Concerning the Constitution, I think Christianity should be mentioned since its role in Europe's history was indeed crucial.
I think it's even more crucial that today we have religious freedom for all, including the freedom not to worship any god. It's a shame that some people still insist on somehow forcing their religious beliefs and symbols onto others. Please grant other people the same freedoms you want for yourself.
As pointed out in this post several archeological finds disprove parts of the bible.
there are many well known _objections_ to some things in the bible, but i'm not aware of anything that is universally understood to be simply incorrect. are you ?
No I'm not aware of anything universally understood, yet alone of anything universally understood to be incorrect.:-) So once you set the bar that high I have to stop arguing with you - you'll always find at least one person (apart from yourself) which will disagree. If the validity of their position does not matter, I have no chance
in convincing you.
if there was anything in the bible that was uncontestably false, nobody would believe in the bible anymore.
Well you can contest anything, even if your objection has no observable merit. In the case of
the cited post you could just say "what do archeologists know?". However if you use any
archeological evidence to support the claim
that parts of the bible can be proven to be
correct, then the archeological evidence showing that other parts of the bible can be proven to be incorrect need to be considered, too.
You need to use the same criteria
to decide which archeological evidence is credible, no matter whether it proves or disproves.
So you'll need to retract "part of the bible can be proven" or you'll need to accept "part of the bible can be disproven" - or you need to show that
the archeological investigations pointing to the
latter are somehow flawed. And showing these flaws you need to use the
same standards for both kinds of archeological investigations.
Problem is that DRM does not make it harder for the thief to steal your car. DRM in your analogy would mean requiring your customers to travel to NYC to pick up the car keys, even though you sell the cars in Miami. It would require the buyer to park his car in the DRM-approved garage every night, not where his house is. Certain groups of people (say members of a particular party) would not even be allowed to buy cars.
Also there'd be unlocked, ready-to-drive cars standing around at every corner...
DRM isn't intended to force EVERYONE to buy legit copies of music, the goal is to make piracy so hard that there is less and less incentive in doing so.
Right, it might be intended to do this, but the argument is that it does the opposite. It's easier to illegally copy music than to buy it. And this is BECAUSE of DRM.
The bible talks about lots of different things. Some of these things have been verified via archalogical evidence. Insofar as a recording of ancient history, the bible is surprisingly accurate in all of the things it depicts which are verifiable
As has been pointed out in earlier posts already - there are many things in the bible which can be disproven. If you want to make a honest argument you need to include this: parts of the bible are proven to be false. Not merely confusing or unclear as you state, but false. So sorry, but your theorie of the rest of the bible becoming understandable in time does not fly.
The point has been raised before, so I apologize for the repeat, but: vast numbers of PCs are currently virus-infected, many can be remote-controlled by dubious characters. A secure link is no longer a solution when core parts of your web browser can be replaced by something else - the user may click on the voting link, but end up on a completely different (though similar looking) web site. Security on the transfer from the voting server to the voter's PC is a requirement, but it only covers the connection, it does not secure the PC itself.
Banking is easier to secure, in some aspects - you can always trace where the money went. Voting on the other hand has to be anonymous, so verifying becomes more difficult.
Besides there is a deadline for vote counting - even if the result can be proven wrong, if it takes long enough you can legally get away with election fraud. (Please skip recent elections for this, I'm just trying to make a technical point which I feel needs to be addressed for internet voting.)
Well the last SuSE installation I used automatically created a user and a root account. Logging in with kdm, user root is not even visible. Given that, it wouldn't even occur to most newbies that they could start a desktop session as root. MS should use the same system.
Similarly SuSE automatically checks for updates, and if it finds security updates it will display a red "!" in the taskbar.
I tend to agree that users should not have to patch their computer all the time - unfortunately quality is still rather low in the software field. It should really be up to the software vendors to thoroughly test their products before shipping them. Patches *ought* to be a rare occurance.:-)
I think you are right - for the medium term auto-update as default is probably the only way to go.
You are right, however I think *if* MS would make this sort of thing the default, then most software vendors would adjust. Similarly MS could provide a "ask for root password before starting the install" mechanism. Once that's there and many users work as non-admin by default, software vendors would start to use it. Otherwise if there software is difficult to install they would lose sales.
I'm still not quite clear what a personal firewall is really doing for you. It can close some ports - which makes sense since MS didn't allow for some ports to be closed, even though they weren't needed for normal users. However once they fix that (I'm not sure whether that's the case already) what else can the personal firewall accomplish?
(I understand firewalls for networks - there you can have some ports open on the PCs for them to communicate with each other, but not with other machines on the internet.)
Anyway, I'm not criticizing this, just looking for enlightenment.:-)
Well using FrameMaker on Linux does not mean you have to document an open source project. Most of the chip design industry is moving to Linux these days - a large percentage of these companies use Frame to document chip designs. This is not a big industry, but it is one which spends a lot of money on tools.
FrameMaker has stagnated for so long, it's not even funny. It is a great application I really enjoy working with it, however it still has the same bugs which annoyed me 10 years ago when I used it to write my MSc thesis:
You draw graphics in an anchored frame, using "snap" to grid - resizing the frame will result to all your objects to move of the grid. The graphic becomes unmaintainable.
You delete a graphic object, and it messes up the display of the remaining objects - you need to scroll off the page and back to refresh.
(10 years of this bug!)
There is no multi-level Undo - you can go back one step, that's it. (Not really a bug, but it's just ridicoulous.)
And there are lots of other complaints: There is still no Linux version, the pricing is too high for it to become more commonly used, every installation seems to have a different set of fonts, each version has a new file format to be incompatible with the previous one, master pages and LOC/LOT/LOF formats are awkward to handle for new users, fmbatch still has the same limited set of features...
I'm sure Adobe will eventually succeed in killing this tool, just by neglect and greed.
Uhm - I hope you are joking. The recounts were about paper punchcards, and mechanical vote counting machines, not about a pencil and paper system. A pencil and paper system means you make cross somewhere on the ballot, at the end those ballots are counted by hand.
I think he is right, these mithuro guys seem to make posts solely to direct people onto their web sites. Sometimes the links are slightly related to the topic (as in this case) other times they just point to the main site.
Ok, this post was not a pure troll post as such, but who would rate it +5 ? It's a summary post, and not a particularly good one. I think this is a whole ring of mithuro spammers who mod each other up. They seem to be about to break through the moderation system.
Why? I think we are looking at completely different issues there. If you want to compare the security of two systems you need to do that with similar configurations. Whether it's legal to distribute software in a certain way is independent of it's quality.
With the exception of one or two things on the list, this stuff has been true about Linux for a long time. So why does it suddenly mean Linux is going to boom?
I think in this case, it's not what he says, but the fact that he says it that is important. It seems the idea that OSS is going to "take over" now is becoming more widespread. That in itself - people believing it's inevitable - might actually lead to it happening.
Once you think that Linux is going to be the future anyway, you might as well look into migrating your software, investing in training etc. I actually do see this happening in my field (chip design) almost everybody seems to be firmly convinced that in the future we'll design chips on Linux systems. Because of this our department is switching from it's HP infrastructure to IBM+Linux, even though the HPs still do the job, and there is no danger of them not being supported by the tool vendors any time soon. However if you think you'll have to switch anyway, why buy more HPs now? So new servers are Linux servers. There is something in it of course (the Linux servers give you more performance for the money) but maintaining two architectures is more work for the admins, too.
Well I think there are two possible undesirable situation here. Let's assume there is a good little guy, and a big evil company:
current system: big company sues little guy, little guy wins the case but the costs of defending himself bankrupt him
loser pays: little guy wants to sue big
company, but the risk of losing stops him, the big company gets away with taking his stuff
In both situations the system failed to provide justice - however as long as the court system is in reasonable shape, the party who is in the right would usually win the law suit. So considering that, I think the problem in the latter situation should occur less than in the former.
Not that this would be perfect, but it could be an improvement.
Well Google's algorithm is not supposed to reflect people's opinion about something. Sure they may try to find out that opinion and use it as input to their algorithm, but that's not the goal. The goal is to provide suitable hits for a query. When I type in "ferrari motor racing" I'm not interested in getting a site of the united pedestrian movement, no matter whether they have a strong opinion on Ferraris or not.
Why is that Google's problem?
Well initially it's my problem: I type in what I'm looking for, I'm not getting the sites which would be suitable for the query (or I'm getting results which are buried under lots of other stuff). The result of that is Google's problem: I'm using other search engines - once enough people do that it decreases their ad revenue.
now frustrated SuSE fans will be legally able to distribute home-rolled SuSE isos
But they've been able to do this all along - the restrictions in the Yast license solely applied to commercial distribution. Giving it away for free, modifying the source etc - that's all been allowed already. I can see your point though, that someone selling the SuSE ISOs could reduce their sales.
Well the source code for yast is here:
yast2-2.8.31-40.src.rpm
Restrictions are solely for commercial redistribution i.e. you can't pass on a copy of Yast for profit. Nothing stopping you from distributing it for free, though:
license
As for giving away stuff: reiserfs, lots of kernel modifications, lots of support for Xfree86 (Dirk Hohndel was a SuSE employee for a long time).
What's Loki's status anyway? There website still seems to be around, and they still seem to be selling stuff. Did they just lay off all the developers and keep selling there old products?
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's even more crucial that today we have religious freedom for all, including the freedom not to worship any god. It's a shame that some people still insist on somehow forcing their religious beliefs and symbols onto others. Please grant other people the same freedoms you want for yourself.
there are many well known _objections_ to some things in the bible, but i'm not aware of anything that is universally understood to be simply incorrect. are you ?
No I'm not aware of anything universally understood, yet alone of anything universally understood to be incorrect. :-) So once you set the bar that high I have to stop arguing with you - you'll always find at least one person (apart from yourself) which will disagree. If the validity of their position does not matter, I have no chance
in convincing you.
if there was anything in the bible that was uncontestably false, nobody would believe in the bible anymore.
Well you can contest anything, even if your objection has no observable merit. In the case of the cited post you could just say "what do archeologists know?". However if you use any archeological evidence to support the claim that parts of the bible can be proven to be correct, then the archeological evidence showing that other parts of the bible can be proven to be incorrect need to be considered, too. You need to use the same criteria to decide which archeological evidence is credible, no matter whether it proves or disproves.
So you'll need to retract "part of the bible can be proven" or you'll need to accept "part of the bible can be disproven" - or you need to show that the archeological investigations pointing to the latter are somehow flawed. And showing these flaws you need to use the same standards for both kinds of archeological investigations.
Also there'd be unlocked, ready-to-drive cars standing around at every corner...
DRM isn't intended to force EVERYONE to buy legit copies of music, the goal is to make piracy so hard that there is less and less incentive in doing so.
Right, it might be intended to do this, but the argument is that it does the opposite. It's easier to illegally copy music than to buy it. And this is BECAUSE of DRM.
As has been pointed out in earlier posts already - there are many things in the bible which can be disproven. If you want to make a honest argument you need to include this: parts of the bible are proven to be false. Not merely confusing or unclear as you state, but false. So sorry, but your theorie of the rest of the bible becoming understandable in time does not fly.
Banking is easier to secure, in some aspects - you can always trace where the money went. Voting on the other hand has to be anonymous, so verifying becomes more difficult.
Besides there is a deadline for vote counting - even if the result can be proven wrong, if it takes long enough you can legally get away with election fraud. (Please skip recent elections for this, I'm just trying to make a technical point which I feel needs to be addressed for internet voting.)
Similarly SuSE automatically checks for updates, and if it finds security updates it will display a red "!" in the taskbar.
I tend to agree that users should not have to patch their computer all the time - unfortunately quality is still rather low in the software field. It should really be up to the software vendors to thoroughly test their products before shipping them. Patches *ought* to be a rare occurance. :-)
I think you are right - for the medium term auto-update as default is probably the only way to go.
You are right, however I think *if* MS would make this sort of thing the default, then most software vendors would adjust. Similarly MS could provide a "ask for root password before starting the install" mechanism. Once that's there and many users work as non-admin by default, software vendors would start to use it. Otherwise if there software is difficult to install they would lose sales.
(I understand firewalls for networks - there you can have some ports open on the PCs for them to communicate with each other, but not with other machines on the internet.)
Anyway, I'm not criticizing this, just looking for enlightenment. :-)
Well using FrameMaker on Linux does not mean you have to document an open source project. Most of the chip design industry is moving to Linux these days - a large percentage of these companies use Frame to document chip designs. This is not a big industry, but it is one which spends a lot of money on tools.
And there are lots of other complaints: There is still no Linux version, the pricing is too high for it to become more commonly used, every installation seems to have a different set of fonts, each version has a new file format to be incompatible with the previous one, master pages and LOC/LOT/LOF formats are awkward to handle for new users, fmbatch still has the same limited set of features...
I'm sure Adobe will eventually succeed in killing this tool, just by neglect and greed.
Uhm - I hope you are joking. The recounts were about paper punchcards, and mechanical vote counting machines, not about a pencil and paper system. A pencil and paper system means you make cross somewhere on the ballot, at the end those ballots are counted by hand.
True, but they didn't use a pen+paper method.
Ok, this post was not a pure troll post as such, but who would rate it +5 ? It's a summary post, and not a particularly good one. I think this is a whole ring of mithuro spammers who mod each other up. They seem to be about to break through the moderation system.
Mods please keep an eye on any mithuro posts. :-(
Why? I think we are looking at completely different issues there. If you want to compare the security of two systems you need to do that with similar configurations. Whether it's legal to distribute software in a certain way is independent of it's quality.
I think in this case, it's not what he says, but the fact that he says it that is important. It seems the idea that OSS is going to "take over" now is becoming more widespread. That in itself - people believing it's inevitable - might actually lead to it happening.
Once you think that Linux is going to be the future anyway, you might as well look into migrating your software, investing in training etc. I actually do see this happening in my field (chip design) almost everybody seems to be firmly convinced that in the future we'll design chips on Linux systems. Because of this our department is switching from it's HP infrastructure to IBM+Linux, even though the HPs still do the job, and there is no danger of them not being supported by the tool vendors any time soon. However if you think you'll have to switch anyway, why buy more HPs now? So new servers are Linux servers. There is something in it of course (the Linux servers give you more performance for the money) but maintaining two architectures is more work for the admins, too.
I like it, but it's curious. :-)
In both situations the system failed to provide justice - however as long as the court system is in reasonable shape, the party who is in the right would usually win the law suit. So considering that, I think the problem in the latter situation should occur less than in the former.
Not that this would be perfect, but it could be an improvement.
And I failed to read your second post before replying - sorry.
Why is that Google's problem?
Well initially it's my problem: I type in what I'm looking for, I'm not getting the sites which would be suitable for the query (or I'm getting results which are buried under lots of other stuff). The result of that is Google's problem: I'm using other search engines - once enough people do that it decreases their ad revenue.
I was referring to the link in the message body, not the one in the signature...
I don't have the impression that there is anything on that website which is connected with SCO in any way. Are you just spamming for mithuro.com?
Sure there is a BIOS alternative, here you go: linuxbios.org
But they've been able to do this all along - the restrictions in the Yast license solely applied to commercial distribution. Giving it away for free, modifying the source etc - that's all been allowed already. I can see your point though, that someone selling the SuSE ISOs could reduce their sales.
As for giving away stuff: reiserfs, lots of kernel modifications, lots of support for Xfree86 (Dirk Hohndel was a SuSE employee for a long time).
What's Loki's status anyway? There website still seems to be around, and they still seem to be selling stuff. Did they just lay off all the developers and keep selling there old products?
Is there any point to your post, other than posting unrelated links to your mithuro.com webpage?