Y'know, I bet its those Christians again. If the "self-proclaimed guardians of morality" would just stop harrassing the poor little geeks, then we wouldn't need these computer profiling tools.
We could have our freedom! Freedom to be different, to indulge our base instincts without any niggling voices telling us that we are humans, not animals! We could live, free from the cruel repressions of those who want us to love each other.
We could have world peace, or at least whirlled peas. We could stand up, hand in pasty hand, and share our victimization.
</sarcasm>
Jon: we are all victims sometimes. Do you know when we become victimized? When we define ourselves in terms of how we've been oppressed. It's time to get over it. Yeah, school sucks. So you do better for your kids than your parents did for you. IMNSHO, Homeschool. But you don't spend your whole life dwelling on a sucky circumstance that you can't do anything about.
Given your lack of identifiable geekiness, all I can figure is that you are trying for demagoguery with these "hellmouth" articles. The first one was good. The second half as good. The progression is geometric, or worse.
The real news is that java has almost doubled its use in the past 6 months! From 5 percent to 9 percent! I can't believe that they are spinning this as "Java is still in trouble" when it's growin at 400%/year!
Remember the persian chessboard problem*? Rate of growth is at least as important as amount.
* For the proverb impaired, a king promised a young man a reward of his choosing. The young man asked that the king take a chess board, put one grain of wheat on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so forth. The thing is that this ends up being:
2^64 + 2^63 + 2^62... + 2 = a whole lot of grain.
As anyone with an alpha can tell you, 2^64 is a huge number. I heard somewhere that this number was quite a bit more than the annual grain yield for the whole world for any given century.
I guess I don't get it. It seems like they are creating something similar to "DDE" in the Windows environment to support their application embedding operations.
However, as I understand it, the overhead of a local execution in a good ORB (say ORBit or OmniORB) is equivalent to that of a shared library call. Why not use a good ORB and have the added benefit of network communications?
Can someone who is brighter than I explain this? For the record, I actually use KDE and am not a GNOMEr in any real sense of the word.
Okay... I spoke casually. As usual,/.'ers will jump on any slight mistake. There is a special call for Christians to love each other, that is documented in a number of places in scripture. In large part, this is advocated
However, we are still called to love non-Christians. The thing is that charity starts in your own back yard: if I can't love my fellow Christians, then how can I love people who are not Christians? And what is the chance that someone who has rejected God's love will accept love from me as one of God's followers? As any teenager with a crush nows, love has to be accepted to have any vitality.
I am Christian, and I find the 10 Commandments in school and school sponsored prayer inappropriate. Which just proves that Christians are not nearly so homogenous a group as you would claim.
FTR, the inquisition is a straw man: the popular myth is way ahead of what actually happened. The Salem Witch trials were not nearly so bad as the European witch trials that went on for centuries: blame them instead. The murders of abortion doctors are irrelevant: we're talking 2 murders? C'mon, you can do better than that. Let's try:
Christian cooperation with the Nazi's. Yeap. It happened, all over the place. But there was a man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who spoke up. He is probably one of the top ten Christian writers of this century.
The crusades. Read up.
The aforementioned witch trials in europe for centuries.
The persecution of the Albigensian (spelling? Name? It's been a while) heresy in the 14th century.
At the end of all that (and worse) I'm still a Christian. Why? Because Christianity does not require that I check my brain at the door. It doesn't require that I follow some structural church to the edge of insanity. It doesn't require that I kill, maim, or anything else.
What does it require? That I love my fellow Christians and God. That I forgive people who sin against me. That I give freely to people in need (but it does not require that I become impoverished).
Maybe I'm not a Christian? Maybe, maybe I'm just a poor sinner following God through Christ and the leading of the Holy spirit to my salvation every day. A "christ-follower".
I am Christian, and I find the 10 Commandments in school and school sponsored prayer inappropriate. Which just proves that Christians are not nearly so homogenous a group as you would claim. FTR, the inquisition is a straw man: the popular myth is way ahead of what actually happened. The Salem Witch trials were not nearly so bad as the European witch trials that went on for centuries: blame them instead. The murders of abortion doctors are irrelevant: we're talking 2 murders? C'mon, you can do better than that. Let's try: Christian cooperation with the Nazi's. Yeap. It happened, all over the place. But there was a man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who spoke up. He is probably one of the top ten Christian writers of this century. The crusades. Read up. The aforementioned witch trials in europe for centuries. The persecution of the Albigensian (spelling? Name? It's been a while) heresy in the 14th century. At the end of all that (and worse) I'm still a Christian. Why? Because Christianity does not require that I check my brain at the door. It doesn't require that I follow some structural church to the edge of insanity. It doesn't require that I kill, maim, or anything else. What does it require? That I love my fellow Christians and God. That I forgive people who sin against me. That I give freely to people in need (but it does not require that I become impoverished). Maybe I'm not a Christian? Maybe, maybe I'm just a poor sinner following God through Christ and the leading of the Holy spirit to my salvation every day. A "christ-follower". Have a groovy day.
I have now been married for four years. This is my first and, barring the tragedy of an untimely death, will be my only marriage. This statement has to do with some rather strong religious beliefs I have: even if my wife divorced me, I would not remarry. And she feels the same way.
So, we have to make our marriage work. And work it does. Why does it work?
Because both my wife and myself are willing to put aside our egos in pursuit of happiness. Your post reeks of the self-aggrandizement that our society has used to replace humility. A real marriage that is going to have any future has to include mutual sacrifice. And yes, there have been occasions where that has included my wife acting as my servant.
But there's a flip side to that. I have an obligation to care for my wife, no matter what. That obligation includes dieing for her if the issue came up. It includes working hard a long way from home four days a week so that she doesn't have to work and one of us can stay home with our son. Why her? Because I have job skills that let me make more money, plus I really suck at breast-feeding. (On an aside: my son is now coming up on two and has only been sick -- including colds and ear infections -- when he was teething. Compare that to a formula-fed baby sometime).
I have done some, limited, marital counseling. And I can tell you that the only way that a marriage will work in the long term is if both partners give up their ego's and petty desires and pursue the much more lasting joy that can be found in marriage and family. Most problems in marriage come when one partner decides that "just this once" they will place their immediate wants ahead of the needs of their marriage and family. They gave up that right when they said "Love, honor, and cherish till death do us part". Anything less than total love and total sacrifice as though your spouse is yourself is not marriage, but masturbation.
This will be contentious, but I have to say that I am so sick of our culture acting as though everyone has some kind of right to pursue their immediate wants. Often, you have to give up your immediate wants to get what you need -- and you will find greater joy in getting what you really need than the shallow "self-esteem" that our culture glorifies. It's called being an adult.
Maybe its just that Moore's law has made what I do possible on desktop machines. Ten years ago it would have taken desktop machines days if not weeks to do what I can do in a single day.
But, ten years ago, would you have felt the need to do it?
The problem is that while computers make things easy to do, once things become easier to do they also become required. The things that are added tend to be nonessentials -- for example, consider all these fancy, pretty internal documents done in word and friends. 10 years ago, they would have mostly been done on a typewriter without the benefit of fancy formatting and that would have been fine.
Even worse, docments are created that would not have been before because it's now easy. Which just proves that most work is busy work.
I would say that they only rational purpose of trademark law is to protect consumers against counterfeit products. So, I am prohibited from selling a "Sun Enterprise 4500" server that is in fact a dual celeron. I can't step on Sun's brand name or their product names.
The problem is that trademark law tries to operate without reference to intent. That is, under legal theories commonly espoused, I would be prohibited from using the phrase "Sun Enterprise 4500" to describe a service that cleaned your windows in an Enterprise Office Building so that it would be bright and sunny 4500 minutes a year. Those legal theories are bogus.
To me, trademark should be reduced to a registry of brand and product names, and the only way I should be able to sue someone whould be under fraud laws. I.e. if they were trying to fraudulently pass off their product as my product.
The biggest problem here is one that's endemic to the legal system: having a lawyer write a nasty letter or even file a lawsuit is cheap. Defending against a spurious lawsuit is not cheap -- and you can't do defense on a contingency basis. In many cases, lawsuits are settled for the defendants anticipated legal fees! This is ridiculous. In my opinion, any civil claim which is ultimately rejected should result in the plaintiff and the plaintiff's lawyers being responsible for all the defendants legal bills. This would level the playing field, and make it possible for defense to operate on a contingency basis as well.
I find it really distressing that KDE is moving away from CORBA. For one thing, the possibilities of distributed objects are endless. And Microsoft already has such a thing in their DCOM model (which sucks, I know. But still, its there).
Why couldn't they just swallow their pride and use a faster ORB? Say ORBit? I know that there are no C++ bindings, but that's better than falling back to a shared library implementation! The fact is that MICO (which they were going to use) has been pronounced too slow to be usable by everyone who's tried.
And forget interoperability with this thing -- there's no technological basis to make GNOME and KDE interoperable now.
The benefits of Dvorak keyboards are in a position similar to that of Linux's reliability: the best evidence is anecdotal.
Let me add to the pile of anecdotal evidence. A year ago, I came down with carpal tunnel syndrom. Not wanting to become unemployed, I took a number of drastic actions, including learning to type dvorak and getting Dvorak keyboards for all my computer (I'm sorry, but keycaps suck, especially since Windoze NT doesn't activate your keymap until you are logged in).
My Carpal got better.
Two months ago, I took the leap, became radically overpayed and inredibly worthless, and started consulting. My main client does not really allow for me to use an alternate keyboard without a lot of stress.
My carpal is back.
I know, I know, that's not conclusive. But I will tell you that typing Dvorak/feels/ more natural and more comfortable. It is certainly better than the "Natural Keyboard". Also, I was able to learn dvorak to get up to my normal (90 wpm) speed in about 4 weeks.
Give it a try -- if you don't like, all ou've lost is an xmodmap command! If you do like it, you've saved your wrists.
I hope that as the Age of Enlightenment continues, people will begin to realize that their personal beliefs (or lack thereof) are exactly that.. personal.
You know... Has it ever occurred to you that Christianity might be/true/? Not what certain televangelists spout on 4:30AM TV shows, but the basic facts? That there is a God, and that he loved you so much that he died on a cross to save you from the punishment you deserved?
Stipulate it for argument. Are you then suggesting that I should not tell you, as often as I can, that it is true? That I should not save you from eternal misery and seperation from God?
Even if you think I'm an irrational fool, I'm at least well-intentioned. How many in this "age of enlightenment" can claim (honestly) that their intentions are anything better than stuffing their pockets and building up their egos? Before you say that proclaiming christ is my way of building up my ego: have you considered how much crap I take for it? How much hate mail I get? How, every time I post on this topic, script kiddies try to take out my server at home?
The only explanation is that I've learned to love my fellow man enough that I want him (you) to be happy.
And that I don't get any thanks for it? Do you realize that, literally, noone outside of slashdot (i.e. no one who knows me or that can do anything for me) knows that I spend this much time trying to inject some truth into this forum?
*sigh* I guess I'll go clamp down on the old inetd.
Finally, there's that old refrain that "pornography treats people as objects," whatever that means. First, define pornography. Then explain to me how an image of a man and woman (or man, or two women, or whatever!) engaged in sex suddenly reduces the participants to simple objects in a way that is any different from any other form of entertainment or instruction.
Pornography is imagery and other materials designed for the soul purpose of sexual titillation. Spare me your lawyers jargon. You know very well the difference between porn and legitimate art. Also, I'm interested in constructing a list (more a list of ratings, not a list of banned sites) of sites from the perspective of western culture: if the muslims want one that bans faces (which is a very foolish example btw) they can build one.
I may as well dive off the deep end and speak truth (and don't waste time trying to tell me this is just my opinion). God intended sex to be a way in which two people, a man and a woman, could experience a profound and joyous union. I know that sounds pious, but its true. As it so happens, this kind of union was intended to be permanent -- hence, Christians don't approve of divorce. From a biblical perspective, there is no such thing as pre-marital sex since sex/is/ marriage.
The problem is that porn is for the purpose of titillation: this image that you are defending takes what is intended to be a joyous union of bodies and (yes) souls, and turns it into an excuse to masturbate. The people pictured are not even known as people, they are nothing but objects -- so many pounds of protoplasm in a pleasing shape.
Let me guess: you don't have kids, do you? If you had kids, you would know how literally impossible it is to censor everything they do. The problem is that everything that happens creates an impression on them -- and the impressions last forever. The other problem is that they lack judgement. And, I do have to sleep sometime. If you had kids, you would know that too. Somehow, I suspect that you either don't have kids or just plain don't care about your kids.
Finally, stop your whining. You don't have to help -- you can just wait until the government takes over. It will happen, because for all the nonsense that goes around more people agree with me about this stuff than agree with you. The problem is that most of them don't agree with me about freedom of speech.
"Educate, don't legislate" you say? You seem to suffer from the modern theory of education, which is "throw the kids in the vat with everything you wouldn't want to happen to you. The ones that make it out, we keep". Has it occurred to you that the rise of your ideology (screw freedom: just give me liberty and give it to me now) is exactly what makes our country so screwed up today?
Last person who spent as much time villifying a religious groups as much as some people around here do was Hitler. One of these days I'm going to put together a piece where I take all of Hitler's speeches, substitute Christian for Jew, and see how many fools around here I get agreeing with it.
I'm not trying to take away anyone's freedom of speech. I'm asking that they/use some restraint/ in exercising it. Oh yeah -- are you seriously asserting that seeing people piss in each other is going to reduce teen pregnancy? I guess it might turn the Kids off of sex altogether...
I think just about everyone who reads slashdot would radically dislike a rating system enforced by the government. Unfortunately, there is a very real and substantial problem with the Internet for many people right now: namely, there is no way for me to protect my children from the most disgustingly vile content imaginable short of cutting off the Internet entirely.
I can't keep them from accessing it, even by sitting over the shoulder the whole time, because pornographic sites deliberately misrepresent themselves as appropriate sites. And many (most?) of these sites deliberately include images on their front pages which are inappropriate for children (and me for that matter). Do you really want your seven year old daughter seeing pictures of a man peeing on a woman, even for a second as you make a dive for the monitor power switch? If you think this isn't a problem, you are either a fool or have never been a parent. For examples, take a look www.whitehouse.com sometime.
And the fact is that you can't watch your kids all the time. You have to sleep sometime. Don't even get me started on page jacking -- your kids don't even have to be doing something wrong to get sent to some of the worst smut on the Internet.
To make matters worse, anyone without Internet access is rapidly being marginalized by our society. So, my choice is to (a) have my children be marginalized or (b) have them grow up thinking that normal sexuality is whips, chains, and defecating on each other. Or milder, but just as bad, have them grow up thinking that pornography is harmless and a normal expression of sexuality (its not -- pornography treats people as objects. I though that was something geeks were against?).
As I see it, ratings systems are a good thing because if they aren't setup, the government will find a way to outlaw porn all together. At least outside the united states. In the US, they will come up with some way to worm around the 1st ammendment and water it down just as they have the second.
What is desperately needed (now) is an organization and appropriate technologies to construct a publically, freely available list of offensive sites. You want to resist censorship? Help construct this list. Believe me, it is far better to exercise responsibility voluntarily than with the government making you.
As the author says, "I don't think there is any reason (apart from this text, perhaps) to assume Jesux is a hoax. Perhaps
you've all not been around the Christian community as much as I. This could very well be real.
I'm serious guys -- a lot of people check their brains at the door as soon as the topic of God comes up. It was not (to me, as a serious Bible student training for ministry and someone who spends way too much time at his church) self-evident that this was a hoax. I know many people who believe this -- and stranger still.
Which brings up another question. A lot of the beliefs expressed behind this hoaxical distro were wrong. That's right. Wrong. For example, there is no cause to not use sendmail just because Eric Allman happens to be gay Biblically speaking. Which just goes to show that you can't believe everything that calls itself Christianity.
As with many areas in life, there is no substitute for careful, independent research and careful, independent thought. You can't just pick what you heard some televangelist say on Sunday morning, mix it in with something you vaguely remember from Sunday School when you were five, and label it as Christianity -- you've gotta do the research and decide for yourself.
One of my favorite quotes is from Victorian Christian apologist George MacDonald:
The kind of God that many atheists believe in is not worth believing in. Their notion of God is so confused that it is hardly worthy of consideration.
Solaris is already free, at least for personal use. You can download it from Sun. Sun did this to stem the tide of Linux -- and it failed miserably.
Also, on the same hardware Solaris is noticeably slower than Linux. In fact, I recently compared performance of my Ultra 5 (at work) and my K6/2-300 (at home). I did it in a simple minded way: I compiled GCC on both. My K6-2 started later and finished sooner -- I didn't actually measure the times, but it was around twice as fast.
It costs less than $500, the Ultra 5 costs around $3000. Bottom line is that in the low-end server/desktop market, Sun hardware just doesn't make any sense. Given that Solaris/x86 is not too hot (in my experience it is nowhere near as robust as Solaris/SPARX or Linux) why would we give up Linux?
Also, a lot of the advantage of Linux is that, instead of having to go out and get all the GNU tools to make a system useful after you load Solaris, it comes with them. Things like bash, GNU find, GNU grep are dramatically better than the equivalent bundled commands.
A lot of people here are saying a lot of stuff about the CIA -- implying that they are trying to take over Silicon Valley or somesuch.
It just ain't so.
Look... The CIA is basically just a bureacracy nowadays. Seriously. They are divided into two groups: operations and analysis. The operations group has grown smaller and smaller over the years, and the analysis group has concentrated more and more on relatively benign sources of information such as satellite imagery.
So they chose to waste $28Million trying to lam their way into the secret plans of Silicon Valley startups. Do you really think that they will pick the right startups, or that the startups will be inclined to give them the time of day?
Don't worry about it -- we waste more than $28 Mil every day. Just let them play their games.
If we continue to have public schools, we will have a huge portion of the people who suppose that the "theory" of evolution is a proven fact (it's not, and Darwinian evolution is hardly thought of outside the United States anymore)
All statistics that I've seen indicate that home schooling, at least in the early grades, results in better educated, better rounded children on average. While I must admit that some home-schoolers are right-wing subliterates, most of the ones I know (and I know a/lot/ -- on the order of 50 families) do an excellent job of teaching their children basic skills.
The biggest danger sign is when they stop doing the Iowa tests. If the child can't pass the Iowa tests, then there's a problem. My Pastor's 9 year old took the one of the standardized tests a couple of weeks ago and scored 12th grade 9th month. Oh yeah -- despite being a radical Christian, he taught his kids evolution -- in fact, he had them read Origin of the Species and another book: "Darwin's Black Box" by Behe. Highly recommended -- maybe it will cure you of the fact that you apparently know less about Biology than a home-schooled nine year old.
Incidentally, did you know that most Ivy League colleges/prefer/ home-schoolers now? For example, Harvard, Yale, Wheaton. Of course, according to you those are all just charm schools, right?
Also, let's talk a little bit about socialization. First, there have never been any studies whatsoever done to show that home-schooled children are less socially adept as adults than public schooled Children. In fact, there have been several which have traced some of the rampant neuroses of our culture to the school system. Second, home school children/do/ get socialization. Very often in church, if not there then with neighbour children or relatives. What reason do you have to believe that 35 hours a week of socialization is called for?
Finally, for me socialization was little better than torture. I was beaten, harrassed, and isolated. I ended up dropping out of high school because I would literally go in every morning ready to take on the day and leave literally suicidal. I would love to see any of you anti-homeschoolers show how THAT'S healthy. You talk about what you don't know about. Stop, learn, and take notes.
Slashdot Mirror
Y'know, I bet its those Christians again. If the "self-proclaimed guardians of morality" would just stop harrassing the poor little geeks, then we wouldn't need these computer profiling tools.
We could have our freedom! Freedom to be different, to indulge our base instincts without any niggling voices telling us that we are humans, not animals! We could live, free from the cruel repressions of those who want us to love each other.
We could have world peace, or at least whirlled peas. We could stand up, hand in pasty hand, and share our victimization.
</sarcasm>
Jon: we are all victims sometimes. Do you know when we become victimized? When we define ourselves in terms of how we've been oppressed. It's time to get over it. Yeah, school sucks. So you do better for your kids than your parents did for you. IMNSHO, Homeschool. But you don't spend your whole life dwelling on a sucky circumstance that you can't do anything about.
Given your lack of identifiable geekiness, all I can figure is that you are trying for demagoguery with these "hellmouth" articles. The first one was good. The second half as good. The progression is geometric, or worse.
Remember the persian chessboard problem*? Rate of growth is at least as important as amount.
* For the proverb impaired, a king promised a young man a reward of his choosing. The young man asked that the king take a chess board, put one grain of wheat on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so forth. The thing is that this ends up being:
As anyone with an alpha can tell you, 2^64 is a huge number. I heard somewhere that this number was quite a bit more than the annual grain yield for the whole world for any given century.However, as I understand it, the overhead of a local execution in a good ORB (say ORBit or OmniORB) is equivalent to that of a shared library call. Why not use a good ORB and have the added benefit of network communications?
Can someone who is brighter than I explain this? For the record, I actually use KDE and am not a GNOMEr in any real sense of the word.
No. They just run into our churches, scream "This religious is bull!" and start shooting.
However, we are still called to love non-Christians. The thing is that charity starts in your own back yard: if I can't love my fellow Christians, then how can I love people who are not Christians? And what is the chance that someone who has rejected God's love will accept love from me as one of God's followers? As any teenager with a crush nows, love has to be accepted to have any vitality.
Salaam.
FTR, the inquisition is a straw man: the popular myth is way ahead of what actually happened. The Salem Witch trials were not nearly so bad as the European witch trials that went on for centuries: blame them instead. The murders of abortion doctors are irrelevant: we're talking 2 murders? C'mon, you can do better than that. Let's try:
- Christian cooperation with the Nazi's. Yeap. It happened, all over the place. But there was a man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who spoke up. He is probably one of the top ten Christian writers of this century.
- The crusades. Read up.
- The aforementioned witch trials in europe for centuries.
- The persecution of the Albigensian (spelling? Name? It's been a while) heresy in the 14th century.
At the end of all that (and worse) I'm still a Christian. Why? Because Christianity does not require that I check my brain at the door. It doesn't require that I follow some structural church to the edge of insanity. It doesn't require that I kill, maim, or anything else.What does it require? That I love my fellow Christians and God. That I forgive people who sin against me. That I give freely to people in need (but it does not require that I become impoverished).
Maybe I'm not a Christian? Maybe, maybe I'm just a poor sinner following God through Christ and the leading of the Holy spirit to my salvation every day. A "christ-follower".
Have a groovy day.
I am Christian, and I find the 10 Commandments in school and school sponsored prayer inappropriate. Which just proves that Christians are not nearly so homogenous a group as you would claim. FTR, the inquisition is a straw man: the popular myth is way ahead of what actually happened. The Salem Witch trials were not nearly so bad as the European witch trials that went on for centuries: blame them instead. The murders of abortion doctors are irrelevant: we're talking 2 murders? C'mon, you can do better than that. Let's try: Christian cooperation with the Nazi's. Yeap. It happened, all over the place. But there was a man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who spoke up. He is probably one of the top ten Christian writers of this century. The crusades. Read up. The aforementioned witch trials in europe for centuries. The persecution of the Albigensian (spelling? Name? It's been a while) heresy in the 14th century. At the end of all that (and worse) I'm still a Christian. Why? Because Christianity does not require that I check my brain at the door. It doesn't require that I follow some structural church to the edge of insanity. It doesn't require that I kill, maim, or anything else. What does it require? That I love my fellow Christians and God. That I forgive people who sin against me. That I give freely to people in need (but it does not require that I become impoverished). Maybe I'm not a Christian? Maybe, maybe I'm just a poor sinner following God through Christ and the leading of the Holy spirit to my salvation every day. A "christ-follower". Have a groovy day.
So, we have to make our marriage work. And work it does. Why does it work?
Because both my wife and myself are willing to put aside our egos in pursuit of happiness. Your post reeks of the self-aggrandizement that our society has used to replace humility. A real marriage that is going to have any future has to include mutual sacrifice. And yes, there have been occasions where that has included my wife acting as my servant.
But there's a flip side to that. I have an obligation to care for my wife, no matter what. That obligation includes dieing for her if the issue came up. It includes working hard a long way from home four days a week so that she doesn't have to work and one of us can stay home with our son. Why her? Because I have job skills that let me make more money, plus I really suck at breast-feeding. (On an aside: my son is now coming up on two and has only been sick -- including colds and ear infections -- when he was teething. Compare that to a formula-fed baby sometime).
I have done some, limited, marital counseling. And I can tell you that the only way that a marriage will work in the long term is if both partners give up their ego's and petty desires and pursue the much more lasting joy that can be found in marriage and family. Most problems in marriage come when one partner decides that "just this once" they will place their immediate wants ahead of the needs of their marriage and family. They gave up that right when they said "Love, honor, and cherish till death do us part". Anything less than total love and total sacrifice as though your spouse is yourself is not marriage, but masturbation.
This will be contentious, but I have to say that I am so sick of our culture acting as though everyone has some kind of right to pursue their immediate wants. Often, you have to give up your immediate wants to get what you need -- and you will find greater joy in getting what you really need than the shallow "self-esteem" that our culture glorifies. It's called being an adult.
I'm rambling... Later.
But, ten years ago, would you have felt the need to do it?
The problem is that while computers make things easy to do, once things become easier to do they also become required. The things that are added tend to be nonessentials -- for example, consider all these fancy, pretty internal documents done in word and friends. 10 years ago, they would have mostly been done on a typewriter without the benefit of fancy formatting and that would have been fine.
Even worse, docments are created that would not have been before because it's now easy. Which just proves that most work is busy work.
I would say that they only rational purpose of trademark law is to protect consumers against counterfeit products. So, I am prohibited from selling a "Sun Enterprise 4500" server that is in fact a dual celeron. I can't step on Sun's brand name or their product names.
The problem is that trademark law tries to operate without reference to intent. That is, under legal theories commonly espoused, I would be prohibited from using the phrase "Sun Enterprise 4500" to describe a service that cleaned your windows in an Enterprise Office Building so that it would be bright and sunny 4500 minutes a year. Those legal theories are bogus.
To me, trademark should be reduced to a registry of brand and product names, and the only way I should be able to sue someone whould be under fraud laws. I.e. if they were trying to fraudulently pass off their product as my product.
The biggest problem here is one that's endemic to the legal system: having a lawyer write a nasty letter or even file a lawsuit is cheap. Defending against a spurious lawsuit is not cheap -- and you can't do defense on a contingency basis. In many cases, lawsuits are settled for the defendants anticipated legal fees! This is ridiculous. In my opinion, any civil claim which is ultimately rejected should result in the plaintiff and the plaintiff's lawyers being responsible for all the defendants legal bills. This would level the playing field, and make it possible for defense to operate on a contingency basis as well.
IBM was (and is) a big supporter of Java.
So much for the Midas touch. Not saying that IBM supporting Linux isn't a good thing, but I think it's too early for the champaign.
I find it really distressing that KDE is moving away from CORBA. For one thing, the possibilities of distributed objects are endless. And Microsoft already has such a thing in their DCOM model (which sucks, I know. But still, its there).
Why couldn't they just swallow their pride and use a faster ORB? Say ORBit? I know that there are no C++ bindings, but that's better than falling back to a shared library implementation! The fact is that MICO (which they were going to use) has been pronounced too slow to be usable by everyone who's tried.
And forget interoperability with this thing -- there's no technological basis to make GNOME and KDE interoperable now.
The benefits of Dvorak keyboards are in a position similar to that of Linux's reliability: the best evidence is anecdotal.
/feels/ more natural and more comfortable. It is certainly better than the "Natural Keyboard". Also, I was able to learn dvorak to get up to my normal (90 wpm) speed in about 4 weeks.
Let me add to the pile of anecdotal evidence. A year ago, I came down with carpal tunnel syndrom. Not wanting to become unemployed, I took a number of drastic actions, including learning to type dvorak and getting Dvorak keyboards for all my computer (I'm sorry, but keycaps suck, especially since Windoze NT doesn't activate your keymap until you are logged in).
My Carpal got better.
Two months ago, I took the leap, became radically overpayed and inredibly worthless, and started consulting. My main client does not really allow for me to use an alternate keyboard without a lot of stress.
My carpal is back.
I know, I know, that's not conclusive. But I will tell you that typing Dvorak
Give it a try -- if you don't like, all ou've lost is an xmodmap command! If you do like it, you've saved your wrists.
Stipulate it for argument. Are you then suggesting that I should not tell you, as often as I can, that it is true? That I should not save you from eternal misery and seperation from God?
Even if you think I'm an irrational fool, I'm at least well-intentioned. How many in this "age of enlightenment" can claim (honestly) that their intentions are anything better than stuffing their pockets and building up their egos? Before you say that proclaiming christ is my way of building up my ego: have you considered how much crap I take for it? How much hate mail I get? How, every time I post on this topic, script kiddies try to take out my server at home?
The only explanation is that I've learned to love my fellow man enough that I want him (you) to be happy.
And that I don't get any thanks for it? Do you realize that, literally, noone outside of slashdot (i.e. no one who knows me or that can do anything for me) knows that I spend this much time trying to inject some truth into this forum?
*sigh* I guess I'll go clamp down on the old inetd.
Pornography is imagery and other materials designed for the soul purpose of sexual titillation. Spare me your lawyers jargon. You know very well the difference between porn and legitimate art. Also, I'm interested in constructing a list (more a list of ratings, not a list of banned sites) of sites from the perspective of western culture: if the muslims want one that bans faces (which is a very foolish example btw) they can build one.
I may as well dive off the deep end and speak truth (and don't waste time trying to tell me this is just my opinion). God intended sex to be a way in which two people, a man and a woman, could experience a profound and joyous union. I know that sounds pious, but its true. As it so happens, this kind of union was intended to be permanent -- hence, Christians don't approve of divorce. From a biblical perspective, there is no such thing as pre-marital sex since sex
The problem is that porn is for the purpose of titillation: this image that you are defending takes what is intended to be a joyous union of bodies and (yes) souls, and turns it into an excuse to masturbate. The people pictured are not even known as people, they are nothing but objects -- so many pounds of protoplasm in a pleasing shape.
Let me guess: you don't have kids, do you? If you had kids, you would know how literally impossible it is to censor everything they do. The problem is that everything that happens creates an impression on them -- and the impressions last forever. The other problem is that they lack judgement. And, I do have to sleep sometime. If you had kids, you would know that too. Somehow, I suspect that you either don't have kids or just plain don't care about your kids.
Finally, stop your whining. You don't have to help -- you can just wait until the government takes over. It will happen, because for all the nonsense that goes around more people agree with me about this stuff than agree with you. The problem is that most of them don't agree with me about freedom of speech.
"Educate, don't legislate" you say? You seem to suffer from the modern theory of education, which is "throw the kids in the vat with everything you wouldn't want to happen to you. The ones that make it out, we keep". Has it occurred to you that the rise of your ideology (screw freedom: just give me liberty and give it to me now) is exactly what makes our country so screwed up today?
Last person who spent as much time villifying a religious groups as much as some people around here do was Hitler. One of these days I'm going to put together a piece where I take all of Hitler's speeches, substitute Christian for Jew, and see how many fools around here I get agreeing with it.
/use some restraint/ in exercising it. Oh yeah -- are you seriously asserting that seeing people piss in each other is going to reduce teen pregnancy? I guess it might turn the Kids off of sex altogether...
I'm not trying to take away anyone's freedom of speech. I'm asking that they
Jackass.
I think just about everyone who reads slashdot would radically dislike a rating system enforced by the government. Unfortunately, there is a very real and substantial problem with the Internet for many people right now: namely, there is no way for me to protect my children from the most disgustingly vile content imaginable short of cutting off the Internet entirely.
I can't keep them from accessing it, even by sitting over the shoulder the whole time, because pornographic sites deliberately misrepresent themselves as appropriate sites. And many (most?) of these sites deliberately include images on their front pages which are inappropriate for children (and me for that matter). Do you really want your seven year old daughter seeing pictures of a man peeing on a woman, even for a second as you make a dive for the monitor power switch? If you think this isn't a problem, you are either a fool or have never been a parent. For examples, take a look www.whitehouse.com sometime.
And the fact is that you can't watch your kids all the time. You have to sleep sometime. Don't even get me started on page jacking -- your kids don't even have to be doing something wrong to get sent to some of the worst smut on the Internet.
To make matters worse, anyone without Internet access is rapidly being marginalized by our society. So, my choice is to (a) have my children be marginalized or (b) have them grow up thinking that normal sexuality is whips, chains, and defecating on each other. Or milder, but just as bad, have them grow up thinking that pornography is harmless and a normal expression of sexuality (its not -- pornography treats people as objects. I though that was something geeks were against?).
As I see it, ratings systems are a good thing because if they aren't setup, the government will find a way to outlaw porn all together. At least outside the united states. In the US, they will come up with some way to worm around the 1st ammendment and water it down just as they have the second.
What is desperately needed (now) is an organization and appropriate technologies to construct a publically, freely available list of offensive sites. You want to resist censorship? Help construct this list. Believe me, it is far better to exercise responsibility voluntarily than with the government making you.
I'm serious guys -- a lot of people check their brains at the door as soon as the topic of God comes up. It was not (to me, as a serious Bible student training for ministry and someone who spends way too much time at his church) self-evident that this was a hoax. I know many people who believe this -- and stranger still.
Which brings up another question. A lot of the beliefs expressed behind this hoaxical distro were wrong. That's right. Wrong. For example, there is no cause to not use sendmail just because Eric Allman happens to be gay Biblically speaking. Which just goes to show that you can't believe everything that calls itself Christianity.
As with many areas in life, there is no substitute for careful, independent research and careful, independent thought. You can't just pick what you heard some televangelist say on Sunday morning, mix it in with something you vaguely remember from Sunday School when you were five, and label it as Christianity -- you've gotta do the research and decide for yourself.
One of my favorite quotes is from Victorian Christian apologist George MacDonald:
Solaris is already free, at least for personal use. You can download it from Sun. Sun did this to stem the tide of Linux -- and it failed miserably.
Also, on the same hardware Solaris is noticeably slower than Linux. In fact, I recently compared performance of my Ultra 5 (at work) and my K6/2-300 (at home). I did it in a simple minded way: I compiled GCC on both. My K6-2 started later and finished sooner -- I didn't actually measure the times, but it was around twice as fast.
It costs less than $500, the Ultra 5 costs around $3000. Bottom line is that in the low-end server/desktop market, Sun hardware just doesn't make any sense. Given that Solaris/x86 is not too hot (in my experience it is nowhere near as robust as Solaris/SPARX or Linux) why would we give up Linux?
Also, a lot of the advantage of Linux is that, instead of having to go out and get all the GNU tools to make a system useful after you load Solaris, it comes with them. Things like bash, GNU find, GNU grep are dramatically better than the equivalent bundled commands.
A lot of people here are saying a lot of stuff about the CIA -- implying that they are trying to take over Silicon Valley or somesuch.
It just ain't so.
Look... The CIA is basically just a bureacracy nowadays. Seriously. They are divided into two groups: operations and analysis. The operations group has grown smaller and smaller over the years, and the analysis group has concentrated more and more on relatively benign sources of information such as satellite imagery.
So they chose to waste $28Million trying to lam their way into the secret plans of Silicon Valley startups. Do you really think that they will pick the right startups, or that the startups will be inclined to give them the time of day?
Don't worry about it -- we waste more than $28 Mil every day. Just let them play their games.
You're getting in the way of my victimization. Stop it. ;)
Has anyone figured out what the point of the 4.5 series is? I haven't.
I guess part of it is "netcenter integration". Since I don't use netcenter, I guess it doesn't matter.
You're right. And as a libertarian, I know better.
Man, I really should have hit the preview button on that comment.
If we continue to have public schools, we will have a huge portion of the people who suppose that the "theory" of evolution is a proven fact (it's not, and Darwinian evolution is hardly thought of outside the United States anymore)
/lot/ -- on the order of 50 families) do an excellent job of teaching their children basic skills.
/prefer/ home-schoolers now? For example, Harvard, Yale, Wheaton. Of course, according to you those are all just charm schools, right?
/do/ get socialization. Very often in church, if not there then with neighbour children or relatives. What reason do you have to believe that 35 hours a week of socialization is called for?
All statistics that I've seen indicate that home schooling, at least in the early grades, results in better educated, better rounded children on average. While I must admit that some home-schoolers are right-wing subliterates, most of the ones I know (and I know a
The biggest danger sign is when they stop doing the Iowa tests. If the child can't pass the Iowa tests, then there's a problem. My Pastor's 9 year old took the one of the standardized tests a couple of weeks ago and scored 12th grade 9th month. Oh yeah -- despite being a radical Christian, he taught his kids evolution -- in fact, he had them read Origin of the Species and another book: "Darwin's Black Box" by Behe. Highly recommended -- maybe it will cure you of the fact that you apparently know less about Biology than a home-schooled nine year old.
Incidentally, did you know that most Ivy League colleges
Also, let's talk a little bit about socialization. First, there have never been any studies whatsoever done to show that home-schooled children are less socially adept as adults than public schooled Children. In fact, there have been several which have traced some of the rampant neuroses of our culture to the school system. Second, home school children
Finally, for me socialization was little better than torture. I was beaten, harrassed, and isolated. I ended up dropping out of high school because I would literally go in every morning ready to take on the day and leave literally suicidal. I would love to see any of you anti-homeschoolers show how THAT'S healthy. You talk about what you don't know about. Stop, learn, and take notes.