Most American cities are rat holes, and you couldn't pay me enough to live there.
It took me 7 years, but I finally got free of Nashville, TN. I now live out in the country about an hour away from the city.
I much prefer the low cost of living, no traffic, and friendlier (and fewer neighbours). The place where I live would easily have cost close to a half million in Nashville because of the land.
There are some downsides: ISDN is my fastest connection option right now, and there aren't any decent theaters. So, entertainment has to be a bit more planned and less spontaneous since it involves at least a half hour drive.
Now, if there were a city that wasn't polluted as all get out, and that had decent public transportation (Chicago is the best example that I have personal experience with), that might change my mind.
Quick responses, because I'm off to a meeting. 1)Yes, transitional form is a creationist invention, however the meaning is plain enough that you understood what I meant. You can maintain that everything is a transitional form, but you really don't have the evidence to back that up. How do you know this to be true? Evolutionists cannot agree among themselves what the proper sequencing is of the fossil record. I will continue to insist on the lack of transitional forms until the evidence of transition is at least obvious enough for biologists and paleontologists to agree on a proper sequencing. It certainly argues against a Darwinian approach to evolution; the fossil record simply doesn't contain the rich variety of critters necessary to support half-fish half-mammals, etc. Thus, most evolutionists I've read lately seem to be supporting punctuated equilibrium or one of the other models. One then must question what the causative factor in new changes is. Crap... out of time, must run. May respond more fully later. Probably not, as the article will have fallen off the front page by then and been condemned to rubbish bin of articles never read again.
Since I don't know the previous poster, I can't speak for him, but I would assume that his argument is based not observation within his own lifetime, rather the complete lack of any transitional forms in the available paleontological evidence.
Archaeopteryx is occasionally cited as a transitional form, but there are a large body of evolutionist scientists who say that by any reasonable definition, if it existed today, it would be classified as a bird and not as some lizard-bird hybrid.
Of course, there is also the core issue of whether evolution can be reconciled with the second law of thermodynamics. Which of course brings in the debate about whether the earth can be considered a closed system or not, yada yada yada.
You seem to be ridiculing his position, when the simple fact is that there is probably no way we will ever *prove* either a creationist or an evolutionary point of view. At best, several thousand years of observation (including, hopefully, the opportunity to observe planets other than our own), should more clearly show the likelihood of one or the other.
Personally, I'm a creationist as I think it seems the most likely explanation, but I don't think the evidence available is overwhelmingly in favour of either viewpoint. Certainly, a particular kind of creation (or a particular kind of evolution for that matter) cannot be proven by the available evidence.
Study after study has shown that educational spending is not a valid predictor of the success of our educational success. Two major changes would vastly improve our educational system without increasing spending (and would increase the value of any additional funds we do allocate):
1 - End tenure. If an incompetent teacher can keep their position for 3 years, they are pretty much guaranteed to keep it forever. There is little or no accountability. Unlike you and I who have to produce results to keep our jobs, let alone advance in them, teachers have to do next to nothing to further their careers.
2 - End certification. Teaching certification in the US is largely dependent upon finishing a college education that is heavy on pedagogical method (which usually lacks any empirical basis as to its effectiveness) and very light on actual content. If you have a doctorate in mathematics, you are not "qualified" to teach math in a public school, yet someone who has 18 credit hours of undergraduate education is.
Further, money allocated to education rarely makes it to the classroom. Typically, a large percentage of it is consumed by administrative overhead.
That's incorrect now. I'm scheduled for my surgery on the 16th. According to Dr. Norris, the FDA just approved (within the last couple of months), a procedure to adjust for over-correction or to correct mild farsightedness.
OOPS... Used HTML on the last one when I meant to use text. Should have used the preview button.
Assuming the most optimistic case of the impact of nanotechnology, we could suddenly find ourselves in a situation I have been predicting for several years.
Since Eli Whitney developed the concept of the assembly line, industry has been making amazing progress in its ability to produce more goods at less cost in a shorter amount of time. Computerization has increased the pace of progress toward efficiency (measured in effort hours to produce a widget, not neccessarily in cost; economists normally talk about efficiency in terms of the ration to capital invested vs. the return on capital; I am speaking here only of the human investment).
This is immediately obvious when you consider how many people you know are actively engaged in "real" work (the production and distribution of food, construction of homes, medical practice, and other effort that is generally necessary for the continuation of life as we know it) versus the number who are engaged in non-productive work (advertising, web site design, movie production/distribution, selling clothes at the GAP, and other work that is not essential to the maintenance of life). We continue to move toward a service economy.
Thus far, human efficiency gains have been mostly limited to agricultural/industrial work (replacing mules with tractors (allowing one farmer to farm a greater area of land) or replacing auto workers with robots), and have been limited by the government (farm subsidies to keep economically unviable farmers in production) or unions (through contracts which guarantee jobs which might otherwise be eliminated by increases in efficiency). To a lesser degree we have seen this in clerical positions (no one has a typists pool anymore; Also, fewer people have secretaries who work directly for them). If we take farming as an example, you will notice that the price of many agricultural commodities is undergoing a prolonged and severe depression because it is possible to product a far greater amount of food than consumers demand.
Nanotechnology, the Internet, and other nascent technological developments stand to further accelerate our move toward human efficiency and expand it into other areas. The problem is that demand is basically a limited quantity. Invention of new products can serve to create additional demand, but these products are usually luxuries and demand for them fluctuates with people's perception of their wealth.
When there is insufficient demand, prices drop, forcing companies to find means of operating more efficiently. Frequently, this means cutting employees. Thus, it is conceivable that we may in the near (20-50 years) future face a situation where excess production capacity forces a downturn for prices in every industrial sector (quality AI could do this to service industries as well), forcing companies to cut employees, further reducing the quantity of demand available in the economy. I'm not sure that our current economic systems can survive such a situation.
Naturally, the optimistic Star Trek fans will suggest that we will all lead idyllic communal lives in harmony with nature and wealth will be completely abolished, but such does not seem consistent with human nature.
Assuming the most optimistic case of the impact of nanotechnology, we could suddenly find ourselves in a situation I have been predicting for several years. Since Eli Whitney developed the concept of the assembly line, industry has been making amazing progress in its ability to produce more goods at less cost in a shorter amount of time. Computerization has increased the pace of progress toward efficiency (measured in effort hours to produce a widget, not neccessarily in cost; economists normally talk about efficiency in terms of the ration to capital invested vs. the return on capital; I am speaking here only of the human investment). This is immediately obvious when you consider how many people you know are actively engaged in "real" work (the production and distribution of food, construction of homes, medical practice, and other effort that is generally necessary for the continuation of life as we know it) versus the number who are engaged in non-productive work (advertising, web site design, movie production/distribution, selling clothes at the GAP, and other work that is not essential to the maintenance of life). We continue to move toward a service economy. Thus far, human efficiency gains have been mostly limited to agricultural/industrial work (replacing mules with tractors (allowing one farmer to farm a greater area of land) or replacing auto workers with robots), and have been limited by the government (farm subsidies to keep economically unviable farmers in production) or unions (through contracts which guarantee jobs which might otherwise be eliminated by increases in efficiency). To a lesser degree we have seen this in clerical positions (no one has a typists pool anymore; Also, fewer people have secretaries who work directly for them). If we take farming as an example, you will notice that the price of many agricultural commodities is undergoing a prolonged and severe depression because it is possible to product a far greater amount of food than consumers demand. Nanotechnology, the Internet, and other nascent technological developments stand to further accelerate our move toward human efficiency and expand it into other areas. The problem is that demand is basically a limited quantity. Invention of new products can serve to create additional demand, but these products are usually luxuries and demand for them fluctuates with people's perception of their wealth. When there is insufficient demand, prices drop, forcing companies to find means of operating more efficiently. Frequently, this means cutting employees. Thus, it is conceivable that we may in the near (20-50 years) future face a situation where excess production capacity forces a downturn for prices in every industrial sector (quality AI could do this to service industries as well), forcing companies to cut employees, further reducing the quantity of demand available in the economy. I'm not sure that our current economic systems can survive such a situation. Naturally, the optimistic Star Trek fans will suggest that we will all lead idyllic communal lives in harmony with nature and wealth will be completely abolished, but such does not seem consistent with human nature.
While my tastes are *all* over the place (Orff, St. Saens, George Jones, Journey, Boston, Ozzy, James Taylor, Bob Marley, for example), I find that if I am really getting serious about coding I tend to gravitate to 60s and 70s R&B and funk: everything from Gladys Knight and the Pips to Parliament to Sly & the Family Stone.
It doesn't matter if the license only applies to the betas or not. The betas contain GPL'ed material, which cannot be licensed under different terms without permission of all the contributors.
While I suspect that Corel didn't mean to do a Bad Thing, that doesn't alleviate their guilt. If they are serious about participating in the free software community, they need to apologize and change their licensing terms immediately.
I have to agree with the previous poster. I am greatly in favour of having a real space program, but what NASA has been doing for the past 15 years is not a real space program.
The ISS is years late, billions over budget, and will only have a fraction of the capabilities originally intended.
It's tragic to think that we have seen no significant advance in our space capabilities since the late 70s.
BTW, for a great novel that harps on the same theme, read Homer Hickham's Back to the Moon. It's a great story and it is very strong in the technical details (Hickham is a retired NASA engineer; his childhood was the subject of the movie October Sky - the absolute best geek movie ever).
I would say that is the only method that will work (parental supervision). While it's nice to believe that internet filtering or the vchip or some other sort of what is essentially a passive type of agent technology will help educators or parents exercise some control over what the children in their care are exposed to the two major difficulties will ultimately be insurmountable:
1)Content on the net is constantly changing. There's no way to keep an accurate list of good/bad content.
2)Different parents and/or educators are going to have different opinions regarding what sort of content is appropriate for a given group of children. Thus a tendency exists to err on the side of caution. In the case of software that doesn't recognize any difference between users, erring on the side of caution for a 5 year old is going to eliminate a significant amount of content that would be appropriate for a 16 year old.
The only workable solution is to have computer access in a place where it can be monitored by an actual living human being.
I guess it depends on what you mean by mainstream. To me, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, etc are mainstream OSes, but people who don't work in a field that uses real computers probably wouldn't think so.
>But the ending was a letdown. Basically, Neo just >suddenly acquires magical powers and kicks the >bad guys' ass. He doesn't have to do anything for >this, it just happens. So after 2 hours of >buildup, the movie went out with a whimper.
Dude, you missed it. He does have to do something; he has to accept that the truth he has always known is a lie. Prior to the end, he obviously gets this on an intellectual level, but he hasn't yet moved to a real emotional acceptance of it. If you prefer, he has not grokked its fullness.
Ultimately, that's much more of an accomplishment than "doing something" if by doing something you mean going on a quest, killing a bad guy, whatever.
OK, you've got me there. I was reasoning from insufficient data. However, this does bring up a question:
How does one manage not to make anything off a single book he has written? This is intended as an honest question, not a flame: Do your books sell poorly? Or have you negotiated very poor contracts with publishers?
Have you considered experimenting with alternate means of selling your material? This is something you seem to have at least thought about, judging by the ad hoc RTTM campaign.
While I too long for simpler times when it was possible to have a piece of art, an event, or a building that wasn't sponsored by some huge corporation, I have to question Jon's integrity.
I think that he honestly believes that he believes what he wrote, but his own actions in hyping Run to the Mountain here, differ from what Lucas is doing only in degree, not in essential manner.
Jon: would you honestly have refused a Pepsi ad campaign for RttM if it had been offered?
I'm glad it won't happen...
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps you have never read the Bible. Go home tonight and read Judges 19. Here's the basic gist of it:
Guy takes a concubine, she misses her family and runs back home. He tracks her down and starts to take her back home. On the way back they stop in a town. The men of the town all want to have sex with HIM, but this old guy takes him in to protect them. Well, the folks in the town threaten to beat down the door if he doesn't come out, so they throw the concubine outside. The men of the town rape here repeatedly, and then go home. She dies from her wounds, and the guy finds her body the next morning. He cuts her body into eleven pieces and sends one to each of the other tribes of Israel, who start a war against the tribe of Benjamin and wipe out all but 600 of the male Benjamites.
The theme of judges of course is that the people were living in a new land, they had no king, and they didn't seek the will of the lord, and here is the sort of thing that happened as a result.
However, it's naive to say that people can't take something in the bible and use it as a justification for their own evil. Perhaps you remember the Crusades? Or a certain Balkan nation filled with Orthodox Christians who are trying to exterminate an entire people group as we speak?
Ummm, how does one consider a four processor Intel box a "high-end" machine. To my way of thinking, that's very much a mid-end machine. A high end machine would be one with > 16 processors and a ton of memory.
That's an area where Linux truly doesn't play at the moment, but with SGI's donation of an O2K, we may see some big changes there soon. That said, I doubt if we'll ever have great scalability to lots of processors, simply because the user/developer community for those type of machines is comparatively small. Then again, maybe I'm wrong.
There seems to be a misconception that most people didn't get the joke, and therefore are miffed about it. While I can't speak for anyone else, I got it the first time around. I wasn't offended by it, I just thought it was pretty dull and pointless for an AFD joke. By the 5th or 6th time I had seen it, I was just ticked off that everytime I refreshed, I had the same bogus story reposted again.
Read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein. He spends a whole lot of time on the difference between funny once and always funny humour.
If there had been an option to filter it, I wouldn't have minded. On the other hand, that would have been a dead giveaway for those who weren't sure.
Oh well, I got what I paid for, so I don't guess I can complain.
Slashdot Mirror
Most American cities are rat holes, and you couldn't pay me enough to live there.
It took me 7 years, but I finally got free of Nashville, TN. I now live out in the country about an hour away from the city.
I much prefer the low cost of living, no traffic, and friendlier (and fewer neighbours). The place where I live would easily have cost close to a half million in Nashville because of the land.
There are some downsides: ISDN is my fastest connection option right now, and there aren't any decent theaters. So, entertainment has to be a bit more planned and less spontaneous since it involves at least a half hour drive.
Now, if there were a city that wasn't polluted as all get out, and that had decent public transportation (Chicago is the best example that I have personal experience with), that might change my mind.
Quick responses, because I'm off to a meeting. 1)Yes, transitional form is a creationist invention, however the meaning is plain enough that you understood what I meant. You can maintain that everything is a transitional form, but you really don't have the evidence to back that up. How do you know this to be true? Evolutionists cannot agree among themselves what the proper sequencing is of the fossil record. I will continue to insist on the lack of transitional forms until the evidence of transition is at least obvious enough for biologists and paleontologists to agree on a proper sequencing. It certainly argues against a Darwinian approach to evolution; the fossil record simply doesn't contain the rich variety of critters necessary to support half-fish half-mammals, etc. Thus, most evolutionists I've read lately seem to be supporting punctuated equilibrium or one of the other models. One then must question what the causative factor in new changes is. Crap... out of time, must run. May respond more fully later. Probably not, as the article will have fallen off the front page by then and been condemned to rubbish bin of articles never read again.
Since I don't know the previous poster, I can't speak for him, but I would assume that his argument is based not observation within his own lifetime, rather the complete lack of any transitional forms in the available paleontological evidence.
Archaeopteryx is occasionally cited as a transitional form, but there are a large body of evolutionist scientists who say that by any reasonable definition, if it existed today, it would be classified as a bird and not as some lizard-bird hybrid.
Of course, there is also the core issue of whether evolution can be reconciled with the second law of thermodynamics. Which of course brings in the debate about whether the earth can be considered a closed system or not, yada yada yada.
You seem to be ridiculing his position, when the simple fact is that there is probably no way we will ever *prove* either a creationist or an evolutionary point of view. At best, several thousand years of observation (including, hopefully, the opportunity to observe planets other than our own), should more clearly show the likelihood of one or the other.
Personally, I'm a creationist as I think it seems the most likely explanation, but I don't think the evidence available is overwhelmingly in favour of either viewpoint. Certainly, a particular kind of creation (or a particular kind of evolution for that matter) cannot be proven by the available evidence.
Study after study has shown that educational spending is not a valid predictor of the success of our educational success. Two major changes would vastly improve our educational system without increasing spending (and would increase the value of any additional funds we do allocate):
1 - End tenure. If an incompetent teacher can keep their position for 3 years, they are pretty much guaranteed to keep it forever. There is little or no accountability. Unlike you and I who have to produce results to keep our jobs, let alone advance in them, teachers have to do next to nothing to further their careers.
2 - End certification. Teaching certification in the US is largely dependent upon finishing a college education that is heavy on pedagogical method (which usually lacks any empirical basis as to its effectiveness) and very light on actual content. If you have a doctorate in mathematics, you are not "qualified" to teach math in a public school, yet someone who has 18 credit hours of undergraduate education is.
Further, money allocated to education rarely makes it to the classroom. Typically, a large percentage of it is consumed by administrative overhead.
That's incorrect now. I'm scheduled for my surgery on the 16th. According to Dr. Norris, the FDA just approved (within the last couple of months), a procedure to adjust for over-correction or to correct mild farsightedness.
OOPS... Used HTML on the last one when I meant to use text. Should have used the preview button.
Assuming the most optimistic case of the impact of nanotechnology, we could suddenly find ourselves in a situation I have been predicting for several years.
Since Eli Whitney developed the concept of the assembly line, industry has been making amazing progress in its ability to produce more goods at less cost in a shorter amount of time. Computerization has increased the pace of progress toward efficiency (measured in effort hours to produce a widget, not neccessarily in cost; economists normally talk about efficiency in terms of the ration to capital invested vs. the return on capital; I am speaking here only of the human investment).
This is immediately obvious when you consider how many people you know are actively engaged in "real" work (the production and distribution of food, construction of homes, medical practice, and other effort that is generally necessary for the continuation of life as we know it) versus the number who are engaged in non-productive work (advertising, web site design, movie production/distribution, selling clothes at the GAP, and other work that is not essential to the maintenance of life). We continue to move toward a service economy.
Thus far, human efficiency gains have been mostly limited to agricultural/industrial work (replacing mules with tractors (allowing one farmer to farm a greater area of land) or replacing auto workers with robots), and have been limited by the government (farm subsidies to keep economically unviable farmers in production) or unions (through contracts which guarantee jobs which might otherwise be eliminated by increases in efficiency). To a lesser degree we have seen this in clerical positions (no one has a typists pool anymore; Also, fewer people have secretaries who work directly for them). If we take farming as an example, you will notice that the price of many agricultural commodities is undergoing a prolonged and severe depression because it is possible to product a far greater amount of food than consumers demand.
Nanotechnology, the Internet, and other nascent technological developments stand to further accelerate our move toward human efficiency and expand it into other areas. The problem is that demand is basically a limited quantity. Invention of new products can serve to create additional demand, but these products are usually luxuries and demand for them fluctuates with people's perception of their wealth.
When there is insufficient demand, prices drop, forcing companies to find means of operating more efficiently. Frequently, this means cutting employees. Thus, it is conceivable that we may in the near (20-50 years) future face a situation where excess production capacity forces a downturn for prices in every industrial sector (quality AI could do this to service industries as well), forcing companies to cut employees, further reducing the quantity of demand available in the economy. I'm not sure that our current economic systems can survive such a situation.
Naturally, the optimistic Star Trek fans will suggest that we will all lead idyllic communal lives in harmony with nature and wealth will be completely abolished, but such does not seem consistent with human nature.
Assuming the most optimistic case of the impact of nanotechnology, we could suddenly find ourselves in a situation I have been predicting for several years. Since Eli Whitney developed the concept of the assembly line, industry has been making amazing progress in its ability to produce more goods at less cost in a shorter amount of time. Computerization has increased the pace of progress toward efficiency (measured in effort hours to produce a widget, not neccessarily in cost; economists normally talk about efficiency in terms of the ration to capital invested vs. the return on capital; I am speaking here only of the human investment). This is immediately obvious when you consider how many people you know are actively engaged in "real" work (the production and distribution of food, construction of homes, medical practice, and other effort that is generally necessary for the continuation of life as we know it) versus the number who are engaged in non-productive work (advertising, web site design, movie production/distribution, selling clothes at the GAP, and other work that is not essential to the maintenance of life). We continue to move toward a service economy. Thus far, human efficiency gains have been mostly limited to agricultural/industrial work (replacing mules with tractors (allowing one farmer to farm a greater area of land) or replacing auto workers with robots), and have been limited by the government (farm subsidies to keep economically unviable farmers in production) or unions (through contracts which guarantee jobs which might otherwise be eliminated by increases in efficiency). To a lesser degree we have seen this in clerical positions (no one has a typists pool anymore; Also, fewer people have secretaries who work directly for them). If we take farming as an example, you will notice that the price of many agricultural commodities is undergoing a prolonged and severe depression because it is possible to product a far greater amount of food than consumers demand. Nanotechnology, the Internet, and other nascent technological developments stand to further accelerate our move toward human efficiency and expand it into other areas. The problem is that demand is basically a limited quantity. Invention of new products can serve to create additional demand, but these products are usually luxuries and demand for them fluctuates with people's perception of their wealth. When there is insufficient demand, prices drop, forcing companies to find means of operating more efficiently. Frequently, this means cutting employees. Thus, it is conceivable that we may in the near (20-50 years) future face a situation where excess production capacity forces a downturn for prices in every industrial sector (quality AI could do this to service industries as well), forcing companies to cut employees, further reducing the quantity of demand available in the economy. I'm not sure that our current economic systems can survive such a situation. Naturally, the optimistic Star Trek fans will suggest that we will all lead idyllic communal lives in harmony with nature and wealth will be completely abolished, but such does not seem consistent with human nature.
While my tastes are *all* over the place (Orff, St. Saens, George Jones, Journey, Boston, Ozzy, James Taylor, Bob Marley, for example), I find that if I am really getting serious about coding I tend to gravitate to 60s and 70s R&B and funk: everything from Gladys Knight and the Pips to Parliament to Sly & the Family Stone.
It doesn't matter if the license only applies to the betas or not. The betas contain GPL'ed material, which cannot be licensed under different terms without permission of all the contributors.
While I suspect that Corel didn't mean to do a Bad Thing, that doesn't alleviate their guilt. If they are serious about participating in the free software community, they need to apologize and change their licensing terms immediately.
I have to agree with the previous poster. I am greatly in favour of having a real space program, but what NASA has been doing for the past 15 years is not a real space program.
The ISS is years late, billions over budget, and will only have a fraction of the capabilities originally intended.
It's tragic to think that we have seen no significant advance in our space capabilities since the late 70s.
BTW, for a great novel that harps on the same theme, read Homer Hickham's Back to the Moon. It's a great story and it is very strong in the technical details (Hickham is a retired NASA engineer; his childhood was the subject of the movie October Sky - the absolute best geek movie ever).
I would say that is the only method that will work (parental supervision). While it's nice to believe that internet filtering or the vchip or some other sort of what is essentially a passive type of agent technology will help educators or parents exercise some control over what the children in their care are exposed to the two major difficulties will ultimately be insurmountable:
1)Content on the net is constantly changing. There's no way to keep an accurate list of good/bad content.
2)Different parents and/or educators are going to have different opinions regarding what sort of content is appropriate for a given group of children. Thus a tendency exists to err on the side of caution. In the case of software that doesn't recognize any difference between users, erring on the side of caution for a 5 year old is going to eliminate a significant amount of content that would be appropriate for a 16 year old.
The only workable solution is to have computer access in a place where it can be monitored by an actual living human being.
I guess it depends on what you mean by mainstream. To me, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, etc are mainstream OSes, but people who don't work in a field that uses real computers probably wouldn't think so.
Yeah. Dig the last modified date though.
>But the ending was a letdown. Basically, Neo just >suddenly acquires magical powers and kicks the >bad guys' ass. He doesn't have to do anything for >this, it just happens. So after 2 hours of >buildup, the movie went out with a whimper.
Dude, you missed it. He does have to do something; he has to accept that the truth he has always known is a lie. Prior to the end, he obviously gets this on an intellectual level, but he hasn't yet moved to a real emotional acceptance of it. If you prefer, he has not grokked its fullness.
Ultimately, that's much more of an accomplishment than "doing something" if by doing something you mean going on a quest, killing a bad guy, whatever.
OK, you've got me there. I was reasoning from insufficient data. However, this does bring up a question:
How does one manage not to make anything off a single book he has written? This is intended as an honest question, not a flame: Do your books sell poorly? Or have you negotiated very poor contracts with publishers?
Have you considered experimenting with alternate means of selling your material? This is something you seem to have at least thought about, judging by the ad hoc RTTM campaign.
While I too long for simpler times when it was possible to have a piece of art, an event, or a building that wasn't sponsored by some huge corporation, I have to question Jon's integrity.
I think that he honestly believes that he believes what he wrote, but his own actions in hyping Run to the Mountain here, differ from what Lucas is doing only in degree, not in essential manner.
Jon: would you honestly have refused a Pepsi ad campaign for RttM if it had been offered?
Perhaps you have never read the Bible. Go home tonight and read Judges 19. Here's the basic gist of it:
Guy takes a concubine, she misses her family and runs back home. He tracks her down and starts to take her back home. On the way back they stop in a town. The men of the town all want to have sex with HIM, but this old guy takes him in to protect them. Well, the folks in the town threaten to beat down the door if he doesn't come out, so they throw the concubine outside. The men of the town rape here repeatedly, and then go home. She dies from her wounds, and the guy finds her body the next morning. He cuts her body into eleven pieces and sends one to each of the other tribes of Israel, who start a war against the tribe of Benjamin and wipe out all but 600 of the male Benjamites.
The theme of judges of course is that the people were living in a new land, they had no king, and they didn't seek the will of the lord, and here is the sort of thing that happened as a result.
However, it's naive to say that people can't take something in the bible and use it as a justification for their own evil. Perhaps you remember the Crusades? Or a certain Balkan nation filled with Orthodox Christians who are trying to exterminate an entire people group as we speak?
Ummm, how does one consider a four processor Intel box a "high-end" machine. To my way of thinking, that's very much a mid-end machine. A high end machine would be one with > 16 processors and a ton of memory.
That's an area where Linux truly doesn't play at the moment, but with SGI's donation of an O2K, we may see some big changes there soon. That said, I doubt if we'll ever have great scalability to lots of processors, simply because the user/developer community for those type of machines is comparatively small. Then again, maybe I'm wrong.
There seems to be a misconception that most people didn't get the joke, and therefore are miffed about it. While I can't speak for anyone else, I got it the first time around. I wasn't offended by it, I just thought it was pretty dull and pointless for an AFD joke. By the 5th or 6th time I had seen it, I was just ticked off that everytime I refreshed, I had the same bogus story reposted again.
Read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein. He spends a whole lot of time on the difference between funny once and always funny humour.
If there had been an option to filter it, I wouldn't have minded. On the other hand, that would have been a dead giveaway for those who weren't sure.
Oh well, I got what I paid for, so I don't guess I can complain.
And it grows ever more tiring with each incarnation.