Such as the verifiable/falsifiable details about evolution, geology, cosmology?
Or do you refer to the complete absence of details about the Trojan War, the details of the Roman Republic (and earlier)? Or do they not count as "ancient"?
I suspect we're not going to agree on the Bible as an unbiased source of information about human behaviour and psychology, and the "accuracy" of the bible will probably differ for us depending on whether or not we accept some of the tenets of the Bible.
Thanks for the civil response however.
Fair points, however be aware that the Bible and other such text are at least partially propaganda designed to retail selective anecdotes to support a particular world view. They shouldn't be viewed as unbiased or accurate recording of events that occurred.
Well, earlier in the year, a nice young rider with a 2 month old son went over his handlebars in a low speed crash.
Helmets are useful for crashes below 14mph. The testing by ANSI/SNELL uses a model in which a weight is dropped on the helmet from some prescribed height which supposedly simulates a collision of that speed. The helmets are not supposed to be effective over that speed.
The ANSI/SNELL model doesn't take into account the damage done to the brain when it slaps against the inside of the cranium when decellerating.
Arguments have been made that a helmet increases the rotational radius of the head which leads to increased neck/spine/medulla oblongata injuries
Finally, there is an observed effect for _all_ safety measures (especially for motorists) that attention devoted to safety decreases due to a perception of increased "safety".
So, it's not quite as dumb as it sounds although it was couched in provocative terms about yuppies etc.
Disclaimer: I wear a helmet and have had mild concussion from an endo while wearing it -- but that was mountain biking.
Craig Venter's funding is private and commercial. When he first started TIGR (The Institute for Genome Research) he got a lot of flack from scientists that worked for research sponsored by society through taxes being used to pay for NSF and NIH grants. The accusations were that he (and his speculative commerical backers) were leeching off publically funded science and not sharing their data back rapidly with the rest of the scientific community. This hiding of results is a big no-no in scientific academia -- both culturally and historically.
So your worries about military vs. civilian might be extended to military vs. private_company vs. public.
Venter's new virus is owned and controlled by civilians that aren't controlled by you and me.
Eugenia is obviously interested in banging the same old drum again and again..... some of these points were made to her the last time she reviewed RH9 and RH8 and yet she appears incapable of learning that RH is _not_ going to come with MP3 support until the IP situation is sorted.
She was also told that she should use official RPMs and yet she continues to ignore thsi.
I used to look at OSNews occasionally, but I think I just won't bother as it's irritation without information.
(Oh yeah... Debian is my primary OS in case anyone is wondering).
This American Life"
Also this happens in other countries where thousands of convictions per year are admitted to be unsafe, many of them having "confessions" as a central plank in the prosecution's case:
Contrary to popular perceptions, then, wrongful criminal convictions are a normal, everyday feature of the criminal justice system - the system doesn't just sometimes get it wrong, it gets it wrong everyday, of every week, of every month of every year. With the result that thousands of innocent people experience a whole variety of harmful consequences that wrongful criminal convictions engender.
The law is an ass and it needs very careful guidance in order to make sure that it doesn't get it wrong.
People accused of crimes need to be tried publically with all the evidence available for the perusal of citizens.
Same with those damn witches, but we dealt with them eh?
I have to say that I suspect this guy to be guilty, but there has been sufficient monkeying-about with his due-process rights that it is not safe to accept anyone's testimony including his own on face value. All these cases should be tried in the clear light of day, in the open where we can all see what the facts are and where twelve members of the public can decided what to believe instead of some administration appointees and their fucked-up apparatus that failed to prevent 9-11.
Damn right. The Taliban were/are a deeply horrible lot, just like the Northern Alliance who are now in power with the support of all the major Western democracies. I can't believe that we're still supporting people that stone women to death, murder homosexuals and flog people for immodesty after we claimed that we were liberating them from religious fundamentalists.
Contrary to what you may have heard, Afghanistan is not a liberated country, but has become a living hell under the pro-Massoud terrorist warlords. According to the latest UN report, Afghanistan has become the world's largest opium producer and all the warlords and others in power are engaged in the dirty business of drug trafficking. Only a few days ago Human Rights Watch revealed the real situation of alleged "press freedom" in Afghanistan, writing - I quote -:
"Security officials have warned journalists to stop publishing critical articles (...). A number of journalists have already been arrested by police forces and detained in Kabul's jails."
Existing cities are easily converted to healthy, relaxing places if more people would just get off their ass and ride a bike.
Most trips that people take are very short ( a matter of a few miles, a few minutes ) to pick up groceries or go out for food.
These can easily be done on bicycle.
No need for Segways or creating new cities.
We just need some self-discipline people!
Re:Why would anyone be concerned?
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 1
You assume that your brain is the equivalent of the trunk of your car.
I'd like to see some legal opinion to back that up. I think we're in untested waters here and precedent has not been established.
Ideally laws should be framed and enacted to benefit society and if the balance of allowing employers to screen out potential rapists from their workplaces is decided by the Supreme Court or other competent authorities to outweigh the risks to privacy then that is what should happen.
I hope you wouldn't argue against this?
Re:Stay out of my brain you authoritarian fuck!
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Look, it's the equivalent of being able to gather evidence for a pre-emptive strike. If I can find convincing evidence that you're a psychotic then I can take the appropriate action to prevent you from harming other people in the future.
Would you leave a loaded gun lying around?
Would you leave a bottle of poison marked soda out?
Would you leave Hussein in charge of WMDs?
(Well, I know that a deviant like you would, but the rest of us wouldn't, those are rhetorical questions addressed to the rest of the audience)
No, of course you wouldn't. So if we can prevent one workplace massacre by the simple expedient of a painless scan then we should. Appropriate checks and balances (something like the separation of powers built into the constitution) could be instituted to make sure that there was no unauthorized sharing of the scan except to law-enforcement and anti-terrorist figures.
Re:Why would anyone be concerned?
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Yes!! It would be so much better than the camcorder that we have to rely on presently. Do you know if this is actually possible with this technology or are you just speculating on a possible future application?
Why would anyone be concerned?
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 0
Unless they've got something to hide? This is a very positive technology that will help detect psychopaths, people inherently unfitted to their jobs, deviants, and other misfits.
Widespread deployment will allow the proper treatment and direction of people as _individuals_ instead of assuming that some sort of "one size fits all" Bill of Rights can be applied in a blanket way.
This article and the comments on it are examples of hysteria and romantic pessimism.
Re:What this actually means
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
Okay. First of all, DRM is NOT synonymous with "digital copyright protection", okay?
No, but DRM is the probable mechanism by which "digital copyright protection" will be enforced. The question facing all producers of software/hardware is whether the public is going to accept the new enclosures of "digital copyright" or revolt against them. Linus is trying to ride the wave and make sure that there's a way that Linux will be able to play "copyright" restricted works by facilitating the integration of a mechanism antithetical to the GPL into GPL'ed code.
Since you don't modify the kernel itself, the GPL has no scope here, so it's obviously not prohibited under the terms of the GPL.
Good point. However this is argued by those that believe in the ethics behind the GPL as being a weakness of the GPL. Many would like to extend the GPL (as Linus mentions about NG-GPL) to make sure that this evasion of the spirit of the GPL (which is that if you give me a tool I can look at it, break it, show it to other people, add stuff to it) cannot occur.
Torvalds muddying discussion with PERSONAL stuff
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
On the whole, this is just
another example of why rms calls me "just an engineer" and thinks I have
no ideals.
Nice one Linus, drag in the hated figure of RMS to rally the troops around to support your position and make sure that this becomes a personality grudge-fest instead of a discussion about the principles involved.
Easy steps to win an argument in the GNU/Linux community:
State position
Point out that RMS doesn't like you or the position.
Profit!
Who gives a rat's ass what RMS says about your ideals. The question is what are your ideals? The continued existence of GNU/Linux above all other things?
And like the software patent issue, I also don't necessarily like DRM
myself, but I still ended up feeling the same: I'm an "Oppenheimer", and I
refuse to play politics with Linux, and I think you can use Linux for
whatever you want to - which very much includes things I don't necessarily
personally approve of.
OK, so how do you justify that? Just stating your position doesn't justify it.
[ Personally, I see it as a virtue - trying to make the world a slightly
better place _without_ trying to impose your moral values on other
people.
That's a dishonest position: when you do anything you impose your moral values on other people. The decision to not "impose your moral values" is in itself an imposition of your moral values on me. Everything we do and don't do has an effect on everyone around us. Specifically allowing the spread of DRM into GNU/Linux allows the propagation of content which has none of the fair use rights that content has had in the past in other media. Your decision not to oppose this (which it is your right to make blah blah etc) is a decision to allow something which you "don't agree with" to occur. You've made a choice with concrete effects in the real world.
You do whatever the h*ll rings your bell, I'm just an engineer
who wants to make the best OS possible. ]
Then don't make political pronouncements on political matters and pretend that you're not doing that.
Reply to oncoming flames: no, I can't code to a hundredth fraction of Linus.
Sweet! Wish I had some mod points to raise your informative post above the dross. When you say it works fine in your laptop what make/model is that and what ethernet adapter does it have?
This is one of the most immediately handy things about the new release. The ability to choose how interfaces behave via a grub boot menu item means that a laptop that is trundled around to be used in different places is now very easily usable without extra tweaking.
No more hitting "I" for interactive boot to make sure that I skip "eth0" configuration when I power up on the train!
Hi Jason,
that's an interesting and valid experience and I'd agree that 5-10k/s with timeouts is not an acceptable download experience for a paid RHN-subscriber.
I'm using an old dial-up modem and I know that there's no point in signing up for the RHN because my downloads are already maxxed-out.
So, yeah, I'd be pissed if I were you and it's good that the BitTorrent option is there. I notice that Red Hat have choked-off leeches like me that would like to use their free-beer access to RHN so that paying-subscribers like you can get full priority access (I've no complaints with that, it's perfectly fair), so obviously they're trying to get you the bandwidth you've paid for.
(Note, I know my posts sound very pro-Red Hat, but I don't work for them and actually prefer Debian. My post was mostly reacting against unfounded generalized allegations about Red Hat that are being thrown around. Your post is nice and factual though!).
In conclusion it sounds like Red Hat could do with a couple more servers to meet the demands of subscribers to the RHN like yourself.
It's not a massive leak for Red Hat. The people that are going crazy about the BitTorrent downloads weren't going to pay for a full RHN subscription anyway.
I don't get why people are so pumped about getting RH 9 (shrike) a week early anyway. I'm going to wait until April 7th and then download it via my FREE (beer) RHN subscription that is available to anyone that wants one.
All the FUD and hysteria being spewed about Red Hat's new pricing strategy boggles my mind: it's still a fully GPL compliant and Free and free distribution.
The only non-Free bits are the actual up2date server (Proxy or Satellite server) for which there are several Free alternatives: yum, current etc. And the only people that have any reason to want those are large businesses which really should be putting some money back into the company that developed those wonderful tools: Red Hat!
I'm tired of listening to the whining. Red Hat has contributed a huge amount to the community by generating revenue from corporate users which goes into supporting people like Alan Cox and Havoc Pennington and Jeff Johnson (da rpm dude!). No revenue means less hackers like that means less Free and free software.
Old way: An erroneous hit is made on you in NCIC. The officer deviates from procedure and federal law by not confirming the hit with the ORI. You sue the DOJ and local agency for violation of civil rights. The judge throws out the case against DOJ, finds the local agency and arresting officer liable. You get money. Hooray.
The new way: An erroneous hit is made on you in NCIC. The officer deviates from procedure and federal law by not confirming the hit with the ORI. You sue the local agency for violation of civil rights. The judge finds the local agency and arresting officer liable. You still get money. Hooray.
Yeah, you get back some taxpayers money that should have gone to funding undernourished schoolkids lunches or getting a math textbook to some kid. Hoo-fuckin-ray.
After being detained, locked up, questioned, harrassed, having your freedom removed for who knows how long you get some money which can't possibly compensate. Hoo-fuckin-ray.
Does the arresting officer get removed from his position, his superiors disciplined and the rules revised to make sure it doesn't happen to some other innocent person? No. Hoo-fuckin-ray.
Let's all have another big cheer for the waste of taxpayers money in the service of abuse of human rights. Hip Hip Hoo-fuckin-ray!
Slashdot Mirror
Such as the verifiable/falsifiable details about evolution, geology, cosmology? Or do you refer to the complete absence of details about the Trojan War, the details of the Roman Republic (and earlier)? Or do they not count as "ancient"? I suspect we're not going to agree on the Bible as an unbiased source of information about human behaviour and psychology, and the "accuracy" of the bible will probably differ for us depending on whether or not we accept some of the tenets of the Bible. Thanks for the civil response however.
Fair points, however be aware that the Bible and other such text are at least partially propaganda designed to retail selective anecdotes to support a particular world view. They shouldn't be viewed as unbiased or accurate recording of events that occurred.
The bible specificly mentions a degrading ceremony done to such a reluctant slave, within which he was branded (at his ear).
The bible also says that the world was created by an omnipotent God and a lot of other stuff that's unbelievable to me, so why should I believe that?
Well, earlier in the year, a nice young rider with a 2 month old son went over his handlebars in a low speed crash.
Helmets are useful for crashes below 14mph. The testing by ANSI/SNELL uses a model in which a weight is dropped on the helmet from some prescribed height which supposedly simulates a collision of that speed. The helmets are not supposed to be effective over that speed.
The ANSI/SNELL model doesn't take into account the damage done to the brain when it slaps against the inside of the cranium when decellerating.
Arguments have been made that a helmet increases the rotational radius of the head which leads to increased neck/spine/medulla oblongata injuries
Finally, there is an observed effect for _all_ safety measures (especially for motorists) that attention devoted to safety decreases due to a perception of increased "safety".
So, it's not quite as dumb as it sounds although it was couched in provocative terms about yuppies etc.
Disclaimer: I wear a helmet and have had mild concussion from an endo while wearing it -- but that was mountain biking.
Craig Venter's funding is private and commercial. When he first started TIGR (The Institute for Genome Research) he got a lot of flack from scientists that worked for research sponsored by society through taxes being used to pay for NSF and NIH grants. The accusations were that he (and his speculative commerical backers) were leeching off publically funded science and not sharing their data back rapidly with the rest of the scientific community. This hiding of results is a big no-no in scientific academia -- both culturally and historically. So your worries about military vs. civilian might be extended to military vs. private_company vs. public. Venter's new virus is owned and controlled by civilians that aren't controlled by you and me.
Eugenia is obviously interested in banging the same old drum again and again ..... some of these points were made to her the last time she reviewed RH9 and RH8 and yet she appears incapable of learning that RH is _not_ going to come with MP3 support until the IP situation is sorted.
... Debian is my primary OS in case anyone is wondering).
She was also told that she should use official RPMs and yet she continues to ignore thsi.
I used to look at OSNews occasionally, but I think I just won't bother as it's irritation without information.
(Oh yeah
Good job Fedora Core.
Are you talking about the _population_ of cells showing an adaptive response or about actual _individual_ cells?
The law is an ass and it needs very careful guidance in order to make sure that it doesn't get it wrong.
People accused of crimes need to be tried publically with all the evidence available for the perusal of citizens.
Same with those damn witches, but we dealt with them eh?
I have to say that I suspect this guy to be guilty, but there has been sufficient monkeying-about with his due-process rights that it is not safe to accept anyone's testimony including his own on face value. All these cases should be tried in the clear light of day, in the open where we can all see what the facts are and where twelve members of the public can decided what to believe instead of some administration appointees and their fucked-up apparatus that failed to prevent 9-11.
Actually it's a Public Radio Interational program: This American Life but a lot of their programs are carried on NPR. It's a good show.
Existing cities are easily converted to healthy, relaxing places if more people would just get off their ass and ride a bike.
Most trips that people take are very short ( a matter of a few miles, a few minutes ) to pick up groceries or go out for food.
These can easily be done on bicycle.
No need for Segways or creating new cities.
We just need some self-discipline people!
You assume that your brain is the equivalent of the trunk of your car.
I'd like to see some legal opinion to back that up. I think we're in untested waters here and precedent has not been established.
Ideally laws should be framed and enacted to benefit society and if the balance of allowing employers to screen out potential rapists from their workplaces is decided by the Supreme Court or other competent authorities to outweigh the risks to privacy then that is what should happen.
I hope you wouldn't argue against this?
Look, it's the equivalent of being able to gather evidence for a pre-emptive strike. If I can find convincing evidence that you're a psychotic then I can take the appropriate action to prevent you from harming other people in the future. Would you leave a loaded gun lying around? Would you leave a bottle of poison marked soda out? Would you leave Hussein in charge of WMDs? (Well, I know that a deviant like you would, but the rest of us wouldn't, those are rhetorical questions addressed to the rest of the audience) No, of course you wouldn't. So if we can prevent one workplace massacre by the simple expedient of a painless scan then we should. Appropriate checks and balances (something like the separation of powers built into the constitution) could be instituted to make sure that there was no unauthorized sharing of the scan except to law-enforcement and anti-terrorist figures.
Yes!! It would be so much better than the camcorder that we have to rely on presently. Do you know if this is actually possible with this technology or are you just speculating on a possible future application?
Unless they've got something to hide? This is a very positive technology that will help detect psychopaths, people inherently unfitted to their jobs, deviants, and other misfits.
Widespread deployment will allow the proper treatment and direction of people as _individuals_ instead of assuming that some sort of "one size fits all" Bill of Rights can be applied in a blanket way.
This article and the comments on it are examples of hysteria and romantic pessimism.
No, but DRM is the probable mechanism by which "digital copyright protection" will be enforced. The question facing all producers of software/hardware is whether the public is going to accept the new enclosures of "digital copyright" or revolt against them. Linus is trying to ride the wave and make sure that there's a way that Linux will be able to play "copyright" restricted works by facilitating the integration of a mechanism antithetical to the GPL into GPL'ed code.
Good point. However this is argued by those that believe in the ethics behind the GPL as being a weakness of the GPL. Many would like to extend the GPL (as Linus mentions about NG-GPL) to make sure that this evasion of the spirit of the GPL (which is that if you give me a tool I can look at it, break it, show it to other people, add stuff to it) cannot occur.
Nice one Linus, drag in the hated figure of RMS to rally the troops around to support your position and make sure that this becomes a personality grudge-fest instead of a discussion about the principles involved.
Easy steps to win an argument in the GNU/Linux community:
Who gives a rat's ass what RMS says about your ideals. The question is what are your ideals? The continued existence of GNU/Linux above all other things?
OK, so how do you justify that? Just stating your position doesn't justify it.
That's a dishonest position: when you do anything you impose your moral values on other people. The decision to not "impose your moral values" is in itself an imposition of your moral values on me. Everything we do and don't do has an effect on everyone around us. Specifically allowing the spread of DRM into GNU/Linux allows the propagation of content which has none of the fair use rights that content has had in the past in other media. Your decision not to oppose this (which it is your right to make blah blah etc) is a decision to allow something which you "don't agree with" to occur. You've made a choice with concrete effects in the real world.
Then don't make political pronouncements on political matters and pretend that you're not doing that.
Reply to oncoming flames: no, I can't code to a hundredth fraction of Linus.
Excellent. Thanks for the info. I'm going to try this out now.
Sweet! Wish I had some mod points to raise your informative post above the dross. When you say it works fine in your laptop what make/model is that and what ethernet adapter does it have?
This is one of the most immediately handy things about the new release. The ability to choose how interfaces behave via a grub boot menu item means that a laptop that is trundled around to be used in different places is now very easily usable without extra tweaking. No more hitting "I" for interactive boot to make sure that I skip "eth0" configuration when I power up on the train!
Hi Jason, that's an interesting and valid experience and I'd agree that 5-10k/s with timeouts is not an acceptable download experience for a paid RHN-subscriber. I'm using an old dial-up modem and I know that there's no point in signing up for the RHN because my downloads are already maxxed-out. So, yeah, I'd be pissed if I were you and it's good that the BitTorrent option is there. I notice that Red Hat have choked-off leeches like me that would like to use their free-beer access to RHN so that paying-subscribers like you can get full priority access (I've no complaints with that, it's perfectly fair), so obviously they're trying to get you the bandwidth you've paid for. (Note, I know my posts sound very pro-Red Hat, but I don't work for them and actually prefer Debian. My post was mostly reacting against unfounded generalized allegations about Red Hat that are being thrown around. Your post is nice and factual though!). In conclusion it sounds like Red Hat could do with a couple more servers to meet the demands of subscribers to the RHN like yourself.
It's not a massive leak for Red Hat. The people that are going crazy about the BitTorrent downloads weren't going to pay for a full RHN subscription anyway.
I don't get why people are so pumped about getting RH 9 (shrike) a week early anyway. I'm going to wait until April 7th and then download it via my FREE (beer) RHN subscription that is available to anyone that wants one.
All the FUD and hysteria being spewed about Red Hat's new pricing strategy boggles my mind: it's still a fully GPL compliant and Free and free distribution.
The only non-Free bits are the actual up2date server (Proxy or Satellite server) for which there are several Free alternatives: yum, current etc. And the only people that have any reason to want those are large businesses which really should be putting some money back into the company that developed those wonderful tools: Red Hat!
I'm tired of listening to the whining. Red Hat has contributed a huge amount to the community by generating revenue from corporate users which goes into supporting people like Alan Cox and Havoc Pennington and Jeff Johnson (da rpm dude!). No revenue means less hackers like that means less Free and free software.
Yeah, you get back some taxpayers money that should have gone to funding undernourished schoolkids lunches or getting a math textbook to some kid. Hoo-fuckin-ray.
After being detained, locked up, questioned, harrassed, having your freedom removed for who knows how long you get some money which can't possibly compensate. Hoo-fuckin-ray.
Does the arresting officer get removed from his position, his superiors disciplined and the rules revised to make sure it doesn't happen to some other innocent person? No. Hoo-fuckin-ray.
Let's all have another big cheer for the waste of taxpayers money in the service of abuse of human rights. Hip Hip Hoo-fuckin-ray!
POP3 is NOT supported. See their support page for details.