I'd suggest you give Ubuntu (I like Kubuntu because I like KDE) a look. It does pretty well with autodetecting hardware -- better than Knoppix did -- and maintaining it is pretty easy too. Actually, maintaining the packages is easier than in Windows, because Adept checks every day to see if there are upgrades available and prompts you to do the update if you want to. I know Windows has something similar for system-level stuff, but Adept does it for everything you've got.
It's not to the level it needs to be to take over the world, but it's ready for a whole demographic layer of folks who weren't ready to try Linux a few years ago. I'd aim it for folks who are pretty tech-savvy and adventurous, and to folks who are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the world of computers. The latter group I'd suggest it for because they haven't already bought into the MS branding -- they don't know what a computer's for, exactly, so they don't think they need Office and PhotoShop and IE. You can set them up with kubuntu on old hardware and have them functioning on something that couldn't run Vista, and would crawl with XP.
Yeah, sorta, maybe. I've done a number of kubuntu installs lately, and they really aren't terribly complicated (although I'll admit that my small-but-growing linux background made facing/dev/hda1 and/dev/hda2 comfortable and familiar where they wouldn't be to a linux noob). It asks for the language you want to install in, and then your time zone, and what partition you want to install to (with the drool-proof option of finding space on your main partition automatic and default) (and safe the two times I tried it), and then your name and what you want the machine named. A Windows install would not have been easier, but most Windows users have never done a Windows install, so it might be a bit much for most Windows users. To make this an apples comparison, then, we should have folks not talking about how hard or easy the ubuntu install was unless they've done a Windows install, and the rest should be discussion of using it after someone else has done the install, just like somebody else did the Windows install it's being compared to.
People will still find things to complain about, but they complain about Windows machines also. If you locked them into using Ubuntu, the way they've always been locked into Windows, it wouldn't take a week for them to find that most of them can do most of what they need to do (if not all of it) just as easily under ubuntu as they did under Windows. They might also notice that their machines are more stable and run faster, particularly without having the performance hits of always-on anti-virus programs (Norton slammed our office from day one, and each new version is worse).
I know that everybody wants a flat learning curve on everything they want to do, but that's not available anywhere. You can't fight for your right to know nothing and expect to keep up with the advances of our increasingly technical society. "I don't like computers" is like "I don't like internal combustion engines" these days -- interesting, but it doesn't reduce the enormous life-style hit you're going to take for that position if you're serious about it.
I find it tiresome to have people talking about all of the slaves the Egyptians took when there really were very few slaves in Egypt. The pyramids weren't built by slaves. The Egyptians managed to put together a civilization that survived for a half-dozen millenia -- more than three times as long as the Christian Era -- something no European civilization can touch. We're certainly in no position to be looking down our noses at them.
Yes, a very good point. Nobody should be citing any encyclopedia in a scholarly paper. However, using an encyclopedia (including Wikipedia) is a good place to start getting some background in a topic that you're not already familiar with, and then you can follow up the sources cited to get into the secondary and primary material. An advantage to Wikipedia is that it might have not only a cite but a link to a text copy of the original document cited.
I'm really, really tiring of the snobbery about Wikipedia. I've had several of my professors say "Don't use Wikipedia," but I've found their points to be rather silly in that regard. With the exception at the top of my comment, it's as good a place to start as any on most topics, and better than many. The discussion/talk page on every article also gives the beginner an understanding of what some of the controversies are on whatever topic that's at least as useful as what they can gain from footnotes in a standard text (a hell of a lot more useful than endnotes).
You mean the quarry sites right next to the Sphinx that show how the blocks were cut and that match the makeup of the blocks in the pyramid? Go ahead and look at them if you want -- they're pretty cool.
Everybody is clear that the pyramids were faced in a lighter colored and polished stone from across the river, some remnants of which can be seen at the top of (I believe) Khufu's pyramid? That was removed by later dynasties for use in other monuments. And the top stones were quarried in Upper (Southern) Egypt and barged down to Giza. These were not simple structures, even though they were not completed, and they were made from a variety of materials. I'm not persuaded that there may have been some of this concrete involved, but I would wonder why it wasn't used anyplace else at any other time over the thousands of years after the pyramids were built. It would seem to have been a good candidate for construction, perhaps as an alternative to the mud-brick that almost everything in Egypt was made from. Obviously, if it's what any significant part of the pyramids are made from, it's far more durable than mud-brick.
There are massive piles of rubble that are remnants of the ramps laid out along the edge of the Giza plateau. So, yes, they've looked for them and found them.
Climate things were different then than now, and Egypt did feed Rome, but those events are thousands of years apart. There was desert there at the time of the Old Kingdom -- the Egyptians always had a term for the black lands (which were flooded by the Nile every year) and the red lands (which were desert). There was a time a few thousand years earlier than the Egyptian civilization when North Africa was very wet, but then George Bush came along with Hummers and changed the climate and turned it all to desert.
Oh, wait, that was a climate change that can't be blamed on Bush. I forgot.
Um, the scarab beetle was a holy symbol because it pushed around the little balls of dung and (with eggs laid in it), life came out of it. It was a symbol of life and birth. The ball-ness of it was also cool, but it wasn't the only reason for the scarab's role in Egyptian religion.
I think you're misunderstanding the role of choice in the lives of dependent workers in ancient Egypt. Which isn't surprising -- it's a very different way of seeing the world than much of anybody capable of reading this message has ever experienced. This was a society where your lot in life was determined when you were born -- with very, very few exceptions, there was no upward mobility anywhere in society, so you didn't have people trying to claw their way to the top of the social order from the peasant class -- there was never upward mobility for peasants, ever at all. To us, that sounds oppressive and depressing, but remember that this was a civilization that traces back to the time of the creation of language, and that survived until the time that the rest of the world was capable of producing written documents to talk about them. Our notion of an egalitarian system with possibility for upward social mobility is a recent massively implemented social experiment by contrast, where we keep things going by tap-dancing very, very quickly and hoping that everything doesn't go into the crapper tomorrow, because it could.
These workers did not rebel. Had they rebelled, they could have overwhelmed any army any king ever took into the field by simply burying the other army in their bodies. They did not do so over a period of thousands of years, which is not a sign that they hated their lives and badly wanted more.
They did not have choice about when or if they would work on the pyramids -- it was hard enough work to organize this labor without having to recruit volunteers, especially since there would be no guarantee that the right workers would volunteer (and not volunteer). And they wouldn't have known what to do if someone had asked for volunteers -- it just wasn't part of their world. Their world was on in which the most important thing an Egyptian could to was his job, and that job was (essentially) that of his father. If anyone, from the king down to a peasant, failed to do his job well, ma'at was disturbed, and the consequences of that could be catastrophic to everyone. Egyptian girls didn't get starry eyed over the misunderstood rebel, with or without a cause -- a rebel was a threat that was addressed without hesitation. It was not unheard of for a king who was seen to have failed his duty to ma'at to have his afterlife (the most important thing in the Egyptian world) directly attacked.
Trying to overlay modern or even old European cultural structures on ancient Egypt doesn't work. The Egyptians were not Europeans, and they didn't live in a world any European would recognize. You want a reference that discusses this stuff? Look for Barry Kemp, professor of Egyptology at Cambridge and his books with Ancient Egypt in the title. He makes these points strongly, albeit more than a little boringly as well. I'm not pulling this out of my butt.
Oh, you got some of those purposes right, but others wrong. The pyramids were about having a shape for the king's tomb that would help a portion of his being find its way into the sky to become one with Amun-Re, so their purpose was religious. These purposes were not, ultimately effective -- none of the great pyramids were finished before their intended occupants had already died -- they weren't actually finished at all.
They were also very large public-works projects, and they were very impressive, but they were not used to quell slave rebellions because there weren't that many slaves (none in the production of the pyramids, discussed elsewhere in the thread), and there were never rebellions starting from the lower-classes in ancient Egypt. Rebellions always started from the top, with either the local elites or the family of the king. While the peasants weren't kicking back and watching TV with a remote control, they were reasonably content with their situation -- Egypt was the most stable society Earth has seen, and you don't get that with a system where the bulk of the population is seriously unhappy (it certainly didn't work for Sparta for even a significant fraction of the time it worked for Egypt, and the Egyptian civilization did not fall because of peasant revolts -- it was conquered by a series of outsiders).
There was some trade at the time of the Old Kingdom (when the pyramids were built), but it was pretty minor compared to what it would be with the New Kingdom, several thousand years later, primarily because there weren't significant kingdoms for them to trade with. They did some localized trade for things like wood and copper, but most of what they needed for survival and decoration was available in Egypt.
There were two story houses, and massive apartment-like neighborhoods that date back to this period.
But, yeah, these consumed massive amounts of economic power, and they were not about royal ego-trips. It's really hard for modern folks to understand the way in which the people who worked on this (which included a massive administrative work to organize the laborers' rotations, food and physical needs) understood what they were doing and why.
No, they could not be sold, and they were not linked to the land, so they were neither slaves nor serfs. They were not arbitrarily separated from their families, although they might be sent away (as to work on pyramids) for a time. They were seen as important members of society and as Egyptians, which put them ahead of anybody who wasn't. They could not be killed at whim without consequences -- someone of position has their responsibility to ma'at as well, and killing anybody arbitrarily was a significant disturbance of ma'at. Even the king had responsibility to ma'at -- the greatest and most direct responsibility of anybody. They had a place in the afterworld which they could achieve through doing their part to maintain ma'at. They would not be permanently sent out of Egypt where there would be no chance that they could receive proper burial that would prepare them for the afterlife.
As I said, their lives were not to be confused with Club Med or Disneyland -- they were filled with very hard physical labor, and they did not enjoy rights and freedoms that we take for granted. However, for the times that they lived in, they had better lives than those of similar station in other lands, because Egypt was so capable of producing abundant amounts of grain, and those over them had serious responsibility to see to it that they did have food and shelter.
There were Egyptian slaves, as I said. There may well have been more of them than there were elites/nobles. But there were far more dependent workers (which included farmer workers, tanners, smiths, potters, etc.) than there were slaves.
Just finished a quarter of Ancient Egypt History, so this stuff's still relatively fresh in my mind.
No. The Egyptian economy was not money-based, it was goods-based, with commonly used goods being units of grain, loaves of bread (of various kinds) and jugs of beer. The beer was rather, um, chunky, with a relatively low alcohol content compared to modern beers (kind of like liquid bread). Dependent workers were paid in bread and beer, definitely.
It's based off of the growing understanding of the way ancient Egyptian culture functioned. There were slaves in Egypt, but they were a very small part of the population, and were primarily used in the homes of the elites. The vast majority of the population were dependent workers who were dependent upon the temples that controlled the vast majority of the agricultural land that they worked on. They worked on the land and on other projects for the benefit of the temples or the king (no separation between church and state -- no real concept of either church or state, actually) and the temples provided them with their food and other things. They were not chattel, and were not sold. They were neither slaves nor serfs. They were peasants, who had the same end of the stick peasants have always had.
Yes and no. Yes, there were some well-paid (well-fed) professionals in charge of the construction of the pyramids. No, there were no slaves involved with the production of the pyramids. There was, however, a huge body of workers that rotated to the pyramid site from different regions to work on these pyramids. They were peasants who were not slaves, but their lives were pretty bleak. They had the same diet while working on the pyramids as they did when working in the fields. Working on the pyramids (or other large construction projects) was just another part of their responsibility in maintaining ma'at, and was carried out during the part of the year when these workers weren't needed for agricultural work.
This was a mixture of religious responsibility and make-work that not only satisfied ma'at, it also provided work with which these workers could earn food when there wasn't other work to be had.
Spam is hard to identify? I'm not sure what you're talking about. I've been using PopFile to sort my email for quite a long time, in both high-spam periods and low-spam periods, and it's been more than 99% accurate almost all of that time (more than 90% accurate within a week even on low volume with a little training). It took about three messages to train it to tell phish from spam.
I've been curious as to why providers like gmail and hotmail don't check to see if a message being sent to some threshold number of their users has an identical message body (or do a naive-Bayesian on the text, or whatever) as a way of responding to dictionary-attack spam (which I'm getting through gmail and yahoo on addresses that I don't circulate).
I've also been curious as to why there isn't some sort of large shared naive-Bayesian filter run by trusted individuals that can be used by major providers who want to use statistical analysis to filter their spam on a massive scale. Something that would work like Spamcop, with maybe a bit of Phishtank involved, only it would be based on the content of the message, rather than forgeable identifiers of the sources of the message which can be changed quickly through bot-nets. I was able to train above 99% accuracy with a few thousand messages at 50% spam -- yahoo, gmail or hotmail are dealing with millions in a day, so they should be able to get quite a few decimals on that 99% in a matter of hours, especially if they shared the results.
I think signed messages and certificates are a great idea and could be a helpful part of closing down opportunities for faked emails. If everybody used Enigmail, we could not only have signed messages with verified senders, we could even have email that was private (more secure than the current less-private-than-postcard system at the very least). When I talk to civilians about these kinds of things, though, I get eye-glaze very quickly on. I can usually scare them out of the eye-glaze when I tell them of the time I sent a response to an email that was sent to someone else before the original recipient had even read the message I was responding to (an acquaintence was running a packet-sniffer watching for the names of people he knew, and sent it to me because he thought I might want to know -- a one-and-only occurance), but then they go back to complacency because they've not been hurt by sending non-private email, so they don't care.
unless she's ready to deal with Linux life. The same with anybody else -- you're not going to see massive amounts of absolute Linux beginners deciding that they're going to buy a Linux PC from Dell when they don't know what Linux is. When I talk to civilians about Linux with the implication that they might use it, they get this panicked look and say "I have a hard enough time with what I've already got, so don't change it." I point out to them that What they've already got has a limited shelf-life since they're on XP and Vista is out, and then they just look nervous and change the subject.
I've got a few understanding that the learning curve going from XP to Linux isn't much more than going from XP to Vista, and, once they do the learning curve on Linux, they're dealing with a system where change is smoother and more incremental -- things that you learn in Linux tend to stay true longer than things that you learn in Windows. And I think Vista's going to be the piece that's going to, eventually, push some of them over to at least give Linux a shot. It won't be for all of them, but, with what most of them do with computers at work everyday, they simply don't need anything that they can't get for free under Linux. And, if they get comfortable with it at work, there's a lot better chance they'll try it at home sometime, probably starting with a multi-boot setup -- there's really no reason anybody who can operate the Lilo or Grub menu couldn't handle a multi-boot setup.
Frankly, I don't see why Dell couldn't work out deals with a number of the top distros to have a basic install of each of them with drivers for all the included hardware working and set them up in a multi-boot setup with a shared/home that they all use, and the option of deleting any of the distros that isn't wanted. Support of the OS is a red-herring and can be handled by the ways others have spoken of elsewhere in the thread. But, again, this is going to be for Linux users who want to buy from Dell (for reasons beyond my ken), and not for Dell customers who think it would be fun to play with Linux for the first time by buying a Linux PC from Dell.
I think this is a place where change of measurement system would be a lot more useful to the average person than trying to force SI use where it's wanted, frankly. A size 2 is not twice as large as a size 1, and a size 10 is not five times that of a size 2, whether we're talking dresses or shoes, and they're not based on any acknowledged standard, so a size 2 with one manufacturer may be the same as a 2.5 with another, or a 1.5 in a third -- for dress sizes, the more it costs, the smaller it's size number will be.
Get international clothing makers to establish a system of sizing that is internationally consistant and coherent, and you will have done as much good in the world as you would by forcing my aunt (or daughter) to figure out her weight in kgs.
Oh, I periodically will convert from celsius to farenheit when I'm listening to "Beds are Burning" to remind myself how hot the Western Desert lives.
Personally, other than the base-10 parts of it, I don't find SI units particulary superior to Imperial units. If you're doing dimensional analysis, it's not that tough to throw a couple more conversion factors into the mix to switch from one unit to the other.
As to when/if America will become totally metric, I think it'll come after you get fluoride into all municiple water supplies. Americans, on a day-to-day basis, don't see any need to learn a different system of measurements, but, bit by bit, as global culture penetrates further and further, it's bringing an increased familiarity in the units.
I think SI is handy as a lingua franca for measurements -- if we all can convert to SI, then we can compare if we need to. It doesn't mean that we need to stop using other systems, anymore than everybody in the world needs to stop speaking anything but English because English has become the linga franca for international communication. And those who need to convert can learn how to -- it's a lot easier to learn a new measurement system than it is to learn a new language, and lots of people know more than one language.
Nothing is being harmed by the way things are. There's no reason to make heroic efforts to change what is, at most, one of the least significant problems facing the world.
Not as much as your choices do. It's not that they have no impact at all, it's just less than our own choices. All they can decide about the life of someone who is gay (compared to everybody else) is whether or not they pass legislation that addresses the issues of gays, and the nature of that legislation, and how it's enforced. They can't make you gay or not gay. They can't choose who you include in or exclude from your life. They don't give you a job. They don't determine how well you do that job. And the list goes on and on. Your choices, and the choices of others around you just count for more.
Neither. It will be more of the same, with a few surface symbolic changes, and a healthy dose of the shoe being on the other foot (keep handy all of the Democrat complaints about the rights of the minority, particularly when it comes to the use of the fillibuster), but that's about it. The budget will not balance, troops will not leave Iraq any quicker than they would have otherwise, the globe will continue warming at the same rate, Islamists and France will continue hating America, your commute will take the same amount of time, and your boss will still be as much of an idiot as before.
For every one of us, our lives are far more determined by our own choices than by the choices of 545 people in DC. And those 545 people in DC have way more in common with each other than they do with much of anybody who lives outside of I-95 and I-495. No set of them has a lot more character than any other set, and the ones with the strongest senses of right and wrong have the hardest time getting there, and the hardest time staying there.
So changing which set of them controls this or that institution is not revolutionary change -- change was supposed to be relatively slow and buffered, not necessarily as slow and buffered as it has been. The previous majority party held the house for just over a decade. The one before that held it for four decades. No telling how long the new majority will last, but don't expect them to respect you, your freedom, or your wallet any more than their counterparts have for the past fifty years. They may not respect them any less either.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd suggest you give Ubuntu (I like Kubuntu because I like KDE) a look. It does pretty well with autodetecting hardware -- better than Knoppix did -- and maintaining it is pretty easy too. Actually, maintaining the packages is easier than in Windows, because Adept checks every day to see if there are upgrades available and prompts you to do the update if you want to. I know Windows has something similar for system-level stuff, but Adept does it for everything you've got.
It's not to the level it needs to be to take over the world, but it's ready for a whole demographic layer of folks who weren't ready to try Linux a few years ago. I'd aim it for folks who are pretty tech-savvy and adventurous, and to folks who are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the world of computers. The latter group I'd suggest it for because they haven't already bought into the MS branding -- they don't know what a computer's for, exactly, so they don't think they need Office and PhotoShop and IE. You can set them up with kubuntu on old hardware and have them functioning on something that couldn't run Vista, and would crawl with XP.
Yeah, sorta, maybe. I've done a number of kubuntu installs lately, and they really aren't terribly complicated (although I'll admit that my small-but-growing linux background made facing /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 comfortable and familiar where they wouldn't be to a linux noob). It asks for the language you want to install in, and then your time zone, and what partition you want to install to (with the drool-proof option of finding space on your main partition automatic and default) (and safe the two times I tried it), and then your name and what you want the machine named. A Windows install would not have been easier, but most Windows users have never done a Windows install, so it might be a bit much for most Windows users. To make this an apples comparison, then, we should have folks not talking about how hard or easy the ubuntu install was unless they've done a Windows install, and the rest should be discussion of using it after someone else has done the install, just like somebody else did the Windows install it's being compared to.
People will still find things to complain about, but they complain about Windows machines also. If you locked them into using Ubuntu, the way they've always been locked into Windows, it wouldn't take a week for them to find that most of them can do most of what they need to do (if not all of it) just as easily under ubuntu as they did under Windows. They might also notice that their machines are more stable and run faster, particularly without having the performance hits of always-on anti-virus programs (Norton slammed our office from day one, and each new version is worse).
I know that everybody wants a flat learning curve on everything they want to do, but that's not available anywhere. You can't fight for your right to know nothing and expect to keep up with the advances of our increasingly technical society. "I don't like computers" is like "I don't like internal combustion engines" these days -- interesting, but it doesn't reduce the enormous life-style hit you're going to take for that position if you're serious about it.
I don't know. I liked the year they did LOL-Ponys!
But, wait. This isn't April.
I was thinking this might be a good use to put kudzu to. Unless it's not as fast-growing and earth-covering as I've been told.
I find it tiresome to have people talking about all of the slaves the Egyptians took when there really were very few slaves in Egypt. The pyramids weren't built by slaves. The Egyptians managed to put together a civilization that survived for a half-dozen millenia -- more than three times as long as the Christian Era -- something no European civilization can touch. We're certainly in no position to be looking down our noses at them.
Yes, a very good point. Nobody should be citing any encyclopedia in a scholarly paper. However, using an encyclopedia (including Wikipedia) is a good place to start getting some background in a topic that you're not already familiar with, and then you can follow up the sources cited to get into the secondary and primary material. An advantage to Wikipedia is that it might have not only a cite but a link to a text copy of the original document cited.
I'm really, really tiring of the snobbery about Wikipedia. I've had several of my professors say "Don't use Wikipedia," but I've found their points to be rather silly in that regard. With the exception at the top of my comment, it's as good a place to start as any on most topics, and better than many. The discussion/talk page on every article also gives the beginner an understanding of what some of the controversies are on whatever topic that's at least as useful as what they can gain from footnotes in a standard text (a hell of a lot more useful than endnotes).
You mean the quarry sites right next to the Sphinx that show how the blocks were cut and that match the makeup of the blocks in the pyramid? Go ahead and look at them if you want -- they're pretty cool.
Everybody is clear that the pyramids were faced in a lighter colored and polished stone from across the river, some remnants of which can be seen at the top of (I believe) Khufu's pyramid? That was removed by later dynasties for use in other monuments. And the top stones were quarried in Upper (Southern) Egypt and barged down to Giza. These were not simple structures, even though they were not completed, and they were made from a variety of materials. I'm not persuaded that there may have been some of this concrete involved, but I would wonder why it wasn't used anyplace else at any other time over the thousands of years after the pyramids were built. It would seem to have been a good candidate for construction, perhaps as an alternative to the mud-brick that almost everything in Egypt was made from. Obviously, if it's what any significant part of the pyramids are made from, it's far more durable than mud-brick.
There are massive piles of rubble that are remnants of the ramps laid out along the edge of the Giza plateau. So, yes, they've looked for them and found them.
Climate things were different then than now, and Egypt did feed Rome, but those events are thousands of years apart. There was desert there at the time of the Old Kingdom -- the Egyptians always had a term for the black lands (which were flooded by the Nile every year) and the red lands (which were desert). There was a time a few thousand years earlier than the Egyptian civilization when North Africa was very wet, but then George Bush came along with Hummers and changed the climate and turned it all to desert.
Oh, wait, that was a climate change that can't be blamed on Bush. I forgot.
Egyptians knew sand.
Um, the scarab beetle was a holy symbol because it pushed around the little balls of dung and (with eggs laid in it), life came out of it. It was a symbol of life and birth. The ball-ness of it was also cool, but it wasn't the only reason for the scarab's role in Egyptian religion.
They were never there. The kings they were built for died before they could be completed, so they weren't completed. The kings were buried elsewhere.
I think you're misunderstanding the role of choice in the lives of dependent workers in ancient Egypt. Which isn't surprising -- it's a very different way of seeing the world than much of anybody capable of reading this message has ever experienced. This was a society where your lot in life was determined when you were born -- with very, very few exceptions, there was no upward mobility anywhere in society, so you didn't have people trying to claw their way to the top of the social order from the peasant class -- there was never upward mobility for peasants, ever at all. To us, that sounds oppressive and depressing, but remember that this was a civilization that traces back to the time of the creation of language, and that survived until the time that the rest of the world was capable of producing written documents to talk about them. Our notion of an egalitarian system with possibility for upward social mobility is a recent massively implemented social experiment by contrast, where we keep things going by tap-dancing very, very quickly and hoping that everything doesn't go into the crapper tomorrow, because it could.
These workers did not rebel. Had they rebelled, they could have overwhelmed any army any king ever took into the field by simply burying the other army in their bodies. They did not do so over a period of thousands of years, which is not a sign that they hated their lives and badly wanted more.
They did not have choice about when or if they would work on the pyramids -- it was hard enough work to organize this labor without having to recruit volunteers, especially since there would be no guarantee that the right workers would volunteer (and not volunteer). And they wouldn't have known what to do if someone had asked for volunteers -- it just wasn't part of their world. Their world was on in which the most important thing an Egyptian could to was his job, and that job was (essentially) that of his father. If anyone, from the king down to a peasant, failed to do his job well, ma'at was disturbed, and the consequences of that could be catastrophic to everyone. Egyptian girls didn't get starry eyed over the misunderstood rebel, with or without a cause -- a rebel was a threat that was addressed without hesitation. It was not unheard of for a king who was seen to have failed his duty to ma'at to have his afterlife (the most important thing in the Egyptian world) directly attacked.
Trying to overlay modern or even old European cultural structures on ancient Egypt doesn't work. The Egyptians were not Europeans, and they didn't live in a world any European would recognize. You want a reference that discusses this stuff? Look for Barry Kemp, professor of Egyptology at Cambridge and his books with Ancient Egypt in the title. He makes these points strongly, albeit more than a little boringly as well. I'm not pulling this out of my butt.
Oh, you got some of those purposes right, but others wrong. The pyramids were about having a shape for the king's tomb that would help a portion of his being find its way into the sky to become one with Amun-Re, so their purpose was religious. These purposes were not, ultimately effective -- none of the great pyramids were finished before their intended occupants had already died -- they weren't actually finished at all.
They were also very large public-works projects, and they were very impressive, but they were not used to quell slave rebellions because there weren't that many slaves (none in the production of the pyramids, discussed elsewhere in the thread), and there were never rebellions starting from the lower-classes in ancient Egypt. Rebellions always started from the top, with either the local elites or the family of the king. While the peasants weren't kicking back and watching TV with a remote control, they were reasonably content with their situation -- Egypt was the most stable society Earth has seen, and you don't get that with a system where the bulk of the population is seriously unhappy (it certainly didn't work for Sparta for even a significant fraction of the time it worked for Egypt, and the Egyptian civilization did not fall because of peasant revolts -- it was conquered by a series of outsiders).
There was some trade at the time of the Old Kingdom (when the pyramids were built), but it was pretty minor compared to what it would be with the New Kingdom, several thousand years later, primarily because there weren't significant kingdoms for them to trade with. They did some localized trade for things like wood and copper, but most of what they needed for survival and decoration was available in Egypt.
There were two story houses, and massive apartment-like neighborhoods that date back to this period.
But, yeah, these consumed massive amounts of economic power, and they were not about royal ego-trips. It's really hard for modern folks to understand the way in which the people who worked on this (which included a massive administrative work to organize the laborers' rotations, food and physical needs) understood what they were doing and why.
No, they could not be sold, and they were not linked to the land, so they were neither slaves nor serfs. They were not arbitrarily separated from their families, although they might be sent away (as to work on pyramids) for a time. They were seen as important members of society and as Egyptians, which put them ahead of anybody who wasn't. They could not be killed at whim without consequences -- someone of position has their responsibility to ma'at as well, and killing anybody arbitrarily was a significant disturbance of ma'at. Even the king had responsibility to ma'at -- the greatest and most direct responsibility of anybody. They had a place in the afterworld which they could achieve through doing their part to maintain ma'at. They would not be permanently sent out of Egypt where there would be no chance that they could receive proper burial that would prepare them for the afterlife.
As I said, their lives were not to be confused with Club Med or Disneyland -- they were filled with very hard physical labor, and they did not enjoy rights and freedoms that we take for granted. However, for the times that they lived in, they had better lives than those of similar station in other lands, because Egypt was so capable of producing abundant amounts of grain, and those over them had serious responsibility to see to it that they did have food and shelter.
There were Egyptian slaves, as I said. There may well have been more of them than there were elites/nobles. But there were far more dependent workers (which included farmer workers, tanners, smiths, potters, etc.) than there were slaves.
Just finished a quarter of Ancient Egypt History, so this stuff's still relatively fresh in my mind.
No. The Egyptian economy was not money-based, it was goods-based, with commonly used goods being units of grain, loaves of bread (of various kinds) and jugs of beer. The beer was rather, um, chunky, with a relatively low alcohol content compared to modern beers (kind of like liquid bread). Dependent workers were paid in bread and beer, definitely.
It's based off of the growing understanding of the way ancient Egyptian culture functioned. There were slaves in Egypt, but they were a very small part of the population, and were primarily used in the homes of the elites. The vast majority of the population were dependent workers who were dependent upon the temples that controlled the vast majority of the agricultural land that they worked on. They worked on the land and on other projects for the benefit of the temples or the king (no separation between church and state -- no real concept of either church or state, actually) and the temples provided them with their food and other things. They were not chattel, and were not sold. They were neither slaves nor serfs. They were peasants, who had the same end of the stick peasants have always had.
Yes and no. Yes, there were some well-paid (well-fed) professionals in charge of the construction of the pyramids. No, there were no slaves involved with the production of the pyramids. There was, however, a huge body of workers that rotated to the pyramid site from different regions to work on these pyramids. They were peasants who were not slaves, but their lives were pretty bleak. They had the same diet while working on the pyramids as they did when working in the fields. Working on the pyramids (or other large construction projects) was just another part of their responsibility in maintaining ma'at, and was carried out during the part of the year when these workers weren't needed for agricultural work.
This was a mixture of religious responsibility and make-work that not only satisfied ma'at, it also provided work with which these workers could earn food when there wasn't other work to be had.
Spam is hard to identify? I'm not sure what you're talking about. I've been using PopFile to sort my email for quite a long time, in both high-spam periods and low-spam periods, and it's been more than 99% accurate almost all of that time (more than 90% accurate within a week even on low volume with a little training). It took about three messages to train it to tell phish from spam.
I've been curious as to why providers like gmail and hotmail don't check to see if a message being sent to some threshold number of their users has an identical message body (or do a naive-Bayesian on the text, or whatever) as a way of responding to dictionary-attack spam (which I'm getting through gmail and yahoo on addresses that I don't circulate).
I've also been curious as to why there isn't some sort of large shared naive-Bayesian filter run by trusted individuals that can be used by major providers who want to use statistical analysis to filter their spam on a massive scale. Something that would work like Spamcop, with maybe a bit of Phishtank involved, only it would be based on the content of the message, rather than forgeable identifiers of the sources of the message which can be changed quickly through bot-nets. I was able to train above 99% accuracy with a few thousand messages at 50% spam -- yahoo, gmail or hotmail are dealing with millions in a day, so they should be able to get quite a few decimals on that 99% in a matter of hours, especially if they shared the results.
I think signed messages and certificates are a great idea and could be a helpful part of closing down opportunities for faked emails. If everybody used Enigmail, we could not only have signed messages with verified senders, we could even have email that was private (more secure than the current less-private-than-postcard system at the very least). When I talk to civilians about these kinds of things, though, I get eye-glaze very quickly on. I can usually scare them out of the eye-glaze when I tell them of the time I sent a response to an email that was sent to someone else before the original recipient had even read the message I was responding to (an acquaintence was running a packet-sniffer watching for the names of people he knew, and sent it to me because he thought I might want to know -- a one-and-only occurance), but then they go back to complacency because they've not been hurt by sending non-private email, so they don't care.
unless she's ready to deal with Linux life. The same with anybody else -- you're not going to see massive amounts of absolute Linux beginners deciding that they're going to buy a Linux PC from Dell when they don't know what Linux is. When I talk to civilians about Linux with the implication that they might use it, they get this panicked look and say "I have a hard enough time with what I've already got, so don't change it." I point out to them that What they've already got has a limited shelf-life since they're on XP and Vista is out, and then they just look nervous and change the subject.
/home that they all use, and the option of deleting any of the distros that isn't wanted. Support of the OS is a red-herring and can be handled by the ways others have spoken of elsewhere in the thread. But, again, this is going to be for Linux users who want to buy from Dell (for reasons beyond my ken), and not for Dell customers who think it would be fun to play with Linux for the first time by buying a Linux PC from Dell.
I've got a few understanding that the learning curve going from XP to Linux isn't much more than going from XP to Vista, and, once they do the learning curve on Linux, they're dealing with a system where change is smoother and more incremental -- things that you learn in Linux tend to stay true longer than things that you learn in Windows. And I think Vista's going to be the piece that's going to, eventually, push some of them over to at least give Linux a shot. It won't be for all of them, but, with what most of them do with computers at work everyday, they simply don't need anything that they can't get for free under Linux. And, if they get comfortable with it at work, there's a lot better chance they'll try it at home sometime, probably starting with a multi-boot setup -- there's really no reason anybody who can operate the Lilo or Grub menu couldn't handle a multi-boot setup.
Frankly, I don't see why Dell couldn't work out deals with a number of the top distros to have a basic install of each of them with drivers for all the included hardware working and set them up in a multi-boot setup with a shared
I think this is a place where change of measurement system would be a lot more useful to the average person than trying to force SI use where it's wanted, frankly. A size 2 is not twice as large as a size 1, and a size 10 is not five times that of a size 2, whether we're talking dresses or shoes, and they're not based on any acknowledged standard, so a size 2 with one manufacturer may be the same as a 2.5 with another, or a 1.5 in a third -- for dress sizes, the more it costs, the smaller it's size number will be.
Get international clothing makers to establish a system of sizing that is internationally consistant and coherent, and you will have done as much good in the world as you would by forcing my aunt (or daughter) to figure out her weight in kgs.
Oh, I periodically will convert from celsius to farenheit when I'm listening to "Beds are Burning" to remind myself how hot the Western Desert lives.
Personally, other than the base-10 parts of it, I don't find SI units particulary superior to Imperial units. If you're doing dimensional analysis, it's not that tough to throw a couple more conversion factors into the mix to switch from one unit to the other.
As to when/if America will become totally metric, I think it'll come after you get fluoride into all municiple water supplies. Americans, on a day-to-day basis, don't see any need to learn a different system of measurements, but, bit by bit, as global culture penetrates further and further, it's bringing an increased familiarity in the units.
I think SI is handy as a lingua franca for measurements -- if we all can convert to SI, then we can compare if we need to. It doesn't mean that we need to stop using other systems, anymore than everybody in the world needs to stop speaking anything but English because English has become the linga franca for international communication. And those who need to convert can learn how to -- it's a lot easier to learn a new measurement system than it is to learn a new language, and lots of people know more than one language.
Nothing is being harmed by the way things are. There's no reason to make heroic efforts to change what is, at most, one of the least significant problems facing the world.
Yep. Sexagismal digits rock. That's why we still use them to measure time.
Not as much as your choices do. It's not that they have no impact at all, it's just less than our own choices. All they can decide about the life of someone who is gay (compared to everybody else) is whether or not they pass legislation that addresses the issues of gays, and the nature of that legislation, and how it's enforced. They can't make you gay or not gay. They can't choose who you include in or exclude from your life. They don't give you a job. They don't determine how well you do that job. And the list goes on and on. Your choices, and the choices of others around you just count for more.
In Soviet Russia, smart-ass comments make you!
Neither. It will be more of the same, with a few surface symbolic changes, and a healthy dose of the shoe being on the other foot (keep handy all of the Democrat complaints about the rights of the minority, particularly when it comes to the use of the fillibuster), but that's about it. The budget will not balance, troops will not leave Iraq any quicker than they would have otherwise, the globe will continue warming at the same rate, Islamists and France will continue hating America, your commute will take the same amount of time, and your boss will still be as much of an idiot as before.
For every one of us, our lives are far more determined by our own choices than by the choices of 545 people in DC. And those 545 people in DC have way more in common with each other than they do with much of anybody who lives outside of I-95 and I-495. No set of them has a lot more character than any other set, and the ones with the strongest senses of right and wrong have the hardest time getting there, and the hardest time staying there.
So changing which set of them controls this or that institution is not revolutionary change -- change was supposed to be relatively slow and buffered, not necessarily as slow and buffered as it has been. The previous majority party held the house for just over a decade. The one before that held it for four decades. No telling how long the new majority will last, but don't expect them to respect you, your freedom, or your wallet any more than their counterparts have for the past fifty years. They may not respect them any less either.