No, it's not. It's people trying (and failing) to make a reductio ad absurdum argument. That is, extrapolating the position until it doesn't make sense. The idea being, if the extrapolation is absurd, the original claim must be absurd by association.
The thing that's scary is that some people are starting to think at the extremes.
Sigh. This has been hashed out long before. But I'll go ahead and add comments anyway. This will get modded way offtopic, since it is.
Read the following quotes, and ask yourself, if this were the information you had, wouldn't you consider Iraq to be a clear and present danger? If we can't trust the assertions of our Democratic leaders, who can we trust?
"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line." - President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998
"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." - President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998
"Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face." - Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998
"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983." - Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998
"We urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs." - Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sens. Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and others Oct. 9, 1998
"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process." - Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998
"Hussein has... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies." - Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999
"There is no doubt that... Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies." - Letter to President Bush, Signed by Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL,) and others, December 5, 2001
"We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandated of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them." - Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002
"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country." - Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. - Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction." - Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002
"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons..." - Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002
"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a
I agree with you completely. It's one of the reasons that Renderman is as popular as it is. For many things, "good enough" is, well, good enough.
However, "real time" isn't the driver here. The original poster was claiming that real time rendering technologies were a requirement, and I disagreed. The question is one of price vs. performance, not a particular hard time budget, which is what real time would entail.
If, within the next few years, we see some really good rendering engines - cone-tracer + radiosity (or better) at speeds fast enough for live-action - then maybe Mr Lucas would do the last 3 parts just to play with the new gizmos. I could believe it.
Real-time rendering has never really been a part of movie production. What's needed (and has been developed) is good compositing technology, so the live action footage may be seamlessly combined with computer generated imagery. But it doesn't really matter how long the CGI takes to render. That's what distributed parallelism is all about. It's the realism that's important, not the rendering time.
Death is what allows evolution to occur in the first place. Without death, organisms couldn't be replaced by ever improving versions of themselves.
I think you mean that reproduction, not death, is what allows evolution to occur. It's not the fact that the organism dies that causes evolutionary change, it's the fact that the organism has a process for replacing itself. That process is reproduction, however it's accomplished. Death is mostly unrelated.
So, by defenition [sic], if it works on your laptop then it is "laptop ready." Not likely! If a distro is ready for the laptop, then it should work OK on the vast majority of laptops, not just the one that you happen to have.
We should hold the author of the article to the same standard. His "State of Laptop Linux" was based on his experience with a number of distributions on a single Toshiba laptop.
And I contest the claim that a government lab spending money on something has anything to do with a private buisness being able to make money from the same activity.
The money that was involved in these contracts was sourced at a government lab from taxpayer dollars and sent to private businesses in direct compensation for their successful software development work. This is pretty much the definition of "making money" from the activity.
As a government entity the monetary compensation is funded by tax revenue.
Of course. I'm well aware of that and try to spend the money responsibly. We have the occasional business problem (I won't name names - read your newspapers), but I would argue that those are the exception, not the rule. At least in my experience.
As long as your "employer" is funded by my tax revenue the Developers are on the dole.
(Not quite sure why you put the word employer in quotes. The University of California employs thousands of people. Even if I were a Federal employee, the Federal government is just as much an employer as private entities.)
But the funding source is irrelvant to the argument. The point is that open source developers very well can get paid for their work. Since I work for a public entity, the direct examples I give come from federal taxpayer dollars. I'm sure you can come up with examples from private enterprise.
Much like welfare, the dispensing entity has limited liability to produce a return.
Can you explain what you mean here? We've had very good return on our open source contracts, and I believe that they've been good investments of the public's money.
Here's a different question: Would you rather have us entering contracts to produce closed source or open source products? Considering that it's the public's money, I would argue strongly that, unless there are classification issues to address, all software produced from public dollars should be made open source and available to the public at large.
Dude, convincing government employees that they're parasites feeding off of the taxpaying public is next to impossible.
I fully understand and appreciate that my salary is paid for from the public largess. I would argue that my co-workers understand the same. I do everything I can to responsibly spend those dollars to do the task that Congress has tasked my Lab to do. Your comment about "parasites" argues more toward your belief about the value of that task. That's not up to me or even my Lab to decide. Take it up with your representatives and senators who fund us with the budget they vote for.
But all of that is somewhat irrelevant to the point.
I am giving counter argument to the idea that open source developers are not paid. The funding source is not germane to the argument. I gave four examples where we directly paid people to produce open source software. I'm sure you will be able to find other examples.
nobody would be able to make a living writing software
I have managed contracts to fund developers working on opensourcesoftwareprojects. My employer pays programmers to write software and to release it with an open source license. The Department of Energy (our funding source) has spent literally millions of dollars over the last few years on projects like this.
I contest the claim that writing open source software entails no monetary compensation to the software developer.
[S]imply block out connection to the tracking protocol. If Personal Internet firewalls were not so dufus designed they would make it easy to say 'this program has no business connecting to the Internet, silently disable all connection attempts without notice'.
The point was that the PDF would not be displayed if the tracking server could not be contacted. If you blocked the outgoing connection, you now have a useless PDF.
Then that's the fault of the sender. Most email clients have three options: plain text, html, or both. [This] is generally configurable on a per user basis.
Very true. I hope GMail has such configuration. I haven't logged in recently to check.
But, seriously: Why don't you just get a compitent email client? [Patronization deleted.]
As for my druthers - I wasn't trying to argue from my own personal preferences or setup. I don't have a compatibility problem with my local email client. I can handle text, HTML, or both just fine. But my experience is irrelevant to the general case.
I was pointing out that the argument that you can always assume an HTML-capable mail reader in the general case is a false one. There are many people out there who still use text-only email readers for valid reasons other than they "can't be bothered."
Maybe with gmail it is. But you're not guaranteed that all mail clients will behave this way. I have received emails that are purely HTML with no separate text MIME block.
The point was that you don't know the environment in which your email is read at the recipient end. Is it a webmail app? Is it mutt? Thunderbird? Outlook? You have no guarantee (unless you ask the recipient) that they'll even be able to render HTML with their email reader. Not everyone uses a webmail program these days.
someone high up at OSDL clear believes "scandal-mongering = advertising revenue"
Considering that article headlines come from the article submitter (the rank and file), I find your claim of high-level scandal-mongering to be, well... scandal-mongering!
Some people may be missing the point. This is more than just a way to hold a bootable Linux distribution. This is all of your home, third party applications, databases, everything. Rather than merely keeping some of your documents with you (as many do with small USB drives), this contains everything, simply everything you need to do work on your computer. It is your computer, in essence. On my laptop (running Fedora Core), my home directory weighs in at about 16 gigabytes.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called "satire".
No, it's not. It's people trying (and failing) to make a reductio ad absurdum argument. That is, extrapolating the position until it doesn't make sense. The idea being, if the extrapolation is absurd, the original claim must be absurd by association.
The thing that's scary is that some people are starting to think at the extremes.
But would you do so automagically?
Your a sheep if you agree , your a zelout if your agree , if you disagree your a troll , if you disagree your a tool.
I advise application of electrodes to the genitals of all those who misspell "you're" four times in a row!
Read the following quotes, and ask yourself, if this were the information you had, wouldn't you consider Iraq to be a clear and present danger? If we can't trust the assertions of our Democratic leaders, who can we trust?
What most people refer to as a "soul" is really just the result of a complex processing system coping with trauma.
Or so you believe. You have no way of proving definitively that this is the case. Belief or disbelief in a soul is non-provable.
I agree with you completely. It's one of the reasons that Renderman is as popular as it is. For many things, "good enough" is, well, good enough.
However, "real time" isn't the driver here. The original poster was claiming that real time rendering technologies were a requirement, and I disagreed. The question is one of price vs. performance, not a particular hard time budget, which is what real time would entail.
I appreciate your elucidation.
If, within the next few years, we see some really good rendering engines - cone-tracer + radiosity (or better) at speeds fast enough for live-action - then maybe Mr Lucas would do the last 3 parts just to play with the new gizmos. I could believe it.
Real-time rendering has never really been a part of movie production. What's needed (and has been developed) is good compositing technology, so the live action footage may be seamlessly combined with computer generated imagery. But it doesn't really matter how long the CGI takes to render. That's what distributed parallelism is all about. It's the realism that's important, not the rendering time.
But which end is first? The end closest to 3.14 or the other end? :-)
Death is what allows evolution to occur in the first place. Without death, organisms couldn't be replaced by ever improving versions of themselves.
I think you mean that reproduction, not death, is what allows evolution to occur. It's not the fact that the organism dies that causes evolutionary change, it's the fact that the organism has a process for replacing itself. That process is reproduction, however it's accomplished. Death is mostly unrelated.
So, by defenition [sic], if it works on your laptop then it is "laptop ready." Not likely! If a distro is ready for the laptop, then it should work OK on the vast majority of laptops, not just the one that you happen to have.
We should hold the author of the article to the same standard. His "State of Laptop Linux" was based on his experience with a number of distributions on a single Toshiba laptop.
And I contest the claim that a government lab spending money on something has anything to do with a private buisness being able to make money from the same activity.
The money that was involved in these contracts was sourced at a government lab from taxpayer dollars and sent to private businesses in direct compensation for their successful software development work. This is pretty much the definition of "making money" from the activity.
Government money should NOT be used in GPL software. BSD sure, but not GPL.
All of the licenses that I have required from external entities has been BSD.
As a government entity the monetary compensation is funded by tax revenue.
Of course. I'm well aware of that and try to spend the money responsibly. We have the occasional business problem (I won't name names - read your newspapers), but I would argue that those are the exception, not the rule. At least in my experience.
As long as your "employer" is funded by my tax revenue the Developers are on the dole.
(Not quite sure why you put the word employer in quotes. The University of California employs thousands of people. Even if I were a Federal employee, the Federal government is just as much an employer as private entities.)
But the funding source is irrelvant to the argument. The point is that open source developers very well can get paid for their work. Since I work for a public entity, the direct examples I give come from federal taxpayer dollars. I'm sure you can come up with examples from private enterprise.
Much like welfare, the dispensing entity has limited liability to produce a return.
Can you explain what you mean here? We've had very good return on our open source contracts, and I believe that they've been good investments of the public's money.
Here's a different question: Would you rather have us entering contracts to produce closed source or open source products? Considering that it's the public's money, I would argue strongly that, unless there are classification issues to address, all software produced from public dollars should be made open source and available to the public at large.
Dude, convincing government employees that they're parasites feeding off of the taxpaying public is next to impossible.
I fully understand and appreciate that my salary is paid for from the public largess. I would argue that my co-workers understand the same. I do everything I can to responsibly spend those dollars to do the task that Congress has tasked my Lab to do. Your comment about "parasites" argues more toward your belief about the value of that task. That's not up to me or even my Lab to decide. Take it up with your representatives and senators who fund us with the budget they vote for.
But all of that is somewhat irrelevant to the point.
I am giving counter argument to the idea that open source developers are not paid. The funding source is not germane to the argument. I gave four examples where we directly paid people to produce open source software. I'm sure you will be able to find other examples.
nobody would be able to make a living writing software
I have managed contracts to fund developers working on open source software projects. My employer pays programmers to write software and to release it with an open source license. The Department of Energy (our funding source) has spent literally millions of dollars over the last few years on projects like this.
I contest the claim that writing open source software entails no monetary compensation to the software developer.
the penny has 66/33 probability of ...
A what probability?
There was a lot of discussion about the latter point, including some really fascinating suggestions that belong in another discussion.
Would you be willing to make a Journal entry about this? I'd be interested to hear more of what you learned about support options in your panel.
[S]imply block out connection to the tracking protocol. If Personal Internet firewalls were not so dufus designed they would make it easy to say 'this program has no business connecting to the Internet, silently disable all connection attempts without notice'.
The point was that the PDF would not be displayed if the tracking server could not be contacted. If you blocked the outgoing connection, you now have a useless PDF.
Or did I misread something in your argument...
Then that's the fault of the sender. Most email clients have three options: plain text, html, or both. [This] is generally configurable on a per user basis.
Very true. I hope GMail has such configuration. I haven't logged in recently to check.
But, seriously: Why don't you just get a compitent email client? [Patronization deleted.]
As for my druthers - I wasn't trying to argue from my own personal preferences or setup. I don't have a compatibility problem with my local email client. I can handle text, HTML, or both just fine. But my experience is irrelevant to the general case.
I was pointing out that the argument that you can always assume an HTML-capable mail reader in the general case is a false one. There are many people out there who still use text-only email readers for valid reasons other than they "can't be bothered."
Tick tock, tick tock. I think she's about at 13 to 14 minutes at this point.
Maybe with gmail it is. But you're not guaranteed that all mail clients will behave this way. I have received emails that are purely HTML with no separate text MIME block.
Are you a troll? I'll feed you anyway...
The point was that you don't know the environment in which your email is read at the recipient end. Is it a webmail app? Is it mutt? Thunderbird? Outlook? You have no guarantee (unless you ask the recipient) that they'll even be able to render HTML with their email reader. Not everyone uses a webmail program these days.
a confidential set of slides clearly labeled "Apple Need-to-Knox Confidential."
Containing Apple's secret gelatin recipe!
someone high up at OSDL clear believes "scandal-mongering = advertising revenue"
Considering that article headlines come from the article submitter (the rank and file), I find your claim of high-level scandal-mongering to be, well... scandal-mongering!
Some people may be missing the point. This is more than just a way to hold a bootable Linux distribution. This is all of your home, third party applications, databases, everything. Rather than merely keeping some of your documents with you (as many do with small USB drives), this contains everything, simply everything you need to do work on your computer. It is your computer, in essence. On my laptop (running Fedora Core), my home directory weighs in at about 16 gigabytes.