In other words, it has nothing to do with skin color or gender but just with seniority?
No. I did not say nor imply that. There is a kind of behavior that is not just hostile toward new people but is particularly hostile to women and POC. White men might not see any difference between that behavior and how newbies are treated but apparently women and POC do perceive a difference.
People are free to deny that such a difference is real. People are likewise free to invalidate the perceptions that traditionally non-priveleged people experience. Apparently SO has chosen to accept that something is going on and it's more than just antagonism toward new people. SO has chosen to accept that the patterns of behavior seen on SO are similar enough to what women and POC experience (and white men do not) when interacting with STEM communities in real life that they feel unwelcome at SO.
Such a thing is difficult to prove. But clearly there is something going on. SO has chosen one explanatory path that apparently most of/. finds difficult to believe. I'm guessing that most/.ers have a different explanation for the observed disparities.
My argument is that the behavior observed on SO by people who are new to the site reminds them of the exact same behavior they see within the white male-dominated world of CS. So yes, everyone on SO might actually be a black woman (and just lie on those surveys) but they are acting like the people who marginalize women and POC within the world of STEM, as perceived, presumably, by women and POC. It's the behavior that we're looking at.
Or could it just maybe be that the only kind of discriminator whether respecting someone or not is whether that person knows what they're talking about or whether they're talking out of their ass?
Because that's what geeks really care about and that's what I base the respect I give to people on. Because that's all a medium like Stack Overflow allows you to use, because that's all you actually see about a person.
Do you not see that people have different styles of writing? And therefore maybe the styles of writing adopted by most of the responders on SO, which in turn is encouraged by the overall culture at SO, mimics the marginalizing actions that women and POC observe in the real world? There is no "pure" writing that is free from all social conditioning and norms. Try as you might, your "natural" form of writing is a product of your culture and experiences.
So...could it be that a lot of that "sexual/racial/whatever discrimination" is happening just in the user's imagination?
I don't think discrimination is being claimed here. What I gathered is that certain kinds of people do not feel comfortable engaging with the community. Some of these are people who are new. This is definitely something I've picked up on. I used to be fairly active on the TeX/LaTeX site but am not any more for unrelated reasons. And I am a new programmer working on a massive lifetime program. Even though I know how SE works overall and know how to form good questions, etc, I never seek out help from SO because of its clear animosity toward new programmers. It's not worth the headache. I look for help/answers elsewhere.
For women and POC they, apparently, experience something similar that is keeping them away. It could just be newbishness, or it could be that they see in the culture of SO the same toxic aspects they see in STEM fields at school or work.
I imagine the reasoning goes like this. Out in the real world, white men are automatically treated with a higher level of respect and deference especially when it comes to STEM fields. They are the majority in the professional world and make the most money and have the most prestige. Women and POCs who are just coming into the field see all of this as a kind of Good Ol' Boys club and feel excluded or at least marginalized. There is a culture surrounding this and styles of behavior that communicate these ideas to people even if not done consciously.
So when a woman or POC comes to SO they see that exact same kind of behavior and receive those same kinds of signals that they see in real life and this is what discourages them from trying to engage or break into a club that doesn't want them (or at least seems like it doesn't want any outsiders).
This isn't to put the blame on all white men as many are sensitive to these issues and try to be more inclusive. This is to point out that a cultural problem does exist in STEM fields, especially programming, and SO just kind of falls into the same pattern because it isn't actively trying to not fall into that pattern.
I have no idea what the solution would be or if there can be a solution that works well.
Yes you can read -- between the lines. Remember, Amazon is famously anti-union. Do you think they don't have some kind of ulterior motive here? Save money, lower/eliminate benefits eventually, make even the "skilled" employees interchangeable and easily replaceable. Being at the very bottom rung of the economic ladder in America, it's nice to see that the upper middle-class is finally starting to get a taste of what's happening to everyone else.
Sorry for the early morning cynicism. From the bottom we're all just saying "duh, what did you expect?"
I was given a Vic-20 by my parents for Christmas one year when I was about 10 instead of the Atari 2600 I really wanted. I did enjoy the game that came with it (Radar Rat Race) but was still disappointed. Later that day I cracked open the manual and began typing in the commands. "HELLO, WORLD!" appeared on my screen. Eh. And then an animated ASCII jumping-jack man. That's pretty cool. And then a program that asks for your age, runs it against several IF-THEN statements and prints out an answer based on your age.
What a second. What?
So I added numbers together and did more IF-THEN checks. Holy fucking shit. I realized at that moment that I could do anything with these commands. I could create any program I wanted including games like Pacman. There was no limit. I had the Power.
So I programmed hardcore for the next 6 years. I became very good in Basic and proficient in machine language. And then I stopped programming around 17. I was burned out and it wasn't fun anymore.
Eventually I became a music major (composition) and gave up on computers altogether. Then a few years ago I came up with an idea for a super massively large music generating program. While I had forgotten how to program and had no feel for modern technology (when programming) and anything that had happened in languages in those 30 years, I still knew how to think like a programmer.
I chose Lua for this project (which didn't even exist when last I had typed code into a machine) and have become fairly proficient in it (some 6000 lines of code or so).
So yeah, entirely self-taught and then re-self-taught.
I have some huge gaps in my knowledge concerning really cool mathematical algorithms that I'll probably never learn. But I'm not really a programmer. I'm a composer using programming to realize a bigger project.
I went straight to college and nearly flunked out that first year. I really, really needed a break and took it at the cost of my GPA. After that I was fine but the damage was done. Take a year off if you need it.
I'm not a programmer but I've gotten way in over my head on this one program I'm developing (music generating software). I'm constantly using code from all over the place and I attribute it and provide license information for all of it. I don't know what's considered trivial or what any other relevant laws are so I make sure I am always covered. And if I can't find licensing information about some code then I search elsewhere for a solution. Since this one big project is my entire life I want to make sure every single little i is dotted and t crossed. If this makes it easier for me to use code from SE then great with a clear conscience then great!
Sorry I'm so late to reply. Most distros are horribly out of date with the version they package thus missing out on bug fixes and new packages. But even if it is up-to-date it's unnecessary. TeXLive has its own method for upgrading that's similar to apt-get. Basically every day I run: tlmgr update --all which lists and updates everything that needs an update as well as installing any new packages. Every year there's a new version of TeXLive so you just install it into a new directory, change a link to point to it instead of the old one and you're ready to go.
emacs (apt-get...) Lilypond (latest development version from the site) TeXLive (never use your distro's version of TeX/LaTeX -- always just install TeXLive) Timidity (playback of the MIDI files that Lilypond creates and convert them to FLAC) mplayer
John Cage's experience in an anechoic chamber was instrumental to much of his thinking about music and silence. Or at least it made for a good anecdote that he used quite often:
"There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."
The pride of my personal library is my copy of the 20 volume edition of the OED (2nd). I have it conveniently placed near my writing desk and make constant use of it. I fully appreciate the greater convenience of an online version but there's nothing quite like seeing it all laid out like this. While the market for something this expensive and large might be dwindling I doubt it will ever go away completely. And then at $295/year currently for the online version I just cannot justify spending that much (due to the weird price fluctuations at Amazon, and a lot of patience, that's the exact price I paid for my printed version). I also have the OED Historical Thesaurus which is an amazing work. The article mentions that they're going to combine it with the OED for the online version. That would make the yearly price more reasonable but it still seems more than I'd be willing to do for every year for the rest of my life.
I've given this a lot of thought over the years and I believe you can break it down into three circumstances
1) If you're using a monosaced typeface or a typewriter, use two spaces. It's the convention and I personally think it makes reading the text much easier. Of course how often does this situation arise these days? Not very.
2) With a typesetter or typesetting software a "space" has no specific length as it varies depending on the needs of the typesetter. That said some typesetters pad the space after a period and some don't. Either way it will look good and consistent. Trust your typesetter. Though if you use TeX you have your choice of which style to go with. It doesn't matter which you choose, it'll look fine.
3) If you're using a word processor it doesn't matter. Word processors produce crap for output. By using one you are stating up front that you don't care how the final product looks. By definition you are producing an informal text and as such you can use as many spaces as you want since it's not going to affect the aesthetic value or readability of the text any more than the decision to use a word processor in the first place. If you do care about how it looks and reads use typesetting software.
OK folks, I think a lot of you are missing what the trilogy was really about. First off, it has nothing to do with humans. Yep, the humans are just batteries. The trilogy is actually a struggle pitting the oracle against the architect. What the oracle wants is for rogue programs (the ones to be deleted) to be able to live free in the matrix. The final scene where the architect agrees to let those who want to be free be free, he is referring to rogue programs i.e. they won't be deleted now. The oracle has manipulated everything from the beginning, including setting up Agent Smith as the super agent (thanks to Neo's merging with him in the first movie). By making him such a bad ass he would be able to destroy the Architect's "perfect" matrix (and the batteries which would be bad also) the Oracle is able to force the Arhitect's hand and get him to let rogue programs "live" free. The fact that Zion was saved was completely irrelevant except as a motivating force to get Neo to go through with the final merging.
In fact when Agent Smith has Neo down and then, against his will, makes the exact same statement that the Oracle had made earlier, Neo gets it. He understands that he is to merge with Agent Smith/Oracle thus bringing an end to her fight with the Architect. The problem most people are having is assuming an anthrocentric take on the movie. The humans are lost, they are batteries, Zion cannot prevail and will never do so. The people who make up Zion (pod escapees) are only useful as a consequence of the imperfection necessary in the Matrix program to keep the pod people happy. As the Arhitect said it was a dangerous game the Oracle had played.
This might be the easy way out. First, most applications use extensive keybindings like "[space]" for pause or "p" for play, whatever, and the better apps let you assign your own keybindings (Ogle, for instance). Now, get one of those IR wireless keyboards -- not a RF (radio frequency) as they won't work for this. Hopefully your remote is a learning remote. If not, they can be had for cheap, but I would recommend going with a something better like the Home Theater Master MX-500. Now you can teach the IR keyboard signals from your keyboard (keybindings from above) into the appropriate buttons on your remote and you should be able to control your apps through the IR keyboard receiver which conveniently plugs into your keyboard port. I use this setup to control xmms, Ogle, and can even play MAME Pacman (poorly as remotes aren't made for this kind of thing), or really control just about any app I need to. And if you choose a configurable window manager (Win2K should qualify) then you can control your computer pretty well from your remote (KDE, for example, has a simple mouse emulation mode that can be manipulated with this remote control setup). By the way, I found my IR kayboard recently for $29 US. This whole thing works very well for me.
I have no opinion on "intellectual property rights," because the term is too broad to have a sensible opinion about. It is a catch-all, covering copyrights, patents, trademarks, and other disparate areas of law; areas so different, in the laws and in their effects, that any statement about all of them at once is surely simplistic. To think intelligently about copyrights, patents or trademarks, you must think about them separately. The first step is declining to lump them together as "intellectual property".
I'm not sure if I understand why one would choose to misrepresent RMS so badly. In any case this particular passage seems quite clear and I see no evidence of his "speaking with a forked tongue". Perhaps RMS doesn't speak well for all of us, but we should at least give him the respect of quoting him accurately and then discussing the pros and cons of his views.
I agree, VP is the perfect game when you just want something quick, fun, and entertaining. And with Virtual Pool Hall just out, now would be the time to do the port.
Point taken, but since we are talking hypotheticals, RMS strikes me as someone who will not give up and so the HURD would eventually have come about. Personally I'm looking forward to booting the entire GNU operating system. BTW, since Debian has gotten involved there does seem to be some real progress being made. Things will get mighty interesting if/when it does come out (will the industry see it as fragmentation and will we care what they think? or will Linux compatability be strictly maintained?).
If by Linux you refer to the kernel, then most likely without an open source Linux work would have continued more diligently on the GNU HURD kernel and we'd have entually ended up with an open source (GPLed) operating system and kernel. It just would have taken longer.
also think about how sick vegans and such get because it's so hard to maintain a healthy diet without eating any kind of animal product)..for that oversight. Please insert the word "many" right before "vegans". In a post this long, however, I'm bound to make mistakes like these. *sigh*
I appreciate the gesture, but anytime someone makes this kind of blatant generalization I feel compelled to ask for evidence to support this statement. I can give you all sorts of anecdotal evidence to support my side, but I won't since anecdotal does not equal proof. Secondly, you seem to be operating under the misconception that there is some nutrient that humans need that can't be gotten from vegetables, care to elaborate?
Even if I were to agree with you, which I don't, having never been a plant, I can safely we say "we don't know anything for sure about what it's like to be a plant". People who haven't been raped can't even understand what it's like to be a rape victim. They can say they do, but do they truly understand? I think not. Therefore, it seems a little.. well. It seems untoward to assume one can assume what it's like to be a plant. Humans don't even fully understand how the human brain functions.
Are you being a bit disingenious? Assuming we start from the idea that scietific materialism does in fact explain the universe, we can know with a high degree of certainty that thoughts and feelings all originate in the brain. Plants don't have brains, nor any apparent mechanism that would allow them to consciously experience any sensation. Animals do. Fish and reptiles have very small brains with very limited capacities (as compared to most mammals) so with them the question is a bit more difficult (which is why vegans give these creatures the benefit of the doubt). With mammals there is less uncertainty (especially primates). This appears to be rather basic biology. Yeah sure, we could be wrong (just as you might be wrong in not believing that I'm actually a unicorn who came here from Mars yesterday), but we can make reasonable pronouncements if we can safely lower the probability to insignificant levels (like the probability of me being a Martian unicorn). So basically it appears very reasonable to say that plants don't have feelings and especially don't consciously suffer therfore it is ok to eat them. Animals might be able to suffer (and some we are more certain about) therefore it is most likely wrong to eat them (according to this ethical basis).
Also, thinking about all the vegans and vegetarians out there. They don't want to eat animals (ok, that comment was broad-sweeping.. I'll admit right now that that is not the rationale for all of them.. for those that it is, that is who the following is concerned with, alright?). Well.. guess what? Plants are alive too! Just because they can't run off, they aren't "deserving" of life? Because they can't scream, you assume they can't feel? By that line of reasoning, a mute amputee would not be deserving of life either. Think about it. (also think about how sick vegans and such get because it's so hard to maintain a healthy diet without eating any kind of animal product)
The question is not whether the organism is alive, but whether it has significant enough cognitive abilities to experience suffering. Plants have no brains, therefore they cannot suffer. Insects have a sort of rudimentary brain, but clearly not enough to allow any sort of consciousness. Fish and reptiles would appear to be in a gray area. Mammals, however, clearly can feel pain and react in ways similar to humans. Perhaps they do have enough cognitive ability to suffer. Hopefully you can see the distinction here between life and cognitive ability which is the ethical basis for my being vegan. And I am a healthy vegan even after 10 years of doing so.
For example, Singer was involved in starting the Great Ape project, which advocates equal rights for primates, the same moral and legal rights as humans. (Rights but not obligations, in the same way that young children and the mentally ill are absolved of certain responsibilities.) Peter Singer (and in my brief overview of the Great Ape site) has never said that apes deserve *equal* rights. What he has said is that apes deserve the basic rights to live unmolested by humans (as in animal experimentation). Apes, obviously (at least according to Singer himself) are not capable of the kind of complex cognitive abilities that would neccesitate giving them "equal" rights such as voting or owning homes, etc. Without sounding too harsh, this is another example of Singer being misrepresented. This fact suggests a rather different 'spin' on the quote than/. suggests. It does seem, to me at least, to be inconsistent to believe that apes should be protected and respected, but not so children. Again, Singer has never stated that children shouldn't be afforded these same basic rights, only those whose brain is so severely damaged that there is no significant cognitive activity happening (what constitutes "significant" can be difficult to determine) much in the same way that with, say, insects there is not enough cognitive ability for the insect to be able to register suffering or for that matter any conscious thought, so it is ethically Ok to kill insects (no one is suffering), maybe fish, probably not normal adult mammals, and not normal adult primates. So there is no inconsistancy to Singer's beliefs. Basically any animal that is capable of actual mental sufferring should be given the right to not be subjected to suffering by human hand. This includes normal children AND apes. dave
And what if a majority of it's shareholders are people like you and me who think linux is the best thing and want to see RH continue as it is?
Wow, what an idea. We become shareholders and thus begin getting money back for all the GPL software we produce (sort of). I could dig that. Now if I can just remember where I have all that extra money lying around set aside for stock investments...
Point taken. But since we're talking hypotheticals, humor me a bit longer. Now lets say RH does become the sandard Linux distribution for businesses. Now if RH integrates their own proprietary software into it's product (under pressure from its shareholders) then we might have a problem on our hands. I am inclined, however, to think this scenario unlikely as the GPL does seem strong enough to prevent RH (or anyone for that matter, not to pick too heavily on Redhat) from taking over Linux even if it does take over the Linux business market.
Linux will survive as a free alternative OS even if a forked non-free version does become the standard in the business world, after all most of us use it for reasons other than that it is the standard OS (which, of course it isn't yet). It would be a shame to see things turn this ugly, I'm hoping they won't.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, it has nothing to do with skin color or gender but just with seniority?
No. I did not say nor imply that. There is a kind of behavior that is not just hostile toward new people but is particularly hostile to women and POC. White men might not see any difference between that behavior and how newbies are treated but apparently women and POC do perceive a difference.
People are free to deny that such a difference is real. People are likewise free to invalidate the perceptions that traditionally non-priveleged people experience. Apparently SO has chosen to accept that something is going on and it's more than just antagonism toward new people. SO has chosen to accept that the patterns of behavior seen on SO are similar enough to what women and POC experience (and white men do not) when interacting with STEM communities in real life that they feel unwelcome at SO.
Such a thing is difficult to prove. But clearly there is something going on. SO has chosen one explanatory path that apparently most of /. finds difficult to believe. I'm guessing that most /.ers have a different explanation for the observed disparities.
My argument is that the behavior observed on SO by people who are new to the site reminds them of the exact same behavior they see within the white male-dominated world of CS. So yes, everyone on SO might actually be a black woman (and just lie on those surveys) but they are acting like the people who marginalize women and POC within the world of STEM, as perceived, presumably, by women and POC. It's the behavior that we're looking at.
Or could it just maybe be that the only kind of discriminator whether respecting someone or not is whether that person knows what they're talking about or whether they're talking out of their ass?
Because that's what geeks really care about and that's what I base the respect I give to people on. Because that's all a medium like Stack Overflow allows you to use, because that's all you actually see about a person.
Do you not see that people have different styles of writing? And therefore maybe the styles of writing adopted by most of the responders on SO, which in turn is encouraged by the overall culture at SO, mimics the marginalizing actions that women and POC observe in the real world? There is no "pure" writing that is free from all social conditioning and norms. Try as you might, your "natural" form of writing is a product of your culture and experiences.
So ...could it be that a lot of that "sexual/racial/whatever discrimination" is happening just in the user's imagination?
I don't think discrimination is being claimed here. What I gathered is that certain kinds of people do not feel comfortable engaging with the community. Some of these are people who are new. This is definitely something I've picked up on. I used to be fairly active on the TeX/LaTeX site but am not any more for unrelated reasons. And I am a new programmer working on a massive lifetime program. Even though I know how SE works overall and know how to form good questions, etc, I never seek out help from SO because of its clear animosity toward new programmers. It's not worth the headache. I look for help/answers elsewhere.
For women and POC they, apparently, experience something similar that is keeping them away. It could just be newbishness, or it could be that they see in the culture of SO the same toxic aspects they see in STEM fields at school or work.
I imagine the reasoning goes like this. Out in the real world, white men are automatically treated with a higher level of respect and deference especially when it comes to STEM fields. They are the majority in the professional world and make the most money and have the most prestige. Women and POCs who are just coming into the field see all of this as a kind of Good Ol' Boys club and feel excluded or at least marginalized. There is a culture surrounding this and styles of behavior that communicate these ideas to people even if not done consciously.
So when a woman or POC comes to SO they see that exact same kind of behavior and receive those same kinds of signals that they see in real life and this is what discourages them from trying to engage or break into a club that doesn't want them (or at least seems like it doesn't want any outsiders).
This isn't to put the blame on all white men as many are sensitive to these issues and try to be more inclusive. This is to point out that a cultural problem does exist in STEM fields, especially programming, and SO just kind of falls into the same pattern because it isn't actively trying to not fall into that pattern.
I have no idea what the solution would be or if there can be a solution that works well.
Yes you can read -- between the lines. Remember, Amazon is famously anti-union. Do you think they don't have some kind of ulterior motive here? Save money, lower/eliminate benefits eventually, make even the "skilled" employees interchangeable and easily replaceable. Being at the very bottom rung of the economic ladder in America, it's nice to see that the upper middle-class is finally starting to get a taste of what's happening to everyone else.
Sorry for the early morning cynicism. From the bottom we're all just saying "duh, what did you expect?"
I was given a Vic-20 by my parents for Christmas one year when I was about 10 instead of the Atari 2600 I really wanted. I did enjoy the game that came with it (Radar Rat Race) but was still disappointed. Later that day I cracked open the manual and began typing in the commands. "HELLO, WORLD!" appeared on my screen. Eh. And then an animated ASCII jumping-jack man. That's pretty cool. And then a program that asks for your age, runs it against several IF-THEN statements and prints out an answer based on your age.
What a second. What?
So I added numbers together and did more IF-THEN checks. Holy fucking shit. I realized at that moment that I could do anything with these commands. I could create any program I wanted including games like Pacman. There was no limit. I had the Power.
So I programmed hardcore for the next 6 years. I became very good in Basic and proficient in machine language. And then I stopped programming around 17. I was burned out and it wasn't fun anymore.
Eventually I became a music major (composition) and gave up on computers altogether. Then a few years ago I came up with an idea for a super massively large music generating program. While I had forgotten how to program and had no feel for modern technology (when programming) and anything that had happened in languages in those 30 years, I still knew how to think like a programmer.
I chose Lua for this project (which didn't even exist when last I had typed code into a machine) and have become fairly proficient in it (some 6000 lines of code or so).
So yeah, entirely self-taught and then re-self-taught.
I have some huge gaps in my knowledge concerning really cool mathematical algorithms that I'll probably never learn. But I'm not really a programmer. I'm a composer using programming to realize a bigger project.
I went straight to college and nearly flunked out that first year. I really, really needed a break and took it at the cost of my GPA. After that I was fine but the damage was done. Take a year off if you need it.
I'm not a programmer but I've gotten way in over my head on this one program I'm developing (music generating software). I'm constantly using code from all over the place and I attribute it and provide license information for all of it. I don't know what's considered trivial or what any other relevant laws are so I make sure I am always covered. And if I can't find licensing information about some code then I search elsewhere for a solution. Since this one big project is my entire life I want to make sure every single little i is dotted and t crossed. If this makes it easier for me to use code from SE then great with a clear conscience then great!
Sorry I'm so late to reply. Most distros are horribly out of date with the version they package thus missing out on bug fixes and new packages. But even if it is up-to-date it's unnecessary. TeXLive has its own method for upgrading that's similar to apt-get. Basically every day I run: tlmgr update --all which lists and updates everything that needs an update as well as installing any new packages. Every year there's a new version of TeXLive so you just install it into a new directory, change a link to point to it instead of the old one and you're ready to go.
emacs (apt-get ...)
Lilypond (latest development version from the site)
TeXLive (never use your distro's version of TeX/LaTeX -- always just install TeXLive)
Timidity (playback of the MIDI files that Lilypond creates and convert them to FLAC)
mplayer
John Cage's experience in an anechoic chamber was instrumental to much of his thinking about music and silence. Or at least it made for a good anecdote that he used quite often:
"There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."
The pride of my personal library is my copy of the 20 volume edition of the OED (2nd). I have it conveniently placed near my writing desk and make constant use of it. I fully appreciate the greater convenience of an online version but there's nothing quite like seeing it all laid out like this. While the market for something this expensive and large might be dwindling I doubt it will ever go away completely. And then at $295/year currently for the online version I just cannot justify spending that much (due to the weird price fluctuations at Amazon, and a lot of patience, that's the exact price I paid for my printed version). I also have the OED Historical Thesaurus which is an amazing work. The article mentions that they're going to combine it with the OED for the online version. That would make the yearly price more reasonable but it still seems more than I'd be willing to do for every year for the rest of my life.
I've given this a lot of thought over the years and I believe you can break it down into three circumstances
1) If you're using a monosaced typeface or a typewriter, use two spaces. It's the convention and I personally think it makes reading the text much easier. Of course how often does this situation arise these days? Not very.
2) With a typesetter or typesetting software a "space" has no specific length as it varies depending on the needs of the typesetter. That said some typesetters pad the space after a period and some don't. Either way it will look good and consistent. Trust your typesetter. Though if you use TeX you have your choice of which style to go with. It doesn't matter which you choose, it'll look fine.
3) If you're using a word processor it doesn't matter. Word processors produce crap for output. By using one you are stating up front that you don't care how the final product looks. By definition you are producing an informal text and as such you can use as many spaces as you want since it's not going to affect the aesthetic value or readability of the text any more than the decision to use a word processor in the first place. If you do care about how it looks and reads use typesetting software.
In fact when Agent Smith has Neo down and then, against his will, makes the exact same statement that the Oracle had made earlier, Neo gets it. He understands that he is to merge with Agent Smith/Oracle thus bringing an end to her fight with the Architect. The problem most people are having is assuming an anthrocentric take on the movie. The humans are lost, they are batteries, Zion cannot prevail and will never do so. The people who make up Zion (pod escapees) are only useful as a consequence of the imperfection necessary in the Matrix program to keep the pod people happy. As the Arhitect said it was a dangerous game the Oracle had played.
Fucking brilliant.
No Dirk Benedict?
According to the Agnula website, DeMuDi and ReHMuDi are essentially the same thing just built on different distros (Debian and Redhat).
This might be the easy way out. First, most applications use extensive keybindings like "[space]" for pause or "p" for play, whatever, and the better apps let you assign your own keybindings (Ogle, for instance). Now, get one of those IR wireless keyboards -- not a RF (radio frequency) as they won't work for this. Hopefully your remote is a learning remote. If not, they can be had for cheap, but I would recommend going with a something better like the Home Theater Master MX-500. Now you can teach the IR keyboard signals from your keyboard (keybindings from above) into the appropriate buttons on your remote and you should be able to control your apps through the IR keyboard receiver which conveniently plugs into your keyboard port. I use this setup to control xmms, Ogle, and can even play MAME Pacman (poorly as remotes aren't made for this kind of thing), or really control just about any app I need to. And if you choose a configurable window manager (Win2K should qualify) then you can control your computer pretty well from your remote (KDE, for example, has a simple mouse emulation mode that can be manipulated with this remote control setup). By the way, I found my IR kayboard recently for $29 US. This whole thing works very well for me.
I have no opinion on "intellectual property rights," because the term is too broad to have a sensible opinion about. It is a catch-all, covering copyrights, patents, trademarks, and other disparate areas of law; areas so different, in the laws and in their effects, that any statement about all of them at once is surely simplistic. To think intelligently about copyrights, patents or trademarks, you must think about them separately. The first step is declining to lump them together as "intellectual property".
I'm not sure if I understand why one would choose to misrepresent RMS so badly. In any case this particular passage seems quite clear and I see no evidence of his "speaking with a forked tongue". Perhaps RMS doesn't speak well for all of us, but we should at least give him the respect of quoting him accurately and then discussing the pros and cons of his views.
I agree, VP is the perfect game when you just want something quick, fun, and entertaining. And with Virtual Pool Hall just out, now would be the time to do the port.
dave
Point taken, but since we are talking hypotheticals, RMS strikes me as someone who will not give up and so the HURD would eventually have come about. Personally I'm looking forward to booting the entire GNU operating system. BTW, since Debian has gotten involved there does seem to be some real progress being made. Things will get mighty interesting if/when it does come out (will the industry see it as fragmentation and will we care what they think? or will Linux compatability be strictly maintained?).
Dave
If by Linux you refer to the kernel, then most likely without an open source Linux work would have continued more diligently on the GNU HURD kernel and we'd have entually ended up with an open source (GPLed) operating system and kernel. It just would have taken longer.
Dave
also think about how sick vegans and such get because it's so hard to maintain a healthy diet without eating any kind of animal product) ..for that oversight. Please insert the word "many" right before "vegans". In a post this long, however, I'm bound to make mistakes like these. *sigh*
I appreciate the gesture, but anytime someone makes this kind of blatant generalization I feel compelled to ask for evidence to support this statement. I can give you all sorts of anecdotal evidence to support my side, but I won't since anecdotal does not equal proof. Secondly, you seem to be operating under the misconception that there is some nutrient that humans need that can't be gotten from vegetables, care to elaborate?
Even if I were to agree with you, which I don't, having never been a plant, I can safely we say "we don't know anything for sure about what it's like to be a plant". People who haven't been raped can't even understand what it's like to be a rape victim. They can say they do, but do they truly understand? I think not. Therefore, it seems a little.. well. It seems untoward to assume one can assume what it's like to be a plant. Humans don't even fully understand how the human brain functions.
Are you being a bit disingenious? Assuming we start from the idea that scietific materialism does in fact explain the universe, we can know with a high degree of certainty that thoughts and feelings all originate in the brain. Plants don't have brains, nor any apparent mechanism that would allow them to consciously experience any sensation. Animals do. Fish and reptiles have very small brains with very limited capacities (as compared to most mammals) so with them the question is a bit more difficult (which is why vegans give these creatures the benefit of the doubt). With mammals there is less uncertainty (especially primates). This appears to be rather basic biology. Yeah sure, we could be wrong (just as you might be wrong in not believing that I'm actually a unicorn who came here from Mars yesterday), but we can make reasonable pronouncements if we can safely lower the probability to insignificant levels (like the probability of me being a Martian unicorn). So basically it appears very reasonable to say that plants don't have feelings and especially don't consciously suffer therfore it is ok to eat them. Animals might be able to suffer (and some we are more certain about) therefore it is most likely wrong to eat them (according to this ethical basis).
dave
Also, thinking about all the vegans and vegetarians out there. They don't want to eat animals (ok, that comment was broad-sweeping.. I'll admit right now that that is not the rationale for all of them.. for those that it is, that is who the following is concerned with, alright?). Well.. guess what? Plants are alive too! Just because they can't run off, they aren't "deserving" of life? Because they can't scream, you assume they can't feel? By that line of reasoning, a mute amputee would not be deserving of life either. Think about it. (also think about how sick vegans and such get because it's so hard to maintain a healthy diet without eating any kind of animal product)
The question is not whether the organism is alive, but whether it has significant enough cognitive abilities to experience suffering. Plants have no brains, therefore they cannot suffer. Insects have a sort of rudimentary brain, but clearly not enough to allow any sort of consciousness. Fish and reptiles would appear to be in a gray area. Mammals, however, clearly can feel pain and react in ways similar to humans. Perhaps they do have enough cognitive ability to suffer. Hopefully you can see the distinction here between life and cognitive ability which is the ethical basis for my being vegan. And I am a healthy vegan even after 10 years of doing so.
For example, Singer was involved in starting the Great Ape project, which advocates equal rights for primates, the same moral and legal rights as humans. (Rights but not obligations, in the same way that young children and the mentally ill are absolved of certain responsibilities.) Peter Singer (and in my brief overview of the Great Ape site) has never said that apes deserve *equal* rights. What he has said is that apes deserve the basic rights to live unmolested by humans (as in animal experimentation). Apes, obviously (at least according to Singer himself) are not capable of the kind of complex cognitive abilities that would neccesitate giving them "equal" rights such as voting or owning homes, etc. Without sounding too harsh, this is another example of Singer being misrepresented. This fact suggests a rather different 'spin' on the quote than /. suggests. It does seem, to me at least, to be inconsistent to believe that apes should be protected and respected, but not so children. Again, Singer has never stated that children shouldn't be afforded these same basic rights, only those whose brain is so severely damaged that there is no significant cognitive activity happening (what constitutes "significant" can be difficult to determine) much in the same way that with, say, insects there is not enough cognitive ability for the insect to be able to register suffering or for that matter any conscious thought, so it is ethically Ok to kill insects (no one is suffering), maybe fish, probably not normal adult mammals, and not normal adult primates. So there is no inconsistancy to Singer's beliefs. Basically any animal that is capable of actual mental sufferring should be given the right to not be subjected to suffering by human hand. This includes normal children AND apes. dave
And what if a majority of it's shareholders are people like you and me who think linux is the best thing and want to see RH continue as it is?
...
Wow, what an idea. We become shareholders and thus begin getting money back for all the GPL software we produce (sort of). I could dig that. Now if I can just remember where I have all that extra money lying around set aside for stock investments
dave
Point taken. But since we're talking hypotheticals, humor me a bit longer. Now lets say RH does become the sandard Linux distribution for businesses. Now if RH integrates their own proprietary software into it's product (under pressure from its shareholders) then we might have a problem on our hands. I am inclined, however, to think this scenario unlikely as the GPL does seem strong enough to prevent RH (or anyone for that matter, not to pick too heavily on Redhat) from taking over Linux even if it does take over the Linux business market.
Linux will survive as a free alternative OS even if a forked non-free version does become the standard in the business world, after all most of us use it for reasons other than that it is the standard OS (which, of course it isn't yet). It would be a shame to see things turn this ugly, I'm hoping they won't.
dave