I noticed that the software mentioned is available for Windoze, MacOS and BeOS, but not any free software OSes. Also, something tells me that this guy's not about to go free-software with his new stroke of "genius".
Yes, I have to agree with you there. But until I realised that, I was encouraged by the following bit in the Guardian piece...
Taking another cue from nature, Barbalet has organised his entire Nervanet project as a "public access development forum".
Silly me, I thought this sounded a little like collaborative development. Sort of like real free software. Geez, I can be naive sometimes!
Also, I never said I personaly adgree with this, I'm only saying that it makes logical sense and seems practical.
Hmmm, logical. Yes, I'll grant that this proposal is indeed logical for extreme cases of disability. And the logic works on at least three levels that I can think of right off the bat.
Economic: This has been pointed out already. Such individuals (the extremely disabled) are invariably a huge drain on both the national and the family economies. Almost invariably without being able to contribute back to the community in any tangible manner.
Evolutionary: As far as the continued evolution of the Human Race goes, they should not be allowed to reproduce if they are insufficiently equipped to fend for themselves (i.e. the risk of passing on the disability is too great). Without the possibility of reproduction, there is little point, if any, for these people to consume resources that could be more profitably utilised by those with reproductive capability.
Emotional: This is an interesting one. Whereas I mentioned above that a severely disabled member of the family can be an enormous economic drain on the family budget, I can imagine that it pales in comparison to the emotional drain.
Yes, all very logical.
And the ability to reason is one of the key things that distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. However, another key difference is our capacity for emotion. The emotional arguments must also be considered, and that is when the waters get muddied just a whole heap. I have to admit that, for me, the emotional arguments are very hard to argue either for or against (partially because I do not hold very strong religious beliefs).
Basically, I have to cop out and say that there is no easy answer to this issue. A solely logical approach would be just as terrifying as a solely emotive approach.
Sure, the physical world has laws to regulate behaviour, but it's not the same as regulating internet (by which most people mean the web... sad but true) content. The web is not the exact equivalent of a public sidewalk or a shopping mall. You have to choose to view a particular site, and there is no requirement to visit or even pass through any other site to get to your destination.
I disagree. Fetchmail *is* one of the highest profile Open Source projects. Because, if you know nothing about Open Source, you read Eric Raymond's Fetchmail Press Release (aka The Cathedral and the Bazaar) After all, fetchmail was specifically created to test the Bazaar theory, and Eric makes that quite clear in his essay.
There's another factor in the apparently low moderation of this topic.
You can either post *or* moderate.
Now those who are moderators obviously have first-hand knowledge of the system as it is, and might just have something to say about it. If they feel it is worth saying, they obviously feel it is worth reading, so they choose to post rather than moderate. Hence we have an artificially large number of moderators choosing not to moderate on this topic.
Certainly some moderators will have chosen to post anonymously (originally, you were supposed to), and their comments may have been bumped up from 0 to 1. Without knowing how many comments started at 0 and how many started at 1, it's really impossible to accurately gauge how many comments have been moderated up. But it certainly looks to me as if the number of positive moderations *far* outweighs the number of negative.
Secure Desktop Power User Secure Server Open Server Custom install
"Power User" is a common enough term that it would make newbies think twice before choosing it, while allowing those with a clue to have something more fun to play with. It'd also have the advantage of sorely punishing those who think they are power users, but are actually far from it!
Well, you're half right. It's true that you either have it or you don't, but it is possible to be affected by it to differing degrees. Just look at a number of Down's syndrome folks, and you will see that the physical manifestations of the disorder vary widely from one individual to the next. They all have that same extra chromosome, but some don't show it as much.
Don't Paramount have a history of leaking future plots with "names and places changed to protect the innocent"? This could well be another example of that practice.
I certainly like the idea of a little more creativity on the alien effects front. It'd also be nice not to be able to pick whether a given character is a good guy or a bad guy based purely on how "alien" they look.
"Guys" as a form of address is widely accepted as a gender-nonspecific term.
Other uses of the word are *usually* intended to imply the male gender only.
Context is the key, and I think we are all intelligent enough here to glean the appropriate context from Rob's comment. He's run polls on the gender breakup of his audience, so he's obviously aware that he does not have a 100% male audience.
I don't know whether you have the same expression where you come from, but here in Australia, we call that attitude "The cowboy mentality" (making do with what you've got)
Rob obviously ain't no cowboy!
He plans to do everything possible to do accurate load testing. That's why he said scripts posting the same shit over and over are no good.
I applaud this approach. There's no way you can accurately simulate a REAL production load, but you can come pretty damn close. That's what he's aiming for.
What he really needs to do is get a lively flamewar happening over there. Maybe he should post a coupla vi/Open Source/Gnome/RedHat/sendmail vs. emacs/Free Software/KDE/Debian/Qmail flamebait stories over there.
I'm not sure if you were trying to "throw another shrimp on the barbie" but, if you were, you say "g'day" not "good day". (an eye for an eye, a clue for a clue:)
(I hope the pseudo tags come through the formatting)
I had a feeling that a little extraneous verbosity might assist in the conveyance of the impression that the path chosen by the various routers in the succession of transfers between the origin and the destination points of my query seemed to be rather prevaricated. My application of the indefinite article to the continents and oceans covered by the journey was intended as a comparison, not as an indication of plurality. And yet I had to abbreviate my composition for fear of repetitive use of the term "the width of..." and out of a desire not to wax overly loquacious, as occasionally I am wont to do.
Or, if you prefer, an Australian continent, an Indian Ocean, an African continent, an Atlantic ocean and (at least) a North American continent. Check out this snippet of traceroute
--- 11 Pos1-0-0.wel-core1.Sydney.telstra.net (203.50.6.46) 207.687 ms 1968.950 ms 519.342 ms 12 GigabitEthernet5-0-0.wel10.Perth.telstra.net (203.50.113.37) 337.857 ms 369.053 ms 548.711 ms 13 Serial1-0-1.paix1.PaloAlto.telstra.net (203.50.126.2) 781.644 ms 609.641 ms 409.682 ms ---
For the geographically impaired, that's the East coast of Australia to the West coast of Australia to the West coast of the US! (Huh?)
Hmm, just tried it to slashdot.org, and the intercontinental part of the route seems a tad more sane (i.e. Sydney straight to San Francisco), but this time it was 24 hops overall! (WTF?)
No wonder/. always seems slow from here!
Just where in the US is/., anyway? North, South, East or West?
I think there are quite a few people here who would agree that software patents (not copyrights) suck big-time. It's likely, though, that they aren't going away any time in the foreseeable future. With that in mind, here's an idea.
Shouldn't the PTO just start start reviewing Patent applications a bit more thoroughly? If they did, and used a little bit of smarts, they'd easily get a bead on just who the patent squatters are. Earn yourself a history of patent squatting, and you've earnt yourself a priority drop on your next patent inspection. For each patent application that is turned down as obvious or prior art, the applicant receives a point. For each patent granted that is overturned by the legal system, the applicant recieves, say, ten points. Applications are then processed in reverse order of the number of points held by the applicant. The little guy who has no points gets his patent through quickly while the patent squatter has to wait, maybe years, for his patent. That would certainly discourage this abhorrent abuse patent law. It would take a little while to really kick in but it would work, surely.
It is likely that if company X wants to improve linux with patch Y and Linus says no they will just apply it in their distribution.
And each time company X wants the latest features of the next kernel, they will need to re-apply their patches to the unfragmented kernel, or remain using the old kernel. If their patches are worth incorporating into the new kernel, developers will be screaming at Linus to fold it in. If not, they will find it prohibitively expensive to keep re-applying their patches with every new kernel release. And if they continue using the old, patched kernel, they will find themselves at a market disadvantage, eventually to the point that no-one buys their distribution. Fragmentation of the kernel is a non-issue.
Oh yeah, how will we know if their patches are worth applying? Easy! We have the source. This is how the GPL prevents fragmentation, while the BSD licence allows it.
I have to agree with you on this, because I have tried it. One of the first things I tried with my Pilot (palm pro) was reading some of the Gutenberg Project's E-texts and I found the experience to be less than enjoyable. The interface is perfect for storing and recalling small, discrete snippets of information and longer reference documents (which you really only access in discrete snippets). But for "stream-oriented" data such as a lengthy novel, I want a much higher resolution than the Pilot's offering.
I also found that I went through batteries much faster, probably because I often preferred to use the backlight to read the books.
There are already countless thousands of man-hours (person-hours for the picky) and many millions of dollars going towards providing all sorts of benefits to the poor and disadvantaged. This is a good thing.
BUT, it is quite clear that these same poor and disadvantaged people are likely to become even further disadvantaged as technology becomes more pervasive in society. However we can, with a little effort and organisation, salvage perfectly usable computers out of old hardware that we consider to be of little value. Distributing these machines among the poor will help to bridge or lessen the technology gap that is currently a vast chasm.
If we are going to provide welfare to our less advantaged members of society, it has to be more than just feeding them. Giving them our old computers is one way of helping, there are many others.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I have to agree with you there. But until I realised that, I was encouraged by the following bit in the Guardian piece...
Silly me, I thought this sounded a little like collaborative development. Sort of like real free software. Geez, I can be naive sometimes!
Hmmm, logical. Yes, I'll grant that this proposal is indeed logical for extreme cases of disability. And the logic works on at least three levels that I can think of right off the bat.
Yes, all very logical.
And the ability to reason is one of the key things that distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. However, another key difference is our capacity for emotion. The emotional arguments must also be considered, and that is when the waters get muddied just a whole heap. I have to admit that, for me, the emotional arguments are very hard to argue either for or against (partially because I do not hold very strong religious beliefs).
Basically, I have to cop out and say that there is no easy answer to this issue. A solely logical approach would be just as terrifying as a solely emotive approach.
Sure, the physical world has laws to regulate behaviour, but it's not the same as regulating internet (by which most people mean the web... sad but true) content. The web is not the exact equivalent of a public sidewalk or a shopping mall. You have to choose to view a particular site, and there is no requirement to visit or even pass through any other site to get to your destination.
I disagree. Fetchmail *is* one of the highest profile Open Source projects. Because, if you know nothing about Open Source, you read Eric Raymond's Fetchmail Press Release (aka The Cathedral and the Bazaar) After all, fetchmail was specifically created to test the Bazaar theory, and Eric makes that quite clear in his essay.
There's another factor in the apparently low moderation of this topic.
You can either post *or* moderate.
Now those who are moderators obviously have first-hand knowledge of the system as it is, and might just have something to say about it. If they feel it is worth saying, they obviously feel it is worth reading, so they choose to post rather than moderate. Hence we have an artificially large number of moderators choosing not to moderate on this topic.
Certainly some moderators will have chosen to post anonymously (originally, you were supposed to), and their comments may have been bumped up from 0 to 1. Without knowing how many comments started at 0 and how many started at 1, it's really impossible to accurately gauge how many comments have been moderated up. But it certainly looks to me as if the number of positive moderations *far* outweighs the number of negative.
Or how about...
Secure Desktop
Power User
Secure Server
Open Server
Custom install
"Power User" is a common enough term that it would make newbies think twice before choosing it, while allowing those with a clue to have something more fun to play with. It'd also have the advantage of sorely punishing those who think they are power users, but are actually far from it!
Well, you're half right. It's true that you either have it or you don't, but it is possible to be affected by it to differing degrees. Just look at a number of Down's syndrome folks, and you will see that the physical manifestations of the disorder vary widely from one individual to the next. They all have that same extra chromosome, but some don't show it as much.
The Tasmanian "tiger" is actually a marsupial, not a feline of any sort. It's more closely related to the kangaroo than a cat.
Still a major achievement if they can pull it off
Don't Paramount have a history of leaking future plots with "names and places changed to protect the innocent"? This could well be another example of that practice.
I certainly like the idea of a little more creativity on the alien effects front. It'd also be nice not to be able to pick whether a given character is a good guy or a bad guy based purely on how "alien" they look.
Seeing as we're being pedantic...
She's a super, king-size, mega-mega BEEYATCH
She's a super King-Kamayamaya Beeyatch!
She's a super King Kamehameha beeyatch!
'Course not, they're all in his belfry :)
And judging by his proud display of the "Freak of the Week" logo, Jim is fully aware of this!
Seriously though, that has to be one of the most comprehensive narrow interest sites I have ever seen.
Kudos and a straightjacket to Jim Buzbee!
OK, here's my take on it.
"Guys" as a form of address is widely accepted as a gender-nonspecific term.
Other uses of the word are *usually* intended to imply the male gender only.
Context is the key, and I think we are all intelligent enough here to glean the appropriate context from Rob's comment. He's run polls on the gender breakup of his audience, so he's obviously aware that he does not have a 100% male audience.
So stop being so damn precious!
I don't know whether you have the same expression where you come from, but here in Australia, we call that attitude "The cowboy mentality" (making do with what you've got)
Rob obviously ain't no cowboy!
He plans to do everything possible to do accurate load testing. That's why he said scripts posting the same shit over and over are no good.
I applaud this approach. There's no way you can accurately simulate a REAL production load, but you can come pretty damn close. That's what he's aiming for.
What he really needs to do is get a lively flamewar happening over there. Maybe he should post a coupla vi/Open Source/Gnome/RedHat/sendmail vs. emacs/Free Software/KDE/Debian/Qmail flamebait stories over there.
Now that's load testing!
I'm not sure if you were trying to "throw another shrimp on the barbie" but, if you were, you say "g'day" not "good day". (an eye for an eye, a clue for a clue :)
(I hope the pseudo tags come through the formatting)
I had a feeling that a little extraneous verbosity might assist in the conveyance of the impression that the path chosen by the various routers in the succession of transfers between the origin and the destination points of my query seemed to be rather prevaricated. My application of the indefinite article to the continents and oceans covered by the journey was intended as a comparison, not as an indication of plurality. And yet I had to abbreviate my composition for fear of repetitive use of the term "the width of..." and out of a desire not to wax overly loquacious, as occasionally I am wont to do.
;)
But I digress...
Or, if you prefer, an Australian continent, an Indian Ocean, an African continent, an Atlantic ocean and (at least) a North American continent. Check out this snippet of traceroute
---
11 Pos1-0-0.wel-core1.Sydney.telstra.net (203.50.6.46) 207.687 ms 1968.950 ms 519.342 ms
12 GigabitEthernet5-0-0.wel10.Perth.telstra.net (203.50.113.37) 337.857 ms 369.053 ms 548.711 ms
13 Serial1-0-1.paix1.PaloAlto.telstra.net (203.50.126.2) 781.644 ms 609.641 ms 409.682 ms
---
For the geographically impaired, that's the East coast of Australia to the West coast of Australia to the West coast of the US! (Huh?)
Hmm, just tried it to slashdot.org, and the intercontinental part of the route seems a tad more sane (i.e. Sydney straight to San Francisco), but this time it was 24 hops overall! (WTF?)
No wonder /. always seems slow from here!
Just where in the US is /., anyway? North, South, East or West?
I'll bet US gov. will still maintain their stance on export of encryption technology.
I think there are quite a few people here who would agree that software patents (not copyrights) suck big-time. It's likely, though, that they aren't going away any time in the foreseeable future. With that in mind, here's an idea.
Shouldn't the PTO just start start reviewing Patent applications a bit more thoroughly? If they did, and used a little bit of smarts, they'd easily get a bead on just who the patent squatters are. Earn yourself a history of patent squatting, and you've earnt yourself a priority drop on your next patent inspection. For each patent application that is turned down as obvious or prior art, the applicant receives a point. For each patent granted that is overturned by the legal system, the applicant recieves, say, ten points. Applications are then processed in reverse order of the number of points held by the applicant. The little guy who has no points gets his patent through quickly while the patent squatter has to wait, maybe years, for his patent. That would certainly discourage this abhorrent abuse patent law. It would take a little while to really kick in but it would work, surely.
No you don't!
"Help! Am being slashdotted!"
That's funny.
I'm sorry but I don't have the time or the bandwidth to follow all of the links in this article.
And each time company X wants the latest features of the next kernel, they will need to re-apply their patches to the unfragmented kernel, or remain using the old kernel. If their patches are worth incorporating into the new kernel, developers will be screaming at Linus to fold it in. If not, they will find it prohibitively expensive to keep re-applying their patches with every new kernel release. And if they continue using the old, patched kernel, they will find themselves at a market disadvantage, eventually to the point that no-one buys their distribution. Fragmentation of the kernel is a non-issue.
Oh yeah, how will we know if their patches are worth applying?
Easy! We have the source. This is how the GPL prevents fragmentation, while the BSD licence allows it.
Browse here for a clue.
I have to agree with you on this, because I have tried it. One of the first things I tried with my Pilot (palm pro) was reading some of the Gutenberg Project's E-texts and I found the experience to be less than enjoyable. The interface is perfect for storing and recalling small, discrete snippets of information and longer reference documents (which you really only access in discrete snippets). But for "stream-oriented" data such as a lengthy novel, I want a much higher resolution than the Pilot's offering.
I also found that I went through batteries much faster, probably because I often preferred to use the backlight to read the books.
Perhaps you don't understand?
There are already countless thousands of man-hours (person-hours for the picky) and many millions of dollars going towards providing all sorts of benefits to the poor and disadvantaged. This is a good thing.
BUT, it is quite clear that these same poor and disadvantaged people are likely to become even further disadvantaged as technology becomes more pervasive in society. However we can, with a little effort and organisation, salvage perfectly usable computers out of old hardware that we consider to be of little value. Distributing these machines among the poor will help to bridge or lessen the technology gap that is currently a vast chasm.
If we are going to provide welfare to our less advantaged members of society, it has to be more than just feeding them. Giving them our old computers is one way of helping, there are many others.