> Not wanting to start any (literal) holy wars here, but the reason that Evolution is tagged as a theory is because the evidence does not provide conclusive proof. Other scientific precepts are tagged as Laws because there is consistent proof that states that this concept is always the case.
Atomic theory? Quantum theory? Theory of relativity?
Theories are models that explain some aspect of the universe. Laws are observed regularities in the way the universe operates, e.g. law of conservation of matter, first law of thermodynamics, etc.
The distinction has nothing to do with proofs, because the empirical sciences don't deal in proofs. Both laws and theories are empirical results.
> Evolution and Creation are both tagged as theories.
Creation is not a theory. Theories are the result of the application of science, but creationism is simply the mantra of biblical literalists.
> Just remember, science cannot and does not prove or disprove the existence of God.
No one with a clue says it does. But science does show that lots of the beliefs of biblical literalism are wrong.
> If it did, there wouldn't be a debate.
Sure there would. Geologists showed us 200 years ago that there never has been a global flood, but the Jehovah's Witnesses reopened the debate in the 20th Century, despite the massive evidence against their position.
> But a buddy was showing me some of his favorite GTK themes on his Gnome desktop, and I have to admit that I was impressed. Unfortunately, when I checked to see how many packages I'd have to install for Gnome, there were over 30 -- Mozilla was one of the dependencies!
> So, can any/.ers recommend a... svelt window manager that supports some of this wonderful eye candy?
The eyecandy comes from different places. Applications that use the GTK+ widgets will render with your choice of GTK+ theme, regardles of what window manager you use. The window manager eyecandy will only effect the "decorations" around the windows, though some of them will allow nice customizations for that. The panel and panel applets are provided by GNOME itself.
I use GNOME, but mostly for the panel these days; most of my favorite applications have been cast aside by current GNOME management. However, by using GARNOME I can comment out the builds for crap that I don't want, and almost trivially add back in a cast-aside GTK+ application that I do want.
I use the Sawfish window manager (another cast-aside), customized to look like the old ShinyFusion theme I used to use under Enlightenment, with many virtual desktops to organize my work (I typically stay logged in for six months at a time), and with lots of nifty buttons in the "decorations" to allow things like maximize-vertically, maximize-horizontally, maximize-both, etc.
BTW, you can window shop for eyecandy at themes.org. It is organized according to what component supports a theme (window manager, toolkit, etc.).
> Yay, HD radio . . . wait, why do we want this again?
So that when they compress the dogshit out of your old favorite and speed it up by 15% to make time for more commercials, you can hear the DSP artifacts in all their ear-grating glory.
Re: Simple non-wastefull solution
on
ISS May Have A Leak
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> ake a leak in the room where the air pressure is at the lowest, follow stream, apply duct tape at the spot where the fluids have left the room.
Or just leave the leak and redesignate the module as "the fart room".
> For pure niche apps (patrol car suspect lookups, etc), I would posit that small commercial companies are in the best possible position to provide support and apps, not the FOSS world
I have a friend who works in IT at a small college, and her group's primary responsibility is maintaining a big commercial app that manages schoolish stuff like registration, etc. Schools all over the state use the same app, so they have a sort of loose association of maintainers across the state, several per college, adding up to several score programmers in total.
She gripes a lot because every time a new release comes out the association has to hack back in all the customizations they've made over the years. I keep telling her that for the number of people and amount of effort involved, they could write their own FOSS application to do the same thing, and spend their time making improvements rather than restoring last year's hacks year after year.
> after all, where does your teenage A-Patchy Webserver hacker get his hands on the specialty hardware used in patrol cars?
Who says it has to be teenage hackers? If a dozen of the biggest cities' IT departments dedicated one programmer each, the job could be done easily at a dispersed cost, trivial in comparison to the total spent when thousands of cities buy the software at commercial prices.
> When are we going to learn that these tax dollars are not being spent wisely? The private market, if left uninhibited by tariffs, regulations, and restrictions, could do a better job of getting us to the moon.
Or would it just give us another expensive dot-com style bust?
People attribute the most amazing powers to the private market, without any justification that I can see. (I suppose having worked for a few private companies and seeing how the sausage is made has made me rather cynical about their purported efficiency.)
Re: Some of the early plans are a bit out there
on
Dreams of the Moon
·
· Score: 1
> I'd love to get paid hourly for that one;-) but seriously, what would the salary be for a job like that?
Their offer sounds pretty good, until you realize what they're going to charge for delivering your groceries.
> Oh well, the base-64, and even the image method are not immune from keyword and Baysian filters (in fact, you could theoreticaly write a Baysian filter based on image features, killing any "Ad-like" images!)
I want a filter that lets a script scum Usenet and download all the pictures of perfect babes, while skipping over the ads, sweathogs, and jailbait.
> Ok, this is probably a dumb question, but why the hell doesn't anyone make a spell checking spam filter? Just set it to junk any incoming email with more than x% spelling mistakes, and voila! All y,o.ur.,. r,a.,n.d,.om.,,. p,.u,.nc,.tu,at,i.on and |33t 5p34k is fucked.
> It'd also have the added bonus of keeping idiots who can't spell worth crap out of your inbox.
OK, but how about a solution that works for people who have programmers for friends?
> My boss (hardcore BSD hacker and anti-spam activist) added a simple rule to our spam filters: more than 5 consonants in a row in the From: field and it's tagged as spam.
Hope he's not expecting any important messages from anyone born in Eastern Europe...
> Paul Graham is emphasizing the need to be open-minded, but he is ignoring the need to be "active-minded". If your "outside the box" idea have failed the test, they need to be rejected.
Unfortunately, lots of people seem to think that "outside the box" is justification for "outside the facts".
Slashdot Mirror
> Not wanting to start any (literal) holy wars here, but the reason that Evolution is tagged as a theory is because the evidence does not provide conclusive proof. Other scientific precepts are tagged as Laws because there is consistent proof that states that this concept is always the case.
Atomic theory? Quantum theory? Theory of relativity?
Theories are models that explain some aspect of the universe. Laws are observed regularities in the way the universe operates, e.g. law of conservation of matter, first law of thermodynamics, etc.
The distinction has nothing to do with proofs, because the empirical sciences don't deal in proofs. Both laws and theories are empirical results.
> Evolution and Creation are both tagged as theories.
Creation is not a theory. Theories are the result of the application of science, but creationism is simply the mantra of biblical literalists.
> Just remember, science cannot and does not prove or disprove the existence of God.
No one with a clue says it does. But science does show that lots of the beliefs of biblical literalism are wrong.
> If it did, there wouldn't be a debate.
Sure there would. Geologists showed us 200 years ago that there never has been a global flood, but the Jehovah's Witnesses reopened the debate in the 20th Century, despite the massive evidence against their position.
> > However, a friend in a position to know tells me that the typical criminal is incredibly stupid.
> This is one of the things that makes me laugh about law enforcement.
FWIW, my friend is not in law enforcement.
> That's what happens when you try to extort a big company using Outlook.
Maybe he'll offer Microsoft a "business relationship" for fixing Outlook, when he gets out of the pokey.
> and this is where he's going to say his computer was hi-jacked, right?
You don't make extortion calls from your own phone, and you don't send extortion e-mail from your own computer.
However, a friend in a position to know tells me that the typical criminal is incredibly stupid.
Make sure you turn off Message Disposition Notification in your e-mail client.
> But a buddy was showing me some of his favorite GTK themes on his Gnome desktop, and I have to admit that I was impressed. Unfortunately, when I checked to see how many packages I'd have to install for Gnome, there were over 30 -- Mozilla was one of the dependencies!
> So, can any
The eyecandy comes from different places. Applications that use the GTK+ widgets will render with your choice of GTK+ theme, regardles of what window manager you use. The window manager eyecandy will only effect the "decorations" around the windows, though some of them will allow nice customizations for that. The panel and panel applets are provided by GNOME itself.
I use GNOME, but mostly for the panel these days; most of my favorite applications have been cast aside by current GNOME management. However, by using GARNOME I can comment out the builds for crap that I don't want, and almost trivially add back in a cast-aside GTK+ application that I do want.
I use the Sawfish window manager (another cast-aside), customized to look like the old ShinyFusion theme I used to use under Enlightenment, with many virtual desktops to organize my work (I typically stay logged in for six months at a time), and with lots of nifty buttons in the "decorations" to allow things like maximize-vertically, maximize-horizontally, maximize-both, etc.
BTW, you can window shop for eyecandy at themes.org. It is organized according to what component supports a theme (window manager, toolkit, etc.).
> this is what passes for "stuff that matters" these days?
Not the first time this story has been on Slashdot, either.
Ah, well. January re-runs...
> Just put them by the doors, and away from crowds, idealy they could set up security checkpoints outside of the terminals
The biggest crowds are at the security checkpoints. Your suggestion merely moves the target.
> Yay, HD radio . . . wait, why do we want this again?
So that when they compress the dogshit out of your old favorite and speed it up by 15% to make time for more commercials, you can hear the DSP artifacts in all their ear-grating glory.
> ake a leak in the room where the air pressure is at the lowest, follow stream, apply duct tape at the spot where the fluids have left the room.
Or just leave the leak and redesignate the module as "the fart room".
> According to Google, 9mm of mercury is 1200 Pascals, whereas 0.25psi is 1700 Pascals.
How many Cobols does that work out to?
> For pure niche apps (patrol car suspect lookups, etc), I would posit that small commercial companies are in the best possible position to provide support and apps, not the FOSS world
I have a friend who works in IT at a small college, and her group's primary responsibility is maintaining a big commercial app that manages schoolish stuff like registration, etc. Schools all over the state use the same app, so they have a sort of loose association of maintainers across the state, several per college, adding up to several score programmers in total.
She gripes a lot because every time a new release comes out the association has to hack back in all the customizations they've made over the years. I keep telling her that for the number of people and amount of effort involved, they could write their own FOSS application to do the same thing, and spend their time making improvements rather than restoring last year's hacks year after year.
> after all, where does your teenage A-Patchy Webserver hacker get his hands on the specialty hardware used in patrol cars?
Who says it has to be teenage hackers? If a dozen of the biggest cities' IT departments dedicated one programmer each, the job could be done easily at a dispersed cost, trivial in comparison to the total spent when thousands of cities buy the software at commercial prices.
> > So as more people use open source, the bigger target it becomes to hackers.
> Care to tell me why that Apache is so much more secure then IIS? Apache is the most popular web server in the world. But IIS has the most flaws....
Because Apache was written to serve Web pages and IIS was written to make somebody rich(er).
Please reschedule Norway and Belgium ahead of Syria and Iraq. Thanks.
> (and I'm not talking about Paris Hilton, either - altho that might be interesting as well.)
As with the internet, so with space exploration: it's probably zero-G porn that will first make it a profitable venture.
> We'll call it the orbital transportation administration. Heck, they could even merge that with Amtrak
Only the rockets never run off the rails...
> When are we going to learn that these tax dollars are not being spent wisely? The private market, if left uninhibited by tariffs, regulations, and restrictions, could do a better job of getting us to the moon.
Or would it just give us another expensive dot-com style bust?
People attribute the most amazing powers to the private market, without any justification that I can see. (I suppose having worked for a few private companies and seeing how the sausage is made has made me rather cynical about their purported efficiency.)
> I'd love to get paid hourly for that one
Their offer sounds pretty good, until you realize what they're going to charge for delivering your groceries.
> Oh well, the base-64, and even the image method are not immune from keyword and Baysian filters (in fact, you could theoreticaly write a Baysian filter based on image features, killing any "Ad-like" images!)
I want a filter that lets a script scum Usenet and download all the pictures of perfect babes, while skipping over the ads, sweathogs, and jailbait.
> Ok, this is probably a dumb question, but why the hell doesn't anyone make a spell checking spam filter? Just set it to junk any incoming email with more than x% spelling mistakes, and voila! All y,o.ur.,. r,a.,n.d,.om.,,. p,.u,.nc,.tu,at,i.on and |33t 5p34k is fucked.
> It'd also have the added bonus of keeping idiots who can't spell worth crap out of your inbox.
OK, but how about a solution that works for people who have programmers for friends?
> My boss (hardcore BSD hacker and anti-spam activist) added a simple rule to our spam filters: more than 5 consonants in a row in the From: field and it's tagged as spam.
Hope he's not expecting any important messages from anyone born in Eastern Europe...
> And really, even if you use a Bayesian filter, how many emails contain the words "majesty" "ellipsoid" and "lippincott"?
Why, just yesterday I got one that said "Her Majesty wants you to polish the ellipsoid on her Lippincott, and then bring it around front."
> OK... so they predict... More Of The Same!
Naturally, 'cause it would take brass balls to predict something different!
> Paul Graham is emphasizing the need to be open-minded, but he is ignoring the need to be "active-minded". If your "outside the box" idea have failed the test, they need to be rejected.
Unfortunately, lots of people seem to think that "outside the box" is justification for "outside the facts".