I find the attemps of the so-called pro-science lobby to ridicule the ID argument in the form of the flying spaghetti monster very unscientific and cowardly. I realise that it helps them laugh, and helps them pursuade themselves that they personally have a sound basis for their own beliefs even though they have taken as little effort to validate them as they think the "religious fundamentalists" have for theirs.
[Idiots please note: I didn't call the FSM theory unscientific I'm just referring to the attempts to ridicule-away-from-discussion using this example; so don't tell me "thats the point" because its a very weak point and badly done]
Concepts of "irreducable complexity" and "observed organisation" (i.e. Paley's Pocketwatch) deserve serious consideration, and to say "OK then I'm going to believe in something ridiculous like the FSM then, to save me having to answer difficult questions" is to miss the point and to resort to throwing insults and saying ID are all idiots. You may believe that, but it's hardly science, and only Bush-level on the debating scale. It's as bad as the Vatican resorting to yelling "Heretic". How soon the tables turn. now the ivory towers think themselves the purveyors and verifiers of truth.
So what if we can't tell if the ID designer was a FSM or something else, thats not the point either. But when you meet the designer you can check for yourself if flying and spaghetti are major characteristics.
Here we go for another round of put-me-in-a-camp and then blame-me-for-not-fitting.
I'm not sure I disagree with your first statement or see any fault in the behaviour you describe.
Yes, (we) are re-implementing a unixoid system and yes (we) are making things how we think they ought to be. Why is Linux just NOW getting stuff? Cos thats where (we) have got to! If you think private namespaces should have been added before numa smp and various other goodies where the various other developers and funders disagree with you, you were free to add it yourself. *cough*. Linux is a work-in-progress, its strange to ask why something wasn't done before when the answer is obviously "because something else was being done." I didn't point out what "I was bound to." I don't care very much who came up with the good ideas. Good for the BSD crowd who you think are acheiving their goals. I have no comment to make on those goals. I'm doing it for fun and wages.
I really think someone mis-understood my comment about select. I've not sponsored any broken-select conventions or paid anyone or envourage anyone to implement a broken select. I merely see the linux select and dare to say I like it that way. In response you tell describe the job I'm involved in and then tell me how badly I'm doing at it.
I will tell you what I'm NOT doing, and that is: looking for your approval. I don't care if what I do, or what people you lump in with me do, makes sense to you or seems rational. It suits me and I'm doing it for me and people who appreciate it.
And to be honest what (we) should do with select even according to your directive depends on the interpretation of 'oid' in 'unixoid'
A clean wrapper around select is very hard to write, any time maths done after the inner select returns could be bogus; resulting in negative times, or incorrect times because "at that time" there was data to read. In the kernel is the proper way to do such time-maths atomically. Let libc, or "the wrapper" go the other way and just replace the old time value.
Now you've told me what the Linux folk are doing wrong, I'll tell you why BSD isn't as big as Linux, cos the history of BSD is littered with bitching and whinging and flames which is all a waste of time. Linux is as big as it is because the BSD folk are sticking with BSD. Linux is a termite mound made out of lego. BSD is a termite mound made out of ivory. I happen to think lego is more fun.
I have high respect for *BSD but I find the response to my mild preference interesting.
I guessed you were when you jumped on me for expressing my preference in return; but thats what you get when you share the source. Folk change it.
I read "the linux" ("the" linux?, kernel 2.4, glibc 2.3.2) man page before my last post:
I've also been well aquainted with this portability issue since reading "man perlfunc" a long time ago, it's just one of a bunch of porting issues and the least of my worries for this reason:
None of my core OS, main packages or dependancies has stayed stable for much more than six months; yes I get lovely new useful apps and features all the time, the lifetime of many given ways of doing things is short aspecially at the desktop.gui end of things. For me, the select timeout issues are just something that is taking a little longer to be "progressed", but its a small enough problem that I can keep it in my head.
You may question the use of "progressed", I don't mind, but I there is some value at least in a philosophy of "what ought the standard to be" and not just "what was it 10 years ago". Yes, I know the cost, but I like the benefits of a new "standard" from time to time, and this decade more are being made.
As I said, horses, I meant "horses for courses", or "each to his own"
hahahahhaaa! Is there is only one band of zealots these days?
What is this "you zelaots" group you are including me with?
Would this be the KDE Zealots or the Gnome Zealots. (Of course, I mean the progressive GPL KDE Zealots, not the Fundamentalist QPL Zealots, who probably mispronounce the pronunciation of SQL with it's precursor SEQL on purpose)
Or do you mean the MSSQL Zealots, or the MySQL Zealots (the purist MySQL Zealots, that is, who think MySQL AB are tainted because they did a deal with SCO branch), or the SQLITE zealots?
Or the BASH Zealots, or the ZSH Zealots?
Or maybe you mean the pro-Gnome-SQLITE fellowship-with-special-forgiveness-for-Amarok-cos -it's-so-cool-even-if-it-is-KDE Zealots?
In case you didn't know I'm one of the short-term-pragmaticist show-me-the-time-left-when-you-call-select Zealots, and I like to see how much time was left when a select call returns. It's not like I write code that can't remember what value it called select with, should it even to know.
If you think "slashdot readers" are a composite person then also realise that the composite person is shizophrenic, and also realise that you are one of it's brain cells. Otherwise try not to over-cluster your perception of slashdot readership and then blame invidivual posters who fall outside one of the dimensions of your clustering.
"yes, he still thinks that micro-kernels are more reliable than monolithic kernels;"
Does anybody dispute this?
AFAIK reliability is not the main pressing benefit of a monolithic kernel design so much as being able to scramble all over the internal structs of other kernel modules without needing a context switch, which can be very helpful and quick.
Yet, Microsoft must change; this old stance has not been working.
We expect the change; and there has been change.
First, the MS true type core fonts (that some think they later regretted) the the WTL (template library) on source forge and their command line tools. There may be something else.
MS are finding a new strategy that ensures financial success; Bill Gates is a businessman first.
This may be the next change coming up; finding that locked in=>locked out; and freedom=friends.
Sure MS office is good, but if its that good, why are they trying to MAKE you use it.
I understand your point but I think they will change and are changing.
I don't know if I am pro-union these days or not, but I do know they were sorely needed in their founding days;
however, the fact that Romanians (hi, guys) CAN compete for jobs, doesn't mean anyone else has to stand back and give them up.
So are you giving up your job to a Romanian, or are you asking someone else to? Or are you asking people not to help eachother collectively keep their individual jobs?
It's not a case of: don't let the Romanians get any of our candy, # it's a case of: lets all see if we can keep our jobs
each person only wants to keep 1 job they need, not particularly *A* job to anyone else.
Previous release Hoary Hedgehog wen't straight onto my Dell M70 laptop which is sata; treats the drive as scsi, works like a treat. (Had to do a special kernel to avoid some scsi race conditions in 2.6.11 but there were nothing to do with sata, and is fixed in the breezy badger kernel (which I'm using now on HH))
Few people on this planet can afford software developed to such a standard.
There will always be a market for "cheaper" software that is not guaranteed to such a level, and with support contacts instead, where developers will try a moderate ammount to fix problems as they arise.
From another perspective, the market is demanding of cheap software - not good software, which is why there is so much of it.
I think outlook express was the best email client out there for years, thunderbird only just makes level, and I'm not talking about features leaking all over the place, I'm talking about a clean interface that does the job. Outlook was a load of kack, but Outlook Express has one of the best email UI I have ever seen, and if it's been beaten, its been beaten by look-alikes.
Excellent comment; but, those picky people would also be wrong.
C/C++ more correctly but rarely known as C++/C is C++ written in the style of C, and is a wicked waste of Bjarne's time.
The guy behind xapian.org/xapian.com, Olly Bets knows how to write C++ with proper and repeated use of the base classes, iterators and templates and to be frank, his C++ looks almost like perl, and it is a delight to read.
C/C++ is just C with objects and falls so far short.
[I'm not mocking you here, just the whole issue and its the religious fanatisiscm on all sides]
Like ID althogether, we don't "know" and we can't prove it.
(whoever "we" is)
A bit like "evolution" (hmmm which theory of evolution is it this time), "we" (who's we?) don't "know" (which "know" do I mean here?)
Spanner: Is self-directed species change ID or evolution? I mean tight loop (body piercing:herpes type interaction) as well as wide loop (pollution:asthma type interation).
6) When do I get to mix objects in PHP, Perl, C, and Java into a single codebase? PHP is my language of choice for most of my work, but sometimes I'd just LOVE to something in C to get some improved performance, or maybe take a perl class and access it directly from PHP... Since there's not a standards organization everybody pays any attention to, this kind of functionality just won't happen anytime soon...
It reminds me of when I was helping my daughter learn to ride a bike.
She was peddling along and I was running along by the side holding the back of the seat to keep it steady.
She said "I'm doing it, dad, I'm doing it - dad, get off, I'm doing it."
It was only my holding on that stopped her falling down, but she couldn't see that.
So, the GPL might stop a few VC's from investing in something Linux-y, so what! If it wasn't for the GPL, then GNU/Linux wouldn't have become what is now starting to tempt VC's.
What do I care for VC's, GNU/Linux suits ME and a lot of people find it that way. I've debugged, contributed source and a few bug fixes, and it's been an absolute bargain for me.
and yet.... I've seen and ran webservers written entirely in php.
PHP has network socket capabilities, can be run outside of a webserver as a standalone scripted app - and with www.swig.org, arbitrary C/C++ libraries can easily be linked in to extend php.
However, my point wasn't against PHP (the source to which I have made some contributions) but all the various bulletin boards which are really discussion boards most of which seem to re-invent in the face of NNTP because few of the authors even know about it, or anything that cannot be shown in a web browser.
TWIG was a very good php webmail/nntp news reader; further it is possible to have an NNTP interface to most BB systems except to the degree that they allow editing of existing threaded posts.
My main grouch was the number of discussions I have an interest in that take place on these foul^H^H^H^Hless than ideal and well tried messaging systems when NNTP is much simpler to read; thank goodness for www.gmane.org that mirrors most mailing lists via NNTP and threaded web interface albeit without the pretty skins and fanciful markup language. It hurts to see 20 year old good systems badly re-written in html and javascript, but only because im contast it hurts to use them.
The tone of my comment makes me sound like William Caxton railing against the ignorant artists who make use of the printing press for..... pictures!! ( don't know that he ever did rail against them, but I could probably do a pretty good impression)
Dude, read my responses and ask if you attitude is is conducive towards honest debate.
My advice and question was relating to the fact that: pretending the question is about the womens body when the actual dispute is clearly about the babys body makes the pro-choice look ashamed or embarrassed and my advice was not to hide the facts because of this reason. [The reason for "hiding" I am informed in this thread is because otherwise the pro-lifers will pull some scurvey trick and make it look like chopping up a babys body IS a bad thing to debate observers, but that is hardly the point, if you are aware then that is enough, I sought only to raise the point and give a warning, not inist you accept it]
You seem to think that I am "hiding behind words" and I don't know why,unless it is that I won't re-debate the entire subject.
I have been frank enough to state where I think the "debating" fault of the pro-choicers is.
If I am hiding behind my words, please show me, otherwise I conclude that your laughing withdrawal is a face saving measure.
I've said twice that I'm not entering into this debate right now, and not responding to the comments I initially replied to, I'm just raising a question at that point in the discussion that pertains to the comment I responded to.
I've not got the government to impose any ideas, I've said I think it is a shame when laws are needed for such things. I haven't said whether I think laws are needed for such things, meaning, which way the same lies.
It seems like you've cast me as the typical pro-lifer and are responding to the typecast rather than what I said, all apart from your last point.
I may well hold the views you cast me as holding, but I have not expressed them here, and have said that I do not intend to express them here right now, I was only exploring the interesting phraseology.
I'm quite capable of discussing the whole issue at length, but I am not doing so here.
I have an Orange SPV C550 which sits around in my pocket and doesn't scratch (sometimes WITH my keys).
It plays music with windows media player, supports a 1GB storage card. (it also plays midi files with quite a decent midi patchset.) It plays games too. It's also an ebook reader.
Did I mention it's also a phone?
Oh, and it is quite scratch proof. Apparently. I didn't put sandpaper in my pocket.
GNU/Linux is what it is BECAUSE it's GPL and GPL appeals to zealots or zealously share and zealously guard their freedom.
If it were not for the GPL, GNU/Linux would be a footnote to the BSD's and the BSD's would NOT be like GNU/Linux is today.
I don't care if someone thinks I'm a zealot - gosh, as if I'd give away some of my freedom just so that a strager whose opinion I don't care for won't label me with what he thinks is an unattractive label.
I'm being zealous for me and the other zealots, not him.
Slashdot Mirror
Well said.
I find the attemps of the so-called pro-science lobby to ridicule the ID argument in the form of the flying spaghetti monster very unscientific and cowardly. I realise that it helps them laugh, and helps them pursuade themselves that they personally have a sound basis for their own beliefs even though they have taken as little effort to validate them as they think the "religious fundamentalists" have for theirs.
[Idiots please note: I didn't call the FSM theory unscientific I'm just referring to the attempts to ridicule-away-from-discussion using this example; so don't tell me "thats the point" because its a very weak point and badly done]
Concepts of "irreducable complexity" and "observed organisation" (i.e. Paley's Pocketwatch) deserve serious consideration, and to say "OK then I'm going to believe in something ridiculous like the FSM then, to save me having to answer difficult questions" is to miss the point and to resort to throwing insults and saying ID are all idiots. You may believe that, but it's hardly science, and only Bush-level on the debating scale. It's as bad as the Vatican resorting to yelling "Heretic". How soon the tables turn. now the ivory towers think themselves the purveyors and verifiers of truth.
So what if we can't tell if the ID designer was a FSM or something else, thats not the point either. But when you meet the designer you can check for yourself if flying and spaghetti are major characteristics.
I prefer to refer more reverently to the creator.
Sam
Here we go for another round of put-me-in-a-camp and then blame-me-for-not-fitting.
I'm not sure I disagree with your first statement or see any fault in the behaviour you describe.
Yes, (we) are re-implementing a unixoid system and yes (we) are making things how we think they ought to be. Why is Linux just NOW getting stuff? Cos thats where (we) have got to! If you think private namespaces should have been added before numa smp and various other goodies where the various other developers and funders disagree with you, you were free to add it yourself. *cough*. Linux is a work-in-progress, its strange to ask why something wasn't done before when the answer is obviously "because something else was being done." I didn't point out what "I was bound to." I don't care very much who came up with the good ideas. Good for the BSD crowd who you think are acheiving their goals. I have no comment to make on those goals. I'm doing it for fun and wages.
I really think someone mis-understood my comment about select. I've not sponsored any broken-select conventions or paid anyone or envourage anyone to implement a broken select. I merely see the linux select and dare to say I like it that way. In response you tell describe the job I'm involved in and then tell me how badly I'm doing at it.
I will tell you what I'm NOT doing, and that is: looking for your approval. I don't care if what I do, or what people you lump in with me do, makes sense to you or seems rational. It suits me and I'm doing it for me and people who appreciate it.
And to be honest what (we) should do with select even according to your directive depends on the interpretation of 'oid' in 'unixoid'
A clean wrapper around select is very hard to write, any time maths done after the inner select returns could be bogus; resulting in negative times, or incorrect times because "at that time" there was data to read. In the kernel is the proper way to do such time-maths atomically. Let libc, or "the wrapper" go the other way and just replace the old time value.
Now you've told me what the Linux folk are doing wrong, I'll tell you why BSD isn't as big as Linux, cos the history of BSD is littered with bitching and whinging and flames which is all a waste of time. Linux is as big as it is because the BSD folk are sticking with BSD. Linux is a termite mound made out of lego. BSD is a termite mound made out of ivory. I happen to think lego is more fun.
I have high respect for *BSD but I find the response to my mild preference interesting.
Sam
ouch....
you BSD zealots got me good.. agggh
final thought: dang, which BSD zealots were they... and thats GNU/Linux to you... Mr GNU/Linux
I guessed you were when you jumped on me for expressing my preference in return; but thats what you get when you share the source. Folk change it.
I read "the linux" ("the" linux?, kernel 2.4, glibc 2.3.2) man page before my last post:
I've also been well aquainted with this portability issue since reading "man perlfunc" a long time ago, it's just one of a bunch of porting issues and the least of my worries for this reason:
None of my core OS, main packages or dependancies has stayed stable for much more than six months; yes I get lovely new useful apps and features all the time, the lifetime of many given ways of doing things is short aspecially at the desktop.gui end of things. For me, the select timeout issues are just something that is taking a little longer to be "progressed", but its a small enough problem that I can keep it in my head.
You may question the use of "progressed", I don't mind, but I there is some value at least in a philosophy of "what ought the standard to be" and not just "what was it 10 years ago". Yes, I know the cost, but I like the benefits of a new "standard" from time to time, and this decade more are being made.
As I said, horses, I meant "horses for courses", or "each to his own"
Sam
you zealots??
s -it's-so-cool-even-if-it-is-KDE Zealots?
hahahahhaaa! Is there is only one band of zealots these days?
What is this "you zelaots" group you are including me with?
Would this be the KDE Zealots or the Gnome Zealots. (Of course, I mean the progressive GPL KDE Zealots, not the Fundamentalist QPL Zealots, who probably mispronounce the pronunciation of SQL with it's precursor SEQL on purpose)
Or do you mean the MSSQL Zealots, or the MySQL Zealots (the purist MySQL Zealots, that is, who think MySQL AB are tainted because they did a deal with SCO branch), or the SQLITE zealots?
Or the BASH Zealots, or the ZSH Zealots?
Or maybe you mean the pro-Gnome-SQLITE fellowship-with-special-forgiveness-for-Amarok-co
In case you didn't know I'm one of the short-term-pragmaticist show-me-the-time-left-when-you-call-select Zealots, and I like to see how much time was left when a select call returns. It's not like I write code that can't remember what value it called select with, should it even to know.
If you think "slashdot readers" are a composite person then also realise that the composite person is shizophrenic, and also realise that you are one of it's brain cells. Otherwise try not to over-cluster your perception of slashdot readership and then blame invidivual posters who fall outside one of the dimensions of your clustering.
Sam
I want select() to monidy my timeval.
horses
Sam
"yes, he still thinks that micro-kernels are more reliable than monolithic kernels ;"
Does anybody dispute this?
AFAIK reliability is not the main pressing benefit of a monolithic kernel design so much as being able to scramble all over the internal structs of other kernel modules without needing a context switch, which can be very helpful and quick.
Sam
Yet, Microsoft must change; this old stance has not been working.
We expect the change; and there has been change.
First, the MS true type core fonts (that some think they later regretted)
the the WTL (template library) on source forge and their command line tools.
There may be something else.
MS are finding a new strategy that ensures financial success; Bill Gates is a businessman first.
This may be the next change coming up; finding that locked in=>locked out; and freedom=friends.
Sure MS office is good, but if its that good, why are they trying to MAKE you use it.
I understand your point but I think they will change and are changing.
I don't know if I am pro-union these days or not, but I do know they were sorely needed in their founding days;
however, the fact that Romanians (hi, guys) CAN compete for jobs, doesn't mean anyone else has to stand back and give them up.
So are you giving up your job to a Romanian, or are you asking someone else to?
Or are you asking people not to help eachother collectively keep their individual jobs?
It's not a case of: don't let the Romanians get any of our candy, #
it's a case of: lets all see if we can keep our jobs
each person only wants to keep 1 job they need, not particularly *A* job to anyone else.
Sam
Previous release Hoary Hedgehog wen't straight onto my Dell M70 laptop which is sata; treats the drive as scsi, works like a treat.
(Had to do a special kernel to avoid some scsi race conditions in 2.6.11 but there were nothing to do with sata, and is fixed in the breezy badger kernel (which I'm using now on HH))
Sam
Please post a link to the tecra stuff you found that helped so much, or just tell us what you had to do.
Sam
Few people on this planet can afford software developed to such a standard.
There will always be a market for "cheaper" software that is not guaranteed to such a level, and with support contacts instead, where developers will try a moderate ammount to fix problems as they arise.
From another perspective, the market is demanding of cheap software - not good software, which is why there is so much of it.
Sam
I think outlook express was the best email client out there for years, thunderbird only just makes level, and I'm not talking about features leaking all over the place, I'm talking about a clean interface that does the job. Outlook was a load of kack, but Outlook Express has one of the best email UI I have ever seen, and if it's been beaten, its been beaten by look-alikes.
Sam
Nice one; ...but thats not real perl.
Strictly speaking: Global symbol "$you" requires explicit package name
Maybe the per parser doesn't throw up any errors but its no more perl that a lot of C/C++ is C++
Sam
Excellent comment; but, those picky people would also be wrong.
C/C++ more correctly but rarely known as C++/C is C++ written in the style of C, and is a wicked waste of Bjarne's time.
The guy behind xapian.org/xapian.com, Olly Bets knows how to write C++ with proper and repeated use of the base classes, iterators and templates and to be frank, his C++ looks almost like perl, and it is a delight to read.
C/C++ is just C with objects and falls so far short.
Sam
[I'm not mocking you here, just the whole issue and its the religious fanatisiscm on all sides]
Like ID althogether, we don't "know" and we can't prove it.
(whoever "we" is)
A bit like "evolution" (hmmm which theory of evolution is it this time), "we" (who's we?) don't "know" (which "know" do I mean here?)
Spanner: Is self-directed species change ID or evolution? I mean tight loop (body piercing:herpes type interaction) as well as wide loop (pollution:asthma type interation).
Sam
6) When do I get to mix objects in PHP, Perl, C, and Java into a single codebase? PHP is my language of choice for most of my work, but sometimes I'd just LOVE to something in C to get some improved performance, or maybe take a perl class and access it directly from PHP... Since there's not a standards organization everybody pays any attention to, this kind of functionality just won't happen anytime soon...
see www.swig.org
php is a library that can be linked with a jvm using jni and both php and java can access the same swig-wrapped objects.
Sam
It reminds me of when I was helping my daughter learn to ride a bike.
She was peddling along and I was running along by the side holding the back of the seat to keep it steady.
She said "I'm doing it, dad, I'm doing it - dad, get off, I'm doing it."
It was only my holding on that stopped her falling down, but she couldn't see that.
So, the GPL might stop a few VC's from investing in something Linux-y, so what!
If it wasn't for the GPL, then GNU/Linux wouldn't have become what is now starting to tempt VC's.
What do I care for VC's, GNU/Linux suits ME and a lot of people find it that way. I've debugged, contributed source and a few bug fixes, and it's been an absolute bargain for me.
Sam
and yet.... I've seen and ran webservers written entirely in php.
..... pictures!! ( don't know that he ever did rail against them, but I could probably do a pretty good impression)
PHP has network socket capabilities, can be run outside of a webserver as a standalone scripted app - and with www.swig.org, arbitrary C/C++ libraries can easily be linked in to extend php.
However, my point wasn't against PHP (the source to which I have made some contributions) but all the various bulletin boards which are really discussion boards most of which seem to re-invent in the face of NNTP because few of the authors even know about it, or anything that cannot be shown in a web browser.
TWIG was a very good php webmail/nntp news reader; further it is possible to have an NNTP interface to most BB systems except to the degree that they allow editing of existing threaded posts.
My main grouch was the number of discussions I have an interest in that take place on these foul^H^H^H^Hless than ideal and well tried messaging systems when NNTP is much simpler to read; thank goodness for www.gmane.org that mirrors most mailing lists via NNTP and threaded web interface albeit without the pretty skins and fanciful markup language. It hurts to see 20 year old good systems badly re-written in html and javascript, but only because im contast it hurts to use them.
The tone of my comment makes me sound like William Caxton railing against the ignorant artists who make use of the printing press for
Sam
The essential lacking feature is generally threaded NNTP access.
Sam
This is why you want to use Zimbra instead of all the other AJAX applications at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/29/000223 &tid=126 because Zimbra guys don't want to own you but the other guys do.
Zimbra guys can charge for convenient hosting, with the customers having no fear of being locked in. Sharing the source will be a business neccessity.
I can't decide if this clause of the GPL is a good thing or not.
Sam
Dude, read my responses and ask if you attitude is is conducive towards honest debate.
My advice and question was relating to the fact that: pretending the question is about the womens body when the actual dispute is clearly about the babys body makes the pro-choice look ashamed or embarrassed and my advice was not to hide the facts because of this reason.
[The reason for "hiding" I am informed in this thread is because otherwise the pro-lifers will pull some scurvey trick and make it look like chopping up a babys body IS a bad thing to debate observers, but that is hardly the point, if you are aware then that is enough, I sought only to raise the point and give a warning, not inist you accept it]
You seem to think that I am "hiding behind words" and I don't know why,unless it is that I won't re-debate the entire subject.
I have been frank enough to state where I think the "debating" fault of the pro-choicers is.
If I am hiding behind my words, please show me, otherwise I conclude that your laughing withdrawal is a face saving measure.
Sam
Someone is confused.
I've said twice that I'm not entering into this debate right now, and not responding to the comments I initially replied to, I'm just raising a question at that point in the discussion that pertains to the comment I responded to.
I've not got the government to impose any ideas, I've said I think it is a shame when laws are needed for such things. I haven't said whether I think laws are needed for such things, meaning, which way the same lies.
It seems like you've cast me as the typical pro-lifer and are responding to the typecast rather than what I said, all apart from your last point.
I may well hold the views you cast me as holding, but I have not expressed them here, and have said that I do not intend to express them here right now, I was only exploring the interesting phraseology.
I'm quite capable of discussing the whole issue at length, but I am not doing so here.
Sam
I have an Orange SPV C550 which sits around in my pocket and doesn't scratch (sometimes WITH my keys).
It plays music with windows media player, supports a 1GB storage card.
(it also plays midi files with quite a decent midi patchset.)
It plays games too.
It's also an ebook reader.
Did I mention it's also a phone?
Oh, and it is quite scratch proof. Apparently. I didn't put sandpaper in my pocket.
Sam
GNU/Linux is what it is BECAUSE it's GPL and GPL appeals to zealots or zealously share and zealously guard their freedom.
If it were not for the GPL, GNU/Linux would be a footnote to the BSD's and the BSD's would NOT be like GNU/Linux is today.
I don't care if someone thinks I'm a zealot - gosh, as if I'd give away some of my freedom just so that a strager whose opinion I don't care for won't label me with what he thinks is an unattractive label.
I'm being zealous for me and the other zealots, not him.
Sam