40 yards is not 200 stories. 1 yard = 1 meter (approx) to use a measurement you're familiar with. That's 10 stories, which most people should be able to in about a a couple minutes. It's a much shorter distance than some current apartment buildings, where everybody goes down the stairs if there's a fire. Of course, there's a tremendous cost to put fire doors in that often...
I think that picking up Eazel would be a no-brainer for Mandrake or RedHat. The company has only a couple dozen technical people, and their work will definitely be a tremendous enhancement to Linux as a desktop platform. I think Eazel has it right when they call themselves the missing piece of the desktop puzzle.
I visited a old friend in Southern California this winter. He lived in a "gated community" where security cameras watched all the areas inside the complex.
My friend had to return to work the day I arrived, so I spent the afternoon relaxing at his place. Having come from Minnesota (4 ft of snow when I left) I went outside and wandered aimlessly around the complex, enjoying the ability to wear shorts in January. I took pictures of interesting things, like Christmas tree lights on tropical trees and ponds filled with liquid water. In retrospect, this does seem awfully suspicious/crazy.
After about half an hour in this paradise, a security guy told me I had to come with him. I didn't live there, my friend was out of his office, and I had no way to prove I wasn't some crazy Minnesotan intent on photographing the area before I killed everybody. I'd done nothing wrong, just acted a little weird. But I spent the rest of the afternoon in the security office until my host could verify I was indeed a legitmate guest. It was not a pleasant experience.
One would hope that real police would do a better job and find something better to do than harass law-abiding people. But I wouldn't want to bet on it.
Here in the Land of 10K Lakes, we've had pretty good success with such lawsuits.
Minnesota led the way in suing the tobbacco comapanies into the ground, we got a shitload of money.
Minnesota also sued successfully Nintendo for anticompetitive pricing schemes in the early around 1990. The claim was that Nintendo used nasty agreements of questionable legality to jack up prices. They won, but all I got as a class member was (IIRC) $15. Don't expect to get every dime MS has ever extracted out of you.
IANAL, but assuming that the lawsuit is made on the same legal grounds as the Nintendo lawsuit, that the laws haven't changed, and that the judges in Minnesota haven't changed, it seems like a pretty clear case. Microsoft's pricing schemes have to be far more anticompetitive than Nintendo's ever were - anybody remember "per-machine" (translation: exlusive), licensing for OEMs?
The need for closed discussions
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It doesn't seem to me that this is a new problem. People have always had the ability to choose what to read or listen to. Should governments force them to read both left- and right-wing newspapers, for example?
It might not always even be a bad thing. I think we need places where people of like views can gather and discuss. I used to read alt.atheism but the trolls(who were "witnessing") and the people flaming back at them were just too much. Here I wanted to discuss my religous beliefs with like-minded people - what do you tell kids?" and so forth - and I have to wade through 100 messages about
RE: RE: RE: UNBELIEVRS GO TO HELL!!!!!! REPENT AND BE SAVED!!!!
in order to get to the discussion I wanted - using a 4800 modem. There was supposed to be a subgroup of alt.atheism for this argument, but nobody read it so the trolls kept posting to the main group (and people kept arguing with them).
I like the occassional flamewar as well as anyone else, but the best discussions occur when people have a common ground. Look at Slashdot posts debating the relative merits of various distros compared to "Windoze sux" posts and "Die GPL Bastard" posts. The Linux discussions tend to be much more factual and involve a hell of a lot less hot air, because everyone involved agrees Linux is a good OS, and all distributions are fairly similar. No one will call you an idiot for explaining why you like Debian.
There's a place for opposite opinions to clash, but Republic.com would turn every single website into a never-ending flamewar.
Re:"Wings" in politics
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(User #84900 Info)
I never liked the term "left" or "right" wing. Where did those come from anyways? Were the terms created by how a certain arrangement of people used to sit in a certain assmebly?
Very perceptive. They come from the National Assembly in France. We've been using the terms ever since there was a hard split among the Girondists (sp) and the other guys, whose name I won't even try and spell. Interestingly, the next phase in the french revolution was the Terror, where the Committee for Public Safety took over. From there it was all downhill....
This is a rather narrow-minded perception of political agendas, even when paired together with the notions of conservative and liberal, these polarized views of an assembly of people's opinions for the most part fails to line up with reality.
Absolutely. I'll attach the word "liberal" to myself quite willingly even though I oppose affirmative action and gun control, since the word is a more accurate description of my overall political views than "conservative" or even "moderate".
Political debates have raged back and forth for ages, and nothing will settle people's conflict better than facts. Though facts can always be manipulated to tell different truths. That's why an open, free democratic union should always consider all the options available, and never "shun this book, as it is unamerican and left wing" for the american people are left wing, and right wing, and diagonal wing, and some are all 3.
You've just hit the point that the book itself misses. As a personal suggestion, the book has an excellent suggestion - listen to opposing viewpoints and actively seek them out. Read opinions written by the "other side" of any question, and try and read them with an open mind, which can be harder than it seems.
As a suggestion to websites, it's excellent - you should at least link to an opposing viewpoint if you really want to serve readers. I think everyone's problem comes from the idea of having a government mandate about political speech on the internet.
It's interesting that so many non-geeks I know don't share this crowd's enthusiasm for porn. Maybe it's true what they say about exposure.. hmm..
I think we're just more honest. I've only met one other guy in my life who I can honestly say never watched any porn. One of the beauties of Slashdot is that people have an amazing tendency to be honest, thanks to anonymity.
No woman can live up to the images in porn.
And no man can live up to the images in an Arnold action movie - most people can separate fantasy from reality. I don't expect my sex life to resemble a porn flick anymore than I expect my National Guard unit to resemble a Rambo movie.
Oh it's easy for you to assume that just because it doesn't fit in with your wonderful, liberal view of life that it's got to be a troll. Far easier than actually trying to come up with some facts to support your position, right?
Ok, you might want to take a look at this story on sexuality over at Kuro5hin. It's a fascinating read, one of the best things I've seen there in a while. Chock full of hard facts about the intrinsic need for sexual release in human beings.
You're not worth arguing with. You'll just apply the word "liberal" to any evidence to any argument you don't like, just like you have in all three of your posts so far.
Furthermore, your argument seems to be based on a particular pseudo-literalist reading of the Bible, so it's not like the discussion would go anywhere.
Expedited discussion with this troll:
1. I'm going to have a little fun, and quote 1 Corinthians 7:1 "Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry", the standard justification for primacy of celibacy over marriage, and tell you that if you really wanted to take the word of God to heart you would forsake all physical pleasure, even with your wife. I'll further support my claim with Luke 14:25-27: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate.... his wife and children,.... --he cannot be my disciple."
2. You're going to writhe and scream and complain and try and explain I'm distorting the passage. You might quote me Shakespeare, and say that "the devil has the power to quote scripture" thinking you have a biblical comeback. You might quote 1 Corinth 7:2-5 as a better retort.
3. Then I'll say Christ makes clear in 7:6-7 that permanent non-marriage is a preferable state.
4. Then you'll invent a new complaint to justify ignoring the passages of the bible you dislike. Of course, by disregarging only one passage, you've kind of shot your argument that we should blindly use the Bible as a set of rules without thinking - if it's wrong there, why isn't it wrong about pornography? (Of course, the bible never mentions pornography, you can borrow the inferential references which conservative theologians find to justify anti-pornographic positions.)
5. I'll be sick of the discussion and won't reply because you will ignore any other facts I introduce into the discussion or attach the word "liberal" to them, as if I should run in terror at being called such a horrible word.
There, we condensed in all down into one post. Wait I think I got a patent idea... Expedited troll conversations via prediction of troller/trollee responses.
It actually worked both ways - I know the MS implementation did not recognize some of the methods in the File class, which caused me great pain once. The ASCII "extensions" can screw you up too if your Java program tries to read text files on two different platforms - "what, you wanted me to stop reading the config file at the EOL? What EOL?"
Bottom line, the incompatibilities were sufficent that you had to test even simple Java programs with MS Java and Sun Java to confirm that they worked correctly. That kind of kills off the cross-platform advantage Java was supposed to have.
Try Redhat 7. Create a new user account, login as that user, download the appropriate themes, run gnome-config and pick the themes for gnome and sawfish (or whatevver). Make a couple new icons on the desktop that point to/usr/bin/xmms and so forth. Total time - less than 30 minutes. (If you're serious and want more details, reply to this post and I'll reply when I get home to my Linux box).
Kudzu (included in RH 7) might autodect USB devices - I don't know, I don't have any. It did autodetect my new soundcard and run sndconfig for me, but that's a PCI card, not a USB device.
Windows offers a friendly environment that makes it easy to use software. Truthfully, there are a lot of people out there for whom Linux is not an option. There are a lot of people out there who don't know how to compile the source they got from someone to get a program to run. To be an efficient Linux user, this is one of the many special skills you have to have.
A real life experiment: Set up windows-clone themes for you desktop and window managers. Put your favorite office program, email client, MP3 player, and web browser on the desktop as icons. Place someone "who isn't good with computers" (according to that person) in front of this machine. Leave them alone, and see what happens. Unless they are exceedingly stubborn, they should survive just fine. I have tried this expirement 3 times - results ranged from "What do you mean this isn't Windows?" to "It's a litte harder than using a Mac".
I don't think the questions were all that bad for an interview to a hostile audience. A couple were quite valid - why do you make the security decisions that you do? Will I ever see Office for Linux? and so forth. This is how hostile interviews go - watch GW Bush try and bullshit his way out of questions about racial profiling after his NAACP speech. (Flame suppressant - this is an example, you could pollute the thread with 10,000 examples involving Al Gore/Ralph Nader/Harry Brown/Cowboy Neal and they'd be true. Please don't.)
We got some loaded questions, we got some good ones. We got some reasonable responses ("Supporting Linux can be a real pain in the ass"), we got some total nonresponses, and we got some outright denials of embarrassing facts("We don't break standards, ever"). Par for the course.
What do you expect? A completely objective, level-headed discussion? You'll never get that on issues people feel this strongly about. I'm fairly impressed.
But you can't test software enough to get out all the design flaws. Or if you can, it's a rare and very expensive skill.
Absolutely. I did QA for a system that had to defect-free for two weeks. It was the most boring job ever - testing every goddamn feature in the thing in 100 different circumstances. The brute-force approach could work for the project because 1) the US govt funded the thing so cost was no object, 2) there were plenty of CS undergrads who would work for grossly substandard wages and 3)there were plenty of fresh undergrads to replace the one that quit after going slightly insane. If you had to pay current market wages you could never make a profit by making 100% reliable software.
I always figured at some point the world would come to understand what bugs are and we could develop social and legal concepts of what sort of warranties make sense for software. So that people will do QA, but not delay releasing software endlessly. So that the sort of bug that raises legal liability exists but is rare enough that people can run a business.
We aren't there yet.
We're as far away as we can get. If I wrote a program with a hidden payload that erased half your files I think I'd be safe legally as long as I insert enough disclaimerage. Remember when Intel claimed it wasn't a problem that the original Pentium couldn't divide correctly? Or that they weren't legally obligated to replace them? Some liability for bugs (at least in payware) has to come back - how much will be a fine art for courts to determine. Ford is not liable if an out-of-warranty vehicle crashes into a retaining wall because the driver didn't replace old brake pads. But they are liable for braindead designs, like relying on tire pressure to provide stability. Something like that needs to happen in software - the limit of liability has to swing back towards the center.
Zero liability for closed-source software is really absurd since you are prevented from fixing problems yourself. It's one thing to disclaim liability for flaws in open-source products, where anybody can fix the problem as needed, but to tell someone that they can't have their money back, they can't fix the bugs, and you will maybe fix them sometime is beyond the pale.
Switching to stable, well-developed software will involve a one-time cost for the migration with permanent cost-savings. IANAAOATA(I am not an accountant or a tax attorney) but you might be able to write it off as a capital expense - it seems like you can claim just about anything as a capital investment without the IRS complaining. From then on, you can remove software expenses from the budget. You don't have the same downtime/security issues to deal with under Linux - they're much less. UNIX people are more expensive, but they have a higher chance of solving the problem instead of running up a massive bill for outside help.
Furthermore, it's amazing how closely you can make Linux mimic Win9x/NT anymore from the user level - run the Redmond95 theme in Gnome and the win98 theme in Sawfish(or other win-clones), run StarOffice, and people can't tell the difference. I have an account on my machine called WinUser with this setup for when normal people have to use it for a minute - after about 2 minutes they're happily typing away. Foot = Start. C:\Windows\Desktop\Bob's Work =/bob. Office = StarOffice or Word = AbiWord, whatever. Anyone with any brain should be OK from there, more or less.
but that doesn't matter. Completely rampant piracy and a breakdown of copyright would probably change certain industries. The music business wouldn't change very much - artists make little/nothing now from CD sales, they make their money on concerts. RIAA's members, which mark up music by 4500%, will be consigned to graveyard of outmoded industries. We'll never hear another manufactured artist like Britney Spears - thank god. Other people will keep making great music (and writing great books) for the same reason they have for millenia - they enjoy it.
Movies are another issue - the product actually costs a considerable amount to create. Live theater, which was almost killed off by movies, may make a resurgence. Expensive blockbusters may die off - there won't be any movies like Battlefield Earth (yay!!!) or The Matrix (sad) but that's what new technology does - it changes things, for better and worse.
IANAL, but if a group of companies cooperates to create a system that reduces consumer choice, and each agrees in advance not to do anything that would break this system (even if a situation arises that would cause such an action to be to that particular company's advantage), isn't that pretty much a textbook case of an antitrust violation?
My lawyer friends say yes. (STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This second-hand synopsis of a bs session with some attorneys is not offered as competnet legal advice. If you need legal advice on this issue, consult an attorney. Why you'd need legal advice on antritrust is beyond me, but to disclaim is divine.) They also note that it won't happen for a couple reasons:
1. GW Bush is president. There won't be any significant antitrust actions for at least 4 years. Not a troll, just the facts.
2. No corporate victims. Sun, Apple, Netscape, you name it - they all lined up to declare Microsoft a child of Satan. Consumers don't give enough money or make enough noise to be the sole reason for an antritrust lawsuit.
The only scenario where we'd get an antritrust lawsuit here is if the system takes a couple years to get off the ground and about the same time we elect a left-wing Democrat as president who appoints a left-wing attorney general who needs a good victim to start his term off.
Actually, the use of an "OR" in that statement is n't so much right. Hamlet's contemplating suicide during that soliloquy, so "XOR" is much more appropriate - you have to choose life or death, they're mutually exclusive. That's one of the problems with English, we use "or" in speech to two different things.
Speaking as an old-school liberal, I have to agree - universities are becoming far too politicized and trying to express the "wrong" opionion will not be permitted. A recent survey indicated that over 70% of college students think racist speech should be banned - we've got a real problem.
These people are an insult to real liberals, who have always believed that the average person is smart enough to make up their own mind - that's why liberals have spent two centuries campaigning for the right to vote for the "lesser people" of all types - because these people matter.
Don't forget that there are too many religous schools where expressing the opposite "wrong" opinion will result in equally harsh censure.
Did I just see someone with a Slashdot UID admit to using AOL as an ISP? What's this world coming to? Pretty soon we'll "Ask Slashdot: Windows ME vs Windows XP?" on the main page..... The world is truly going to hell....
Nothing personal, but the the Linux AIM client is a piece. You can't share files, it segfaults like a Mozilla browser, and is several versions behind the Windows/Mac versions - which is fine, I'm not going to demand that AOL keep the Linux client up-to-date for an operating system that is used by a very small percentage of users.
But if they won't, it's pretty shitty that they won't allow others to do so. This doesn't seem to be the case, thought - GAIM seems to be working right now, but there's no one I really IM and test it out on at 2:15 AM.
0. Didn't look at the copyright.
1. It's well written.
2. Ramajun - if a poor Indian college dropout can come up with hundreds of new mathematical insgights (and rediscover others) in his spare time, it seems plausible that a monk (who could have been copying the bible by hand) could have some astounding mathematical insights.
3. The stuff about imaginary numbers being associated with the devil reminded me of "true" Greek tales about the gods being angry with the discovery of irrational numbers - the legend may be the source for that part of the hoax.
4. After enough math courses, the ideas expressed here (except for the Mandelbrot set) strike me as elementary. Imaginary numbers, probability axoims, ordinal infinity, and Cartesian coordinates seem intuitive. They're not, of course, and I would never come up with all of them on my own, but halfway through a math minor they seem like givens.
Interesting points, but I think you're asking for more information than is useful.
First, the system needs to keep a record of friendly force positions, estimated enemy force positions, and other such battlefield information (the consistent tactical picture). This information has to get to whoever might need it--which may mean the people at the next echelon up, or all the people in close geographic proximity to a particular event, or soldiers involved in the same mission, or friendly units near a fire control line, etc.--
Again, data is useful to only a finite number of users. SSG Johnson might will consider the exact locations of other squads in his platoon useful information - he'll probably consider the location of all the squads in the company useful information. But in most circumstances, the location of squads in other companies will be useless garbage - it ain't even worth knowing. Geography may play a bigger role in determining what's worthwhile than task organization -if SSG Johnson's squad is on the left edge of his company he will probably consider information from the next company quite useful (which would complicate things), but there are still a finite number of lateral "hops" that a piece of data can make before it becomes irrelevant.
Third, how do you guarantee that the higher-ups always have a complete and accurate picture of the battlefield? Now, how do you do that without trashing the network (think 10,000 grunts constantly sending their positions over a low-bandwith RF link back to the commander)? Again, existing systems don't do this well either, but the idea is to do better than the existing systems.
Short answer - you don't. A division commander or his staff don't want or need information on each private anymore than a Fortune 50 CEO wants information on each employee - it's just noise. Just as a piece of information can only make so lateral hops before it becomes too distant to become useless, it can only make so many vertical hops up or down before it becomes useless.
Technology is a micromanager's dream - a sitution where a general officer can issue direct instructions to every one of his subordinate commanders is a bad one. Like any organization, information gets aggregated as it moves up the chain, and it gets specified/expanded as it moves down the chain. The goal should be to provide the maximum amount of information a staff can deal with and instead of giving them every detail that every subordinate unit has.
First, both must overcome a lack of a central server. While Napster has a server for the clients to connect to and cell phones communicate with a radio tower in that the geographic area, a "cell", P2P and Army's new system do not.
Actually, the problem of P2P filesharing is quite different.
In a decentralized P2P filesharing network all users need to be able to communicate with all other users since any user may have information that he/she wants. But a squad leader in Alpha Company probably has no reason to communicate with another squad leader in Charlie company, so they can be on different networks. It also makes "searching" issues non-existent- the number of users on any given network is extremely limited. The network doesn't grow, it subdivides, so the N^2 problem doesn't kick in.
We already use peer communication networks of a sort- they're just much more low-tech. Each unit has their own net, and each unit has a couple people plugged into the higher HQ net - there are also parallel nets, like the fire support net, etc. This solution has worked with boring,old-fashioned radios for decades.
I'm just not sure that military use bodes well for the Linux community.
This is the ultimate proof-of-concept - if Linux is stable enough for a combat system where failure can have life-or-death consequences for the soldiers involved, what isn't it stable enough for? If Linux is adaptable enough for the US Army to use in major both end-items(See previous slashdot story) and personal communications, what can't it be used for? If the NSA wants to use it as a basis for a secure system, what isn't it secure enough for? If I sold Linux-based anything, I would use this as an example.
I have to wonder what RMS would think about GPLd software being used for an imperialistic military.
Free Software requires a free environment, which the US Army exists to protect. You didn't see any Free Software coming out of the Soviet Bloc and you don't see any free software coming out of North Korea, Cuba, Iraq, or Iran today. It's a great thing when free software can be used to protect freedom. That "imperialistic" military you seem unhappy with allows you to work on any project you want and to communicate freely with developers around the world. BTW, would that be the same imperialistic military that is currently preventing cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo?
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40 yards is not 200 stories. 1 yard = 1 meter (approx) to use a measurement you're familiar with. That's 10 stories, which most people should be able to in about a a couple minutes. It's a much shorter distance than some current apartment buildings, where everybody goes down the stairs if there's a fire. Of course, there's a tremendous cost to put fire doors in that often...
I think that picking up Eazel would be a no-brainer for Mandrake or RedHat. The company has only a couple dozen technical people, and their work will definitely be a tremendous enhancement to Linux as a desktop platform. I think Eazel has it right when they call themselves the missing piece of the desktop puzzle.
I visited a old friend in Southern California this winter. He lived in a "gated community" where security cameras watched all the areas inside the complex.
My friend had to return to work the day I arrived, so I spent the afternoon relaxing at his place. Having come from Minnesota (4 ft of snow when I left) I went outside and wandered aimlessly around the complex, enjoying the ability to wear shorts in January. I took pictures of interesting things, like Christmas tree lights on tropical trees and ponds filled with liquid water. In retrospect, this does seem awfully suspicious/crazy.
After about half an hour in this paradise, a security guy told me I had to come with him. I didn't live there, my friend was out of his office, and I had no way to prove I wasn't some crazy Minnesotan intent on photographing the area before I killed everybody. I'd done nothing wrong, just acted a little weird. But I spent the rest of the afternoon in the security office until my host could verify I was indeed a legitmate guest. It was not a pleasant experience.
One would hope that real police would do a better job and find something better to do than harass law-abiding people. But I wouldn't want to bet on it.
Stupid question - how do they catch you?
This is all very freaky to me, I do not have a TV, and I would hate to be suspected of being a criminal just because I don't care for TV....
Here in the Land of 10K Lakes, we've had pretty good success with such lawsuits.
Minnesota led the way in suing the tobbacco comapanies into the ground, we got a shitload of money.
Minnesota also sued successfully Nintendo for anticompetitive pricing schemes in the early around 1990. The claim was that Nintendo used nasty agreements of questionable legality to jack up prices. They won, but all I got as a class member was (IIRC) $15. Don't expect to get every dime MS has ever extracted out of you.
IANAL, but assuming that the lawsuit is made on the same legal grounds as the Nintendo lawsuit, that the laws haven't changed, and that the judges in Minnesota haven't changed, it seems like a pretty clear case. Microsoft's pricing schemes have to be far more anticompetitive than Nintendo's ever were - anybody remember "per-machine" (translation: exlusive), licensing for OEMs?
It doesn't seem to me that this is a new problem. People have always had the ability to choose what to read or listen to. Should governments force them to read both left- and right-wing newspapers, for example?
It might not always even be a bad thing. I think we need places where people of like views can gather and discuss. I used to read alt.atheism but the trolls(who were "witnessing") and the people flaming back at them were just too much. Here I wanted to discuss my religous beliefs with like-minded people - what do you tell kids?" and so forth - and I have to wade through 100 messages about
RE: RE: RE: UNBELIEVRS GO TO HELL!!!!!! REPENT AND BE SAVED!!!!
in order to get to the discussion I wanted - using a 4800 modem. There was supposed to be a subgroup of alt.atheism for this argument, but nobody read it so the trolls kept posting to the main group (and people kept arguing with them).
I like the occassional flamewar as well as anyone else, but the best discussions occur when people have a common ground. Look at Slashdot posts debating the relative merits of various distros compared to "Windoze sux" posts and "Die GPL Bastard" posts. The Linux discussions tend to be much more factual and involve a hell of a lot less hot air, because everyone involved agrees Linux is a good OS, and all distributions are fairly similar. No one will call you an idiot for explaining why you like Debian.
There's a place for opposite opinions to clash, but Republic.com would turn every single website into a never-ending flamewar.
(User #84900 Info)
I never liked the term "left" or "right" wing. Where did those come from anyways? Were the terms created by how a certain arrangement of people used to sit in a certain assmebly?
Very perceptive. They come from the National Assembly in France. We've been using the terms ever since there was a hard split among the Girondists (sp) and the other guys, whose name I won't even try and spell. Interestingly, the next phase in the french revolution was the Terror, where the Committee for Public Safety took over. From there it was all downhill....
This is a rather narrow-minded perception of political agendas, even when paired together with the notions of conservative and liberal, these polarized views of an assembly of people's opinions for the most part fails to line up with reality.
Absolutely. I'll attach the word "liberal" to myself quite willingly even though I oppose affirmative action and gun control, since the word is a more accurate description of my overall political views than "conservative" or even "moderate".
Political debates have raged back and forth for ages, and nothing will settle people's conflict better than facts. Though facts can always be manipulated to tell different truths. That's why an open, free democratic union should always consider all the options available, and never "shun this book, as it is unamerican and left wing" for the american people are left wing, and right wing, and diagonal wing, and some are all 3.
You've just hit the point that the book itself misses. As a personal suggestion, the book has an excellent suggestion - listen to opposing viewpoints and actively seek them out. Read opinions written by the "other side" of any question, and try and read them with an open mind, which can be harder than it seems.
As a suggestion to websites, it's excellent - you should at least link to an opposing viewpoint if you really want to serve readers. I think everyone's problem comes from the idea of having a government mandate about political speech on the internet.
It's interesting that so many non-geeks I know don't share this crowd's enthusiasm for porn. Maybe it's true what they say about exposure.. hmm..
I think we're just more honest. I've only met one other guy in my life who I can honestly say never watched any porn. One of the beauties of Slashdot is that people have an amazing tendency to be honest, thanks to anonymity.
No woman can live up to the images in porn.
And no man can live up to the images in an Arnold action movie - most people can separate fantasy from reality. I don't expect my sex life to resemble a porn flick anymore than I expect my National Guard unit to resemble a Rambo movie.
Oh it's easy for you to assume that just because it doesn't fit in with your wonderful, liberal view of life that it's got to be a troll. Far easier than actually trying to come up with some facts to support your position, right?
.... his wife and children, .... --he cannot be my disciple."
Ok, you might want to take a look at this story on sexuality over at Kuro5hin. It's a fascinating read, one of the best things I've seen there in a while. Chock full of hard facts about the intrinsic need for sexual release in human beings.
You're not worth arguing with. You'll just apply the word "liberal" to any evidence to any argument you don't like, just like you have in all three of your posts so far.
Furthermore, your argument seems to be based on a particular pseudo-literalist reading of the Bible, so it's not like the discussion would go anywhere.
Expedited discussion with this troll:
1. I'm going to have a little fun, and quote 1 Corinthians 7:1 "Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry", the standard justification for primacy of celibacy over marriage, and tell you that if you really wanted to take the word of God to heart you would forsake all physical pleasure, even with your wife. I'll further support my claim with Luke 14:25-27: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate
2. You're going to writhe and scream and complain and try and explain I'm distorting the passage. You might quote me Shakespeare, and say that "the devil has the power to quote scripture" thinking you have a biblical comeback. You might quote 1 Corinth 7:2-5 as a better retort.
3. Then I'll say Christ makes clear in 7:6-7 that permanent non-marriage is a preferable state.
4. Then you'll invent a new complaint to justify ignoring the passages of the bible you dislike. Of course, by disregarging only one passage, you've kind of shot your argument that we should blindly use the Bible as a set of rules without thinking - if it's wrong there, why isn't it wrong about pornography? (Of course, the bible never mentions pornography, you can borrow the inferential references which conservative theologians find to justify anti-pornographic positions.)
5. I'll be sick of the discussion and won't reply because you will ignore any other facts I introduce into the discussion or attach the word "liberal" to them, as if I should run in terror at being called such a horrible word.
There, we condensed in all down into one post. Wait I think I got a patent idea... Expedited troll conversations via prediction of troller/trollee responses.
It actually worked both ways - I know the MS implementation did not recognize some of the methods in the File class, which caused me great pain once. The ASCII "extensions" can screw you up too if your Java program tries to read text files on two different platforms - "what, you wanted me to stop reading the config file at the EOL? What EOL?"
Bottom line, the incompatibilities were sufficent that you had to test even simple Java programs with MS Java and Sun Java to confirm that they worked correctly. That kind of kills off the cross-platform advantage Java was supposed to have.
Try Redhat 7. Create a new user account, login as that user, download the appropriate themes, run gnome-config and pick the themes for gnome and sawfish (or whatevver). Make a couple new icons on the desktop that point to /usr/bin/xmms and so forth. Total time - less than 30 minutes. (If you're serious and want more details, reply to this post and I'll reply when I get home to my Linux box).
Kudzu (included in RH 7) might autodect USB devices - I don't know, I don't have any. It did autodetect my new soundcard and run sndconfig for me, but that's a PCI card, not a USB device.
Windows offers a friendly environment that makes it easy to use software. Truthfully, there are a lot of people out there for whom Linux is not an option. There are a lot of people out there who don't know how to compile the source they got from someone to get a program to run. To be an efficient Linux user, this is one of the many special skills you have to have.
A real life experiment: Set up windows-clone themes for you desktop and window managers. Put your favorite office program, email client, MP3 player, and web browser on the desktop as icons. Place someone "who isn't good with computers" (according to that person) in front of this machine. Leave them alone, and see what happens. Unless they are exceedingly stubborn, they should survive just fine. I have tried this expirement 3 times - results ranged from "What do you mean this isn't Windows?" to "It's a litte harder than using a Mac".
I don't think the questions were all that bad for an interview to a hostile audience. A couple were quite valid - why do you make the security decisions that you do? Will I ever see Office for Linux? and so forth. This is how hostile interviews go - watch GW Bush try and bullshit his way out of questions about racial profiling after his NAACP speech. (Flame suppressant - this is an example, you could pollute the thread with 10,000 examples involving Al Gore/Ralph Nader/Harry Brown/Cowboy Neal and they'd be true. Please don't.)
We got some loaded questions, we got some good ones. We got some reasonable responses ("Supporting Linux can be a real pain in the ass"), we got some total nonresponses, and we got some outright denials of embarrassing facts("We don't break standards, ever"). Par for the course.
What do you expect? A completely objective, level-headed discussion? You'll never get that on issues people feel this strongly about. I'm fairly impressed.
But you can't test software enough to get out all the design flaws. Or if you can, it's a rare and very expensive skill.
Absolutely. I did QA for a system that had to defect-free for two weeks. It was the most boring job ever - testing every goddamn feature in the thing in 100 different circumstances. The brute-force approach could work for the project because 1) the US govt funded the thing so cost was no object, 2) there were plenty of CS undergrads who would work for grossly substandard wages and 3)there were plenty of fresh undergrads to replace the one that quit after going slightly insane. If you had to pay current market wages you could never make a profit by making 100% reliable software.
I always figured at some point the world would come to understand what bugs are and we could develop social and legal concepts of what sort of warranties make sense for software. So that people will do QA, but not delay releasing software endlessly. So that the sort of bug that raises legal liability exists but is rare enough that people can run a business.
We aren't there yet.
We're as far away as we can get. If I wrote a program with a hidden payload that erased half your files I think I'd be safe legally as long as I insert enough disclaimerage. Remember when Intel claimed it wasn't a problem that the original Pentium couldn't divide correctly? Or that they weren't legally obligated to replace them? Some liability for bugs (at least in payware) has to come back - how much will be a fine art for courts to determine. Ford is not liable if an out-of-warranty vehicle crashes into a retaining wall because the driver didn't replace old brake pads. But they are liable for braindead designs, like relying on tire pressure to provide stability. Something like that needs to happen in software - the limit of liability has to swing back towards the center.
Zero liability for closed-source software is really absurd since you are prevented from fixing problems yourself. It's one thing to disclaim liability for flaws in open-source products, where anybody can fix the problem as needed, but to tell someone that they can't have their money back, they can't fix the bugs, and you will maybe fix them sometime is beyond the pale.
Switching to stable, well-developed software will involve a one-time cost for the migration with permanent cost-savings. IANAAOATA(I am not an accountant or a tax attorney) but you might be able to write it off as a capital expense - it seems like you can claim just about anything as a capital investment without the IRS complaining. From then on, you can remove software expenses from the budget. You don't have the same downtime/security issues to deal with under Linux - they're much less. UNIX people are more expensive, but they have a higher chance of solving the problem instead of running up a massive bill for outside help.
/bob. Office = StarOffice or Word = AbiWord, whatever. Anyone with any brain should be OK from there, more or less.
Furthermore, it's amazing how closely you can make Linux mimic Win9x/NT anymore from the user level - run the Redmond95 theme in Gnome and the win98 theme in Sawfish(or other win-clones), run StarOffice, and people can't tell the difference. I have an account on my machine called WinUser with this setup for when normal people have to use it for a minute - after about 2 minutes they're happily typing away. Foot = Start. C:\Windows\Desktop\Bob's Work =
but that doesn't matter. Completely rampant piracy and a breakdown of copyright would probably change certain industries. The music business wouldn't change very much - artists make little/nothing now from CD sales, they make their money on concerts. RIAA's members, which mark up music by 4500%, will be consigned to graveyard of outmoded industries. We'll never hear another manufactured artist like Britney Spears - thank god. Other people will keep making great music (and writing great books) for the same reason they have for millenia - they enjoy it.
Movies are another issue - the product actually costs a considerable amount to create. Live theater, which was almost killed off by movies, may make a resurgence. Expensive blockbusters may die off - there won't be any movies like Battlefield Earth (yay!!!) or The Matrix (sad) but that's what new technology does - it changes things, for better and worse.
IANAL, but if a group of companies cooperates to create a system that reduces consumer choice, and each agrees in advance not to do anything that would break this system (even if a situation arises that would cause such an action to be to that particular company's advantage), isn't that pretty much a textbook case of an antitrust violation?
My lawyer friends say yes. (STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This second-hand synopsis of a bs session with some attorneys is not offered as competnet legal advice. If you need legal advice on this issue, consult an attorney. Why you'd need legal advice on antritrust is beyond me, but to disclaim is divine.) They also note that it won't happen for a couple reasons:
1. GW Bush is president. There won't be any significant antitrust actions for at least 4 years. Not a troll, just the facts.
2. No corporate victims. Sun, Apple, Netscape, you name it - they all lined up to declare Microsoft a child of Satan. Consumers don't give enough money or make enough noise to be the sole reason for an antritrust lawsuit.
The only scenario where we'd get an antritrust lawsuit here is if the system takes a couple years to get off the ground and about the same time we elect a left-wing Democrat as president who appoints a left-wing attorney general who needs a good victim to start his term off.
Actually, the use of an "OR" in that statement is n't so much right. Hamlet's contemplating suicide during that soliloquy, so "XOR" is much more appropriate - you have to choose life or death, they're mutually exclusive. That's one of the problems with English, we use "or" in speech to two different things.
Speaking as an old-school liberal, I have to agree - universities are becoming far too politicized and trying to express the "wrong" opionion will not be permitted. A recent survey indicated that over 70% of college students think racist speech should be banned - we've got a real problem.
These people are an insult to real liberals, who have always believed that the average person is smart enough to make up their own mind - that's why liberals have spent two centuries campaigning for the right to vote for the "lesser people" of all types - because these people matter.
Don't forget that there are too many religous schools where expressing the opposite "wrong" opinion will result in equally harsh censure.
Did I just see someone with a Slashdot UID admit to using AOL as an ISP? What's this world coming to? Pretty soon we'll "Ask Slashdot: Windows ME vs Windows XP?" on the main page..... The world is truly going to hell....
Nothing personal, but the the Linux AIM client is a piece. You can't share files, it segfaults like a Mozilla browser, and is several versions behind the Windows/Mac versions - which is fine, I'm not going to demand that AOL keep the Linux client up-to-date for an operating system that is used by a very small percentage of users.
But if they won't, it's pretty shitty that they won't allow others to do so. This doesn't seem to be the case, thought - GAIM seems to be working right now, but there's no one I really IM and test it out on at 2:15 AM.
I'll admit it - I fell for it. Reasons why:
0. Didn't look at the copyright.
1. It's well written.
2. Ramajun - if a poor Indian college dropout can come up with hundreds of new mathematical insgights (and rediscover others) in his spare time, it seems plausible that a monk (who could have been copying the bible by hand) could have some astounding mathematical insights.
3. The stuff about imaginary numbers being associated with the devil reminded me of "true" Greek tales about the gods being angry with the discovery of irrational numbers - the legend may be the source for that part of the hoax.
4. After enough math courses, the ideas expressed here (except for the Mandelbrot set) strike me as elementary. Imaginary numbers, probability axoims, ordinal infinity, and Cartesian coordinates seem intuitive. They're not, of course, and I would never come up with all of them on my own, but halfway through a math minor they seem like givens.
OK, I got taken. Just trying to feel less stupid.
Interesting points, but I think you're asking for more information than is useful.
First, the system needs to keep a record of friendly force positions, estimated enemy force positions, and other such battlefield information (the consistent tactical picture). This information has to get to whoever might need it--which may mean the people at the next echelon up, or all the people in close geographic proximity to a particular event, or soldiers involved in the same mission, or friendly units near a fire control line, etc.--
Again, data is useful to only a finite number of users. SSG Johnson might will consider the exact locations of other squads in his platoon useful information - he'll probably consider the location of all the squads in the company useful information. But in most circumstances, the location of squads in other companies will be useless garbage - it ain't even worth knowing. Geography may play a bigger role in determining what's worthwhile than task organization -if SSG Johnson's squad is on the left edge of his company he will probably consider information from the next company quite useful (which would complicate things), but there are still a finite number of lateral "hops" that a piece of data can make before it becomes irrelevant.
Third, how do you guarantee that the higher-ups always have a complete and accurate picture of the battlefield? Now, how do you do that without trashing the network (think 10,000 grunts constantly sending their positions over a low-bandwith RF link back to the commander)? Again, existing systems don't do this well either, but the idea is to do better than the existing systems.
Short answer - you don't. A division commander or his staff don't want or need information on each private anymore than a Fortune 50 CEO wants information on each employee - it's just noise. Just as a piece of information can only make so lateral hops before it becomes too distant to become useless, it can only make so many vertical hops up or down before it becomes useless.
Technology is a micromanager's dream - a sitution where a general officer can issue direct instructions to every one of his subordinate commanders is a bad one. Like any organization, information gets aggregated as it moves up the chain, and it gets specified/expanded as it moves down the chain. The goal should be to provide the maximum amount of information a staff can deal with and instead of giving them every detail that every subordinate unit has.
First, both must overcome a lack of a central server. While Napster has a server for the clients to connect to and cell phones communicate with a radio tower in that the geographic area, a "cell", P2P and Army's new system do not.
Actually, the problem of P2P filesharing is quite different.
In a decentralized P2P filesharing network all users need to be able to communicate with all other users since any user may have information that he/she wants. But a squad leader in Alpha Company probably has no reason to communicate with another squad leader in Charlie company, so they can be on different networks. It also makes "searching" issues non-existent- the number of users on any given network is extremely limited. The network doesn't grow, it subdivides, so the N^2 problem doesn't kick in.
We already use peer communication networks of a sort- they're just much more low-tech. Each unit has their own net, and each unit has a couple people plugged into the higher HQ net - there are also parallel nets, like the fire support net, etc. This solution has worked with boring,old-fashioned radios for decades.
I'm just not sure that military use bodes well for the Linux community.
This is the ultimate proof-of-concept - if Linux is stable enough for a combat system where failure can have life-or-death consequences for the soldiers involved, what isn't it stable enough for? If Linux is adaptable enough for the US Army to use in major both end-items(See previous slashdot story) and personal communications, what can't it be used for? If the NSA wants to use it as a basis for a secure system, what isn't it secure enough for? If I sold Linux-based anything, I would use this as an example.
I have to wonder what RMS would think about GPLd software being used for an imperialistic military.
Free Software requires a free environment, which the US Army exists to protect. You didn't see any Free Software coming out of the Soviet Bloc and you don't see any free software coming out of North Korea, Cuba, Iraq, or Iran today. It's a great thing when free software can be used to protect freedom. That "imperialistic" military you seem unhappy with allows you to work on any project you want and to communicate freely with developers around the world. BTW, would that be the same imperialistic military that is currently preventing cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo?