I may not be an authoritative source on the matter, but from what I know about the evolution of life on Earth, it's very unlikely that alien species (even carbon-based, oxygen-respirating ones) have DNA at all like ours. Yes, it's quite possible that they have some sort of genetic material (that is, material carrying the information needed to recreate the organism (though even DNA on Earth (and not every organism on Earth has DNA (many only have RNA (setq e 2.718))))), but the idea that it can be analyzed in the same way as terrestrial DNA is ridiculous. (Of course there's a chance, but the probability is negligible.)
Unfortunately, these types of stories can't be investigated using the scientific method because they consist of unverifiable and unrepeatable data. Imagine if I told you that someone else's closed source software crashed and as proof produced a photograph of this program supposedly crashing your computer. How much science can I do? Perhaps I could analyze the photograph, but there's no way to ascertain how that error message appeared on your screen.
I can't verify your claims with the amount of data you have; that's understandable, because you don't always have a way to produce proof and even if you did, you might not have it with you when this crash occurs. I can't reproduce your results; that's understandable, because this is not a regular event that you observed, and it's impossible to exactly replicate the circumstances under which it happened.
So there's not much science to be done. You can't use the scientific method to prove that the crash happened, and I can't use the scientific method to prove that it didn't. So why waste time over it?
A consequence of this is that linux is not GNU/linux. You can only argue that if you use the marketing definition of an OS.
I don't think even RMS argues that s/linux/GNU\/Linux/imgo. Rather, he uses the correct definition. Linux is the kernel, and because much of the software is part of the GNU project (to provide a free software Unix (that isn't Unix)), the entire system is GNU/Linux, or a Linux-based GNU system.
The problem is that much of the software on your average distro CD is not GNU software. GNU shouldn't get credit for all the non-kernel software in the distro. That's why I say "Linux" or "Linux distribution", depending on whether the person(s) I'm speaking to understands the difference between the operating system and the distribution.
Shortly after the USA bankrupted by massive tax revenue basically suffers a total collapse of government power.
Uh, why can't the government change the tax law? Companies will still have records which the government can ask to see. Companies will still have large office compounds which the government can (with a warrant) search.
Welfare collapses leading to riots. The army cant be paid, healthcare goes totally cash upfront, the education system fails.
You mean the collapse of the Soviet Union? Though the last item has already happened in America.:)
Some Chinese government officials may be mistaken, but free software isn't [completely] about communism. It's about anarchy. It's about freedom of information and communications. It's about true equality, where corporations can compete, but are only successful if they can do a better job than non-commercial organizations of cooperating people. It's a system without a central authority, although where it provides the most efficiency local dictators rule by popular consent.
In the world of free software, there's no room for national boundaries, corporate trade secrets, powerful governments, restricted information, or dictatorial regimes.
Rather than showing the Chinese people that we blame them for a government in which they have no say, let's invite them to participate in our world of [relative] freedom. Don't crititice the PRC regime; spread our culture (ours, not American/European pop culture) and ideas, because they will bring a greater benefit to the Chinese than making a point that we're going to limit who can use our supposedly-free software.
(I'm sure someone will shoot me down for the cultural imperialism in that last paragraph.:)
Someone was clever and realized that the character needed to be HTML-encoded, but didn't realize that GoLive does it for you. So he typed in the encoded character, and GoLive dutifully encoded his ampersand.
First, the release will generate massive quantities of good publicity for OSS.
Then AOL will get out of Microsoft's bed (or MS will have court-imposed changes as a result of the antitrust suit) and integrate Mozilla into their client. As it filters down to their members, a huge number of IE users switch to Mozilla -- many without even realizing it.
As I understand it, Mozilla's policy towards standards-compliance is "we'll honor the standards, and if you don't we can't guarantee that we'll handle your crap correctly and it's your problem". Suddenly, a large percentage of the audience of noncompliant sites is using a compliant browser.
The noncompliant crap is fixed when a large number of people can't use it.
One line of GPL code in a 100K BSD app will force the entire app to be GPL as well.
I've got it! I'll write the incredibly-useful "Include IO Stream Library" (which won't even compile), put it under the GPL, and anyone using that line of code will have to release their product under the GPL?
CPAN depends on testers (of known quality) to approve items. Not every language has as centralized a community. This may mean giving people of known quality temporary autocracies to recruit a pool of testers of known quality. After the high standards are set, a more democratic (or anarchist, depending on your POV) can take over.
Why not take the existing CPAN system, modify it to support the features we'd need for this sort of distributed project, and use that? It would need support for multiple languages (say, CPAN::Perl, CPAN::Cplusplus, CPAN::COBOL, all inheriting from CPAN.pm), the ability to specify what parts of the archive different mirrors have (because not every site will want to carry the COBOL stuff), some sort of automatic configuration for people who want it (face it, manual configuration is easier to implement but often unnecessary), and a new name (CLAN?:).
This is a GPL'd system written in a GPL'd language that's available on a wide variety of platforms. Why reinvent the wheel to prove that we don't have to reinvent the wheel?:)
...of 1 GHz on a Win98 machine? What's the reason you'd want to speed up a single-user system like that? Surely those extra Half-Life frames aren't going to make that much of a difference? (And if you have a chip that fast to begin with, is your processor really a framerate bottleneck?) Maybe I unfairly associate overclocking with mysterious gcc crashes, but I just don't see why it's worth the instability.
The maximum point value of a post should be reduced to 4, or even 3.
More importantly, Karma shouldn't be a contest. Allowing extremely high Karma values encourages people to chase after them. A better system might be to set a maximum Karma of a few points higher than the threshold for the bonus point option. That way, even Signal 11 will only be able to make a few first posts before he loses his bonus point. The bonus point threshold can then be scaled such n% of the users have it.
For most people, Karma is mostly the some of moderation done to your comments by moderators. If you moderate and get meta-moderated, your Karma may be slightly affected. If you meta-moderate, you may gain slightly in Karma (not sure if this is true anymore... at the start, I was getting a point a day, but now if there is a bonus I haven't noticed it).
Realistically, no company is going to sell registrations for less than $15 or so. If you really want to, why not register it yourself? I'm sure we'll see some clients appearing on freshmeat a short time after this gets started. At that price, service is what counts, not price. A dollar or two don't make much difference compared to a difference between good service and No Service Inc.
OTOH, if you depend on this, you're taking the risk that they'll remove the system and force you to pay huge fees.
Problem: there's a name for slashdotting servers on purpose: denial of service.
Instead, call up your ISP (speak to customer service, not tech support). Explain that you don't like banner ads and ask them to run a Junkbuster proxy for customers of theirs that would like to browse ad-free. You'll most likely be speaking to a non-technical person, so explain what a proxy server is, how it works, why it would still be optional, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
(And if you want some more humor(?), look at Jizmak's history/karma. :)
I may not be an authoritative source on the matter, but from what I know about the evolution of life on Earth, it's very unlikely that alien species (even carbon-based, oxygen-respirating ones) have DNA at all like ours. Yes, it's quite possible that they have some sort of genetic material (that is, material carrying the information needed to recreate the organism (though even DNA on Earth (and not every organism on Earth has DNA (many only have RNA (setq e 2.718))))), but the idea that it can be analyzed in the same way as terrestrial DNA is ridiculous. (Of course there's a chance, but the probability is negligible.)
I can't verify your claims with the amount of data you have; that's understandable, because you don't always have a way to produce proof and even if you did, you might not have it with you when this crash occurs. I can't reproduce your results; that's understandable, because this is not a regular event that you observed, and it's impossible to exactly replicate the circumstances under which it happened.
So there's not much science to be done. You can't use the scientific method to prove that the crash happened, and I can't use the scientific method to prove that it didn't. So why waste time over it?
Pogue was the only decent columnist MacWorld had when I stopped reading it.
I don't think even RMS argues that s/linux/GNU\/Linux/imgo. Rather, he uses the correct definition. Linux is the kernel, and because much of the software is part of the GNU project (to provide a free software Unix (that isn't Unix)), the entire system is GNU/Linux, or a Linux-based GNU system.
The problem is that much of the software on your average distro CD is not GNU software. GNU shouldn't get credit for all the non-kernel software in the distro. That's why I say "Linux" or "Linux distribution", depending on whether the person(s) I'm speaking to understands the difference between the operating system and the distribution.
So W2K will only be 30 million lines of code?
Uh, why can't the government change the tax law? Companies will still have records which the government can ask to see. Companies will still have large office compounds which the government can (with a warrant) search.
Welfare collapses leading to riots. The army cant be paid, healthcare goes totally cash upfront, the education system fails.
You mean the collapse of the Soviet Union? Though the last item has already happened in America. :)
In the world of free software, there's no room for national boundaries, corporate trade secrets, powerful governments, restricted information, or dictatorial regimes.
Rather than showing the Chinese people that we blame them for a government in which they have no say, let's invite them to participate in our world of [relative] freedom. Don't crititice the PRC regime; spread our culture (ours, not American/European pop culture) and ideas, because they will bring a greater benefit to the Chinese than making a point that we're going to limit who can use our supposedly-free software.
(I'm sure someone will shoot me down for the cultural imperialism in that last paragraph. :)
With, of course, the major difference: the Mao dynasty was not hereditary.
This doesn't force messages to display properly. All it does is causes your messages to default correctly. Now, why couldn't that be the default?
Someone was clever and realized that the character needed to be HTML-encoded, but didn't realize that GoLive does it for you. So he typed in the encoded character, and GoLive dutifully encoded his ampersand.
Rob Malda posts under the username CmdrTaco.
You want to complain about Word? Complain about the file formats. Don't complain that Microsoft actually does make a decent app.
Then AOL will get out of Microsoft's bed (or MS will have court-imposed changes as a result of the antitrust suit) and integrate Mozilla into their client. As it filters down to their members, a huge number of IE users switch to Mozilla -- many without even realizing it.
As I understand it, Mozilla's policy towards standards-compliance is "we'll honor the standards, and if you don't we can't guarantee that we'll handle your crap correctly and it's your problem". Suddenly, a large percentage of the audience of noncompliant sites is using a compliant browser.
The noncompliant crap is fixed when a large number of people can't use it.
End result? Return of the Standards.
Linux does not stand for anything.
I've got it! I'll write the incredibly-useful "Include IO Stream Library" (which won't even compile), put it under the GPL, and anyone using that line of code will have to release their product under the GPL?
CPAN depends on testers (of known quality) to approve items. Not every language has as centralized a community. This may mean giving people of known quality temporary autocracies to recruit a pool of testers of known quality. After the high standards are set, a more democratic (or anarchist, depending on your POV) can take over.
This is a GPL'd system written in a GPL'd language that's available on a wide variety of platforms. Why reinvent the wheel to prove that we don't have to reinvent the wheel? :)
...of 1 GHz on a Win98 machine? What's the reason you'd want to speed up a single-user system like that? Surely those extra Half-Life frames aren't going to make that much of a difference? (And if you have a chip that fast to begin with, is your processor really a framerate bottleneck?) Maybe I unfairly associate overclocking with mysterious gcc crashes, but I just don't see why it's worth the instability.
Someday Intel chips will get so hot and so powerful that only the five richest kings of Europe will be able to cool them.
More importantly, Karma shouldn't be a contest. Allowing extremely high Karma values encourages people to chase after them. A better system might be to set a maximum Karma of a few points higher than the threshold for the bonus point option. That way, even Signal 11 will only be able to make a few first posts before he loses his bonus point. The bonus point threshold can then be scaled such n% of the users have it.
For most people, Karma is mostly the some of moderation done to your comments by moderators. If you moderate and get meta-moderated, your Karma may be slightly affected. If you meta-moderate, you may gain slightly in Karma (not sure if this is true anymore... at the start, I was getting a point a day, but now if there is a bonus I haven't noticed it).
OTOH, if you depend on this, you're taking the risk that they'll remove the system and force you to pay huge fees.
Instead, call up your ISP (speak to customer service, not tech support). Explain that you don't like banner ads and ask them to run a Junkbuster proxy for customers of theirs that would like to browse ad-free. You'll most likely be speaking to a non-technical person, so explain what a proxy server is, how it works, why it would still be optional, etc.
The original: http://www.junkbuster.com/
The version I use: http://www.waldherr.org/junkbuster/
I prefer the latter because, well, look at the site and you'll see. Regardless, I urge you to install and use it.