> Flash is so commonly misused that it's easy to assume it's an entirely worthless technology.
I was delighted to see that I had Flash after my most recent upgrade of my home Linux system.
Delighted for a few days. I disabled it within a week.
Not to dispute your point; if I went to a site for the purpose of watching the animations, then sure, I'd turn it back on. But for most sites it's just another of the many annoyances that are pushing actual content off the Web.
> the fact is that certain kids demand constant monitoring -- these devices, from those that make sure they're not driving the car too fast to gadgets that check to be sure they're at school are simply means to this end.
The more you tighten your grip on the schools, the more children will slip through your fingers.
-- Leia Organa (paraphrased)
So what happens when you aren't monitoring them?
It's not at all obvious that you build can responsible behavior by sending a message that says "I don't trust you".
Have the RIAA and MPAA brought out the Good Citizen inside all of us with their futile attempts to make stealing impossible? Or have they just made it an ever escalating game of "Can I beat the system?"
> You're citing C.O.L.A. (or any Usenet advocacy group, for that matter) as a credible source? Gack!
The link that I cited has its own links to where you can find the raw data and do your own analysis. (Actually, I get bogged down in Nocookieland at the Hot 100 site, but I suppose someone who thought the report didn't jibe with their personal observations could poke around and find the list, given sufficient motivation.)
Other than that, I agree with your sentiment. How does the old saying go?
Believe half of what you read,
None of what you hear,
And the opposite of anything you read on Usenet.
> I also contend your implications that Win2k is more stable than Linux. Back that fact up with some hard data;
Check out this post on comp.os.linux.advocacy, which calculated the uptimes of OSes in the Hot 100 Web sites back in January. The impatient may want to skip to the bottom, where they'll find something like this:
Using Linux as the benchmark (simply because it's the median), you get:
Solaris - 1.65
Linux - 1.00
W2K - 0.54 (State-of-the-art Unix killer, tee hee.)
The patient could use the article's links to produce a current version of the same stats, and let us know whether anything has changed.
If it means anything at all (other than that you've been reading too much New Age drivel), it probably means that one of those regions colonized Europe.
> AFAIK, the Finns and Swedes are not at all related. They just happen to have turned out neighbors. Linguistically, at least, the Finn's language is not at all related to any other European language.
First off, be careful not to equate genetic ancestry with linguistic "ancestry" (if I may so use the word).
For instance, consider the variety of genetic ancestries that make up the populations of native English speakers in the modern world: you can find native speakers of English with biological ancestors from any corner of any continent in the world, saving Antartica.
That's not to say that there's no correlation at all; people do tend to marry others who speak at least one language in common.
But to break your statement down into two parts:
genetic reletedness: a somewhat pedantic point, but it is believed that all modern humans are related. If the Finns and Swedes are "unrelated", then that merely means that their relationship "goes way back". (But notice also another post in this thread thas claims that they are in fact fairly closely related genetically.)
linguistic relatedness: Finnish is not an Indo-European language, but again there may be a deeper relatonship that "goes way back". A lot of historical linguists (but by no means all) believe that there was a more ancient family of languages that included the ancestors of both the Finnish and the IE languages. Since the Proto-Indo-European language is believed to have been "a language" rather than "a family" around 6000 years ago, the common ancestor of that language and Finnish woulh have to be somewhat earlier, perhaps as much as 10,000-15,000 years BP. There are several competing hypotheses, but the most popular one right now posits a family called Nostratic, which you should be able to find described via your favorite search engine. You may also want to search for Proto-Afro-Asiatic.
At any rate -- forgive the pedantry -- it is not really safe to say that two populations "are not at all related", whether refering to their biological or linguistic ancestry either one. (We do often say that two languages "are not related", but that should be taken as a bad shorthand form for "are not demonstrably related.)
I also notice that the third party in the odd grouping {Swedes, Finns, Tuscans} represent the denizens of what was once Etruria, the home of the Etruscans, speakers of another non-IE language in Europe. It may be that the researchers thought that the old Etruscan blood still runs in Tuscany, in which case the odd {Swedes, Finns, Tuscans} becomes "peoples of western Eurasia before the historical sweeps of conquest". I don't think I would make such an assumption about Etruscan blood in Tuscany, but maybe they know something I don't.
> Michael Sims is an information tyrant of the worst type and now he is a slashdot editor. He censors posts he disagrees with, he mods down others that don't march to his beat.
Funny, it looks like he found your post (+1, interesting).
--
Re:Astroturfers now define slashdot content
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 1
> So Microsoft has invented something?!
Alas, I heard about astroturf (albeit not by that name) long before I ever heard of Microsoft doing it.
It's fairly common for big companies to dump a huge pile of money on a law firm with instructions to spend it on small companies who'll sell their souls for the right price. I've seen cases where the law firms won't even bother to deny it when asked by a journalist, though of course they won't name their "clients".
In the USA, legislators draw a lot less criticism for passing laws that small businesses profess to want vs. passing laws that obviously benefit only the largest. Astroturf is one reason you'll sometimes see small businesses voice support for laws that obviously favor large businesses and don't apparently do a darn thing for the small ones.
I would assume that movements or organizations other than businesses do this kind of thing as well, though I don't know of specific instances.
It's trivially easy to find someone who'll sell his/her opinion for money -- most of us are constantly trying to give our opinions away for free.
> Dirac: "So what would it look like if it were the other way around?"
LMAO.
> I just found out that Dirac was born in the house next door to me a few months ago.
Funny; I thought he was much older.
--
Re:Commercial software: A drain on the world econo
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 3
> Software development is a valuable skill, and it's so ironic seeing reams of misled software developers leading the rampage for devaluing what we do.
It's the simple march of progress. Fifty years ago there were probably only a handful of programmers in the whole world, and only a handful of machines to run their programs on. Now there are millions, maybe tens of millions of programmers, and a similar proliferation of machines to run their programs on. "Demand, meet Supply; Supply, meet Demand."
Where do you think that trend will put is in another 20 years?
Yes, there was a window in history where you could become a zillionaire by starting a software company. That window is rapidly being closed by the same technicological trends that made it possible to begin with. This is hardly the first business or trade that was once lucrative and now isn't (or at least is quickly headed that way).
What Mundie and most others don't understand is that open source is going to win no matter what anyone says or does, because its ultimate basis is neither a fad nor a social movement, but the simple march of progress. Microsoft might be able to buy enough legislators to postpone the inevitable, but inevitable it is. Where are the monopolies from the Age of Merchantilism, and what good are their Patents Royal doing them now?
Unless someone is powerful to completely shut down technological progress all over the world, they might as well think of progress as a law of nature and start getting used to the idea of its side effects. What Microsoft needs, whether they realize it or not, is a business plan that doesn't rely on a vault full of source code as its crown jewels.
--
Re:Something good out of this?
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 2
> I'm one of many people who has concerns about the GPL's ability to stand up to a strong challenge.
If it's the inductive (or "viral") nature of the GPL that concerns you, I suspect that the well established covenant running with the land will serve as a suitable legal analogy for that part of the GPL.
--
Re:Must be nice to be omnipotent...
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 2
> Intellectual Property I believe is more of a hindrance upon innovation. Why is it I cannot improve upon a technology in existence for my own benefit? I have a philosophy that there are two types of success in business.
The system currently operating in the USA is a perverted twist to the clear logic of the constitutional grounds for patents: patents should promote the useful arts be getting people to share their secrets of productivity. As implemented, patents are (as you say) a hindrance to the useful arts, because you can get a patent just for being the first person to file a patent on the idea. In most cases, there are no secrets to be shared -- just turf to be staked out.
--
Re:Mundie Actually Makes Sense ...
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 2
> Mundie's comments make much less sense to the end-users of software...does the customer want to pay more or less for a given commodity like a text processor, image editor, or database?
Wasn't it the lame-MS-line-of-the-month a few months ago, that "Using OSS deprives people of the opportunity to pay for their software"?
--
Re:Commercial software: A drain on the world econo
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 3
> And also cost software companies $175 billion annually so the total gain for businesses is 0, some gain some lose, it would also put 1.35 million people out of work and with $175 billion less being spent anually you have economic slowdown. Money saved is no good to the economy, but money spending is what makes for a vibrant and thriving economy.
The unavoidable conclusion is that we should allow people to stand at streetcorners and charge you a fee before they let you pass. By failing to do so, we have put millions of people out of work and kept trillions of dollars out of the economy. Surely we owe it to ourselves to implement such a system immediately?
> "Over the centuries, researchers have found bones and artifacts proving that humans like us have existed for millions of years."
Mmmm. I wonder what would happen if you submitted a paper on, say, genetics, to a scientific journal, and in it cited another paper several centuries old in order to make a controversial point. I fear the new must supercede the old in science.
> "Prejudices based on current scientific theory act as a "knowledge filter," giving us a picture of prehistory that is largely incorrect."
What peer review actually does is endow science with a sort of 'inertia' that keeps it from turning aside at every claim every loonie makes. Sure, that raises the bar and makes people who discover something truly new have to work a bit harder to get their claims accepted, but the benefits of the system outweigh the disadvantages by many orders of magnitude.
A book that proclaims man has existed in anatomically modern form for hundreds of millions of years? could this be a creationist tract? Unfortunately it is. The authors misunderstand the concept of a theory, bring religion into science (science ends up being based on a particular religious viewpoint, thus rendering it invalid), misrepresent scientists' theories and statements, and ignores work which contradict their religious ideas.
This is nice, too:
From the Publisher
I perceive in Forbidden Archeology a work of thoroughgoing scholarship and intellectual adventure. -Dr. Pierce Flynn
And Flynn is a prominent paleontologist? Archaeologist? Anthropologist? No, sociologist.
Also revealing:
Customers who bought this book also bought:
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings : Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age by Charles H. Hapgood
Technology of the Gods : The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients by David Hatcher Childress
When the Sky Fell : In Search of Atlantis by Rand Flem-Ath, Rose Flem-Ath
> If you want to learn more about cristianity: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1862044724/
Another "pebble" is the authors keen ability to state as true facts innumerable elements that have NOT been proven, simply by stating that, by the absence of any proof to the contrary, a fact is true.
Slashdot Mirror
> Microsoft's XP line will do as well or perhaps better than they are expecting, despite what the /. community thinks.
Like W2K did?
--
> Flash is so commonly misused that it's easy to assume it's an entirely worthless technology.
I was delighted to see that I had Flash after my most recent upgrade of my home Linux system.
Delighted for a few days. I disabled it within a week.
Not to dispute your point; if I went to a site for the purpose of watching the animations, then sure, I'd turn it back on. But for most sites it's just another of the many annoyances that are pushing actual content off the Web.
--
> Is anyone else annoyed by the "^_^" emoticon? I mean, it's not even a smiley face
(!)
--
> It's our culture. Everything we do is sexualized. ... How many ads have you seen use sex to sell things?
Didn't I read here just a couple of weeks ago that Salon itself was using s0ft pr0n to lure people to their subscriber-only section?
--
> For someone that runs Linux on all their desktops, you certainly seem to be playing a lot of Windows only games every time a story gets posted.
Yeah, but that's 'cause he plays them on the Slashdot servers.
--
It's not at all obvious that you build can responsible behavior by sending a message that says "I don't trust you".
Have the RIAA and MPAA brought out the Good Citizen inside all of us with their futile attempts to make stealing impossible? Or have they just made it an ever escalating game of "Can I beat the system?"
--
The link that I cited has its own links to where you can find the raw data and do your own analysis. (Actually, I get bogged down in Nocookieland at the Hot 100 site, but I suppose someone who thought the report didn't jibe with their personal observations could poke around and find the list, given sufficient motivation.)
Other than that, I agree with your sentiment. How does the old saying go?
--
> 'I think the more we can control our kids, the better off in the long run they'll be.'
I guess that explains why so many kids get killed in drunk driving accidents their very first weekend away at college.
Responsibility isn't something that magically appears on your 18th birthday.
--
Check out this post on comp.os.linux.advocacy, which calculated the uptimes of OSes in the Hot 100 Web sites back in January. The impatient may want to skip to the bottom, where they'll find something like this:The patient could use the article's links to produce a current version of the same stats, and let us know whether anything has changed.
--
> Several of the slashdot staff are big Mandrake fans; I hope they can keep going in the face of adversity.
Hopefully you didn't mean that the way it sounds.
--
> Ultimately what does it mean?
If it means anything at all (other than that you've been reading too much New Age drivel), it probably means that one of those regions colonized Europe.
--
> 7 etc
6 [you
5 fill
4 in
3 these]
2
"All our spyplane are belong to us."
--
First off, be careful not to equate genetic ancestry with linguistic "ancestry" (if I may so use the word).
For instance, consider the variety of genetic ancestries that make up the populations of native English speakers in the modern world: you can find native speakers of English with biological ancestors from any corner of any continent in the world, saving Antartica.
That's not to say that there's no correlation at all; people do tend to marry others who speak at least one language in common.
But to break your statement down into two parts:
- genetic reletedness: a somewhat pedantic point, but it is believed that all modern humans are related. If the Finns and Swedes are "unrelated", then that merely means that their relationship "goes way back". (But notice also another post in this thread thas claims that they are in fact fairly closely related genetically.)
- linguistic relatedness: Finnish is not an Indo-European language, but again there may be a deeper relatonship that "goes way back". A lot of historical linguists (but by no means all) believe that there was a more ancient family of languages that included the ancestors of both the Finnish and the IE languages. Since the Proto-Indo-European language is believed to have been "a language" rather than "a family" around 6000 years ago, the common ancestor of that language and Finnish woulh have to be somewhat earlier, perhaps as much as 10,000-15,000 years BP. There are several competing hypotheses, but the most popular one right now posits a family called Nostratic, which you should be able to find described via your favorite search engine. You may also want to search for Proto-Afro-Asiatic.
At any rate -- forgive the pedantry -- it is not really safe to say that two populations "are not at all related", whether refering to their biological or linguistic ancestry either one. (We do often say that two languages "are not related", but that should be taken as a bad shorthand form for "are not demonstrably related.)I also notice that the third party in the odd grouping {Swedes, Finns, Tuscans} represent the denizens of what was once Etruria, the home of the Etruscans, speakers of another non-IE language in Europe. It may be that the researchers thought that the old Etruscan blood still runs in Tuscany, in which case the odd {Swedes, Finns, Tuscans} becomes "peoples of western Eurasia before the historical sweeps of conquest". I don't think I would make such an assumption about Etruscan blood in Tuscany, but maybe they know something I don't.
--
> Michael Sims is an information tyrant of the worst type and now he is a slashdot editor. He censors posts he disagrees with, he mods down others that don't march to his beat.
Funny, it looks like he found your post (+1, interesting).
--
> So Microsoft has invented something?!
Alas, I heard about astroturf (albeit not by that name) long before I ever heard of Microsoft doing it.
It's fairly common for big companies to dump a huge pile of money on a law firm with instructions to spend it on small companies who'll sell their souls for the right price. I've seen cases where the law firms won't even bother to deny it when asked by a journalist, though of course they won't name their "clients".
In the USA, legislators draw a lot less criticism for passing laws that small businesses profess to want vs. passing laws that obviously benefit only the largest. Astroturf is one reason you'll sometimes see small businesses voice support for laws that obviously favor large businesses and don't apparently do a darn thing for the small ones.
I would assume that movements or organizations other than businesses do this kind of thing as well, though I don't know of specific instances.
It's trivially easy to find someone who'll sell his/her opinion for money -- most of us are constantly trying to give our opinions away for free.
--
> Here is a list of all the TV shows that will be cancelled or ending
I kinda miss Jack of all Trades. It was really silly, but for some reason I always looked forward to seeing new episodes.
I actually expected it to be pretty good once the writers found their stride. Alas; that won't happen now.
--
> Dirac: "So what would it look like if it were the other way around?"
LMAO.
> I just found out that Dirac was born in the house next door to me a few months ago.
Funny; I thought he was much older.
--
> Software development is a valuable skill, and it's so ironic seeing reams of misled software developers leading the rampage for devaluing what we do.
It's the simple march of progress. Fifty years ago there were probably only a handful of programmers in the whole world, and only a handful of machines to run their programs on. Now there are millions, maybe tens of millions of programmers, and a similar proliferation of machines to run their programs on. "Demand, meet Supply; Supply, meet Demand."
Where do you think that trend will put is in another 20 years?
Yes, there was a window in history where you could become a zillionaire by starting a software company. That window is rapidly being closed by the same technicological trends that made it possible to begin with. This is hardly the first business or trade that was once lucrative and now isn't (or at least is quickly headed that way).
What Mundie and most others don't understand is that open source is going to win no matter what anyone says or does, because its ultimate basis is neither a fad nor a social movement, but the simple march of progress. Microsoft might be able to buy enough legislators to postpone the inevitable, but inevitable it is. Where are the monopolies from the Age of Merchantilism, and what good are their Patents Royal doing them now?
Unless someone is powerful to completely shut down technological progress all over the world, they might as well think of progress as a law of nature and start getting used to the idea of its side effects. What Microsoft needs, whether they realize it or not, is a business plan that doesn't rely on a vault full of source code as its crown jewels.
--
> I'm one of many people who has concerns about the GPL's ability to stand up to a strong challenge.
If it's the inductive (or "viral") nature of the GPL that concerns you, I suspect that the well established covenant running with the land will serve as a suitable legal analogy for that part of the GPL.
--
> Intellectual Property I believe is more of a hindrance upon innovation. Why is it I cannot improve upon a technology in existence for my own benefit? I have a philosophy that there are two types of success in business.
The system currently operating in the USA is a perverted twist to the clear logic of the constitutional grounds for patents: patents should promote the useful arts be getting people to share their secrets of productivity. As implemented, patents are (as you say) a hindrance to the useful arts, because you can get a patent just for being the first person to file a patent on the idea. In most cases, there are no secrets to be shared -- just turf to be staked out.
--
> Mundie's comments make much less sense to the end-users of software...does the customer want to pay more or less for a given commodity like a text processor, image editor, or database?
Wasn't it the lame-MS-line-of-the-month a few months ago, that "Using OSS deprives people of the opportunity to pay for their software"?
--
> And also cost software companies $175 billion annually so the total gain for businesses is 0, some gain some lose, it would also put 1.35 million people out of work and with $175 billion less being spent anually you have economic slowdown. Money saved is no good to the economy, but money spending is what makes for a vibrant and thriving economy.
The unavoidable conclusion is that we should allow people to stand at streetcorners and charge you a fee before they let you pass. By failing to do so, we have put millions of people out of work and kept trillions of dollars out of the economy. Surely we owe it to ourselves to implement such a system immediately?
--
> "Microsoft, it's time for you to join us."
"Come over to the Dark Side, Microsoft!"
--
> Modern genetics
Modern genetics supports evolution.
> lack of fossil evidence supporting evolution
There is an amazing amount of fossil evidence for evolution.
> cosmology
Irrelevant to the verity of evolution, unless you want to make ludicrous claims about the age of the universe.
> statistical look into the chance of life forming from a Big Bang
The big bang part is also irrelevant cosmology, and you didn't even bother to give us some made-up statistics, let alone some valid ones.
> etc, etc, etc.
The word "etc" does not bear much weight in science. You either have the evidence or you don't.
You don't.
If that your single most airtight disproof of evolution, evolution can coast now.
--
Mmmm. I wonder what would happen if you submitted a paper on, say, genetics, to a scientific journal, and in it cited another paper several centuries old in order to make a controversial point. I fear the new must supercede the old in science.
> "Prejudices based on current scientific theory act as a "knowledge filter," giving us a picture of prehistory that is largely incorrect."
What peer review actually does is endow science with a sort of 'inertia' that keeps it from turning aside at every claim every loonie makes. Sure, that raises the bar and makes people who discover something truly new have to work a bit harder to get their claims accepted, but the benefits of the system outweigh the disadvantages by many orders of magnitude.
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0892132949
From one of the reviews posted on that page:This is nice, too:And Flynn is a prominent paleontologist? Archaeologist? Anthropologist? No, sociologist.
Also revealing:> If you want to learn more about cristianity: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1862044724
--