morality (Smith said that his characters "are free: no social mores keep them in check"), doctrine, worship and authority that are specifically Catholic are specifically targetted. If this were a different religion (say, Islam), one would call it bigotry. When Catholicism takes such a beating, we are told that this is "humor". For one who does not believe, of course, the gags will not seem offensive. For those who take their Catholic faith seriously, who hold certain things sacred, such gags are designed to offend. It is not really fair to ask someone who is the butt of ridicule to laugh along.
I wonder why people think it remarkable or even noteworthy to "challenge" the Catholic faith. It has been "challenged" for the last 2000 years: the movie Dogma is just another chirp in a long, noisy and ultimately futile cacophony that spans time and space. The movie is a bundle of infantile cheap shots meant to convey a sense of irreverence. The director appeals to being vaguely "pro-faith", as long as that faith is not Catholicism.
The issue is not really religiousity: that is an impulse burned into the heart of humanity, and expressed in some fuzzy emotive way in these doomsday movies. The issue is more a vague -- and sometimes explicit -- anti-Catholicism that seeks to lampoon Catholic symbols and authority. Director Kevin Smith's agenda is clear: "I made it because I had become disenchanted with the Catholic Church and I had a crisis of faith." (Daily Telegraph, 5/22/99, Jessica Callan). American bigotry has a long history. We know that the Puritans "sought to 'purify' the Church of England of remnants of the Roman Catholic 'popery'" (quoted straight from Encyclopedia Britannica). Americans have jettisoned the Puritans' piety, but retained their bigotry.
Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr observed that anti-Catholic prejudice is "the deepest bias in the history of the American people." Yale professor Peter Viereck commented that "Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals." This bashing, of course, is more subtle today than the old KKK days. Catholics are praised for not being fully Catholic in creed or practice. Catholic authority figures, symbols and images are ridiculed. Crucifixes and rosaries have been used in movies as Hollywood code for "danger, cuckoos at work". In this regard the new Arnold movie is no exception. All this knowingly annoy or upset pious Catholics, while being too boorish and infantile to object seriously. A look at the Catholic League's reports on anti-Catholicism at www.catholicleague.org should prove interesting.
I suppose there is some comfort in seeing all this irreverence. It is not possible to be irreverent unless there is an object of reverence. You cannot ridicule the ridiculous. As G.K. Chesterton remarked, "let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion." There is perhaps just enough truth visible in Catholicism to make people uncomfortable. When we are uncomfortable, we laugh. Perhaps some of us will stop laughing long enough to see that there is something there worth investigating seriously, something obscured by our frantic, desperate flippancy.
Perhaps not that many people have noticed, but the Pope has rather cheerily proclaimed Y2K as a jubilee year. Maybe there is more to Christianity than doomsday. The Pope would rather we join the celebration.
Slashdotters should not be upset that the Judge does not think Linux & friends constitute viable competition. End user features and apps are still not there, and are taking a long time being fulfilled. After all these years, the Linux GUI is still a mess. The font system is still a duct-taped collection consisting of X native fonts, FreeType, Ghostscript and WordPerfect/Applixware/StarOffice's engine with no central configuration or core collection of good scalable fonts. It is hard to cut and paste anything beyond raw text clippings. Office type software? Forget it. Linux is still mostly missing the boat with the "application platform of the future", lacking a decent web browser. After a year of furious development, Mozilla is still unusable. If not for the bloated, buggy, closed-source monster known as Netscape, much of the web would be hostile territory for Linux folks. We would not be able to shop, access your stock/bank account and other end-user web applications that Windows people take for granted. The main problem is that open source software platforms is still very much promise-ware, if anything is promised at all. Some, like Mozilla, have promising technology, but the key word is still "promise". Many projects have stalled -- remember kpilot? -- and may never reach their target. A decent web browser? Wait. Quicktime? Wait. Something comparable to MS Office? Wait. A decent PalmPilot desktop? Wait. A recent Java port? Wait. Full USB support? Wait. A fix for the font mess? Silence. A lot of games? Wait for a trickle. Clipboard handling of graphics and rich text? Silence. Anti-aliased fonts? Wait. An MS Outlook type app? Wait. A full-featured IDE or CASE tool? Wait. Quicken? Silence. Voice recognition? Silence. Linux and other open source platforms have a lot of good stuff. As long as they fit our needs, we will use them happily. It would be a serious delusion, however, to assume that such platforms would be viable alternatives to Windows in the near future. The most common end user needs are simply not met. The standard "please wait -- maybe forever", "well, *I* don't need no such steenkin' feature", or "go write your own, whiner" responses of the open source world are less than useful to the typical Windows user. The question of whether we want such end users in Linux/BSD-space I will leave to others to answer. But it is clear that many Windows users currently have nowhere to go in Open Source Land. And by the time the gaps are filled, they may be off chasing some other technology trend.
I have a question for those who hope Mozilla will some day "beat" MSIE: what if Microsoft decides to "embrace and extend" Mozilla? If Mozilla has a killer layout engine, an MS engineer can grab it and stuff it into Internet Explorer. Ditto any other good component. An at-least-as-good-as-Mozilla IE fitted with additional MS goodies (SSL, mail client, FrontPage etc) would seem to be unbeatable. Mozilla is open source and modular. This means it is quite vulnerable to being hijacked by MS or being plundered for code treasures. Also, Mozilla cannot beat IE on price as they are both free of charge.
A good effect of this scenario is that it guarantees good code all round. The down side, of course, is that those who hope to see Microsoft beaten will continue to be disappointed.
No, Rob, the poor guy doesn't want to hack source code to make things work. He's an EE, dammit, not a software engineer. He just wants his software to work, like his coffee machine, calculator or even the SCO Xenix machines you used to work on. The poor, idealistic fool.:-)
The reason I am not interested in the discouragement that women face in technical fields is that any such bias is provably surmountable. You are one example. I have met plenty of women programmers as classmates, coworkers and in more, err, social circumstances. The question -- as yet unanswered -- is why such women who are already programmers do not seem to take prominent roles in open source projects. They are the proud, the strong, the ones who conquered all obstacles blah blah. Right. So why aren't they contributing?
You asked yourself "why is it that so few women in CS look to CS for entertainment?" That is the question I have been asking all along. That you have now ASKED the question is progress. Perhaps you could answer your own question of why you do not make a hobby out of your work. When you do that, you will begin to answer the original question that started this discussion. Why do already-qualified women not take part in open source projects?
Frankly, I don't think you are qualified to answer the question either, as you are not a programmer. There are certainly women in IT and technical fields. The presence of women in my CS programs and organizations like WITI testify to that. From this not insignificant group of qualified women, we should have seen SOME who would be interested in writing open source stuff. Social pressures, early discouragement (etc.) do not figure here, because they are ALREADY programmers. That additional step -- from "just a job" to "it's a great hobby too" -- is what counts. There, it is a unilateral decision, neither encouraged nor discouraged.
It is a pity that little or no attempt has been made to answer the original question: why are there so few women in open source projects? There are certainly enough technically qualified women -- I have met them -- to start just ONE open source project. It is not difficult, as I can attest.
One does not learn to love something like coding. I don't mean just being a techie, but actually working on open source which is what this topic is about. I know women who are pushed into computer science, which appears the reverse of what you experienced. What cannot be pushed, however, is the love of the code itself. A friend with an MS in CS still cannot comprehend why I would actually code for fun. For her, it's a job. Another friend with a CS degree -- for all the encouragement from the powers that be -- bailed out of programming as soon as she could. Lots of women happily take up technical degrees and occupations, but that is not the question here. To actually love to code and do it as a hobby -- you don't seem to be in this category either -- is what this topic is about, and that does not and cannot be taught.
I can't say I find the excuses for the lack of female geeks very convincing in this context. Open source hacking is a fairly solitary work, done solo or by collaboration over the network. There is not that much interpersonal communication or body parts involved in writing software. I would imagine that such a hobby would be even easier to break into than other formerly male-dominated endeavors. Surely traditional excuses centering around environment or encouragement fizzle here, when women have entered other environments without problems.
One who loves to write free software should not need to be "encouraged" or "pushed" into it. The love of the craft, the chance to create complex and beautiful things from pure thought and will is enough reward. One should not need to break into any secret circle of practitioners: this is open source, where code and tools are freely available. One should not need approval from peers: they won't stop your typing fingers or tamper with your Internet connection. Just go. Do it, and do it because you love it.
Yes it is ... no it is not ... yes ... no ...
on
Galileo's Daughter
·
· Score: 1
With the advent of general relativity, the debate of what is moving and what is still is meaningless. It all depends on your frame of reference. Consequently, the debate on whether the earth moves is now obsolete. Feel free to find other things to argue about.
Well of course science or philosophy existed in various other cultures. I never denied that. But science it its current form did thrive within Christianity, which illustrates that the two are hardly incompatible.
Besides sweeping and vague generalizations, you also muddle up science with a lot of other stuff. What does the topic have to do with Incan and Aztec *culture*, for example? Why does ending the abhorrent practice of human sacrifice in some cultures be a conflict between religion and science? Another muddle is your mixing up of the wider field of philosophy and the empirical science of which Galileo is proclaimed the father. My point was that it was within allegedly science-hostile Christian civilization that modern science could make sustained progress, leaving everyone else in the dust. It was not my intention to bash other cultures -- I have 100% Chinese blood in me -- but to point out the debt that modern science owes to its birthplace.
Finally, I make no pretense at speaking for other churches. I spoke of my Catholic Church -- the 2000 year old institution in question -- and she was pretty much ignored through much of the evolution debate. A pity, since her more nuanced reflections on the topic might have added some substance to the debate. The fact still remains that, concerning the Catholic Church, few people can allege an outright conflict between faith and science beyond the Galileo controversy.
The Pope wrote an encyclical called Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) that gives a brief outline of philosophy. The gist of it is this: Christianity offered such a powerful explanation of the world that the older philosophy was thought to be unnecessary. There was no rejection of philosophy as a matter of doctrine, however. After all, St Augustine discovered Christianity by way of Plato.
While Islam got hold of Aristotle before Christianity, it remains true that Christian civilization willingly embraced and developed that old philosophy. And it remains true that only in Christian civilization that the empirical science that secular society prizes thrived and flourished.
It would be useful to keep in mind the context that my points are made. They were not intended to make sweeping generalizations concerning either science or religion, but aimed at the local topic. Firstly, heliocentrism was already proposed as a hypothesis. Copernicus, not Galileo, published that with Church approval. Galileo pushed it as established fact without empirical basis, offering little more than polemics. If this is your idea of scientific inquiry, then science is in pretty bad shape. Secondly, the Galileo affair took place in the context of Christianity, in a dispute allegedly concerning heresy. The point is that you cannot have heresy without dogma, and there was no dogma to violate. Consequently, the dispute was not really a matter of Christian doctrine, and the religious aspect of the dispute is secondary.
One would expect to find, for a 2000 year old Church that allegedly impedes science, quite a few examples of the science/religion conflict. That one can find no other alleged conflict for the Catholic Church other than the Galileo affair, and even that is revealed as something of a complex legal and personality issue than one of science (Galileo had no proof) or religion (geocentrism was not a dogma), is as Newman notes a case of the exception proving the rule.
Think for a moment. It is within Christianity that the university was born, that rigorous philosophical reasoning thrived, and where empirical science flourished. In every other culture, science was stillborn, never going far. Christianity is where spirit and flesh meets, where God truly walked among men. Aquinas argued, then, that there can be no conflict between faith and reason. Embracing rather than shrinking from truth, Christendom became the birthplace and nursery of science.
I wonder how much of the world's knowledge of the Catholic Church is based on fanciful history, born of Reformation-era polemics and further warped over time? Think of your own comments, completely unsubstantiated, and full of hand-waving. A "spirited discussion" may be useful, but only if based on substantiated facts rather than vague polemics.
There are lots of misunderstandings concerning the "Galileo affair", now permanently engraved in popular legend. It looks like Katz has spouted a few more of them, and perhaps invented a few of his own. Galileo was neither heretic nor was heliocentrism a heresy, nor was he ever charged with actual heresy: you can only be a heretic if there was a doctrine to deny. Contrary to popular legend, it was never church dogma that the sun revolved around the earth. Copernicus -- a Catholic priest -- published his work on heliocentrism with Vatican approval and dedicated his work to the Pope. No dogma, no heresy. The best they could come up with was suspicion of heresy.
Had Galileo been rigorously scientific in the dispute, he would not have gotten into his trouble. The main problem was that he advocated a controversial thesis without any convincing proof. Telescope or no, you can't easily prove that the earth revolved around the sun when all you saw was stuff whizzing across the sky. One possible argument -- parallax of the stars -- backfired in that his telescope was not sensitive enough to detect the parallax. He used spurious arguments such as ocean tides. He had no proof. The geek had no source code.
Another problem was that he had all the diplomacy of a bull in a china shop. I do not understand how Katz could characterize someone as undiplomatic and polemical as Galileo as "humble". He insulted the Pope, got into a bitter dispute with the Jesuits -- he insisted comets were an optical illusion -- and appeared to violate an order not to teach heliocentrism. Leaving the strictly scientific field, Galileo insisted on muscling into theology.
Mistakes were made on both sides of a rather complex affair. But Galileo came under a fairly benign Inquisition, and his house arrest was spent in relative luxury (a personal valet? Good grief). Any thread of torture was a formality. He could receive guests, and finished some of his best work then. Contrary to popular legend, Galileo's most important contributions to science came before and after the heliocentrism dispute.
I doubt if anybody in that event had a ready-made "model of reality" in the midst of that massacre. But you miss my point: the article was eager to dismiss unconvenient on-the-spot witnesses' accounts with little or no reason. One does not make a credible argument against a witness -- let alone several -- by saying "you are wrong and hallucinated the whole thing. I have no proof, but you did". Try that in a court of law. But that is indeed what the article did, and substituted its own thesis backed up by even more unreliable data: unnamed "sources" and speculation with little or no connection to the evidence.
The article is poorly substantiated, lacking names and proof. To smugly say "the article is correct" is to ignore the fact that the source of the article is also part of the "notoriously unreliable" media.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from the unnecessary Reformation-era rhetoric and Catholic bashing,
there are a number of historical fallacies in your post. Prevent the Bible
from being printed? The first book off Gutenberg's press was the Bible. A
Catholic Bible. Prevent it from being translated in English? There was a
bunch of awful non-Catholic English translations before the respectable and
beautiful King James Version. But then we have this minor detail that the
Catholic Duoay Rheims version predated the KJV by a couple of years. Be
thankful that there is a Bible at all: without those Catholic monks
hand-copying those manuscripts all through the centuries, there would have
been no Bible to print.
Then there is Latin. In medieval Europe, most people were illiterate. The
few who could read, could read Latin. Europe had a universal language. The
value of a printed English translation was doubtful. But literate Europe
insisted on reenacting their Babel, splintering themselves along nationalist
and language barriers. Good going, guys.
Yeah, I know about the disk space (typically ~300MB), but how much memory
does it need? IMHO, reviews of large software packages would be more useful
if they included the RAM footprint of the running program(s). We would then
have some idea -- beyond the subjective "it feels like" evaluations -- of
the footprint. Would someone like to share his output of "top"? That would
be much appreciated.
Help ... I am having trouble reconciling the Mozilla hype to what I have
experienced so far with Netscape 6 pr 1. I downloaded the Linux binary. So
this is supposed to be the lean, mean, HTML-crunching machine. Posts on
slashdot gush about how fast it renders. Well, it is not lean: according to
top, it starts up at over 20MB and climbs up from there. This is about twice
Netscape 4.72's footprint, and 3-4 times KDE's kfm footprint. It is not fast
either. In fact, it is absolutely the slowest browser I have seen on any
platform apart from Emacs's w3-mode.
This is not some problem inherent in Linux, since the Opera preview (when it
is not crashing) is small and very speedy. And please, enough with the
"debugging information" or "it is beta" excuses. This is supposed to be a
public preview to impress consumers. And it is hard to imagine any kind of
optimization that will give the 300% speedup this browser will need to
be competitive with other browsers, even on Linux.
Am I missing a "--run-this-fast" switch or something? Is this sluggishness
limited to the Linux version? I am running this on a P166 64MB.
Chris
Lots to respond to here. First, if you expect bounced messages from ORBS, you can always filter them out (the ORBS web site even tells you how). Second, ORBS does not test daily: it has not checked my hub for months. Third, I don't much mind the 17 messages (I receive rejected messages anyway) as I do having my hub hijacked by a spammer to send thousands of message if the jerk had got to my hub before ORBS did. Fourth, if your MTA crashes from unremarkable, nonmalicious, fully documented SMTP requests, then it is too buggy and fragile to be on the Internet. You should be grateful to ORBS for pointing that out, and fix it. Don't be lazy: I fixed mine.
I manage a mail hub that was probed by ORBS. They provided the service of informing me of the security hole, for which I am grateful. Thanks to them, I secured my server against spam relaying.
Besides the obvious desire to provoke, why would you call their probes an "attack"? From my mail logs, I see that their probes take up very little resources. There were not that many requests, and there were pauses between them. They test using legitimate SMTP requests, and they are entitled to do so once you put your SMTP server on the net. There is a big difference between a handful of probes that result in perhaps a single relayed mail, and a spammer pounding on your unsecured server with thousands of requests for relayed email. I would rather have ORBS test my server any day.
See their site for details. They do not randomly test sites, but only test when a suspected unsecured site is nominated by someone. Their probing serves, as you say, to "talk to the host accused". The admin has a whole month to secure the thing if it is found insecure, before it is publicly listed.
Summary: Ericsson I888 World cellphone (rented), IBMNet ISP account, 3Com
Palm IIIx with irenhance, web and email software.
Don't write off that GSM phone of yours yet. You can rent (or buy) an
Ericsson I888 from Omnipoint and stuff your SIM into it (their I888s are not
SP-locked). You can also get an IBMNet (now attglobal.net) account which has
dialup points all over the world.
I used that solution the last time I went on vacation. I loaded the
appropriate software into my Palm IIIx and was set to go. The I888 has a
builtin modem and an IR port, so I could use it with my Palm without a
cable. I noted the appropriate IBMNet access numbers. In short, I checked my
email in airports in Boston, New York, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and
Frankfurt with the same hardware and Internet account (it was a very long
trip). You would want to watch those roaming charges.
Does anyone have some idea of whether Mandrake 7 (the real one, not the
beta) is better than its predecessors in the bugginess department? I like
Mandrake for a number of reasons, but the last one was disappointingly
buggy. For example, the floppy tape driver was broken, XEmacs' info-mode and
gdb-mode were FUBAR-ed, the glibc reference went AWOL, an X server was
miscompiled and IBM's JDK did not work. I would hope that this version is
less buggy, as I am reluctant to go through that pain again.
Chris
That is an interesting way to define away offense. Well, of course "it's a
... a director made the movie ...
f fensiveNature.htm
comedy" and "done in a joking manner": that is how ridicule works. Does an
insult cease to be offensive when done with a grin? Hey, now all those jokes
that we now label sexist, racist, anti-semitic and homophobic are suddenly
inoffensive: after all, they are done "in a joking manner". Ridicule exists
to offend. From my reading, it does not look like you believe there is such
a thing as ridicule or mocking.
I am all for intelligent dialog and debate. The British public debates and
writings from early this century, for example, demonstrate a remarkable
degree of civil, intelligent discourse and even good humor. This movie, by
contrast, is a mess of crude, sophomoric gags. I would be worried if people
make their decisions religious based on toilet humor. Criticism often
illuminates: ridicule only obscures. Let's see
because he became "disenchanted with the Catholic Church", and throws in a
pile of "dick jokes" that mock many of the things Catholics hold sacred
and you don't think he wanted to offend Catholics? Even Playboy magazine
remarked that "If members of the Catholic League don't picket this one,
they're comatose". A look at the reviews at
http://www.catholicleague.org/Dogma%20Booklet/O
should make it obvious that folks consider this movie offensive to Catholics
... and many of them seem to be happy about that. I don't know what you have
in mind being "officials in the Catholic Church", as if laypeople do not
count. The only "officials" I have in mind have better things to do than to
watch and review such movies.
Have you gone shopping before? A carton of milk sits with a whole bunch of
other cartons, virtually identical, with some differing in labels and price
tags. To pick one off the shelf is something done with casual abandon: after
all, one is as good as another, and they are all milk, aren't they? You can
even get a generic store brand. Catholicism -- like many religions -- is not
that kind of choice. It makes assertions of truth that conflicts with other
religions, making religious indifference unworkable. A generic, sentimental
sense of religiousity is no substitute. Reject the politically incorrect
aspects of Catholicism -- dogma, authority, morality etc -- and it ceases to
be Catholicism. So to talk vaguely about "the whole point of religion" and
that "it's all about faith" as in your earlier response is really quite
irrelevant.
I think Smith's quote I had in my original post should be self-explanatory.
He made the film because he "had become disenchanted with the Catholic
Church". Disgruntled Catholics or ex-Catholics often regard the Church as
some sort of enemy or target of ridicule. For some reason, they are the ones
supported by Hollywood.
I think you do not completely understand what Catholicism entails. It is not
just a vague sense of religiousity, warm fuzzy feelings or some vague
feeling that is supposed to be called "faith". One doesn't "get a religion"
as if picking something off the shelf. The Catholic Church -- like many
religions -- makes very specific claims of truth, often incompatible with
other religions. The usual objects of ridicule -- authority and dogmas --
are integral parts of Catholicism.
What typically happens is that politically incorrect aspects of Catholicism
takes a beating. Morality (Smith said that his characters "are free: no
social mores keep them in check"), doctrine, worship and authority that are
specifically Catholic are specifically targetted. If this were a different
religion (say, Islam), one would call it bigotry. When Catholicism takes
such a beating, we are told that this is "humor". For one who does not
believe, of course, the gags will not seem offensive. For those who take
their Catholic faith seriously, who hold certain things sacred, such gags
are designed to offend. It is not really fair to ask someone who is the butt
of ridicule to laugh along.
I wonder why people think it remarkable or even noteworthy to
"challenge" the Catholic faith. It has been "challenged" for the last
2000 years: the movie Dogma is just another chirp in a long, noisy
and ultimately futile cacophony that spans time and space. The movie is
a bundle of infantile cheap shots meant to convey a sense of
irreverence. The director appeals to being vaguely "pro-faith", as long
as that faith is not Catholicism.
The issue is not really religiousity: that is an impulse burned into the
heart of humanity, and expressed in some fuzzy emotive way in these
doomsday movies. The issue is more a vague -- and sometimes explicit --
anti-Catholicism that seeks to lampoon Catholic symbols and
authority. Director Kevin Smith's agenda is clear: "I made it because I
had become disenchanted with the Catholic Church and I had a crisis of
faith." (Daily Telegraph, 5/22/99, Jessica Callan). American bigotry
has a long history. We know that the Puritans "sought to 'purify' the
Church of England of remnants of the Roman Catholic 'popery'" (quoted
straight from Encyclopedia Britannica). Americans have jettisoned the
Puritans' piety, but retained their bigotry.
Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr observed that anti-Catholic
prejudice is "the deepest bias in the history of the American people."
Yale professor Peter Viereck commented that "Catholic baiting is the
anti-Semitism of the liberals." This bashing, of course, is more subtle
today than the old KKK days. Catholics are praised for not being fully
Catholic in creed or practice. Catholic authority figures, symbols and
images are ridiculed. Crucifixes and rosaries have been used in movies
as Hollywood code for "danger, cuckoos at work". In this regard the new
Arnold movie is no exception. All this knowingly annoy or upset pious
Catholics, while being too boorish and infantile to object seriously. A
look at the Catholic League's reports on anti-Catholicism at
www.catholicleague.org should prove interesting.
I suppose there is some comfort in seeing all this irreverence. It is
not possible to be irreverent unless there is an object of
reverence. You cannot ridicule the ridiculous. As G.K. Chesterton
remarked, "let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous
thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the
day in a state of some exhaustion." There is perhaps just enough truth
visible in Catholicism to make people uncomfortable. When we are
uncomfortable, we laugh. Perhaps some of us will stop laughing long
enough to see that there is something there worth investigating
seriously, something obscured by our frantic, desperate flippancy.
Perhaps not that many people have noticed, but the Pope has rather
cheerily proclaimed Y2K as a jubilee year. Maybe there is more to
Christianity than doomsday. The Pope would rather we join the
celebration.
Slashdotters should not be upset that the Judge does not think Linux & friends constitute viable competition. End user features and apps are still not there, and are taking a long time being fulfilled. After all these years, the Linux GUI is still a mess. The font system is still a duct-taped collection consisting of X native fonts, FreeType, Ghostscript and WordPerfect/Applixware/StarOffice's engine with no central configuration or core collection of good scalable fonts. It is hard to cut and paste anything beyond raw text clippings. Office type software? Forget it. Linux is still mostly missing the boat with the "application platform of the future", lacking a decent web browser. After a year of furious development, Mozilla is still unusable. If not for the bloated, buggy, closed-source monster known as Netscape, much of the web would be hostile territory for Linux folks. We would not be able to shop, access your stock/bank account and other end-user web applications that Windows people take for granted. The main problem is that open source software platforms is still very much promise-ware, if anything is promised at all. Some, like Mozilla, have promising technology, but the key word is still "promise". Many projects have stalled -- remember kpilot? -- and may never reach their target. A decent web browser? Wait. Quicktime? Wait. Something comparable to MS Office? Wait. A decent PalmPilot desktop? Wait. A recent Java port? Wait. Full USB support? Wait. A fix for the font mess? Silence. A lot of games? Wait for a trickle. Clipboard handling of graphics and rich text? Silence. Anti-aliased fonts? Wait. An MS Outlook type app? Wait. A full-featured IDE or CASE tool? Wait. Quicken? Silence. Voice recognition? Silence. Linux and other open source platforms have a lot of good stuff. As long as they fit our needs, we will use them happily. It would be a serious delusion, however, to assume that such platforms would be viable alternatives to Windows in the near future. The most common end user needs are simply not met. The standard "please wait -- maybe forever", "well, *I* don't need no such steenkin' feature", or "go write your own, whiner" responses of the open source world are less than useful to the typical Windows user. The question of whether we want such end users in Linux/BSD-space I will leave to others to answer. But it is clear that many Windows users currently have nowhere to go in Open Source Land. And by the time the gaps are filled, they may be off chasing some other technology trend.
I have a question for those who hope Mozilla will some day "beat" MSIE: what if Microsoft decides to "embrace and extend" Mozilla? If Mozilla has a killer layout engine, an MS engineer can grab it and stuff it into Internet Explorer. Ditto any other good component. An at-least-as-good-as-Mozilla IE fitted with additional MS goodies (SSL, mail client, FrontPage etc) would seem to be unbeatable. Mozilla is open source and modular. This means it is quite vulnerable to being hijacked by MS or being plundered for code treasures. Also, Mozilla cannot beat IE on price as they are both free of charge.
A good effect of this scenario is that it guarantees good code all round. The down side, of course, is that those who hope to see Microsoft beaten will continue to be disappointed.
No, Rob, the poor guy doesn't want to hack source :-)
code to make things work. He's an EE, dammit, not a
software engineer. He just wants his software to work,
like his coffee machine, calculator or even the SCO
Xenix machines you used to work on. The poor,
idealistic fool.
The reason I am not interested in the discouragement
that women face in technical fields is that any such
bias is provably surmountable. You are one example. I
have met plenty of women programmers as classmates,
coworkers and in more, err, social circumstances. The
question -- as yet unanswered -- is why such women who
are already programmers do not seem to take prominent
roles in open source projects. They are the proud, the
strong, the ones who conquered all obstacles blah blah.
Right. So why aren't they contributing?
You asked yourself "why is it that so few
women in CS look to CS for entertainment?" That is the
question I have been asking all along. That you have
now ASKED the question is progress. Perhaps you could
answer your own question of why you do not make
a hobby out of your work. When you do that, you will
begin to answer the original question that started
this discussion. Why do already-qualified women not take part
in open source projects?
Frankly, I don't think you are qualified to answer the
question either, as you are not a programmer. There
are certainly women in IT and
technical fields. The presence of women in my CS
programs and organizations like WITI testify to that.
From this not insignificant group of qualified women,
we should have seen SOME who would be interested in
writing open source stuff. Social pressures, early
discouragement (etc.) do not figure here, because they
are ALREADY programmers. That additional step -- from
"just a job" to "it's a great hobby too" -- is what counts.
There, it is a unilateral decision, neither encouraged
nor discouraged.
It is a pity that little or no attempt has been made to
answer the original question: why are there so few
women in open source projects? There are certainly
enough technically qualified women -- I have met
them -- to start just ONE open source project. It is not
difficult, as I can attest.
One does not learn to love something like coding. I don't mean just being a techie, but actually working on open source which is what this topic is about. I know women who are pushed into computer science, which appears the reverse of what you experienced. What cannot be pushed, however, is the love of the code itself. A friend with an MS in CS still cannot comprehend why I would actually code for fun. For her, it's a job. Another friend with a CS degree -- for all the encouragement from the powers that be -- bailed out of programming as soon as she could. Lots of women happily take up technical degrees and occupations, but that is not the question here. To actually love to code and do it as a hobby -- you don't seem to be in this category either -- is what this topic is about, and that does not and cannot be taught.
I can't say I find the excuses for the lack of female geeks very convincing in this context. Open source hacking is a fairly solitary work, done solo or by collaboration over the network. There is not that much interpersonal communication or body parts involved in writing software. I would imagine that such a hobby would be even easier to break into than other formerly male-dominated endeavors. Surely traditional excuses centering around environment or encouragement fizzle here, when women have entered other environments without problems.
One who loves to write free software should not need to be "encouraged" or "pushed" into it. The love of the craft, the chance to create complex and beautiful things from pure thought and will is enough reward. One should not need to break into any secret circle of practitioners: this is open source, where code and tools are freely available. One should not need approval from peers: they won't stop your typing fingers or tamper with your Internet connection. Just go. Do it, and do it because you love it.
With the advent of general relativity, the debate of what is moving and what is still is meaningless. It all depends on your frame of reference. Consequently, the debate on whether the earth moves is now obsolete. Feel free to find other things to argue about.
Well of course science or philosophy existed in various other cultures. I never denied that. But science it its current form did thrive within Christianity, which illustrates that the two are hardly incompatible.
Besides sweeping and vague generalizations, you also muddle up science with a lot of other stuff. What does the topic have to do with Incan and Aztec *culture*, for example? Why does ending the abhorrent practice of human sacrifice in some cultures be a conflict between religion and science? Another muddle is your mixing up of the wider field of philosophy and the empirical science of which Galileo is proclaimed the father. My point was that it was within allegedly science-hostile Christian civilization that modern science could make sustained progress, leaving everyone else in the dust. It was not my intention to bash other cultures -- I have 100% Chinese blood in me -- but to point out the debt that modern science owes to its birthplace.
Finally, I make no pretense at speaking for other churches. I spoke of my Catholic Church -- the 2000 year old institution in question -- and she was pretty much ignored through much of the evolution debate. A pity, since her more nuanced reflections on the topic might have added some substance to the debate. The fact still remains that, concerning the Catholic Church, few people can allege an outright conflict between faith and science beyond the Galileo controversy.
The Pope wrote an encyclical called Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) that gives a brief outline of philosophy. The gist of it is this: Christianity offered such a powerful explanation of the world that the older philosophy was thought to be unnecessary. There was no rejection of philosophy as a matter of doctrine, however. After all, St Augustine discovered Christianity by way of Plato.
While Islam got hold of Aristotle before Christianity, it remains true that Christian civilization willingly embraced and developed that old philosophy. And it remains true that only in Christian civilization that the empirical science that secular society prizes thrived and flourished.
It would be useful to keep in mind the context that my points are made. They were not intended to make sweeping generalizations concerning either science or religion, but aimed at the local topic. Firstly, heliocentrism was already proposed as a hypothesis. Copernicus, not Galileo, published that with Church approval. Galileo pushed it as established fact without empirical basis, offering little more than polemics. If this is your idea of scientific inquiry, then science is in pretty bad shape. Secondly, the Galileo affair took place in the context of Christianity, in a dispute allegedly concerning heresy. The point is that you cannot have heresy without dogma, and there was no dogma to violate. Consequently, the dispute was not really a matter of Christian doctrine, and the religious aspect of the dispute is secondary.
One would expect to find, for a 2000 year old Church that allegedly impedes science, quite a few examples of the science/religion conflict. That one can find no other alleged conflict for the Catholic Church other than the Galileo affair, and even that is revealed as something of a complex legal and personality issue than one of science (Galileo had no proof) or religion (geocentrism was not a dogma), is as Newman notes a case of the exception proving the rule.
Think for a moment. It is within Christianity that the university was born, that rigorous philosophical reasoning thrived, and where empirical science flourished. In every other culture, science was stillborn, never going far.
Christianity is where spirit and flesh meets, where God truly walked among men. Aquinas argued, then, that there can be no conflict between faith and reason. Embracing rather than shrinking from truth, Christendom became the birthplace and nursery of science.
I wonder how much of the world's knowledge of the Catholic Church is based on fanciful history, born of Reformation-era polemics and further warped over time? Think of your own comments, completely unsubstantiated, and full of hand-waving. A "spirited discussion" may be useful, but only if based on substantiated facts rather than vague polemics.
There are lots of misunderstandings concerning the "Galileo affair", now
permanently engraved in popular legend. It looks like Katz has spouted a
few more of them, and perhaps invented a few of his own. Galileo was
neither heretic nor was heliocentrism a heresy, nor was he ever charged
with actual heresy: you can only be a heretic if there was a doctrine to
deny. Contrary to popular legend, it was never church dogma that the sun
revolved around the earth. Copernicus -- a Catholic priest -- published
his work on heliocentrism with Vatican approval and dedicated his work
to the Pope. No dogma, no heresy. The best they could come up with was
suspicion of heresy.
Had Galileo been rigorously scientific in the dispute, he would not have
gotten into his trouble. The main problem was that he advocated a
controversial thesis without any convincing proof. Telescope or no, you
can't easily prove that the earth revolved around the sun when all you
saw was stuff whizzing across the sky. One possible argument -- parallax
of the stars -- backfired in that his telescope was not sensitive enough
to detect the parallax. He used spurious arguments such as ocean
tides. He had no proof. The geek had no source code.
Another problem was that he had all the diplomacy of a bull in a china
shop. I do not understand how Katz could characterize someone as
undiplomatic and polemical as Galileo as "humble". He insulted the Pope,
got into a bitter dispute with the Jesuits -- he insisted comets were an
optical illusion -- and appeared to violate an order not to teach
heliocentrism. Leaving the strictly scientific field, Galileo insisted
on muscling into theology.
Mistakes were made on both sides of a rather complex affair. But Galileo
came under a fairly benign Inquisition, and his house arrest was spent
in relative luxury (a personal valet? Good grief). Any thread of torture
was a formality. He could receive guests, and finished some of his best
work then. Contrary to popular legend, Galileo's most important
contributions to science came before and after the heliocentrism
dispute.
One Catholic view of the mess can be seen at:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/GALILEO.TXT
I doubt if anybody in that event had a ready-made "model of reality" in the midst of that massacre. But you miss my point: the article was eager to dismiss unconvenient on-the-spot witnesses' accounts with little or no reason. One does not make a credible argument against a witness -- let alone several -- by saying "you are wrong and hallucinated the whole thing. I have no proof, but you did". Try that in a court of law. But that is indeed what the article did, and substituted its own thesis backed up by even more unreliable data: unnamed "sources" and speculation with little or no connection to the evidence.
The article is poorly substantiated, lacking names and proof. To smugly say "the article is correct" is to ignore the fact that the source of the article is also part of the "notoriously unreliable" media.