being able to enjoy those cute "I love you" and "Anna Kurovina" messages automatically forwarded from your best friends, co-workers, and total strangers.
The only way to stop those messages from being forwarded to you is to have no friends. Hmmm... Linux users... no friends... Hmmm. Anyway, if you actually want to block spam, you can use PopFile, which works just fine on Windows and Linux.
The ability to browse every site online, at least every one selling X10 cameras and pictures you wouldn't want your boss to see.
Unless your Linux distro automatically disables all Internet popups (mine did: it could not detect my network card), you'll be seeing them everywhere just like everyone else. The solution is to use Mozilla or Opera, which -- as you well know -- work just fine on Windows. Actually, the Windows version of Mozilla works better, because it can actually use fonts like they were meant to be used.
Software so advanced it installs automatically while you browse, no user intervention required. Uninstalling is as simple as wiping your main partition and re-installing Windows.
...Which is still a lot easier than installing Linux even once so that it works as well as a Windows system does (xconfig... xconfig... xconfig... screw it). But, in general, nothing will save you from your own stupidity. Telnet, finger, unsecured apache running as root, buggy OpenSSH... Ah the wonders.
Enjoy desktop environments where settings are spread around 3 different menus...
I'm honestly not sure what you mean by that. Try changing the screen resolution/color depth/refresh rate in Linux sometime, let's see how many menus (read: config files) you'll have to go through. And I'm not even talking about the joys of having Gnome/KDE/Qt/XYZ all on the same system. Dual-booting Win98 is fun compared to that.
A wide swath of available content, all provided to your trusted platform ensuring that your purchased programs will run forever... Until you lose the disk, upgrade your system, ban the program from spying on your browsing habits, or the producer decides to turn the software off remotely.
This is a feature of giant software monopolies, not a feature of the OS. Personally, I don't use any of this software; Photoshop 6 is just dandy for me. Besides, you can download the open-source versions of all this stuff for Windows (OpenOffice, emacs, etc.), and they run better than the Linux versions. You can copy/paste between them all, for one thing.
Linux is no longer hard. Once you have a modern Debian, Red Hat, or Mandrake installed, everything runs easy-peasy.
Yeah, and once you build a base on Mars, going from there to Jupiter is easy too. The problem is getting there in the first place, across the interstellar void. Oh, and of course, you'd better not upgrade any of your hardware, or, if you do, prepare to face the consequences. You'll be lucky if some bootleg driver for your graphics card even exists at all.
Can Linux be used as a desktop system ? Absolutely -- provided that it's used for a fixed and limited number of tasks, and that a Linux guru is available on hand to maintain it. Will Linux be ready for the mainstream ? Perhaps, but that seems a long time in the future.
Wait, but if you could generate these antibodies in bulk on a whim, wouldn't you be all set anyway ? Just injecting them into the bloodstream (assuming that you made them externally for some reason) will already give you a massive immune boost.
One, that somthing which is natural is not required to be within the bounds of the empirical method.
Fair enough, but, in this case, can you clarify what you mean by "natural" ?
or the idea that somthing with a high probablity rate is more true than somthing with a low probablity rate
Your other examples are very good, but this one is just wrong. A lightning strike (lower probability) is just as "true" as rain (higher probability). I am guessing that what you mean is "the choice to use Occam's Razor is subjective"; I am not sure whether it's true or not, but I am willing to concede the point for now.
I'm saying natural rights can't be found through the scientific method and that the scientific method may not be able to uncover all the "unaliable", "immutable", "natural" aspects of reality in the totality of existance.
Then, it sounds like you advocate dualism: i.e., the idea that there are some non-physical "things" out there, such as minds, souls, unaliable rights, perfect forms, etc. (not neccessarily all at once, mind you), which cannot be detected by any device that measures purely physical effects. As I said before, there's nothing wrong terribly with this worldview; unfortunately, the choice between naturalism and dualism is also purely subjective (i.e., requiring of faith), and thus we'd simply have to agree to disagree.
This is the common trap of assuming that everything that is natural in the universe is observable under the emperical method, that is to say "things one can measure."
As I said in my original comment, you're free to believe in some sort of dualism -- but unfortunately, in this case you'll never be able to persuade a skeptic, because dualism of any kind requires a certain measure of faith. There's nothing wrong with that, of course.
Science makes no claims to the valdity of claims of spirtuality, beauty, or morality.
Isn't this pretty much what I said ? Our moral values are not "natural", they are just conventions that we live by. We can use statistics and the empirical method to find out if certain values are creating the society we "ought" to have (as you put it), but ultimately, "ought" is subjective. It sounds like we're in agreement: "natural" rights aren't really natural, unaliable, immutable, etc. -- they're what we make them out to be.
I don't really understand the concept of "natural right". The only truly natural things are the things you can measure -- weight, length, static charge, etc. Rights are just conventions of behavior that we choose to enforce in our society. Fortunately, our society has more rights than some others -- however, that doesn't make it somehow more "natural". For example, an extremist Islamic society, such as Iran, would consider it perfectly natural that women should always be covered in cloth from head to toe; they see our Western dress codes as highly unnatural. You can find similar examples for pretty much any other right, such as free speech (USSR), right to bear arms (lots of countries), property (USSR again), and even right to life (primitive societies for sure, USA depending on whom you ask). The bottom line is, I just don't see anything inherently natural -- i.e., mandated by the laws of nature -- about our rights.
Ok, I understand now what they are saying, but it still doesn't make any sense. Using this kind of logic, giving out my photos for free (as I occasionally do) is unconstitutional, since I am deliberately destroying someone's (perhaps even my own) chance to profit from my copyrighted material. Actually, posting this comment is also uncostitutional, because I could (theoretically) force all of you to pay for it.
What next ? Kindergartens are declared unconstitutional because they teach little kids to share ? Should they teach copyright law instead ? Sheer lunacy.
This is not a valid argument, because modern rockets are orders of magnitude more complicated than, say, the Sputnik. CAD is making it possible to design much more intricate chassis than ones that someone can sketch by hand and calculate with a slide rule -- and the software can also test these chassis without the need for someone to build a prototype. So, yes, it does take longer to design modern rockets, just as it takes longer to design a semi truck as compared to a bicycle.
Inicidentally (getting a bit offtopic here), the first real application of electronic computers as such was the Manhattan Project. Human "computers" (as they were called back then) simply couldn't cut it.
just as we once thought of ourselves and the world as clockwork
Um. I still think of myself and the world as clockwork, if by "clockwork" you mean "a really complicated machine". Of course, this does not work on a quantum level, but I hardly ever need to descend to that level to make sense of things.
Of course, you are always free to believe in some sort of dualism (souls, spirits, perfect forms, etc.), but if you don't, then "clockwork" is actually a pretty good description of how our bodies work.
I don't get it. How can the GPL be unconstitutional ? It's not a law, it's just a license -- a private contract between two parties. The Constitution simply doesn't apply. Now, SCO can claim that the GPL is unenforceable, but that's a different story altogether. What next ? Reading is declared unconstitutinal because it can potentially detract from the market of audio books ?
Once again, America is following someone else's lead into space. I think it's an unfortunate artifact of our political system that no major scientific project can be planned more than 4 years ahead -- because the next president will start by cutting costs, and the first things to cut are always the nonessential niceties, like space travel and medicare. Only a major embarassment, such as a Communist nation (Russia in the past, China currently) waving at us from orbit, can prod America into doing something entirely new and daring. Well, I guess it's better than nothing...
Shifts of this sort have made for a drastic and worrisome change in today's classrooms. Throughout the country, computer technology is dumbing down the academic experience, corrupting schools' financial integrity, cheating the poor, fooling people about the job skills youngsters need for the future and furthering the illusions of state and federal education policy.
No, this article isn't biased at all, no siree bob.
How many times do I have to say it ? Technology is just a tool, like a knife. Good or bad, it all depends on how you wield it.
My fondest memories of middle school (in Israel, though) were the physics/statistics/Pascal/dBase linked courses. You'd learn about forces and energy in Physics (well, mechanics really); you'd learn about standard deviation in statistics; you'd learn about loops and such in Pascal; and you'd learn about tables with dBase. Then, you'd encode the statistics formulae in Pascal, so that you could analyze the data in your dBase tables which came from the physics experiment you did.
In order to accomplish all that, you needed to actually understand all the material in all these classes, because no one explicitly told you how to combine your skills -- they just told you to do it, or suffer the consequences (bad grades, that is). Thus, it was not enough to merely memorize some formulae, which is what most computer-less students do nowadays.
Similarly, in high school and junior college (this time in the US), I dearly loved my graphing calculator, ye olde TI-85. I wrote some Calculus and Physics (mechanics again, and some EM/optics) programs for it, without which I would have spent most of my lab time on simple arithmetic. When I didn't understand some concept, I didn't have to wait for the test -- I knew it right away, because my program failed to work. And of course, there's no way I could have went through all that English without a word processor -- the white-out expenses alone would have put my family deep into bankruptcy.
So, basically, my education was greatly enhanced by computers, not reduced to mindless data entry or whatever the article seems to claim. In addition, I was fortunate enough to be computer literate, and thus I could move ahead a bit by skipping all the basic computer literacy classes.
Note, however, that my education was better than average not because of computers themselves, but because of teachers who used them effectively. This is a critical point that all these "technology is evil !" articles always manage to miss. A good teacher, armed with a good curriculum, can teach physiscs to his students armed with nothing but an abbacus; a bad one will ruin their education even if he had his own personal Beowulf cluster.
Mod parent up ! Note that Trurl's cyber-poet was initially mocked by all the established poets, because it wrote in the Classical style. But Trurl installed confidence buffers into the cyber-poet, and fed it some post-modern poetry; the cyber-poet figured out the style, and when a new wave of real poets came to mock it, he spit out a poem so "fraught with inner meaning" that they all resigned on the spot. I am not sure about the English version of the book; the Russian version gives the text of that poem, and it's about as bad as the stuff this real-life cyber-poet churns out. Absolutely hilarious.
The bottom line is, if you haven't read The Cyberiad, you need to do it. NOW.
I agree with you completely regarding words and art. If a random industrial-sizeed spray paint nozzle can produce the same output as a human "artist" (*cough*Pollock*cough*), then what's the point of calling it "art" at all ?
I think it was Vinograd (sp?) who, when asked by a reporter about AI, replied: "The danger is not that machines will become smarter than people; the danger is that people will become as dumb as machines". The poetry this robo-hack churns out is of the "postmodern" kind: as far as I understand, it's not supposed to have any intrinsic meaning, because meaning detracts from the deconstruction of modern discourse, or something or other. In other words, modern human poets are no better than Eliza, and they're proud of it.
I don't get it: what's the legal precedent for this ? For example, can Pizza Hut start taxing all the Ford pickup trucks because some of them can be used to transport pizzas (thus cutting down on their pizza delivery business) ? This just seems ridiculous to me -- but then again, enough money will buy you whatever laws you like... Still, isn't this a textbook definition of monopoly power -- using your dominance in one market to crush a totally different market ?
On a sidenote, several people have posted something to the extent of "this law is good because it makes music downloads legal". I just don't see how this follows. What I think will happen is that the RIAA (or its Canadian equivalent) will tax ISPs an then go on on their merry way suing people left and right. Common sense doesn't really apply to laws anymore.
I am that weirdo. I'd gladly implant that chip in my body if it were proven with a sufficient degree of certainty to:
Not be harmful to my health
Not be readable by just anyone
Be secure enough to defend against identity theft
A chip means no credit cards, and that makes it a bit less painful to lose my wallet. It will also cut down on this magnetophobia I am developing. Basically, for me the chip is just a matter of convenience, not some kind of an ideological platform. Of course, the health/crypto standards would have to be pretty high for me to accept this chip; currently, I doubt that this is the case.
Another one of Neal Stephenson's inventions comes true. Only, IIRC, in the Diamond Age they used the entire skeleton as the antenna (by implanting a chip inside of a bone). With this, and the e-paper, and all the nanotechnology... I can't even tell truth from fiction anymore.
Ok, now I just have to know. What's so offensive about cylinders ? Try as hard as I might, I can't come up with anything... I guess I'm just not PC enough.
Actually, we don't know how many Russian cosmonauts and their Chinese counterparts have died before the successfull mission was televised. Remember: these are totalitarian countries, they don't have freedom of the press, they can do whatever they want.
Hell yeah, it's about supremacy. China, just as the Soviet Union, is not a Communist government; it is a fascist dictatorship which uses Communism as the official party line to distract the people. As a fascist government, China needs to keep asserting its supremacy, because it needs to keep the people in line. Thus, the fact that America (an imperialist, capitalist, evil empire) has a space program, and China (the glorious motherland of freedom and utopia for all) does not... that's not merely an insult, that is an active threat to their regime.
Gee, for someone so condescending, Roblimo sure isn't very diligent. He starts bashing Windows XP before it even gets installed, and, for some strange reasons, ignores the very features he is using.
For example, Roblimo complains that copy/pasting text requires a keypress. This alone may be considered a petty complaint by some (and, indeed, a Linux newbie would be laughed out of the forum if he posted something like that). However, Roblimo chooses to ignore the fact that Windows copy/paste actually works, and it works consistently. I can copy a URL from my text editor into my browser, and have it work. I can copy an image from my browser into my graphics program, and have it work... etc. This is something that X/Gnome/KDE/Qt/Motif/XYZ has never been able to accomplish, and probably never will.
Roblimo then complains that Windows doesn't come with all the software that he is accustomed to using. Well, yeah. But Windows also comes on just one CD, not seventeen or however many of them Red Hat has now. Still, all his favorite tools are just a download away. Yes, some of them aren't free -- but there are plenty of free tools for the common tasks, as Roblimo himself demonstrated by downloading OpenOffice (or StarOffice, or whichever, I forget).
Roblimo then begins to complain about the Messenger service, and his inability to disable it. Tasks like these are faced by Linux newbies every day; the aforementioned newbies are usually told "RTFM" or "j00 d34d f00" in response to their questions. I find it ironic that Roblimo the Linux guru was unable to complete such a simple task as disabling the Messenger, especially since this task is much easier on Windows than it is on Linux (you can do it all in the UI, as opposed to editing arcane text files).
I could go on, but I think my point is almost clear by now. I will, however, point out one Windows feature that is so well implemented that Roblimo breezed right through it without noticing: ease of use. Roblimo the Windows newbie was able to pop in the CD, click a few buttons, and begin using his computer right away. Not once did he have to edit xconfig files, or learn the "make" syntax, or figure out where init.d is, etc. etc. In addition, Windows automatically recognized his video card, monitor, keyboard, mouse and network card (and presumably the sound card as well). This kind of functionality is light-years ahead of Linux, which requires a lot of manual tweaking (and an occasional hardware purchase) to even begin working.
Basically, I find Roblimo's article disingineous at best, hypocritical at worst. Why should Linux-to-Windows migration be held to a much harsher standard than Windows-to-Linux ?
You think you just made a joke, but isn't this what Palladium is all about (among other things) ? This is why I am sometimes too scared to get out of bed in the morning...
Slashdot Mirror
Can Linux be used as a desktop system ? Absolutely -- provided that it's used for a fixed and limited number of tasks, and that a Linux guru is available on hand to maintain it. Will Linux be ready for the mainstream ? Perhaps, but that seems a long time in the future.
Wait, but if you could generate these antibodies in bulk on a whim, wouldn't you be all set anyway ? Just injecting them into the bloodstream (assuming that you made them externally for some reason) will already give you a massive immune boost.
I don't really understand the concept of "natural right". The only truly natural things are the things you can measure -- weight, length, static charge, etc. Rights are just conventions of behavior that we choose to enforce in our society. Fortunately, our society has more rights than some others -- however, that doesn't make it somehow more "natural". For example, an extremist Islamic society, such as Iran, would consider it perfectly natural that women should always be covered in cloth from head to toe; they see our Western dress codes as highly unnatural. You can find similar examples for pretty much any other right, such as free speech (USSR), right to bear arms (lots of countries), property (USSR again), and even right to life (primitive societies for sure, USA depending on whom you ask). The bottom line is, I just don't see anything inherently natural -- i.e., mandated by the laws of nature -- about our rights.
What next ? Kindergartens are declared unconstitutional because they teach little kids to share ? Should they teach copyright law instead ? Sheer lunacy.
In this case, wouldn't the contract be illegal, not unconstitutional ?
Inicidentally (getting a bit offtopic here), the first real application of electronic computers as such was the Manhattan Project. Human "computers" (as they were called back then) simply couldn't cut it.
Of course, you are always free to believe in some sort of dualism (souls, spirits, perfect forms, etc.), but if you don't, then "clockwork" is actually a pretty good description of how our bodies work.
I don't get it. How can the GPL be unconstitutional ? It's not a law, it's just a license -- a private contract between two parties. The Constitution simply doesn't apply. Now, SCO can claim that the GPL is unenforceable, but that's a different story altogether. What next ? Reading is declared unconstitutinal because it can potentially detract from the market of audio books ?
Once again, America is following someone else's lead into space. I think it's an unfortunate artifact of our political system that no major scientific project can be planned more than 4 years ahead -- because the next president will start by cutting costs, and the first things to cut are always the nonessential niceties, like space travel and medicare. Only a major embarassment, such as a Communist nation (Russia in the past, China currently) waving at us from orbit, can prod America into doing something entirely new and daring. Well, I guess it's better than nothing...
My fondest memories of middle school (in Israel, though) were the physics/statistics/Pascal/dBase linked courses. You'd learn about forces and energy in Physics (well, mechanics really); you'd learn about standard deviation in statistics; you'd learn about loops and such in Pascal; and you'd learn about tables with dBase. Then, you'd encode the statistics formulae in Pascal, so that you could analyze the data in your dBase tables which came from the physics experiment you did.
In order to accomplish all that, you needed to actually understand all the material in all these classes, because no one explicitly told you how to combine your skills -- they just told you to do it, or suffer the consequences (bad grades, that is). Thus, it was not enough to merely memorize some formulae, which is what most computer-less students do nowadays.
Similarly, in high school and junior college (this time in the US), I dearly loved my graphing calculator, ye olde TI-85. I wrote some Calculus and Physics (mechanics again, and some EM/optics) programs for it, without which I would have spent most of my lab time on simple arithmetic. When I didn't understand some concept, I didn't have to wait for the test -- I knew it right away, because my program failed to work. And of course, there's no way I could have went through all that English without a word processor -- the white-out expenses alone would have put my family deep into bankruptcy.
So, basically, my education was greatly enhanced by computers, not reduced to mindless data entry or whatever the article seems to claim. In addition, I was fortunate enough to be computer literate, and thus I could move ahead a bit by skipping all the basic computer literacy classes.
Note, however, that my education was better than average not because of computers themselves, but because of teachers who used them effectively. This is a critical point that all these "technology is evil !" articles always manage to miss. A good teacher, armed with a good curriculum, can teach physiscs to his students armed with nothing but an abbacus; a bad one will ruin their education even if he had his own personal Beowulf cluster.
The bottom line is, if you haven't read The Cyberiad, you need to do it. NOW.
I agree with you completely regarding words and art. If a random industrial-sizeed spray paint nozzle can produce the same output as a human "artist" (*cough*Pollock*cough*), then what's the point of calling it "art" at all ?
I think it was Vinograd (sp?) who, when asked by a reporter about AI, replied: "The danger is not that machines will become smarter than people; the danger is that people will become as dumb as machines". The poetry this robo-hack churns out is of the "postmodern" kind: as far as I understand, it's not supposed to have any intrinsic meaning, because meaning detracts from the deconstruction of modern discourse, or something or other. In other words, modern human poets are no better than Eliza, and they're proud of it.
On a sidenote, several people have posted something to the extent of "this law is good because it makes music downloads legal". I just don't see how this follows. What I think will happen is that the RIAA (or its Canadian equivalent) will tax ISPs an then go on on their merry way suing people left and right. Common sense doesn't really apply to laws anymore.
This makes more sense than the "phallic symbol" idea that the other poster mentioned, but I have to admit, his idea sounds cooler :-)
- Not be harmful to my health
- Not be readable by just anyone
- Be secure enough to defend against identity theft
A chip means no credit cards, and that makes it a bit less painful to lose my wallet. It will also cut down on this magnetophobia I am developing. Basically, for me the chip is just a matter of convenience, not some kind of an ideological platform. Of course, the health/crypto standards would have to be pretty high for me to accept this chip; currently, I doubt that this is the case.Another one of Neal Stephenson's inventions comes true. Only, IIRC, in the Diamond Age they used the entire skeleton as the antenna (by implanting a chip inside of a bone). With this, and the e-paper, and all the nanotechnology... I can't even tell truth from fiction anymore.
Actually, we don't know how many Russian cosmonauts and their Chinese counterparts have died before the successfull mission was televised. Remember: these are totalitarian countries, they don't have freedom of the press, they can do whatever they want.
Supremacy ? You bet.
For example, Roblimo complains that copy/pasting text requires a keypress. This alone may be considered a petty complaint by some (and, indeed, a Linux newbie would be laughed out of the forum if he posted something like that). However, Roblimo chooses to ignore the fact that Windows copy/paste actually works, and it works consistently. I can copy a URL from my text editor into my browser, and have it work. I can copy an image from my browser into my graphics program, and have it work... etc. This is something that X/Gnome/KDE/Qt/Motif/XYZ has never been able to accomplish, and probably never will.
Roblimo then complains that Windows doesn't come with all the software that he is accustomed to using. Well, yeah. But Windows also comes on just one CD, not seventeen or however many of them Red Hat has now. Still, all his favorite tools are just a download away. Yes, some of them aren't free -- but there are plenty of free tools for the common tasks, as Roblimo himself demonstrated by downloading OpenOffice (or StarOffice, or whichever, I forget).
Roblimo then begins to complain about the Messenger service, and his inability to disable it. Tasks like these are faced by Linux newbies every day; the aforementioned newbies are usually told "RTFM" or "j00 d34d f00" in response to their questions. I find it ironic that Roblimo the Linux guru was unable to complete such a simple task as disabling the Messenger, especially since this task is much easier on Windows than it is on Linux (you can do it all in the UI, as opposed to editing arcane text files).
I could go on, but I think my point is almost clear by now. I will, however, point out one Windows feature that is so well implemented that Roblimo breezed right through it without noticing: ease of use. Roblimo the Windows newbie was able to pop in the CD, click a few buttons, and begin using his computer right away. Not once did he have to edit xconfig files, or learn the "make" syntax, or figure out where init.d is, etc. etc. In addition, Windows automatically recognized his video card, monitor, keyboard, mouse and network card (and presumably the sound card as well). This kind of functionality is light-years ahead of Linux, which requires a lot of manual tweaking (and an occasional hardware purchase) to even begin working.
Basically, I find Roblimo's article disingineous at best, hypocritical at worst. Why should Linux-to-Windows migration be held to a much harsher standard than Windows-to-Linux ?
You think you just made a joke, but isn't this what Palladium is all about (among other things) ? This is why I am sometimes too scared to get out of bed in the morning...