The command line is a clunky way of doing things compared to an intuitive GUI
In my experience, teaching newcomers, the GUI is more intuitive but the command line is more powerful, and many are very grateful for having learnt how to use it. Not everyone likes it, but let's not try to bury it like Windows has. You don't need to use it anyway, so I don't see what the problem is:)
Tweaking things is difficult, sure there are lots of options but I still couldn't figure out an easy way of chjanging the screen resolution.
This makes me wonder what distribution you're using. Every newbie-orientated one I've ever come across has a really easy to use control center with an obvious option to change the screen resolution. And tweaking things isn't really possible in Windows, so it's a credit to GNU/Linux that you even can:)
This isn't such a problem for us geeks as we want something that is clean and functional but mr windows user wants anti aliased fonts and fading effects on the menubar.
If you install any of the recent distros (Mandrake 9.1, RedHat 9, SuSE 8.2) you'll fidn both these things there. In fact, they've been there for a while. KDE is now able to look a whole lot more stylish than Windows, and does so by default.
I don't want to sound like another advocate pretending it's all there, but your complaints are mostly outdated or wrong:)
I'd personally like to see a distributor put a lot of effort into making gaming easy. Gentoo is a great platform for gaming, if you are geeky enough to know how to install and maintain it, but for the rest, there really isn't much out there.
It would be relatively simple for Lycoris to spend some time tweaking WINE and/or WINEX to work with the most well known and played games that work fairly well, though not often by default on newbie distros (e.g. Half-Life), and to provide the binaries/source for ported games like the Quake series, UT2003, etc.
Oh, and as for Dreamweaver, there's already something even better out - Quanta+:)
I was merely pointing out that if Iraq had a democracy, the majority would benefit from the removal of Hussein and therefore the majority would want Hussein out.
The majority of the American public didn't vote for Bush... does that mean it's OK if the EU invades your country and puts a democracy in place? Yes, I'm being a little silly, but you get my point I hope. We have no way of knowing whether or not the Iraqi people would have preferred an aggressive invasion of their country by the US, or the arming and training of contra groups (the USA's preferred method), or a UN-controlled army going in on the mandate of unseating a man tried and sentenced at the International Criminal Court, etc. All of this is pure speculation and so utterly worthless.
What will be interesting is the reaction in Iraq over the next 6 months or so while the US set-up their little military junta, secure oil fields for the Iraqi people so they can sell the oil to the US oil companies (how else do you think their oil reaches you car?), and put as much effort into establishing a meaningful democracy and stable country as they did in Afghanistan. Will it even be in America's interests to create a democracy in a country where 1/3rd of the people (Kurds) are fighting repression by one of America's biggest regional allies (Turkey), and where another 1/3rd of the people are Islamic Fundamentalists who would quite like to return to being part of Iran. To America, Democracy is a dangerous thing because it cannot be controlled. The illusion of democracy, however, is their greatest weapon.
As for Palestine... well I'm sure we'll see a veyr progressive "roadmap" coming from an administration chock-full of people who have voiced their forthright support for the Israeli state, and who have supported Israel in its illegal settlements in Palestinian terroritory. Then again, he did promise to Blair, who is definitely committed to a decent solution, that he would, so I suppose we'll see. The best way to tackle terrorism, as we've seen in Northern Ireland, is to undermine any popular support for the terrorists, which means showing they are wrong. As it is, the terrorists who are attacking us are right about one thing - that the USA has military bases in something like 2/3rds of the nations in the world, and it has a track record, which it continues today, in intefering in other nation's affairs illegally without regard for human rights, democracy or liberty (the values it so cherishes yet likes to trash at home). Not that there's any justification, therefore, for terrorism, but you're not going to stop terrorism by putting fuel on the fire.
What will also be scary is what this will do for the hawks in Washington, who in case you didn't know, wanted to invade Iraq purely as an economic and political strategy, to futher US interests and keep their oil industry afloat. They say it themselves, I'm not making it up. And what will this to do the stll-active terrorists intent on destroying secular states, western civilisations, and most prominently America?
Seeing Iraq as an isolated liberation of a country is hopelessly naive, and however much truth there may be in your signature, it says little about whether or not this war was a good idea, or just.
How exactly is this not a detailed study or peer reviewed?
I said the article was no detailed study, and just because they state that this study is detailed, doesn't mean to say it is in the least bit good or credible, and there was no indication of any peer review. As another poster commented, those 240 studies could all happen to be heavily biased one way or the other, they could all share the same flaws, or any number of other factors that would have made the report this article mentions less valuable than it could be.
You missed my point, which is that those acts are natural, of course, but they disrupt the balance of things that would otherwise be if we didn't take those actions so much, and unecessarily so, with so many negative consequences for many species within the ecology, that we can be fairly sure about them being "bad".
Oh go and do Economics 101 or whatever it is that you people like to mention to lend false authority to ignorance. Just because I believe in freedom from poverty, does not mean I am a socialist. If you think it does, you're either a nut, or ignorant. I won't hazard a guess.
No, sorry but most of the research done within the past 10 years has acknowledged and taken into account a siginificant set of natural fluctuations, and concluded that what we are seeing is likely to be caused by human activities. I think describing the cause and effect as ambiguous is far too strong... rather, they are unproven but widely believed to be a more coherent and accurate conclusion than any alternatives.
There are no economic motivations to curb emissions. Tackling climate change, as with many ecological issues, is going to hurt our economies. There also aren't any political motivations amongst those who propose we tackle it, except that we tend to believe that we should tackle the issue. We gain nothing except a safer and more prosperous future in the long term, so I'm not sure about motivations being suspect there. On the other hand, economic and political motivations to stop any action to tackle climate change are obvious, evident and rampant.
Wow! Congratulations - you win the "most stupid post on/. today" award for that one!
Environmentalism is about as far from socialism as it is from right-wing conservatism. Socialism holds that society is the fundamental, whereas environmentalism holds that the ecology is, whereas right-wing conservatism holds that the family and status quo are, etc. etc. Most ecological parties are also essentially capitalist, though they aren't into the laisse-faire capitalism that thinks corporations are trustworhy while states aren't.
When you say freedom, you're just referring to your individual freedom - freedom from the control of others - but there are many more freedoms you enjoy, such as freedom from poverty, freedom from shitty living conditions, freedom from pollution, freedom from a repressive government, etc. etc. Get that into your head, and you might drop the absurd posturing.
And your last paragraph, well, name me an environmentalist who has advocated a third world dictator telling the US how to run its economy!
Oh, the old 3rd world excuse. That's just crap, O.K? I'm sorry, but it is. If there was a chance that, by rejecting Kyoto for those reasons, a new treaty could be drafted that brought developing countries into the fold, then the US might have been justified in rejecting Kyoto. But as that simply wasn't the case, the US has in effect refused to take a small step forward, when the only alternative is to stand still.
Ideally we would have seen far more progressive targets set, and appropriate targets imposed on China and India too, or at least caps. China is going to be a *big* problem in the next 20 years, during which time it may exceed the US in emissions, which, to correct you, is currently by far and away the biggest polluter with 25% of world C02 emissions.
this problem was already discussed in the antics by Aristoteles and Platon
It's Aristotle and Plato.
The ecologist ideology "CO2-pollution" is just rubbish. These guys say that global warming starts around 1903 were CO2-levels couldn't have any effects.
Where did you get that 1903 date. All the literature I've read suggests things started when we started polluting, which rather makes sense if you think about it, so towards the latter quarter of the 18th century. And try to substantiate your claim that it is "just rubbish". Go on, I'd love to see you try when the majority of the scientific community disagrees with you, and the majority of those who agree with you are funded by the oil industry.
So I think this is just a pseudo-scientific ecologist scam to scare people away from modern technology and to keep them in the dark without information to control them better.
Riight, because as an ecologist, I just *hate* all technology. You're just stabbing in the dark there, my friend. To be more accurate, ecologists dislike technology that does more harm to the ecology than good (and we include humans in the ecology, before you say something stupid), and think that technology should be used to further the life quality of the ecology, not some short-termist ideal of quality of life for the rich.
It never ceases to amaze me the level of arrogance among many environmentalists and conservationsist.
That's funny... it never ceases to amaze me how arrogant people can be in thinking we are outside the ecology, or can just trample all over it, quite obviously upsetting balances in drastic ways, and then try to justify it either because we're somehow special, or because "that's just nature". Sure, we're part of the ecology, but it dosn't mean to say that everything we then do in the ecology is a good, natural thing to happen.
Its perfectly natural for our temperatures to fluctuate. Its not that long since we had a fucking Ice age so a bit of warming is not an inherently bad thing.
It also amazes me how ignorant people can be. Yes, certain temperature fluctuations are perfectly natural, but the question is: are the temperature fluctuations we have seen over the past couple of hundred years normal, or are they the result of human activities? It is a fact that rising temperatures are already causing problems in low-lying areas, and that if they continue to rise, as the majority of the scientific community believes, we will see many more problems for humans and the ecology as a whole. You're just fudging the argument.
It was with good reason that the US did not sign the Kyoto treaty.
So hang on a second... based on one article, which contains no evidence, just a few quotes from researchers on one team, and some ideas you state without reference, you think the US decision was correct? Let me repost...
To begin with, almost all of the "evidence" denying global warming has been put out by scientific groups funded by oil companies like Esso (ExxonMobil) and Shell, and have usually been shown to be flawed by the majority of the scientific community. It'd be interesting to see if this group is part of the same group, or in any way funded by those with vested interests in denying global warming.
Secondly, the US didn't ratify Kyoto for economic reasons, not scientific ones - the US Govt's own sceintists confirmed that global warming exists and is caused by a boatload of human activites - though no doubt some ignorant Congressmen voted against it because they bought the bull from phoney science. It was the protection of major US interests that drove them to not sign it... that, and ignorance and stupidity.
Thirdly, did you read that article? It states that "According to Prof Stott, the evidence also undermines doom-laden predictions about the effect of higher global temperatures." Riiight, so the flooding of areas with dense human populations is just a myth, is it? I mean come on, it's fuzzy conjecture in a newspaper, not a detailed scientific study that has been subjected to careful peer review.
I couldn't agree more. Whilst I don't use Debian, because I just love Gentoo too much and I'm naughty like that;), I completely agree with their approach, and I agree with your analysis. I too get fed up of people dismissing the principled stand the FSF and Debian take.
I also get fed up of being harassed for doing philosophy;)
I'm getting a little bored of these reviews... they read more like little diary entries than full reviews. This one is better than most, but it is still just a rambling tale of the odd things this person noticed about the product. At the moment, the only way to determine which distro is better is to try them all, or to sift through reviews weeding out the occasional shred of information from the random problems each person had.
A breakdown of what the distro offers in the way of tools, unusual packages, speed, stability, etc. would be nice. I know it might get a bit repetetive over many versions, but it's still useful to get it all down, and also to comment on how well they work.
Me thinks it's time to set-up www.troll-diary.org and let these reviews be posted alongside the usual ill-thought-out "Linux won't succeed until..." and "distro x isn't as good as BeOS because...". It'll save me checking them out at least:)
Oh come on now, you're taking my points to the extreme and pointing out their breaking points:) Of *course* I wouldn't judge somebody exclusively on some bad karma they got back in 1999, but then are you trying to tell me that if you had one position to fill, and you had two people applying, and one had a better Affero profile than the other (which, after a little investigation, proved well founded), you wouldn't choose the person with the better profile? Are you saying that Affero wouldn't help one bit?
What you say takes *nothing* away from LabRat's criticism of America. I'm sorry, but just because France and Russia have their faults (Russia is a godamn terrorist state itself - Chechnya, anyone?), and just because Saddam is a whole lot worse than all three put together, doesn't mean to say that America can't also have its faults.
Try demonstrating that the current US administration, and those in the past, haven't had/got the faults LabRat describes, and you might go someway towards making an interesting post.
Sorry, but you are trying to make it out as though this *has* to be a matter of good vs. bad. It isn't. Both sides have their faults. Saddam is particularly bad, I don't think Labrat was denying that. But in their own ways, most of the hawks in the US administration are also pretty bad.
So your ranting about Saddam is completely irrelevant, and doesn't take anything from LabRat's argument at all.
I don't get all this fuss over XML. It seems to me that it's just a pretty handy markup language for programmers to use to store data in a human-readable (and therefore human-editable) fashion, that (with the help of things like libxml) also happens to be fairly machine readable. It's also extensible (X- duh!) and yet also has its limits.
Why are there so many/. stories about this? Can somebody explain why this raises people's passions so? It seems to me like arguing the merits of HTML or SGML - it's all so bloody obvious!
Notice that the anti-fascists are the first to cave when it comes to fighting a real Fascist?
Are you trying to imply that all those that fight facism are facists to some degree themselves? If so, then it's certainly an interesting observation, and perhaps more accurate than trying to say that those that are truly anti-facists simply ignore and leave alone facists.
Hmm, well ok, maybe "proof positive" is a bit strong, but it's certainly a useful indicator. Put it this way: without Affero, if I received an application to help with GNOME documentation (assuming I was in charge;-), I'd have to check that person's previous documentation work out, and that's really all I could do. However, if I saw that on Affero this person had a good rating at LinuxQuestions, and a good rating for documents submitted to NewToLinux, then I'd know that his documents on NewToLinux are highly rated, and I'd also have a quick look at his posts on LinuxQuestions to check out what help he has given, his personality, the quality of his posting etc.
Conversely, if I went and looked at his Affero rating, and saw that he had received some negative or middle-of-the-road feedback, or that compared to others on LinuxQuestions he barely had any, I might be less inclined to take him on.
It's not a magic Karma system, like I said, but it's certainly helpful when checking someone's abilities.
It's certainly not a catch-all solution, but then I can think of many cases where it might be useful. For example, if I were to prove very helpful on LinuxQuestions, then I'd get a good Affero rating for that. If I then offered my help on the GNOME documentation project, they'd have proof positive of my ability.
Webs of trust are always transferrable between similar communities. I don't think Poole is pretending Affero is the ultimate Karma system.
I shouldn't imagine that putting the URL of your Affero profile on your CV/resume would help you very much. On the other hand, describing your various Free Software projects most certainly would - already/
Maybe in a few years time, when Affero is more established, some companies might take heed, but I doubt it:)
Slashdot Mirror
The command line is a clunky way of doing things compared to an intuitive GUI
:)
:)
:)
In my experience, teaching newcomers, the GUI is more intuitive but the command line is more powerful, and many are very grateful for having learnt how to use it. Not everyone likes it, but let's not try to bury it like Windows has. You don't need to use it anyway, so I don't see what the problem is
Tweaking things is difficult, sure there are lots of options but I still couldn't figure out an easy way of chjanging the screen resolution.
This makes me wonder what distribution you're using. Every newbie-orientated one I've ever come across has a really easy to use control center with an obvious option to change the screen resolution. And tweaking things isn't really possible in Windows, so it's a credit to GNU/Linux that you even can
This isn't such a problem for us geeks as we want something that is clean and functional but mr windows user wants anti aliased fonts and fading effects on the menubar.
If you install any of the recent distros (Mandrake 9.1, RedHat 9, SuSE 8.2) you'll fidn both these things there. In fact, they've been there for a while. KDE is now able to look a whole lot more stylish than Windows, and does so by default.
I don't want to sound like another advocate pretending it's all there, but your complaints are mostly outdated or wrong
I'd personally like to see a distributor put a lot of effort into making gaming easy. Gentoo is a great platform for gaming, if you are geeky enough to know how to install and maintain it, but for the rest, there really isn't much out there.
:)
It would be relatively simple for Lycoris to spend some time tweaking WINE and/or WINEX to work with the most well known and played games that work fairly well, though not often by default on newbie distros (e.g. Half-Life), and to provide the binaries/source for ported games like the Quake series, UT2003, etc.
Oh, and as for Dreamweaver, there's already something even better out - Quanta+
I was merely pointing out that if Iraq had a democracy, the majority would benefit from the removal of Hussein and therefore the majority would want Hussein out.
The majority of the American public didn't vote for Bush... does that mean it's OK if the EU invades your country and puts a democracy in place? Yes, I'm being a little silly, but you get my point I hope. We have no way of knowing whether or not the Iraqi people would have preferred an aggressive invasion of their country by the US, or the arming and training of contra groups (the USA's preferred method), or a UN-controlled army going in on the mandate of unseating a man tried and sentenced at the International Criminal Court, etc. All of this is pure speculation and so utterly worthless.
What will be interesting is the reaction in Iraq over the next 6 months or so while the US set-up their little military junta, secure oil fields for the Iraqi people so they can sell the oil to the US oil companies (how else do you think their oil reaches you car?), and put as much effort into establishing a meaningful democracy and stable country as they did in Afghanistan. Will it even be in America's interests to create a democracy in a country where 1/3rd of the people (Kurds) are fighting repression by one of America's biggest regional allies (Turkey), and where another 1/3rd of the people are Islamic Fundamentalists who would quite like to return to being part of Iran. To America, Democracy is a dangerous thing because it cannot be controlled. The illusion of democracy, however, is their greatest weapon.
As for Palestine... well I'm sure we'll see a veyr progressive "roadmap" coming from an administration chock-full of people who have voiced their forthright support for the Israeli state, and who have supported Israel in its illegal settlements in Palestinian terroritory. Then again, he did promise to Blair, who is definitely committed to a decent solution, that he would, so I suppose we'll see. The best way to tackle terrorism, as we've seen in Northern Ireland, is to undermine any popular support for the terrorists, which means showing they are wrong. As it is, the terrorists who are attacking us are right about one thing - that the USA has military bases in something like 2/3rds of the nations in the world, and it has a track record, which it continues today, in intefering in other nation's affairs illegally without regard for human rights, democracy or liberty (the values it so cherishes yet likes to trash at home). Not that there's any justification, therefore, for terrorism, but you're not going to stop terrorism by putting fuel on the fire.
What will also be scary is what this will do for the hawks in Washington, who in case you didn't know, wanted to invade Iraq purely as an economic and political strategy, to futher US interests and keep their oil industry afloat. They say it themselves, I'm not making it up. And what will this to do the stll-active terrorists intent on destroying secular states, western civilisations, and most prominently America?
Seeing Iraq as an isolated liberation of a country is hopelessly naive, and however much truth there may be in your signature, it says little about whether or not this war was a good idea, or just.
Um, is this a criticism of Greenpeace?
I said the article was no detailed study, and just because they state that this study is detailed, doesn't mean to say it is in the least bit good or credible, and there was no indication of any peer review. As another poster commented, those 240 studies could all happen to be heavily biased one way or the other, they could all share the same flaws, or any number of other factors that would have made the report this article mentions less valuable than it could be.
You missed my point, which is that those acts are natural, of course, but they disrupt the balance of things that would otherwise be if we didn't take those actions so much, and unecessarily so, with so many negative consequences for many species within the ecology, that we can be fairly sure about them being "bad".
Oh go and do Economics 101 or whatever it is that you people like to mention to lend false authority to ignorance. Just because I believe in freedom from poverty, does not mean I am a socialist. If you think it does, you're either a nut, or ignorant. I won't hazard a guess.
There are no economic motivations to curb emissions. Tackling climate change, as with many ecological issues, is going to hurt our economies. There also aren't any political motivations amongst those who propose we tackle it, except that we tend to believe that we should tackle the issue. We gain nothing except a safer and more prosperous future in the long term, so I'm not sure about motivations being suspect there. On the other hand, economic and political motivations to stop any action to tackle climate change are obvious, evident and rampant.
Heh, point taken :) Here you are:
c ks.pdf
f
The studies funded by oil companies were largely published or commissioned by the Global Climate Coalition (GCC)...
A decade of dirty tricks: Esso's record in funding these suspect scientific reports...
http://www.stopesso.com/pdf/Dirty_Tri
A similar report by Greenpeace USA:
http://www.stopesso.com/pdf/exxon_denial.pd
Environmentalism is about as far from socialism as it is from right-wing conservatism. Socialism holds that society is the fundamental, whereas environmentalism holds that the ecology is, whereas right-wing conservatism holds that the family and status quo are, etc. etc. Most ecological parties are also essentially capitalist, though they aren't into the laisse-faire capitalism that thinks corporations are trustworhy while states aren't.
When you say freedom, you're just referring to your individual freedom - freedom from the control of others - but there are many more freedoms you enjoy, such as freedom from poverty, freedom from shitty living conditions, freedom from pollution, freedom from a repressive government, etc. etc. Get that into your head, and you might drop the absurd posturing.
And your last paragraph, well, name me an environmentalist who has advocated a third world dictator telling the US how to run its economy!
Oh, the old 3rd world excuse. That's just crap, O.K? I'm sorry, but it is. If there was a chance that, by rejecting Kyoto for those reasons, a new treaty could be drafted that brought developing countries into the fold, then the US might have been justified in rejecting Kyoto. But as that simply wasn't the case, the US has in effect refused to take a small step forward, when the only alternative is to stand still.
Ideally we would have seen far more progressive targets set, and appropriate targets imposed on China and India too, or at least caps. China is going to be a *big* problem in the next 20 years, during which time it may exceed the US in emissions, which, to correct you, is currently by far and away the biggest polluter with 25% of world C02 emissions.
It's Aristotle and Plato.
The ecologist ideology "CO2-pollution" is just rubbish. These guys say that global warming starts around 1903 were CO2-levels couldn't have any effects.
Where did you get that 1903 date. All the literature I've read suggests things started when we started polluting, which rather makes sense if you think about it, so towards the latter quarter of the 18th century. And try to substantiate your claim that it is "just rubbish". Go on, I'd love to see you try when the majority of the scientific community disagrees with you, and the majority of those who agree with you are funded by the oil industry.
So I think this is just a pseudo-scientific ecologist scam to scare people away from modern technology and to keep them in the dark without information to control them better.
Riight, because as an ecologist, I just *hate* all technology. You're just stabbing in the dark there, my friend. To be more accurate, ecologists dislike technology that does more harm to the ecology than good (and we include humans in the ecology, before you say something stupid), and think that technology should be used to further the life quality of the ecology, not some short-termist ideal of quality of life for the rich.
That's funny... it never ceases to amaze me how arrogant people can be in thinking we are outside the ecology, or can just trample all over it, quite obviously upsetting balances in drastic ways, and then try to justify it either because we're somehow special, or because "that's just nature". Sure, we're part of the ecology, but it dosn't mean to say that everything we then do in the ecology is a good, natural thing to happen.
Its perfectly natural for our temperatures to fluctuate. Its not that long since we had a fucking Ice age so a bit of warming is not an inherently bad thing.
It also amazes me how ignorant people can be. Yes, certain temperature fluctuations are perfectly natural, but the question is: are the temperature fluctuations we have seen over the past couple of hundred years normal, or are they the result of human activities? It is a fact that rising temperatures are already causing problems in low-lying areas, and that if they continue to rise, as the majority of the scientific community believes, we will see many more problems for humans and the ecology as a whole. You're just fudging the argument.
So hang on a second... based on one article, which contains no evidence, just a few quotes from researchers on one team, and some ideas you state without reference, you think the US decision was correct? Let me repost...
To begin with, almost all of the "evidence" denying global warming has been put out by scientific groups funded by oil companies like Esso (ExxonMobil) and Shell, and have usually been shown to be flawed by the majority of the scientific community. It'd be interesting to see if this group is part of the same group, or in any way funded by those with vested interests in denying global warming.
Secondly, the US didn't ratify Kyoto for economic reasons, not scientific ones - the US Govt's own sceintists confirmed that global warming exists and is caused by a boatload of human activites - though no doubt some ignorant Congressmen voted against it because they bought the bull from phoney science. It was the protection of major US interests that drove them to not sign it... that, and ignorance and stupidity.
Thirdly, did you read that article? It states that "According to Prof Stott, the evidence also undermines doom-laden predictions about the effect of higher global temperatures." Riiight, so the flooding of areas with dense human populations is just a myth, is it? I mean come on, it's fuzzy conjecture in a newspaper, not a detailed scientific study that has been subjected to careful peer review.
I was, of course, referring to everyone's favourite reviewer, but it'd be more fun if she at least posted onto a domain that was true to her name :)
I couldn't agree more. Whilst I don't use Debian, because I just love Gentoo too much and I'm naughty like that;), I completely agree with their approach, and I agree with your analysis. I too get fed up of people dismissing the principled stand the FSF and Debian take.
;)
I also get fed up of being harassed for doing philosophy
I'm getting a little bored of these reviews... they read more like little diary entries than full reviews. This one is better than most, but it is still just a rambling tale of the odd things this person noticed about the product. At the moment, the only way to determine which distro is better is to try them all, or to sift through reviews weeding out the occasional shred of information from the random problems each person had.
:)
A breakdown of what the distro offers in the way of tools, unusual packages, speed, stability, etc. would be nice. I know it might get a bit repetetive over many versions, but it's still useful to get it all down, and also to comment on how well they work.
Me thinks it's time to set-up www.troll-diary.org and let these reviews be posted alongside the usual ill-thought-out "Linux won't succeed until..." and "distro x isn't as good as BeOS because...". It'll save me checking them out at least
Oh come on now, you're taking my points to the extreme and pointing out their breaking points :) Of *course* I wouldn't judge somebody exclusively on some bad karma they got back in 1999, but then are you trying to tell me that if you had one position to fill, and you had two people applying, and one had a better Affero profile than the other (which, after a little investigation, proved well founded), you wouldn't choose the person with the better profile? Are you saying that Affero wouldn't help one bit?
What you say takes *nothing* away from LabRat's criticism of America. I'm sorry, but just because France and Russia have their faults (Russia is a godamn terrorist state itself - Chechnya, anyone?), and just because Saddam is a whole lot worse than all three put together, doesn't mean to say that America can't also have its faults.
Try demonstrating that the current US administration, and those in the past, haven't had/got the faults LabRat describes, and you might go someway towards making an interesting post.
Sorry, but you are trying to make it out as though this *has* to be a matter of good vs. bad. It isn't. Both sides have their faults. Saddam is particularly bad, I don't think Labrat was denying that. But in their own ways, most of the hawks in the US administration are also pretty bad.
So your ranting about Saddam is completely irrelevant, and doesn't take anything from LabRat's argument at all.
I don't get all this fuss over XML. It seems to me that it's just a pretty handy markup language for programmers to use to store data in a human-readable (and therefore human-editable) fashion, that (with the help of things like libxml) also happens to be fairly machine readable. It's also extensible (X- duh!) and yet also has its limits.
/. stories about this? Can somebody explain why this raises people's passions so? It seems to me like arguing the merits of HTML or SGML - it's all so bloody obvious!
Why are there so many
Completely off-topic, sorry, but your sig:
Notice that the anti-fascists are the first to cave when it comes to fighting a real Fascist?
Are you trying to imply that all those that fight facism are facists to some degree themselves? If so, then it's certainly an interesting observation, and perhaps more accurate than trying to say that those that are truly anti-facists simply ignore and leave alone facists.
Hmm, well ok, maybe "proof positive" is a bit strong, but it's certainly a useful indicator. Put it this way: without Affero, if I received an application to help with GNOME documentation (assuming I was in charge ;-), I'd have to check that person's previous documentation work out, and that's really all I could do. However, if I saw that on Affero this person had a good rating at LinuxQuestions, and a good rating for documents submitted to NewToLinux, then I'd know that his documents on NewToLinux are highly rated, and I'd also have a quick look at his posts on LinuxQuestions to check out what help he has given, his personality, the quality of his posting etc.
Conversely, if I went and looked at his Affero rating, and saw that he had received some negative or middle-of-the-road feedback, or that compared to others on LinuxQuestions he barely had any, I might be less inclined to take him on.
It's not a magic Karma system, like I said, but it's certainly helpful when checking someone's abilities.
It's certainly not a catch-all solution, but then I can think of many cases where it might be useful. For example, if I were to prove very helpful on LinuxQuestions, then I'd get a good Affero rating for that. If I then offered my help on the GNOME documentation project, they'd have proof positive of my ability.
Webs of trust are always transferrable between similar communities. I don't think Poole is pretending Affero is the ultimate Karma system.
I shouldn't imagine that putting the URL of your Affero profile on your CV/resume would help you very much. On the other hand, describing your various Free Software projects most certainly would - already/
:)
Maybe in a few years time, when Affero is more established, some companies might take heed, but I doubt it