What kind of wooly crap is this? I mean, if I criticise my biggest customer, or my company's profit base, I think I can expect my manager to have 'words' with me at least. This is just another MS-is-bad-and-I-don't-care-if-that's-true-or-not story.
If you claim to be security consultants who know security, rather than PR consultants who use words like "security" to help advertising, then you do very poorly for yourself by so obviously and publicaly squelching any appearance of having said something potentially negative about the security of one of your largest customers.
The point is that Microsoft's huge power in the industry appears to be making it impossible for real security firms to exist. As such, we should all be leary of any such's claims, and wonder if in fact they are really PR firms who use words like "security".
I'm ashamed of our academics, as cited in the article. He apparently went to get 9 to sign onto that paper and all declined because of funding issues.
What's the point of tenured academics if they are going to be afraid of losing corporate grants and therefore are squelched?
The problem isn't the academics. The problem is the funding.
If you're an academic, there's tremendous pressure to get external funding. That's usually a tenure critereon nowadays; unless you demonstrate an ability to get external funding, you won't get tenure. Even after you get tenure, there's huge incentve to get external funding. For instance, the amount of time and freedom you have to do your research (versus other duties) is often directly linked to the amount of external funding you can secure.
People are surprised sometimes when I tell them that I need to figure out how to get grants to support my research. "Doesn't the University support your research?" Only in that they provide me a 9-month salary, an office, and administrative support-- which, I grant you, is real support. But it's not sufficient; it doesn't pay any grad students or post-docs, it doesn't pay any publication fees, it doesn't pay for any travel, it doesn't pay for any equipment.
If you're in a field where corporate support is expected, then you're caught in a bit of a catch-22. You're supposed to have academic freedom, and indeed once you have tenure the University can't fire you. But if you want to be able to keep doing your research, you need to get funding, and as such you are in a position where you can't say something that will offend whatever corporate source of funding you depend on.
If you want to fix the problem, fix the way that academic researchers are funded. Don't just do away with them altogether, or you'll find that there are even fewer people who can speak with some sort of credentials who aren't completely beholden to some specific private interest. In other sciences, government funding does alleviate some of the trouble, although I'm not so naive as to believe that one's ability to get government funding through the NSF and such wouldn't be harmed by speaking out against certain influential private interests.
It's similar to politicians and large special interest groups. No politician who wants to get elected can support an even wise and rational policy (e.g., let's say eliminating drug patents and reforming the way drug research is funded in the interest of lowering overall healt care costs for individuals) if you risk ticking off huge campaign donors, for you will get buried.
Noone, not even "real astrologers" take them seriously. It's just something to kill another 5 minutes after you already read the comic page
Unfortunately, that's not true... lots of "real astrologers" take what they're doing seriously, which is evidence of self-deception. Many others, including (alas) family members of US presidents, take what astrologers are doing seriously, which means that they are being deceived.
If it were only "harmless entertainment", that would be one thing (although even still, it would be a sad commentary on our society-- like some of the rest of our harmless entertainment). Unfortunately, astrology represents two other dangerous things-- it's a widespread scam and/or one of the most popular cases of public ignorance.
As most people have noted, horoscopes are written as generally as possible, since the horoscopes printed in a paper should "fit" 1/12 of the population. Why do I read them and apply their advice to my life? Because I've been around long enough to understand that a life lacking in mythology is drab and uninspiring. So I take a generic horoscope and look for its (usually positive) outcome in my life. And of course, I find it.
That's fine; if you find inspiration and personal meaning from somewhere, that's fine. However:
I love the Sagan quote, by the way. The bull-headed application of science in the realm of faith is absurd; similar to pointing out that a man can't really be suspended on a cross by nails through his hands.
This is very misguided.
It's one thing to say that you find that myth and faith makes life more interesting and meaningful for you. This is largely the purpose of most any religion. It's an entirely different thing to say that astrology has any real predictive power as a method of divination. That's what Sagan and other scientists are talking about when they say astrology is bunk. And, indeed, astrology has been shown through experiments to have no predictive power. It is wrong-- we know that, because we have evidence that it is wrong.
It's one thing to find meaning and inspiration from something, but it's another thing to claim that there is a truth in that something which has been demonstrated to be empirically false. It's similar to many Christians, who find meaning in the Bible even though they have no problem believing evolution and big-bang cosmology. The Christians who believe that the Bible must be literally true and in young-Earth creationism are wrong, because there is an overwhelming weight of evidence showing that they are wrong. It's not arrogance of scientists to say that they are wrong; it's simply pointing out the facts. Many other Christians, however, manage to reconcile this with their faith by recognizing that for their faith to have meaning, the Bible need not be literally true.
So find your meaning in the stars and the horoscopes if that's valuable to you; that's great. But if you believe that astrology is a generally applicable method of divination, you're deceiving yourself in the face of a tremendous amount of evidence pointing the other way.
Why not. Physics taught me that there is no center point. You can pick any point you want to to base your frame of reference on.
Study a little more physics.
While you are technically right-- you assuredly can choose any frame of reference-- to really have completely indistinguishable frames of reference you need to choose an inertial, i.e. unaccelerated frame. If you choose the Earth as your frame of reference, to properly predict the motion of things other things in the Solar System you're going to have to put in all sorts of mess centrifugal forces and so forth, all of which are fictitious forces arising from the fact that you're working in an accelerated reference frame. You can definitely tell if you're in an accelerated reference frame, and the Earth is one such, much more so than the Sun. (In the Solar System, you can approximate the sun as an unaccelerated reference frame, but of course it too is in the gravitational field of the Galaxy and accelerating as it goes around the Galaxy, so if you want to be really anal the Sun isn't even an inertial reference frame.)
For the record, I think people who are trying to put forward astrology in the modern age don't argue that the stars are affecting you, but the stars and planets are responding to the same kind of underlying (presumambly cosmic) forces that control your environment.
I don't believe that either, but it seems more plausible.
It does? Not if you know anything about stars and planets. We can completely describe the behavior of the planets in our solar system using Newton's theory of Universal Gravitation. (Except for a few small details like the precession of Mercury's orbit, which require corrections from General Relativity.)
This leaves very little room for "mysterious cosmic forces" to affect where the planets show up in front of constellations....
The so-called "theoretical" basis of Astrology is almost as much absolute bunk as the claimed practical "successes" of it (given that astrology has been experimentally shown to have zero predictive power).
If anybody asks me, and I manage to avoid going into a rant about how Astrology is one of the prime examples of popular ignorance in the modern age, I say that my sign is "Orion".
I can't see any way to enforce that.
Of course assuming you are using linux or other open source OS.
And what makes you think that Linux or any other open source OS is going to be able to view any media in the future? (At least legally?) Heck, it's already illegal, technically, in the USA to watch DVDs with open source software, even DVDs that you have legally purchased.
Call me cynical, but I don't think the US government are getting into this for the sake of safeguarding my PC from viruses...
It's cynical, but it's also not an unreasonable fear based on anybody who's been rationally observing the behavior of our government recently.
I fully expect that we'll see increased security resolutions which are ostensively tough on companies like Microsoft, but those companies will embrace them (while all the while getting good PR about "doing the right thing and making the right sacrfices") because ultimatly they will only be minor inconveniences... while the regulations that show up will all but prohibit free software (at least for commercial purposes, and possibly for anybody who wants to connect to the Internet), meaning that in the long run Microsoft benefits hugely from those "minor inconveniences".
Meanwhile, the regulations-- like a lot of what we've seen with airport security-- won't increase actualy computer security one whit, but anybody who complains about them will be chastised by John Ashcroft as a whiner who won't let the government do what it needs to safeguard our homeland.
like the other poster said... the strikes worked because they withheld something the companies wanted - work. if you shut down your website, you aren't withholding anything from the people making the laws (unless by chance). you're _just_ hurting the innocent consumers.
Are the consumers innocent? I would argue that they are guilty-- their ignorance and apathy makes them guilty.
We ostensively live in democracies. The EU is ostensively made up of democracies. Ultimately, the leaders are responsible to the people. And, indeed, when the people sit up, take notice, care, and express their care, the leaders have to pay attention to it. When the people don't pay attention or don't express their care, then the leaders are free to whore themselves out to whichever proprietary interest has the highest bid.
We're not serfs. We're ultimately the people who put our government together. Because so much of the world-- even of the free-software using world!-- is ignorant of the danger of software patents (the damage in the USA, the danger in Europe), or are apathetic, we have trouble. Therefore, the people who are guilty of that ignorance need to be shaken out of it, so that they will inform their representatives what it is they want them to be doing.
The very term "consumer" is ultimately insulting. It indicates that the masses of humanity are a big devouring maw that exist to serve some purpose in an economic system. They are the sheep out there who are to be led about by the various controlling interests. That is not the sort of world we (theoretically) live in, and it's not the world I want to live in. If the sheep are going to be led somewhere they won't like when they get there, anything we can do to help them see it before they get there should be done.
The populace is responsible-- even if they choose to exercise it by ceeding responsibility. Therefore, it is reasonable to get the message out to them, and it is reasonable to inconvenience them.
These site shutting down in protest is not very professional. This is one of the problems with the free software community, politics plays too heavy of a role in their actions.
If you are too timid to take actions that are going to inconvenience somebody you will never be noticed. Software patents are serious. You lose your Linux dodad today; software patents could eventually make you lose them forever.
For instance, do you really believe that the labor movement would ever have gotten anywhere if they never held any strikes? That the civil rights movement would have gotten anywhere if they never got in anybody's face?
The road to hell is paved with business as usual. Shutting down your websites may be "unprofessional", but it makes a meaningful protest that gets across the point of just how serious these sites believe the issue is.
Whether or not I agree with the conclusions, for the time being let's accept them for the sake of argument.
Suppose that the current goals of the open source community (freedom, choice, etc.) are inconsistent with GNU/Linux taking over the desktop.
Do we then really want to take over the desktop?
If we have to become like Microsoft to defeat Microsoft, then what's the point? *If* we were just another proprietary software company, then, yeah, sure, that's the right thing to do. Since, after all, the ultimate goal of any company is just profit. The open source community is very different. The community isn't going to get rich and retire. They're mostly in it because they like the software and they like the freedoms. Changing the things you like to something you don't like so as to win a competition that may come down to little more than a pissing contets seems counter-productive.
In any event, it's moot. The mere fact that open source has the freedoms it has means that choice will simply not go away. Yeah, KDE and/or Gnome may become the "advertising standard" that we use to draw people away from Windows desktops, but unless legislation makes free software illegal, things like X and FVWM and all the other "oh it's so confusing save me from having to choose" things that we hear whining about simply aren't going to go away, because the people who write them want to write them and won't stop in the name of some corporate strategy.
Nice to know you think that we shouldn't include the beginning of the world in science. After all, it's kinda hard to prove that evolution or creationism or a big bang or a big crap or what-have-you happened without time-travel. Likewise, it is impossible to disprove.
Wrong. There's much more to scientific measurement than "go and see".
Many of these theories-- evolution, the big bang, etc.-- make testable predictions. They are either predictions of the results of experiments, or of things we will observe. By making the predicted observations, we can test those thoeries.
(I'm OT, too bad) About that whole speed-of-light thing, w/r/t the idea that we can't "move faster than" c... What if we had propulsion forcing us away from one thing, but then another force pulling us in the opposite direction (toward our destination)? Could we then conceivably move at twice almost the speed of light?...
Or, and perhaps more likely, I'm I just making up questions that I (and only I) think are interesting, when they are just stupid?
I'm not going to say you're stupid:), but you are seriously confusing force, acceleration, and velocity.
Leave relativity out of it and stay way less than the speed of light for the time being. IF you have a force on an object (push or pull), that object will accelerate. When it accelerates, its speed changes. If there is no force, its speed stays the same.
So, if you push on a cart, you are accelerating it. When you stop pushing it, it keeps rolling in the direction you were pushing it (slowing down due to the force of friction). If you had a friend also pulling it, yeah, you could accelerate at twice the rate... or, you could just push twice as hard to accelerate at twice the rate. Moreover, how fast it ends up going depends not only on the rate of acceleration, but how long it was accelerating. (Push on it twice as long, and you'll get it going twice as fast.)
So, what you do to push or pull on something, and whether there are multiple forces, says nothing about how fast you can get something going.
From what I remember, people have made similar "spear carrying" measurements which indicate that seem to indicate that the "surface" of space is curved
Similar spear-carrying measurements have been made, yes. Well, not eactly, but measurements that can determine the curvature of spacetime.
It is curved in the Solar System. That's the effect of the Sun's gravity. That can give you, for instance, the gravitational lensing effect first observed for the Sun be Eddington back in the begininng of the 20th Century.
The Universe as a whole, though, has a flat geometry; measurements have been made that show this. (OK, there's a small uncertainty, so it might be curved a little one way or the other; and, we've only measured the observable Universe, so there could be a curvature we can't see because we're looking at too small of a piece of it (think of trying to measure the curvature of the Earth by looking at a 10'x10' patch of ground).) Here's one site which describes some of the experiments that have been done (and precision has been improved since these):
Your memory from your modern physics class is, at the least, outdated.... 1999 or thereabouts was the first time that a measurement was made of the Universe's geometry that really gained widespread acceptance, in that it was the first time the measurement had been done well enough and precisely enough that it was believable.
The existence of God cannot be disproven scientifically. As long as something cannot be disproven, it is a valid theory.
Err... if a theory is not falsifiable, it is certainly not a useful theory, scientifically speaking.
And if, as you assert, the existence of God cannot be disproven scientifically, then God is not a topic of science. So....
What I am trying to say is that you can believe what you want, but don't force it on others. Eliminating Intelligent Design, or whatever you want to call it, from school curriculum amounts to nothing more than censorship, just like eliminating evolution.
You can keep intelligent design in your curriculum. But it should be a part of a religion or comparative world faiths class, not a part of a science class, because it is not science. It is wrong to claim that it is, and it is dogmatic interference to insist that it be taught as such.
We havn't even discovered if there is/was life on the nearest planet to us... how in the world to these pompous asshats think they can know how the world began?
Can you explain to me how your brain works to form consciousness?
If not, where the hell do you get off being such a pompous asshat as to participate in a philosophical discussion, huh? After all, you seem to think that one must be able to explain a piece of the microcosm to have a chance of saying something meaningful about the macrocosm.
I'm not a physicist, but I think it's finite - multiply the age by the speed of light.
That's just the observable Universe, which is indeed bounded by a "horizon" as you say.
The best current indication of the geometry of the Universe, though, is that it's flat, not a 4d analog to the surface of a sphere, which means that it is in fact infinite, or at the least a whole heck of a lot larger than the size of the observable Universe. We can't observe all of that, because light from anything beyond our "horizon" hasn't had time to reach us.
So... How will the Universe end? Big Crunch, Dark & Cold, Equilibrium, Giant Black Holes, Act of God, or... what?
The default, most natural extrapolation is that it will end in a "heat death", ever expanding, with the expansion ever accelerating. Clusters of galaxies will stay clumped together and will die their little isolated heat deaths, but the clusters will be moving away from each other so fast that they'll move out of causal contact with each other, and eventually we won't be able to see any galaxy that we aren't gravitationally bound to now.
Read "The Five Ages of the Universe" by Adams and Laughlin to find out what happens to the matter in the Universe. They don't take into account the ever-accelerating expansion of the Universe, but within one cluster of galaxies what they outline is pretty well-informed and likely speculation.
Of course, that's just the default assumption. Exactly what will happen depends at least on the nature of the dark energy that makes up 70% of the energy density of the Universe, and just what dark energy is is something that we really do not know; we know much less about it than dark matter. Given what we know today, it would be extremenly surprising if the dynamics were such that the Universe would be able to halt and revesre it's expansion-- I'd personally bet against it-- but then again, many were extremely surprised that we measured the existence of dark energy in the first place.
Intelligent Design, a recent theory that has gained enough respect from the scientific community
Woah, stop right there.
It's proponents claim that it has respect in the scientific community. You will find scientists who like the idea. But the fact is, so far as peer review and confirming experiments and the general scientific community, it is not considered really a viable theory. It's certainly not any competition for evolution amonst the sceintific community at all.
The proponents' PR claims it is, but that's just the PR.
Umm... yeah... Debian... exactly what I picture when I think of a Dynamic Constantly Moving and Developing Product.
Well, it is.
Debian is not a product. Debian Stable (currently Debian Woody) is effectively a product. But Debian is a project.
Debian Stable may only have a new release every couple of years, making it seem very stodgy and safe and conservative and slow. But the Debian project really is dynamic, constantly moving, and constantly developing. Try installing Debian Unstable, and you'll probably find it's a little more constantly moving than you want....
Microsoft would not be the dominant computing company it is today if Gates hadn't been clever enough to sell MS-DOS to hardware manufacturers who were making *clones* (even the term used) of IBM PCs.
Today, though, if anybody were to do the equivalent, Bill Gates would assuredly cry foul and insist that the behavior were a gross violation of fundamental intellectual property rights, and strictly against the law.
Now that Microsoft is the dominant industry leader, they want to make damn well sure that nobody can use the same (legal) tactics they used to gain market share.
Bastards.
It happens in business and politics. Something new gets started because of relatively liberal rules and pervasive freedom. Celebrating and arguing strongly in favor of those, somebody manages to get into a very strong position; and then they will make a philosophicaly about-face. Now they want as restrictive an environment as possible, to insure that they stay in power.
Slashdot Mirror
What kind of wooly crap is this? I mean, if I criticise my biggest customer, or my company's profit base, I think I can expect my manager to have 'words' with me at least. This is just another MS-is-bad-and-I-don't-care-if-that's-true-or-not story.
If you claim to be security consultants who know security, rather than PR consultants who use words like "security" to help advertising, then you do very poorly for yourself by so obviously and publicaly squelching any appearance of having said something potentially negative about the security of one of your largest customers.
The point is that Microsoft's huge power in the industry appears to be making it impossible for real security firms to exist. As such, we should all be leary of any such's claims, and wonder if in fact they are really PR firms who use words like "security".
-Rob
I'm ashamed of our academics, as cited in the article. He apparently went to get 9 to sign onto that paper and all declined because of funding issues.
What's the point of tenured academics if they are going to be afraid of losing corporate grants and therefore are squelched?
The problem isn't the academics. The problem is the funding.
If you're an academic, there's tremendous pressure to get external funding. That's usually a tenure critereon nowadays; unless you demonstrate an ability to get external funding, you won't get tenure. Even after you get tenure, there's huge incentve to get external funding. For instance, the amount of time and freedom you have to do your research (versus other duties) is often directly linked to the amount of external funding you can secure.
People are surprised sometimes when I tell them that I need to figure out how to get grants to support my research. "Doesn't the University support your research?" Only in that they provide me a 9-month salary, an office, and administrative support-- which, I grant you, is real support. But it's not sufficient; it doesn't pay any grad students or post-docs, it doesn't pay any publication fees, it doesn't pay for any travel, it doesn't pay for any equipment.
If you're in a field where corporate support is expected, then you're caught in a bit of a catch-22. You're supposed to have academic freedom, and indeed once you have tenure the University can't fire you. But if you want to be able to keep doing your research, you need to get funding, and as such you are in a position where you can't say something that will offend whatever corporate source of funding you depend on.
If you want to fix the problem, fix the way that academic researchers are funded. Don't just do away with them altogether, or you'll find that there are even fewer people who can speak with some sort of credentials who aren't completely beholden to some specific private interest. In other sciences, government funding does alleviate some of the trouble, although I'm not so naive as to believe that one's ability to get government funding through the NSF and such wouldn't be harmed by speaking out against certain influential private interests.
It's similar to politicians and large special interest groups. No politician who wants to get elected can support an even wise and rational policy (e.g., let's say eliminating drug patents and reforming the way drug research is funded in the interest of lowering overall healt care costs for individuals) if you risk ticking off huge campaign donors, for you will get buried.
-Rob
Noone, not even "real astrologers" take them seriously. It's just something to kill another 5 minutes after you already read the comic page
Unfortunately, that's not true... lots of "real astrologers" take what they're doing seriously, which is evidence of self-deception. Many others, including (alas) family members of US presidents, take what astrologers are doing seriously, which means that they are being deceived.
If it were only "harmless entertainment", that would be one thing (although even still, it would be a sad commentary on our society-- like some of the rest of our harmless entertainment). Unfortunately, astrology represents two other dangerous things-- it's a widespread scam and/or one of the most popular cases of public ignorance.
-Rob
As most people have noted, horoscopes are written as generally as possible, since the horoscopes printed in a paper should "fit" 1/12 of the population. Why do I read them and apply their advice to my life? Because I've been around long enough to understand that a life lacking in mythology is drab and uninspiring. So I take a generic horoscope and look for its (usually positive) outcome in my life. And of course, I find it.
That's fine; if you find inspiration and personal meaning from somewhere, that's fine. However:
I love the Sagan quote, by the way. The bull-headed application of science in the realm of faith is absurd; similar to pointing out that a man can't really be suspended on a cross by nails through his hands.
This is very misguided.
It's one thing to say that you find that myth and faith makes life more interesting and meaningful for you. This is largely the purpose of most any religion. It's an entirely different thing to say that astrology has any real predictive power as a method of divination. That's what Sagan and other scientists are talking about when they say astrology is bunk. And, indeed, astrology has been shown through experiments to have no predictive power. It is wrong-- we know that, because we have evidence that it is wrong.
It's one thing to find meaning and inspiration from something, but it's another thing to claim that there is a truth in that something which has been demonstrated to be empirically false. It's similar to many Christians, who find meaning in the Bible even though they have no problem believing evolution and big-bang cosmology. The Christians who believe that the Bible must be literally true and in young-Earth creationism are wrong, because there is an overwhelming weight of evidence showing that they are wrong. It's not arrogance of scientists to say that they are wrong; it's simply pointing out the facts. Many other Christians, however, manage to reconcile this with their faith by recognizing that for their faith to have meaning, the Bible need not be literally true.
So find your meaning in the stars and the horoscopes if that's valuable to you; that's great. But if you believe that astrology is a generally applicable method of divination, you're deceiving yourself in the face of a tremendous amount of evidence pointing the other way.
-Rob
Why not. Physics taught me that there is no center point. You can pick any point you want to to base your frame of reference on.
Study a little more physics.
While you are technically right-- you assuredly can choose any frame of reference-- to really have completely indistinguishable frames of reference you need to choose an inertial, i.e. unaccelerated frame. If you choose the Earth as your frame of reference, to properly predict the motion of things other things in the Solar System you're going to have to put in all sorts of mess centrifugal forces and so forth, all of which are fictitious forces arising from the fact that you're working in an accelerated reference frame. You can definitely tell if you're in an accelerated reference frame, and the Earth is one such, much more so than the Sun. (In the Solar System, you can approximate the sun as an unaccelerated reference frame, but of course it too is in the gravitational field of the Galaxy and accelerating as it goes around the Galaxy, so if you want to be really anal the Sun isn't even an inertial reference frame.)
-Rob
For the record, I think people who are trying to put forward astrology in the modern age don't argue that the stars are affecting you, but the stars and planets are responding to the same kind of underlying (presumambly cosmic) forces that control your environment.
I don't believe that either, but it seems more plausible.
It does? Not if you know anything about stars and planets. We can completely describe the behavior of the planets in our solar system using Newton's theory of Universal Gravitation. (Except for a few small details like the precession of Mercury's orbit, which require corrections from General Relativity.)
This leaves very little room for "mysterious cosmic forces" to affect where the planets show up in front of constellations....
The so-called "theoretical" basis of Astrology is almost as much absolute bunk as the claimed practical "successes" of it (given that astrology has been experimentally shown to have zero predictive power).
-Rob
I'm amazed by how many people believe in a science? religion?...
I think "scam" is the word you are looking for.
-Rob
If anybody asks me, and I manage to avoid going into a rant about how Astrology is one of the prime examples of popular ignorance in the modern age, I say that my sign is "Orion".
-Rob
I can't see any way to enforce that. Of course assuming you are using linux or other open source OS.
And what makes you think that Linux or any other open source OS is going to be able to view any media in the future? (At least legally?) Heck, it's already illegal, technically, in the USA to watch DVDs with open source software, even DVDs that you have legally purchased.
-Rob
Call me cynical, but I don't think the US government are getting into this for the sake of safeguarding my PC from viruses...
It's cynical, but it's also not an unreasonable fear based on anybody who's been rationally observing the behavior of our government recently.
I fully expect that we'll see increased security resolutions which are ostensively tough on companies like Microsoft, but those companies will embrace them (while all the while getting good PR about "doing the right thing and making the right sacrfices") because ultimatly they will only be minor inconveniences... while the regulations that show up will all but prohibit free software (at least for commercial purposes, and possibly for anybody who wants to connect to the Internet), meaning that in the long run Microsoft benefits hugely from those "minor inconveniences".
Meanwhile, the regulations-- like a lot of what we've seen with airport security-- won't increase actualy computer security one whit, but anybody who complains about them will be chastised by John Ashcroft as a whiner who won't let the government do what it needs to safeguard our homeland.
Yeah, I'm cynical too.
-Rob
like the other poster said... the strikes worked because they withheld something the companies wanted - work. if you shut down your website, you aren't withholding anything from the people making the laws (unless by chance). you're _just_ hurting the innocent consumers.
Are the consumers innocent? I would argue that they are guilty-- their ignorance and apathy makes them guilty.
We ostensively live in democracies. The EU is ostensively made up of democracies. Ultimately, the leaders are responsible to the people. And, indeed, when the people sit up, take notice, care, and express their care, the leaders have to pay attention to it. When the people don't pay attention or don't express their care, then the leaders are free to whore themselves out to whichever proprietary interest has the highest bid.
We're not serfs. We're ultimately the people who put our government together. Because so much of the world-- even of the free-software using world!-- is ignorant of the danger of software patents (the damage in the USA, the danger in Europe), or are apathetic, we have trouble. Therefore, the people who are guilty of that ignorance need to be shaken out of it, so that they will inform their representatives what it is they want them to be doing.
The very term "consumer" is ultimately insulting. It indicates that the masses of humanity are a big devouring maw that exist to serve some purpose in an economic system. They are the sheep out there who are to be led about by the various controlling interests. That is not the sort of world we (theoretically) live in, and it's not the world I want to live in. If the sheep are going to be led somewhere they won't like when they get there, anything we can do to help them see it before they get there should be done.
The populace is responsible-- even if they choose to exercise it by ceeding responsibility. Therefore, it is reasonable to get the message out to them, and it is reasonable to inconvenience them.
-Rob
These site shutting down in protest is not very professional. This is one of the problems with the free software community, politics plays too heavy of a role in their actions.
If you are too timid to take actions that are going to inconvenience somebody you will never be noticed. Software patents are serious. You lose your Linux dodad today; software patents could eventually make you lose them forever.
For instance, do you really believe that the labor movement would ever have gotten anywhere if they never held any strikes? That the civil rights movement would have gotten anywhere if they never got in anybody's face?
The road to hell is paved with business as usual. Shutting down your websites may be "unprofessional", but it makes a meaningful protest that gets across the point of just how serious these sites believe the issue is.
-Rob
Whether or not I agree with the conclusions, for the time being let's accept them for the sake of argument.
Suppose that the current goals of the open source community (freedom, choice, etc.) are inconsistent with GNU/Linux taking over the desktop.
Do we then really want to take over the desktop?
If we have to become like Microsoft to defeat Microsoft, then what's the point? *If* we were just another proprietary software company, then, yeah, sure, that's the right thing to do. Since, after all, the ultimate goal of any company is just profit. The open source community is very different. The community isn't going to get rich and retire. They're mostly in it because they like the software and they like the freedoms. Changing the things you like to something you don't like so as to win a competition that may come down to little more than a pissing contets seems counter-productive.
In any event, it's moot. The mere fact that open source has the freedoms it has means that choice will simply not go away. Yeah, KDE and/or Gnome may become the "advertising standard" that we use to draw people away from Windows desktops, but unless legislation makes free software illegal, things like X and FVWM and all the other "oh it's so confusing save me from having to choose" things that we hear whining about simply aren't going to go away, because the people who write them want to write them and won't stop in the name of some corporate strategy.
-Rob
Nice to know you think that we shouldn't include the beginning of the world in science. After all, it's kinda hard to prove that evolution or creationism or a big bang or a big crap or what-have-you happened without time-travel. Likewise, it is impossible to disprove.
Wrong. There's much more to scientific measurement than "go and see".
Many of these theories-- evolution, the big bang, etc.-- make testable predictions. They are either predictions of the results of experiments, or of things we will observe. By making the predicted observations, we can test those thoeries.
-Rob
(I'm OT, too bad) About that whole speed-of-light thing, w/r/t the idea that we can't "move faster than" c... What if we had propulsion forcing us away from one thing, but then another force pulling us in the opposite direction (toward our destination)? Could we then conceivably move at twice almost the speed of light?...
Or, and perhaps more likely, I'm I just making up questions that I (and only I) think are interesting, when they are just stupid?
I'm not going to say you're stupid :), but you are seriously confusing force, acceleration, and velocity.
Leave relativity out of it and stay way less than the speed of light for the time being. IF you have a force on an object (push or pull), that object will accelerate. When it accelerates, its speed changes. If there is no force, its speed stays the same.
So, if you push on a cart, you are accelerating it. When you stop pushing it, it keeps rolling in the direction you were pushing it (slowing down due to the force of friction). If you had a friend also pulling it, yeah, you could accelerate at twice the rate... or, you could just push twice as hard to accelerate at twice the rate. Moreover, how fast it ends up going depends not only on the rate of acceleration, but how long it was accelerating. (Push on it twice as long, and you'll get it going twice as fast.)
So, what you do to push or pull on something, and whether there are multiple forces, says nothing about how fast you can get something going.
-Rob
From what I remember, people have made similar "spear carrying" measurements which indicate that seem to indicate that the "surface" of space is curved
Similar spear-carrying measurements have been made, yes. Well, not eactly, but measurements that can determine the curvature of spacetime.
It is curved in the Solar System. That's the effect of the Sun's gravity. That can give you, for instance, the gravitational lensing effect first observed for the Sun be Eddington back in the begininng of the 20th Century.
The Universe as a whole, though, has a flat geometry; measurements have been made that show this. (OK, there's a small uncertainty, so it might be curved a little one way or the other; and, we've only measured the observable Universe, so there could be a curvature we can't see because we're looking at too small of a piece of it (think of trying to measure the curvature of the Earth by looking at a 10'x10' patch of ground).) Here's one site which describes some of the experiments that have been done (and precision has been improved since these):
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/boomer ang-sidebar.html
Your memory from your modern physics class is, at the least, outdated.... 1999 or thereabouts was the first time that a measurement was made of the Universe's geometry that really gained widespread acceptance, in that it was the first time the measurement had been done well enough and precisely enough that it was believable.
-Rob
The existence of God cannot be disproven scientifically. As long as something cannot be disproven, it is a valid theory.
Err... if a theory is not falsifiable, it is certainly not a useful theory, scientifically speaking.
And if, as you assert, the existence of God cannot be disproven scientifically, then God is not a topic of science. So....
What I am trying to say is that you can believe what you want, but don't force it on others. Eliminating Intelligent Design, or whatever you want to call it, from school curriculum amounts to nothing more than censorship, just like eliminating evolution.
You can keep intelligent design in your curriculum. But it should be a part of a religion or comparative world faiths class, not a part of a science class, because it is not science. It is wrong to claim that it is, and it is dogmatic interference to insist that it be taught as such.
-Rob
We havn't even discovered if there is/was life on the nearest planet to us... how in the world to these pompous asshats think they can know how the world began?
Can you explain to me how your brain works to form consciousness?
If not, where the hell do you get off being such a pompous asshat as to participate in a philosophical discussion, huh? After all, you seem to think that one must be able to explain a piece of the microcosm to have a chance of saying something meaningful about the macrocosm.
-Rob
I'm not a physicist, but I think it's finite - multiply the age by the speed of light.
That's just the observable Universe, which is indeed bounded by a "horizon" as you say.
The best current indication of the geometry of the Universe, though, is that it's flat, not a 4d analog to the surface of a sphere, which means that it is in fact infinite, or at the least a whole heck of a lot larger than the size of the observable Universe. We can't observe all of that, because light from anything beyond our "horizon" hasn't had time to reach us.
-Rob
So... How will the Universe end? Big Crunch, Dark & Cold, Equilibrium, Giant Black Holes, Act of God, or... what?
The default, most natural extrapolation is that it will end in a "heat death", ever expanding, with the expansion ever accelerating. Clusters of galaxies will stay clumped together and will die their little isolated heat deaths, but the clusters will be moving away from each other so fast that they'll move out of causal contact with each other, and eventually we won't be able to see any galaxy that we aren't gravitationally bound to now.
Read "The Five Ages of the Universe" by Adams and Laughlin to find out what happens to the matter in the Universe. They don't take into account the ever-accelerating expansion of the Universe, but within one cluster of galaxies what they outline is pretty well-informed and likely speculation.
Of course, that's just the default assumption. Exactly what will happen depends at least on the nature of the dark energy that makes up 70% of the energy density of the Universe, and just what dark energy is is something that we really do not know; we know much less about it than dark matter. Given what we know today, it would be extremenly surprising if the dynamics were such that the Universe would be able to halt and revesre it's expansion-- I'd personally bet against it-- but then again, many were extremely surprised that we measured the existence of dark energy in the first place.
-Rob
Intelligent Design, a recent theory that has gained enough respect from the scientific community
Woah, stop right there.
It's proponents claim that it has respect in the scientific community. You will find scientists who like the idea. But the fact is, so far as peer review and confirming experiments and the general scientific community, it is not considered really a viable theory. It's certainly not any competition for evolution amonst the sceintific community at all.
The proponents' PR claims it is, but that's just the PR.
See, for example, http://www.phys.cwru.edu/~krauss/inteloped.html.
-Rob
Umm ... yeah ... Debian ... exactly what I picture when I think of a Dynamic Constantly Moving and Developing Product.
Well, it is.
Debian is not a product. Debian Stable (currently Debian Woody) is effectively a product. But Debian is a project.
Debian Stable may only have a new release every couple of years, making it seem very stodgy and safe and conservative and slow. But the Debian project really is dynamic, constantly moving, and constantly developing. Try installing Debian Unstable, and you'll probably find it's a little more constantly moving than you want....
-Rob
And wasn't Sklyarov arrested when he came to the US?
...for things he did while in Russia, which are legal in Russia. (And which were only illegal in the USA under the technicalities of the DMCA.)
-Rob
If there are jobs that we don't want done, then they should be lost!
-Rob
The use of the term "clone" is very suggestive.
Microsoft would not be the dominant computing company it is today if Gates hadn't been clever enough to sell MS-DOS to hardware manufacturers who were making *clones* (even the term used) of IBM PCs.
Today, though, if anybody were to do the equivalent, Bill Gates would assuredly cry foul and insist that the behavior were a gross violation of fundamental intellectual property rights, and strictly against the law.
Now that Microsoft is the dominant industry leader, they want to make damn well sure that nobody can use the same (legal) tactics they used to gain market share.
Bastards.
It happens in business and politics. Something new gets started because of relatively liberal rules and pervasive freedom. Celebrating and arguing strongly in favor of those, somebody manages to get into a very strong position; and then they will make a philosophicaly about-face. Now they want as restrictive an environment as possible, to insure that they stay in power.
-Rob