C'mon...Smurfette--a lone girl smurf amongst a community of 99 boy smurfs? "They're only a couple apples tall but it's still one big blue bang"
Haven't you seen donnie darko, this issue is covered in full. The smurfs have no sexual organs, and thus are not effected by lust towards smurfette. They are trully innocent.
The raelians are pretty benign. They have huge respect for the individual and individual choice, thus brainwashing and control is strictly out of the question. Most of their gatherings are a place for reasonably attractive people of varying sexual orientation to meet and get their rocks off. They don't practice brainwashing, they do not advise segregated communal living, and the individual's right to say no must be honoured. For all purposes it seems like Rael started this thing in order to have access to large amounts of free sex.
The only serious problem I have with them is that there seem to be large majority of male members which pretty much voids any reason I might have to join up.
The scariest thing about them is their efforts into human cloning. By having a cult with a defined morality so different to the mainstream (i.e. there is no soul, a single human clone is expendable, imortality is acheived through continuous cloning) they can condone research on live humans without consideration of the rights of an individual clone. This really bothers me, and is the darker side of their organisation.
As far as your example of humans being able to suppress their urges to eat (and I assume reproduce) is wrong. Kangaroos are much better at both than humans. Just compare the current death rate of roos in the drought areas of Australia to human death rate in Ethiopia. Roos (and many marsupials) adjust their gestation period around food supply vs local demand for that food which is something humans havn't done yet.
This example is not really relevant to the point you are responding to. Kangaroos do not adjust their gestation period conciously. You don't see a girl kangaroo talking to a boy kangaroo saying "I really want to, but there's no food around, and what if I get pregnant? we really couldn't support a little joey with the drought and all . . ". The post you are responding to makes the point that humans are capable of making exactly such rational decisions, rather than changing their behaviour based purley on genetic traits developed through evolution in harshly arid areas.
I intend to not see it at the movies, but instead download an illegaly riped, high quality divX from soulseek. This way I am entertained, and I also am screwing the bastards who like to screw the people. Its a win-win situation.
note: The above post is a fictional story and should not be interperated as describing past, present or future activities of the poster, or as instrustions or encouragement for any other individuals to engage in any illegal activities
Sometimes I find on Slashdot the most interesting views into the more contradictory elements of human nature. Here we have a request for LOTR to be its own topic, so that the poster can ignore it. This is strangely posted in a thread specificaly about LOTR. Perhaps the poster has some form of crazed addiction to LOTR and they wish to be able to ignore the topic so that they can finaly go cold turkey and get it out of their system. This is probably the least insulting explantion to the poster's intelligence.
Simetra, can you shed some light on why you are reading a thread that you actualy would rather ignore? I am very curious about this.
A criminal's prey is generaly defensless, even if they have a gun. If a criminal knows how to use a gun and a victim doesn't, the victim is much more likely to be injured by their own gun than the criminal is. People are generaly better off without a gun, sure they can't wave their gun around to scare someone off, but neither can they accidently shoot themselves, or their kid, or have their gun taken off them and get shot by it.
Make no mistake about it, if someone has real criminal intent, a gun law will do nothing to prevent them from carrying out their actions. You can get any gun you want (legal or illegal) into this country, or any other, if you have a strong enough desire to. No law will prevent that. If you don't believe me, then why does Britain have problems with gun violence?
I do not believe this. Gun restrictions really do restrict guns. I live in australia and, while it is certainly possible to get a gun if you really want one, its not that easy, especialy for normal people (i.e. with no organised crime connections). You don't hear about shooting on the news here like you do in the US, and there are statistics that back this up (for example check this out).
You claim that britan has gun problems, do you have links to any kind of evidence that Britan's gun related crimes are anywhere near those of the US? I wouldbe surprised to see this.
I don't have evidnece for this on hand, but I remember reading that a decent percentage of gun relatied incidents in the US involved a gun owner as victim, suggesting that gun owners had attempted to use their guns for self defence, but had instead been overpowered and shot by the criminals. Something like this is obviously going to be affected by gun restrictions, if normal people aren't carrying the guns in the first place, then there is no gun involved.
This is all very interesting, I have heard similar arguments before, but not in as much detail. Thanks for sharing this with me. One thing that I am still curious about however is why your belief in the bible neccesitates taking the words literaly rather than seeing parts of the bible as metaphore. As a creationist you must believe that Genesis is an exact account of history, which I am curious about. After all these texts were written several thousand years ago, they were collected from an existing, previously oral, tradition and were inscribed as dogma for the hebrew people. What reason do you have for believing them to be factual and literal historical records?
The difference between using the bible as a frame of reference to using science to attempt to discover answers, is that science has observable evidence at it's core. It exists only to find the best answers to observable phenomena. Individual scientists may discount the bible, but science itself does not. The scientific approach to the bible as a source of evidence is that using the bible relies on a faith in the existance of an entity which, but definition, is not observable, and therefore outside of the realm of science.
Science does not seek to disporve the bible, it merely seeks to explain observed pheneomena. If there are conflicting theories, then science will not side with the bible for the reasons I mentioned above.
Your points are interesting insofar as they may help someone confirm or deny the existance of a specific god, and this is defniately very important to some people, but it really has very very little to do with science. The scientific method is exact and specific and your points really lie outisde of it. While interesting to sum, they should never be confused with science.
I am bit excited at this point, becasue it seems that I have the attention of a serious creationist. And there is something I have always wanted to ask a creationist, which is, why and how are you able to place such trust in the bible? How do you know it is divine inspired, and what grounds do you have for placing your trust in this book, and thus shaping your entire point of view and way of life around it? This is not a piss-take, I realy realy want to know the answer to this.
I apologize if this is what was implied, for it is certainly not what I believe -- quite the contrary. I believe there has only ever been one race of man. The concept of de-evolution as it were is merely an interesting thought to me rather than a conviction. If we are getting dumber, it could easily be a problem of culture or society as opposed to changes in the species.
OK, well this really was not clear in your other posts. You seem to have lumped human history with evolution
My point is basically that I cannot really see any evidence of some of the language structure, mathematics, etc. in pre-historic man, and then suddenly, we have complex writing structures (for example, the library of Ebla in cuneiform (sp?)) and mathematics. Historians are frequently being surprised at the level of technology and understanding that existed in many of the ancient cultures, most of whose knowledge was lost in invasions and intellectual purges that we humans seem to be so fond of.
It is not surprising that cultures that we know of mainly through the artifacts that they left behind, show a certain amount of knowledge, since these cultures must have had such knowledge in order to leave behind these artifacts. Also there is current anthropological evidence, as well as historical evidence of cultures that are based on a purely aural tradition and do not have writing, yet still have sophisticated cultures. So really what you are saying is that the existance of written materials sheds some doubt over the fact that humans existed for a reasonable period of time before such practices were developed, which really is a false claim.
I do not see this as a rationalization of a "faith-based system", but rather as a question concerning where humans came from. We have ages of time in which no progress happened, and then suddenly, and in an alarmingly short period of time according to the evolutionary scale, in which humans have flourished and innovated. This is what seems very strange to me. If I remember my history correctly, homo sapiens first "appeared" around 35,000 BC, and the first civilizations that we acknowledge in history formed around 10,000 BC. My point is that there are 25,000 years (that actually is a very long period of time) in which homo sapiens, people very much like you and me, did nothing by hunting and gathering with no development of language, culture or intellectual pursuits beyond a few rough pictures in caves? Perhaps this was lost in the wars and purgings that I mentioned above, but surely something must have survived. Would we really have wasted so much time with no real discernable progress at all?
I can't discuss the dates with you as I don't know for sure if they are correct or not. However even if these dates are correct, there is no reason whatever to believe that civilisation suddenly sprang into being 10,000 years ago with no development of language, culture or intelectual pursuits beforehand. This is a topic which is way to huge for a thread on slashdot, but, lets take one example here to refute your claim. Look the the native Australians, up until 220 year ago, they had no written traditions, they had no technology more advanced than sticks and stones, they had no permanent dwellings, yet what they did have was a rich cultural heritage, advanced languages and a phenomenal understanding of their environment, to the point where they could manage to easily survive in places considered uninhabitable by the europeans. What is even more amazing is that they had all this knowledge without a formal writen language. Now you could look at their way of life and imagine humans having lived in such a way quite easily 30 or 40 thousand years ago. The fact that such a culture can exist at the same time as the culture of the british who colonised the country shows that there is no relation between time-lines and the civilisation that you refer to. Esentialy, it is pointless to look at the beginings of the history of writing and equate this with an apparent leap in ability of a comunity to develop, hhumans can develope their culture without writing, without stone masonry, and without aggriculture. What writing does do, is improve communication, which allows concepts to be shared more easily, and thus helps technology advance. We can see this in the present day where tchnology is proceeding at amazing speeds, on account of the amazing comunication abilities we posess. To sum this all up, it is false to think that technological advancement is the only way to measure the cultural or intelectual development of individuals or groups of individuals.
I guess that is the main thrust of my question, and it is why I have a problem with the current view of our early history. It makes me wonder if purhaps there could be errors with our dating methods and the assumptions made in generating the time-table that is currently taught in history corriculum.
What I think is more likely than errors in current dating methods, is that there are errors in your logic. While I generaly think it is great to challenge conventional wisdom, I also think that it is better to do this with an informed and rational approach. Not to say that you are totaly un-informed and irrational, but I think that there are some large holes in your arguments that you may not have noticed.
The thing that you don't seem to get is that the ancient babylonians and egyptians were not any different to us, and no one ever claimed they were. We know about these people because they left behind large structures among other things, so obviously they already understood complex mathematics and engineering practices. So its like your saying: "I know of a civilisation a few thousand years old that was capable of complex thought, mathematics, agriculture, engineering, etc, and they were not less evolved than us, and Ithe proof is that they were capable of complex thought, mathematics, agriculture, engineering, etc,". I mean, so what? I know of these people who lived like 200 years ago and they were capable of complex thought, mathematics, agriculture, engineering, etc, so that proves humans have not evolved right?
Theres something you need to understand about the evolutionary model. Its not like this continual ladder that starts with bacteria and climbs up to humans. A sinlge species does not evolve to be a better species, what happens in that species diferentiate and change to adapt better to their environment. Its all about environmental stress. You might even be correct to say that humans were more advanced a few thousand year ago, even if you are (and we really can't proves this one way or the other) that has nothing to do with disproving evolution. It could well be that the environment favours less intelligent humans, and they tend to survive and have more offspring, thus over several thousand years overall intellignece has declined. This is still evolution.
Another factor that you seem to not have grasped is that the ancient cultures you are refering to really are the exact same species of animal that we are today. So there is no reason to think that their intelligence would be any different to ours. If you want to compare humans to an ancient culture, try Australopithecus (not sure about spelling there). There you got a seriously different species. Let's see your claims that these guys were more or just as advanced than us.
You arguments are illogical on many levels, I have just shown 2 here. I don't have any problem with you believing in creation, but don't make the mistake of trying to use science against itself. Admit that your method of determining truths is different to that of science, and don't try to rationalise a faith-based system, it just doesn't work.
I can't speak for Ximian, but I was rather underimpressed with Red Hat 8--and I've never really even tried Linux before. (For the curious, I've got Mandrake 9 on my Linux partition now, although I don't use it very often.)
This kinda sets the tone for your bizare post. You don't like a version of an OS that you have no experience in and little exposure to. . . . . and?
Sure, MS has real competition for the Intel-based PC now--but that's a good thing for them, not a bad thing. Competition means that they've got a challenge, which drives innovation, and good enough competition means that they're not a monopoly, which means that they can do more things than before.
You seem to not have even the basic understanding of microsoft. Are you aware that they were found to be a monopoly in a fairly recent court case? A monopoly does not do well against competition, it functions by squezing out any and all competition, and has absolutely nothing to do with inovation. MS does not inovate anything except their monolopolistic marketing practices. They take existing concepts and products and provide polished (sometimes broken) implementations that fit in with their other products and strengthen their monopoly.
Really? Gee, and here I was thinking that the "easy to use" aspect of Windows, and thus less of a need to hire on Linux experts, put them about even... or that a company with $40 billion in cash can figure out a way to justify their own existance.
Microsoft products are not inherently easy to use. This ease of use factor is a myth, stemming from the fact that the microsoft way is ubiquitous , on account of their monopoly position. MS interfaces are often substandard, illogical and even sometimes just plain broken. I have recently introduced linux webservers into my company and the feedback I am getting from IT people with pure MS backgrounds is that (for example) apache is way easier to set up than IIS, on account of there is one config file where everything is explained in detail, rather than a confusing series of options in a weird tree format with not much explanation as to what everything does.
Of course they do. The best strategies are simple and flexible, while having enough for the decision makers to "all be on the same page."
Now, their entire "business plan" probably is a bit more than two pages, but the "summary document" could very well fit on about two pages.
come on, seriously, this is supposedly a paper detailing the results of some market research on linux use by MS customers. Now I would buy that this was an executive sumary passed around to give a heads up on things. But there is no way that this is a serious analysis on the results. What experience do you have with market research to be able to make these claims?
Too much love can be stifling. Too much happinines can make you ungaurded and easy to hurt. too much clean air can lead to hyperventilation. too much good food can lead to obesity. too much good music can lead to deafness.
moral to the story: any positive can become a negative if you try hard enough.
These *open source only laws* apply only to the government. In these cases, governments are making the decision to use open source within the government. This is a choice being made by an organisation. Its only a law, because that is how governments actualy enforce decisions. There is no difference between a government passing a law that all government agencies should use open source software and a company issuing a statement that all company machines will be using open source software.
What this group is trying to do is to loby governements to reject their own rights to choose to enforce the use of open source software throughout their own organisation. Is this freedom of coice? I think not.
One of the primary concerns after a website has been hacked is that the script kiddies got away with valuable information, this technology does not prevent that in the slightest.
Actually, I can see how it would get around this. Say your web server was completely cut off from your internal network, except for this one hard drive. You write data to the webserver that is ok to go out to the public, and anyone who cracks the server can only see what is on that drive and has no possible way of getting into the rest of your network. Now, of course they could easily get data from your web server, but they whole point is that whatever you put there is available to the public. Any private data is nice and safe in your internal network.
There are other problems though, like what about your server log files. where do they go? If you wanted to keep logs, you would need another writable drive, and then crackers could modify your log files. Its kind of a silly idea I think
It makes no sense becasue you are attempting to view slashdot as an entity in and of iteself, rather than a large collection of individuals. If you read through the parent poster's previous posts (not a bad tounge twister, that) as well as those of his moderators, I doubt you will find these individuals bashing apples choice of bright colours. If you think of slashdot as a large collections of free-thinking individuals, you will be relieved of the apparent distress that you seem to be suffering from reading different points of view in one place.
What you might find about slashdot is that it is a community mad up of LOTS of people. many of which have varying opinions.
Allot of people who read this site LIKE star wars ALLOT. Allot of people who read this site have deep feelings about free software. But that doesn't mean that the site has to favour one group over the other. Like any large group of people, you will notice trends throughout the slashdot community, but it is also divided on many aspect. It seems pointless to criticise slashdot for it's apparent promotion of an idustry. The editors are just reporting thing that other people have told them about and that they think might be interesting. There is no slashdot conspiracy out there. Its just a bunch of people interested in a bunch of things with some common ground between them.
If you have issues with an industry, then good for you, but why criticise slashdot? The site itself does not proclaim any such issues, its just a place to go to read things you might be interested and share your opinions with others.
wars fifty years from now
on
GUIs for Robots
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers
What I think is more likely is that fifty years from now we will see the US decimate more 3rd world countries using robots controlled by teenager, who only think they are playing a game and thus will never reveal what they have done to the media, and in fact no one will ever find out since the press were never informed, and those who try to find out will be detained indefintately without trial for allegedly breaking the latest anti-terrorist laws which prohibit attempting to criticise national defence actions in any circumstances.
Well come to the wonderful future Mr. Bush is building for the world.
Slashdot Mirror
C'mon...Smurfette--a lone girl smurf amongst a community of 99 boy smurfs? "They're only a couple apples tall but it's still one big blue bang"
Haven't you seen donnie darko, this issue is covered in full. The smurfs have no sexual organs, and thus are not effected by lust towards smurfette. They are trully innocent.
Man, you really need a girlfriend.
The raelians are pretty benign. They have huge respect for the individual and individual choice, thus brainwashing and control is strictly out of the question. Most of their gatherings are a place for reasonably attractive people of varying sexual orientation to meet and get their rocks off. They don't practice brainwashing, they do not advise segregated communal living, and the individual's right to say no must be honoured. For all purposes it seems like Rael started this thing in order to have access to large amounts of free sex.
The only serious problem I have with them is that there seem to be large majority of male members which pretty much voids any reason I might have to join up.
The scariest thing about them is their efforts into human cloning. By having a cult with a defined morality so different to the mainstream (i.e. there is no soul, a single human clone is expendable, imortality is acheived through continuous cloning) they can condone research on live humans without consideration of the rights of an individual clone. This really bothers me, and is the darker side of their organisation.
As far as your example of humans being able to suppress their urges to eat (and I assume reproduce) is wrong. Kangaroos are much better at both than humans. Just compare the current death rate of roos in the drought areas of Australia to human death rate in Ethiopia. Roos (and many marsupials) adjust their gestation period around food supply vs local demand for that food which is something humans havn't done yet.
This example is not really relevant to the point you are responding to. Kangaroos do not adjust their gestation period conciously. You don't see a girl kangaroo talking to a boy kangaroo saying "I really want to, but there's no food around, and what if I get pregnant? we really couldn't support a little joey with the drought and all . . ". The post you are responding to makes the point that humans are capable of making exactly such rational decisions, rather than changing their behaviour based purley on genetic traits developed through evolution in harshly arid areas.
I intend to not see it at the movies, but instead download an illegaly riped, high quality divX from soulseek. This way I am entertained, and I also am screwing the bastards who like to screw the people. Its a win-win situation.
note: The above post is a fictional story and should not be interperated as describing past, present or future activities of the poster, or as instrustions or encouragement for any other individuals to engage in any illegal activities
Sometimes I find on Slashdot the most interesting views into the more contradictory elements of human nature. Here we have a request for LOTR to be its own topic, so that the poster can ignore it. This is strangely posted in a thread specificaly about LOTR. Perhaps the poster has some form of crazed addiction to LOTR and they wish to be able to ignore the topic so that they can finaly go cold turkey and get it out of their system. This is probably the least insulting explantion to the poster's intelligence.
Simetra, can you shed some light on why you are reading a thread that you actualy would rather ignore? I am very curious about this.
A criminal's prey is generaly defensless, even if they have a gun. If a criminal knows how to use a gun and a victim doesn't, the victim is much more likely to be injured by their own gun than the criminal is. People are generaly better off without a gun, sure they can't wave their gun around to scare someone off, but neither can they accidently shoot themselves, or their kid, or have their gun taken off them and get shot by it.
Make no mistake about it, if someone has real criminal intent, a gun law will do nothing to prevent them from carrying out their actions. You can get any gun you want (legal or illegal) into this country, or any other, if you have a strong enough desire to. No law will prevent that. If you don't believe me, then why does Britain have problems with gun violence?
I do not believe this. Gun restrictions really do restrict guns. I live in australia and, while it is certainly possible to get a gun if you really want one, its not that easy, especialy for normal people (i.e. with no organised crime connections). You don't hear about shooting on the news here like you do in the US, and there are statistics that back this up (for example check this out).
You claim that britan has gun problems, do you have links to any kind of evidence that Britan's gun related crimes are anywhere near those of the US? I wouldbe surprised to see this.
I don't have evidnece for this on hand, but I remember reading that a decent percentage of gun relatied incidents in the US involved a gun owner as victim, suggesting that gun owners had attempted to use their guns for self defence, but had instead been overpowered and shot by the criminals. Something like this is obviously going to be affected by gun restrictions, if normal people aren't carrying the guns in the first place, then there is no gun involved.
or even 'shooting their load'...
This is all very interesting, I have heard similar arguments before, but not in as much detail. Thanks for sharing this with me. One thing that I am still curious about however is why your belief in the bible neccesitates taking the words literaly rather than seeing parts of the bible as metaphore. As a creationist you must believe that Genesis is an exact account of history, which I am curious about. After all these texts were written several thousand years ago, they were collected from an existing, previously oral, tradition and were inscribed as dogma for the hebrew people. What reason do you have for believing them to be factual and literal historical records?
The difference between using the bible as a frame of reference to using science to attempt to discover answers, is that science has observable evidence at it's core. It exists only to find the best answers to observable phenomena. Individual scientists may discount the bible, but science itself does not. The scientific approach to the bible as a source of evidence is that using the bible relies on a faith in the existance of an entity which, but definition, is not observable, and therefore outside of the realm of science.
Science does not seek to disporve the bible, it merely seeks to explain observed pheneomena. If there are conflicting theories, then science will not side with the bible for the reasons I mentioned above.
Your points are interesting insofar as they may help someone confirm or deny the existance of a specific god, and this is defniately very important to some people, but it really has very very little to do with science. The scientific method is exact and specific and your points really lie outisde of it. While interesting to sum, they should never be confused with science.
I am bit excited at this point, becasue it seems that I have the attention of a serious creationist. And there is something I have always wanted to ask a creationist, which is, why and how are you able to place such trust in the bible? How do you know it is divine inspired, and what grounds do you have for placing your trust in this book, and thus shaping your entire point of view and way of life around it? This is not a piss-take, I realy realy want to know the answer to this.
Here is a list of fossil evidence for australopithecines, and here is some pics of Australopithecus skulls. Make of it what you will.
I apologize if this is what was implied, for it is certainly not what I believe -- quite the contrary. I believe there has only ever been one race of man. The concept of de-evolution as it were is merely an interesting thought to me rather than a conviction. If we are getting dumber, it could easily be a problem of culture or society as opposed to changes in the species.
OK, well this really was not clear in your other posts. You seem to have lumped human history with evolution
My point is basically that I cannot really see any evidence of some of the language structure, mathematics, etc. in pre-historic man, and then suddenly, we have complex writing structures (for example, the library of Ebla in cuneiform (sp?)) and mathematics. Historians are frequently being surprised at the level of technology and understanding that existed in many of the ancient cultures, most of whose knowledge was lost in invasions and intellectual purges that we humans seem to be so fond of.
It is not surprising that cultures that we know of mainly through the artifacts that they left behind, show a certain amount of knowledge, since these cultures must have had such knowledge in order to leave behind these artifacts. Also there is current anthropological evidence, as well as historical evidence of cultures that are based on a purely aural tradition and do not have writing, yet still have sophisticated cultures. So really what you are saying is that the existance of written materials sheds some doubt over the fact that humans existed for a reasonable period of time before such practices were developed, which really is a false claim.
I do not see this as a rationalization of a "faith-based system", but rather as a question concerning where humans came from. We have ages of time in which no progress happened, and then suddenly, and in an alarmingly short period of time according to the evolutionary scale, in which humans have flourished and innovated. This is what seems very strange to me. If I remember my history correctly, homo sapiens first "appeared" around 35,000 BC, and the first civilizations that we acknowledge in history formed around 10,000 BC. My point is that there are 25,000 years (that actually is a very long period of time) in which homo sapiens, people very much like you and me, did nothing by hunting and gathering with no development of language, culture or intellectual pursuits beyond a few rough pictures in caves? Perhaps this was lost in the wars and purgings that I mentioned above, but surely something must have survived. Would we really have wasted so much time with no real discernable progress at all?
I can't discuss the dates with you as I don't know for sure if they are correct or not. However even if these dates are correct, there is no reason whatever to believe that civilisation suddenly sprang into being 10,000 years ago with no development of language, culture or intelectual pursuits beforehand. This is a topic which is way to huge for a thread on slashdot, but, lets take one example here to refute your claim. Look the the native Australians, up until 220 year ago, they had no written traditions, they had no technology more advanced than sticks and stones, they had no permanent dwellings, yet what they did have was a rich cultural heritage, advanced languages and a phenomenal understanding of their environment, to the point where they could manage to easily survive in places considered uninhabitable by the europeans. What is even more amazing is that they had all this knowledge without a formal writen language. Now you could look at their way of life and imagine humans having lived in such a way quite easily 30 or 40 thousand years ago. The fact that such a culture can exist at the same time as the culture of the british who colonised the country shows that there is no relation between time-lines and the civilisation that you refer to. Esentialy, it is pointless to look at the beginings of the history of writing and equate this with an apparent leap in ability of a comunity to develop, hhumans can develope their culture without writing, without stone masonry, and without aggriculture. What writing does do, is improve communication, which allows concepts to be shared more easily, and thus helps technology advance. We can see this in the present day where tchnology is proceeding at amazing speeds, on account of the amazing comunication abilities we posess. To sum this all up, it is false to think that technological advancement is the only way to measure the cultural or intelectual development of individuals or groups of individuals.
I guess that is the main thrust of my question, and it is why I have a problem with the current view of our early history. It makes me wonder if purhaps there could be errors with our dating methods and the assumptions made in generating the time-table that is currently taught in history corriculum.
What I think is more likely than errors in current dating methods, is that there are errors in your logic. While I generaly think it is great to challenge conventional wisdom, I also think that it is better to do this with an informed and rational approach. Not to say that you are totaly un-informed and irrational, but I think that there are some large holes in your arguments that you may not have noticed.
The thing that you don't seem to get is that the ancient babylonians and egyptians were not any different to us, and no one ever claimed they were. We know about these people because they left behind large structures among other things, so obviously they already understood complex mathematics and engineering practices. So its like your saying: "I know of a civilisation a few thousand years old that was capable of complex thought, mathematics, agriculture, engineering, etc, and they were not less evolved than us, and Ithe proof is that they were capable of complex thought, mathematics, agriculture, engineering, etc,". I mean, so what? I know of these people who lived like 200 years ago and they were capable of complex thought, mathematics, agriculture, engineering, etc, so that proves humans have not evolved right?
Theres something you need to understand about the evolutionary model. Its not like this continual ladder that starts with bacteria and climbs up to humans. A sinlge species does not evolve to be a better species, what happens in that species diferentiate and change to adapt better to their environment. Its all about environmental stress. You might even be correct to say that humans were more advanced a few thousand year ago, even if you are (and we really can't proves this one way or the other) that has nothing to do with disproving evolution. It could well be that the environment favours less intelligent humans, and they tend to survive and have more offspring, thus over several thousand years overall intellignece has declined. This is still evolution.
Another factor that you seem to not have grasped is that the ancient cultures you are refering to really are the exact same species of animal that we are today. So there is no reason to think that their intelligence would be any different to ours. If you want to compare humans to an ancient culture, try Australopithecus (not sure about spelling there). There you got a seriously different species. Let's see your claims that these guys were more or just as advanced than us.
You arguments are illogical on many levels, I have just shown 2 here. I don't have any problem with you believing in creation, but don't make the mistake of trying to use science against itself. Admit that your method of determining truths is different to that of science, and don't try to rationalise a faith-based system, it just doesn't work.
I can't speak for Ximian, but I was rather underimpressed with Red Hat 8--and I've never really even tried Linux before. (For the curious, I've got Mandrake 9 on my Linux partition now, although I don't use it very often.)
This kinda sets the tone for your bizare post. You don't like a version of an OS that you have no experience in and little exposure to. . . . . and?
Sure, MS has real competition for the Intel-based PC now--but that's a good thing for them, not a bad thing. Competition means that they've got a challenge, which drives innovation, and good enough competition means that they're not a monopoly, which means that they can do more things than before.
You seem to not have even the basic understanding of microsoft. Are you aware that they were found to be a monopoly in a fairly recent court case? A monopoly does not do well against competition, it functions by squezing out any and all competition, and has absolutely nothing to do with inovation. MS does not inovate anything except their monolopolistic marketing practices. They take existing concepts and products and provide polished (sometimes broken) implementations that fit in with their other products and strengthen their monopoly.
Really? Gee, and here I was thinking that the "easy to use" aspect of Windows, and thus less of a need to hire on Linux experts, put them about even...
or that a company with $40 billion in cash can figure out a way to justify their own existance.
Microsoft products are not inherently easy to use. This ease of use factor is a myth, stemming from the fact that the microsoft way is ubiquitous , on account of their monopoly position. MS interfaces are often substandard, illogical and even sometimes just plain broken. I have recently introduced linux webservers into my company and the feedback I am getting from IT people with pure MS backgrounds is that (for example) apache is way easier to set up than IIS, on account of there is one config file where everything is explained in detail, rather than a confusing series of options in a weird tree format with not much explanation as to what everything does.
Of course they do. The best strategies are simple and flexible, while having enough for the decision makers to "all be on the same page."
Now, their entire "business plan" probably is a bit more than two pages, but the "summary document" could very well fit on about two pages.
come on, seriously, this is supposedly a paper detailing the results of some market research on linux use by MS customers. Now I would buy that this was an executive sumary passed around to give a heads up on things. But there is no way that this is a serious analysis on the results. What experience do you have with market research to be able to make these claims?
ok well, wy don't you try breathing as much clean air as fast as you can for 10 minutes straight, and we'll see how soon you pass out.
Too much love can be stifling. Too much happinines can make you ungaurded and easy to hurt. too much clean air can lead to hyperventilation. too much good food can lead to obesity. too much good music can lead to deafness.
moral to the story: any positive can become a negative if you try hard enough.
napster was always stupid. AudioGalaxy was awesome. SoulSeek is the best replacement. it kicks napsters arse.
These *open source only laws* apply only to the government. In these cases, governments are making the decision to use open source within the government. This is a choice being made by an organisation. Its only a law, because that is how governments actualy enforce decisions. There is no difference between a government passing a law that all government agencies should use open source software and a company issuing a statement that all company machines will be using open source software.
What this group is trying to do is to loby governements to reject their own rights to choose to enforce the use of open source software throughout their own organisation. Is this freedom of coice? I think not.
Actually, I can see how it would get around this. Say your web server was completely cut off from your internal network, except for this one hard drive. You write data to the webserver that is ok to go out to the public, and anyone who cracks the server can only see what is on that drive and has no possible way of getting into the rest of your network. Now, of course they could easily get data from your web server, but they whole point is that whatever you put there is available to the public. Any private data is nice and safe in your internal network.
There are other problems though, like what about your server log files. where do they go? If you wanted to keep logs, you would need another writable drive, and then crackers could modify your log files. Its kind of a silly idea I think
It makes no sense becasue you are attempting to view slashdot as an entity in and of iteself, rather than a large collection of individuals. If you read through the parent poster's previous posts (not a bad tounge twister, that) as well as those of his moderators, I doubt you will find these individuals bashing apples choice of bright colours. If you think of slashdot as a large collections of free-thinking individuals, you will be relieved of the apparent distress that you seem to be suffering from reading different points of view in one place.
no
it was very much a deliberate work
What you might find about slashdot is that it is a community mad up of LOTS of people. many of which have varying opinions.
Allot of people who read this site LIKE star wars ALLOT. Allot of people who read this site have deep feelings about free software. But that doesn't mean that the site has to favour one group over the other. Like any large group of people, you will notice trends throughout the slashdot community, but it is also divided on many aspect. It seems pointless to criticise slashdot for it's apparent promotion of an idustry. The editors are just reporting thing that other people have told them about and that they think might be interesting. There is no slashdot conspiracy out there. Its just a bunch of people interested in a bunch of things with some common ground between them.
If you have issues with an industry, then good for you, but why criticise slashdot? The site itself does not proclaim any such issues, its just a place to go to read things you might be interested and share your opinions with others.
What I think is more likely is that fifty years from now we will see the US decimate more 3rd world countries using robots controlled by teenager, who only think they are playing a game and thus will never reveal what they have done to the media, and in fact no one will ever find out since the press were never informed, and those who try to find out will be detained indefintately without trial for allegedly breaking the latest anti-terrorist laws which prohibit attempting to criticise national defence actions in any circumstances.
Well come to the wonderful future Mr. Bush is building for the world.
Read the first paragraph:
Moby says 18 is suffering from "Pearl Jam Effect."He is refering to himself and his own slow record sales.