To compare with software, that would be rather like the software engineers deciding what features are going to go into the software (and getting paid for it), against the explicit instructions of the customer.
Instead of what, marketing? Like the customers (people) ever get to choose. (Free software = engineer-driven software, and it works well enough that Slashdot got popular enough to start drivelling, aiming for the lowest common advertising dollar.)
But rants aside, a better example would be like your webbrowser trying to replace your operating system's built-in scheduler (i.e. for all programs, not just itself), and actually succeeding... It just goes to show how buggy the constitution/original spec was that this can actually work, and means it's clearly time for a thorough re-write. And none of this amendments crap; the first thing the Constitutional Convention should do is repeal the federal government until such a time as a new, safe one can be implemented.
The question is how: If you go for democracy, you end up with the feds saying "mandate here, mandate there" like in the US or even worse Australia; if you don't, you end up with the excellently undemocratic EU, where the ministers rule supreme, and national (i.e. state) legislatures are forced to implement legislation the EU declared should be.
My favorite option would be to largely or entirely dissolve the Union and allow the national unity of the many states to be expressed through means other than a single federal government. Unfortunately far too many people today fail to see that the nation-state isn't the only legitimate organisation for a government for this notion to ever gain traction.
taking organs from people without consent is wicked.
It's not just that; prisoners on death row should be considered incapable of making that consent. Lots of people on death row will say, "seeing as they're going to murder me regardless of what I say, I might as well let them take my organs" and they get the same benefit. They just need to kill a few more to get the same amount of organs because a few will inconveniently say "no".
(So, if you force death row prisoners to consent and you need 1000 livers, then you kill 1000 healthy people and you're fine. If you allow them to consent and you need 1000 livers, then you kill (say) 1100 healthy people and you're fine (I'm pulling that number out of my arse; it might be more like 10000 for all I know). If you don't allow them to consent and you can't use their organs, then the more people you kill, the less benefit you get, because one of these people might've been in jail for twenty years then dies in a car crash when he leaves and you get yourself an organ.)
Then again, there's also simple health reasons to not want prisoners to be able to give their organs, regardless of whether they're killed or die of natural causes. AIDS and such like are much more common in prison populations, and usually you're excluded from giving blood for at least a while simply because you've been to jail.
At least incarcerated people can get their freedom back (even if not the years they've lost). Dead people can't get their life back. Anyway, I doubt anyone (here at least) would hold America's prison system up as a model for foreign nations to aspire to. It's not as bad as the Chinese, but there's definitely scope for much improvement.
But if we use a logarithmic scale instead of a linear one...
(i.e. just because someone drew a graph that makes it look a bit like there's a relationship, just means someone manipulated the data to make it look like there's a relationship. It's one of the things you learn to do in the pesky statistics classes they make you take when you're a gradstudent so that you can get your papers published in journals. Of course, your real audience has all taken the same pesky classes and simply "unmanipulates" the data when they read the graph, so the only people who actually fall for it a commoners like you. But its commoners we get our money from, so we're quite happy.)
Realtors and bankers next? (quoting the subject for clarity)
Hopefully! I think anyone richer than me should be sent to jail. Obviously they must've been cheating! (Notwithstanding the fact that I'm a student and have only worked full time for about a year.)
You can certainly analyse the biological basis for our senses--although we don't currently understand how awareness comes about from the bundle of neurons in our heads, it is a topic of ongoing study. With enough time, we might even be able to replicate our conciousness in machines, and then even if we become extint, the universe continues on while they do (and this view is nothing more than a logical conclusion of the ones I've expressed earlier in this thread).
I am not trying to say the Universe came into being when I, or the human race, was born. Nor am I trying to say the Universe will end if/when we become extinct. To the extent I have literally said that, even an idiot (must we insult each other?) could see I was using a figure of speech known as exaggeration; how else can sense be made from "Unless or until some other intelligent species exists, the universe ceases to exist the moment the last human dies"? Evidently, it is not possible for the universe to conditionally end. It cannot end, allow mice to develop intelligence, and then un-end, because what would the mice have developed intelligence in? It either has ended, or it has not.
I was describing our relevancy in the universe; we are worth more than the sun and the stars. They are here to serve us and to provide the environment for life and then intelligent life to evolve, and to be observed by us. Your comments about cosmology and astronomy are therefore either strawmen, or proof of your idiocy.
Um, yes. What else is there if there's nothing to look at it? How can you tell the difference between a universe that exists without anything to observe it, and a universe that doesn't exist at all? I don't understand those people who look up in the night sky and say "how insignificant and small am I!", as if physical size had any meaning. I look up in the night sky and say "how amazing it is that I can look up at them and see".
It's not an inflated ego to think you're worth more than a nuclear reaction that has no opinion of itself. I don't understand how you can say "Um, no. Talk about inflated ego." as if not only is your understanding completely obvious, but I'm deluded for seeing that right out. Please, why are we insignificant, just another part of the universe. Then try explaining that to the sun.
(If I sound sarcastic or rude or anything, I'm just trying to communicate as much of the basis for my understanding that we are the universe as possible.)
Earth is the Earth because we're here. Mars is Mars because we're here. (That is, the Earth and Mars won't suddenly change into mystical beings if we all up and move over there.)
The Earth is home; it is a science lab; it is a thing of wonder and beauty. Mars is a mystery, so much alike, yet so different; it is a different science lab; it is also a thing of wonder and beauty. HD 209458 b (an extrasolar planet) also derives all of its value from us being here (where "us" is intelligent life and should be read as inclusively as possible).
There is no value in having a random rock getting dizzy. Its value comes from us being here to look at it and anthropomorphise it.
Who cares if the earth is only habitable by bacteria? I certainly don't. If the Earth can't support intelligent life, it might as well be a lump of rock orbiting a nuclear reaction.
I think the idea is: it might be more likely for life to evolve, and/or life might be safer under different conditions. Obviously the sun/earth isn't perfect for (human) life, because people get skin cancer from exposure to the sun, die of famines caused by not enough/too much rain etc. etc. It's merely sufficient. The difference between an A and a D.
Back to the original point though - humans are just one more example of life. Another species. Another part of the universe.
No we're not. We are the universe. Without us, there is no life, no universe. Unless or until some other intelligent species exists, the universe ceases to exist the moment the last human dies. Now, that doesn't mean there is some sort of meaning to life, but if we say other forms of life are important to us, then they are objectively so. The universe exists for us.
(Plus, I'd be pretty sad if all I saw every day was people and concrete blocks. Sure, insects can be pretty annoying sometimes, but there's other life and other fun.)
What is the chance that there's someone asking why your mom is so expensive? Much, much lower, I'd say, then the chance someone's asking why Windows is so expensive.
Given the common wisdom, I'd say there's probably more articles complaining about the price of a Mac than the price of Windows. Nevertheless, the job of a good search engine is to filter out these results and find you the one about Windows. But the chances that you'll find an article about how expensive your mom is incredibly low, so you can't reasonably expect a search engine to pull up relevant results. Especially when "your mom" has a concrete referent, but you can't work out who it is from one sentence.
Just because you can find similar results with different words doesn't mean the results are comparable.
People buy new computers often enough. For Btrfs to replace ext4 (I'm still using ext3 and didn't even realise an ext4 had been released!), I think all it will take is for major distributions to change the default file system for new installs. Obviously the number of people who replace existing file systems different ones will be comparatively low.
Indeed, and on top of that there's other options besides Red Hat or SuSE's Enterprise Linux offerings. Something like this would be pretty much impossible in FreeBSD, Debian and probably Ubuntu,[1] for instance. I would, however, be inclined to avoid any distribution that was centred on one individual, like Slackware. I have nothing against the individuals, but things happen. People die, for instance, or change their mind about what they're doing.
[1]: It's probably just paranoia, but I'm always a bit scared of Ubuntu because it seems so dependent on one guy with a lot of money. It's probably just how he sells himself, though.
I hear people say "I love my government job, it has great conditions" all the time. Plus outside of actual government/legislative stuff, you tend to get paid a competitive rate for your skills.
(We have the same business with Public-Private Partnerships or whatever it is that PPP stands for. They're beginning to get a bad rap here, but it's taken far too long.)
Not only is what you said false (there have only been two LTS releases, and there have been two non-LTS since the last one), even if it were true, it has less information than what I contained in my question.
No idea at all I'm afraid; it's not something I've ever wondered about. I guess you could manually compile a kernel, but I expect there'd be a bunch of userspace apps you'll also need to installl like an ext4 version of fsck.
You should probably get your centuries looked at, if you're only getting around two years out of them. Mine last a hundred years or so; I gather that's about average.
To be clear, many (most?) packages added to testing aren't expected to go into the next stable. They're added to testing automatically from unstable after no (significant?) bugs have been filed in (usually) ten days. Seeing as packages are added to/from unstable, testers would usually be running unstable. It is more accurate to think of testing as what stable would be, if a new stable was released today.
I run Debian stable on my laptop, and I don't see why I would run Ubuntu instead of Debian. Debian has a larger range of packages and is much more flexible and forgiving if you don't want to run one of the preconfigured subdistros (i.e. Ubuntu/Gnome, Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc.). Plus, having run distributions like Debian/sid or Gentoo, which have continuous updates, I find the reliability you get from a computer which never randomly changes packages is a plus. The six-monthly timetable of Ubuntu is much too short for that; I would've got the bugs ironed out just in time for a new release. There is, as you indicate, the LTS releases: but they're just one of the regular releases and this means you get people pulling in opposite directions (latest and greatest vs good for the whole three/five years). Also, is there some guarantee that you can always upgrade from one LTS release to the next LTS release?
In short, with Debian stable, I know what I'm getting. With Ubuntu, in my mind there's too much uncertainty that I'll have a reliable computer for its lifespan. Even if there isn't any uncertainty, there's no reason to convert. No matter how good Ubuntu is, I can't imagine it being better enough than Debian (on my desktop for my purposes) to warrant converting.
(That said, I would like answers to my questions. Googling "Ubuntu LTS" gives you almost nothing about LTS in general. The one page that's not information about a specific release has almost no content: a paragraph about Ubuntu's normal release schedule, a paragraph about the LTS release schedule, and a paragraph taking you to a list of pages about the beta releases (!) of distributions released a year (!!) or three (!!!) ago. This absence of information, and absence of relevant information, fills me with an absence of confidence, and it's one reason I'm not going to switch my laptop from Debian stable.)
Wait. So if I pay a researcher a trillion dollars to do some research that interests me, and he also got a single cent from the government, I should suddenly lose all my interest in the matter? Why is my trillion dollars worth less than the government's cent? If you had've given that researcher that one cent, you probably would be pleased to get an email letting you know it's done but wouldn't expect anything in return. No-one would ever pay for research again; it'd come down to government money and philanthropists.
It is absurd to suppose the government's money is magic. It is also absurd to suppose that the researcher hasn't made a massive investment. That "douche bag professor" made a massive sacrifice to educate himself to give you all the benefits he produces. He should be reimbursed for that --- fully. The salary he receives is a pittance compared to the benefits he brings to society (if he's capable of profiting hand over fist from his research, I mean). The added incentive of a decent return on investment will mean he generates more to the benefit of society. It's how capitalism works.
(Incidentally, your arguments, taken through to their logical conclusion, lead only to communism for the whole of society. We could save a mint by not building one![1] At least one cent of government money has gone into your education, so all your education is public domain and everything you produced because of it is public domain. If we bring that in retrospectively, nothing will be outside of the public domain; if we grandfather it in, it will be incredibly hard to stay outside the public domain.)
Slashdot Mirror
To compare with software, that would be rather like the software engineers deciding what features are going to go into the software (and getting paid for it), against the explicit instructions of the customer.
Instead of what, marketing? Like the customers (people) ever get to choose. (Free software = engineer-driven software, and it works well enough that Slashdot got popular enough to start drivelling, aiming for the lowest common advertising dollar.)
But rants aside, a better example would be like your webbrowser trying to replace your operating system's built-in scheduler (i.e. for all programs, not just itself), and actually succeeding... It just goes to show how buggy the constitution/original spec was that this can actually work, and means it's clearly time for a thorough re-write. And none of this amendments crap; the first thing the Constitutional Convention should do is repeal the federal government until such a time as a new, safe one can be implemented.
The question is how: If you go for democracy, you end up with the feds saying "mandate here, mandate there" like in the US or even worse Australia; if you don't, you end up with the excellently undemocratic EU, where the ministers rule supreme, and national (i.e. state) legislatures are forced to implement legislation the EU declared should be.
My favorite option would be to largely or entirely dissolve the Union and allow the national unity of the many states to be expressed through means other than a single federal government. Unfortunately far too many people today fail to see that the nation-state isn't the only legitimate organisation for a government for this notion to ever gain traction.
taking organs from people without consent is wicked.
It's not just that; prisoners on death row should be considered incapable of making that consent. Lots of people on death row will say, "seeing as they're going to murder me regardless of what I say, I might as well let them take my organs" and they get the same benefit. They just need to kill a few more to get the same amount of organs because a few will inconveniently say "no".
(So, if you force death row prisoners to consent and you need 1000 livers, then you kill 1000 healthy people and you're fine. If you allow them to consent and you need 1000 livers, then you kill (say) 1100 healthy people and you're fine (I'm pulling that number out of my arse; it might be more like 10000 for all I know). If you don't allow them to consent and you can't use their organs, then the more people you kill, the less benefit you get, because one of these people might've been in jail for twenty years then dies in a car crash when he leaves and you get yourself an organ.)
Then again, there's also simple health reasons to not want prisoners to be able to give their organs, regardless of whether they're killed or die of natural causes. AIDS and such like are much more common in prison populations, and usually you're excluded from giving blood for at least a while simply because you've been to jail.
At least incarcerated people can get their freedom back (even if not the years they've lost). Dead people can't get their life back. Anyway, I doubt anyone (here at least) would hold America's prison system up as a model for foreign nations to aspire to. It's not as bad as the Chinese, but there's definitely scope for much improvement.
But if we use a logarithmic scale instead of a linear one...
(i.e. just because someone drew a graph that makes it look a bit like there's a relationship, just means someone manipulated the data to make it look like there's a relationship. It's one of the things you learn to do in the pesky statistics classes they make you take when you're a gradstudent so that you can get your papers published in journals. Of course, your real audience has all taken the same pesky classes and simply "unmanipulates" the data when they read the graph, so the only people who actually fall for it a commoners like you. But its commoners we get our money from, so we're quite happy.)
Realtors and bankers next? (quoting the subject for clarity)
Hopefully! I think anyone richer than me should be sent to jail. Obviously they must've been cheating! (Notwithstanding the fact that I'm a student and have only worked full time for about a year.)
You can certainly analyse the biological basis for our senses--although we don't currently understand how awareness comes about from the bundle of neurons in our heads, it is a topic of ongoing study. With enough time, we might even be able to replicate our conciousness in machines, and then even if we become extint, the universe continues on while they do (and this view is nothing more than a logical conclusion of the ones I've expressed earlier in this thread).
I am not trying to say the Universe came into being when I, or the human race, was born. Nor am I trying to say the Universe will end if/when we become extinct. To the extent I have literally said that, even an idiot (must we insult each other?) could see I was using a figure of speech known as exaggeration; how else can sense be made from "Unless or until some other intelligent species exists, the universe ceases to exist the moment the last human dies"? Evidently, it is not possible for the universe to conditionally end. It cannot end, allow mice to develop intelligence, and then un-end, because what would the mice have developed intelligence in? It either has ended, or it has not.
I was describing our relevancy in the universe; we are worth more than the sun and the stars. They are here to serve us and to provide the environment for life and then intelligent life to evolve, and to be observed by us. Your comments about cosmology and astronomy are therefore either strawmen, or proof of your idiocy.
Um, yes. What else is there if there's nothing to look at it? How can you tell the difference between a universe that exists without anything to observe it, and a universe that doesn't exist at all? I don't understand those people who look up in the night sky and say "how insignificant and small am I!", as if physical size had any meaning. I look up in the night sky and say "how amazing it is that I can look up at them and see".
It's not an inflated ego to think you're worth more than a nuclear reaction that has no opinion of itself. I don't understand how you can say "Um, no. Talk about inflated ego." as if not only is your understanding completely obvious, but I'm deluded for seeing that right out. Please, why are we insignificant, just another part of the universe. Then try explaining that to the sun.
(If I sound sarcastic or rude or anything, I'm just trying to communicate as much of the basis for my understanding that we are the universe as possible.)
Earth is the Earth because we're here. Mars is Mars because we're here. (That is, the Earth and Mars won't suddenly change into mystical beings if we all up and move over there.)
The Earth is home; it is a science lab; it is a thing of wonder and beauty. Mars is a mystery, so much alike, yet so different; it is a different science lab; it is also a thing of wonder and beauty. HD 209458 b (an extrasolar planet) also derives all of its value from us being here (where "us" is intelligent life and should be read as inclusively as possible).
There is no value in having a random rock getting dizzy. Its value comes from us being here to look at it and anthropomorphise it.
Who cares if the earth is only habitable by bacteria? I certainly don't. If the Earth can't support intelligent life, it might as well be a lump of rock orbiting a nuclear reaction.
I think the idea is: it might be more likely for life to evolve, and/or life might be safer under different conditions. Obviously the sun/earth isn't perfect for (human) life, because people get skin cancer from exposure to the sun, die of famines caused by not enough/too much rain etc. etc. It's merely sufficient. The difference between an A and a D.
Back to the original point though - humans are just one more example of life. Another species. Another part of the universe.
No we're not. We are the universe. Without us, there is no life, no universe. Unless or until some other intelligent species exists, the universe ceases to exist the moment the last human dies. Now, that doesn't mean there is some sort of meaning to life, but if we say other forms of life are important to us, then they are objectively so. The universe exists for us.
(Plus, I'd be pretty sad if all I saw every day was people and concrete blocks. Sure, insects can be pretty annoying sometimes, but there's other life and other fun.)
What is the chance that there's someone asking why your mom is so expensive? Much, much lower, I'd say, then the chance someone's asking why Windows is so expensive.
Given the common wisdom, I'd say there's probably more articles complaining about the price of a Mac than the price of Windows. Nevertheless, the job of a good search engine is to filter out these results and find you the one about Windows. But the chances that you'll find an article about how expensive your mom is incredibly low, so you can't reasonably expect a search engine to pull up relevant results. Especially when "your mom" has a concrete referent, but you can't work out who it is from one sentence.
Just because you can find similar results with different words doesn't mean the results are comparable.
People buy new computers often enough. For Btrfs to replace ext4 (I'm still using ext3 and didn't even realise an ext4 had been released!), I think all it will take is for major distributions to change the default file system for new installs. Obviously the number of people who replace existing file systems different ones will be comparatively low.
Wait, so if you have an incompetent lawyer (or none at all), you can be prevented form appealing even though you have a strong case to do so?
Indeed, and on top of that there's other options besides Red Hat or SuSE's Enterprise Linux offerings. Something like this would be pretty much impossible in FreeBSD, Debian and probably Ubuntu,[1] for instance. I would, however, be inclined to avoid any distribution that was centred on one individual, like Slackware. I have nothing against the individuals, but things happen. People die, for instance, or change their mind about what they're doing.
[1]: It's probably just paranoia, but I'm always a bit scared of Ubuntu because it seems so dependent on one guy with a lot of money. It's probably just how he sells himself, though.
And the irony is that downloading is legal in the Netherlands, just not uploading.
It's almost impossible for a regular user to use the Pirate Bay without uploading something.
I hear people say "I love my government job, it has great conditions" all the time. Plus outside of actual government/legislative stuff, you tend to get paid a competitive rate for your skills.
(We have the same business with Public-Private Partnerships or whatever it is that PPP stands for. They're beginning to get a bad rap here, but it's taken far too long.)
Not only is what you said false (there have only been two LTS releases, and there have been two non-LTS since the last one), even if it were true, it has less information than what I contained in my question.
No idea at all I'm afraid; it's not something I've ever wondered about. I guess you could manually compile a kernel, but I expect there'd be a bunch of userspace apps you'll also need to installl like an ext4 version of fsck.
I have no idea what a koan is, but I didn't type that by accident... I think it's a type of rhetoric.
You should probably get your centuries looked at, if you're only getting around two years out of them. Mine last a hundred years or so; I gather that's about average.
Debian Testing is the testing for the next Stable
To be clear, many (most?) packages added to testing aren't expected to go into the next stable. They're added to testing automatically from unstable after no (significant?) bugs have been filed in (usually) ten days. Seeing as packages are added to/from unstable, testers would usually be running unstable. It is more accurate to think of testing as what stable would be, if a new stable was released today.
I run Debian stable on my laptop, and I don't see why I would run Ubuntu instead of Debian. Debian has a larger range of packages and is much more flexible and forgiving if you don't want to run one of the preconfigured subdistros (i.e. Ubuntu/Gnome, Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc.). Plus, having run distributions like Debian/sid or Gentoo, which have continuous updates, I find the reliability you get from a computer which never randomly changes packages is a plus. The six-monthly timetable of Ubuntu is much too short for that; I would've got the bugs ironed out just in time for a new release. There is, as you indicate, the LTS releases: but they're just one of the regular releases and this means you get people pulling in opposite directions (latest and greatest vs good for the whole three/five years). Also, is there some guarantee that you can always upgrade from one LTS release to the next LTS release?
In short, with Debian stable, I know what I'm getting. With Ubuntu, in my mind there's too much uncertainty that I'll have a reliable computer for its lifespan. Even if there isn't any uncertainty, there's no reason to convert. No matter how good Ubuntu is, I can't imagine it being better enough than Debian (on my desktop for my purposes) to warrant converting.
(That said, I would like answers to my questions. Googling "Ubuntu LTS" gives you almost nothing about LTS in general. The one page that's not information about a specific release has almost no content: a paragraph about Ubuntu's normal release schedule, a paragraph about the LTS release schedule, and a paragraph taking you to a list of pages about the beta releases (!) of distributions released a year (!!) or three (!!!) ago. This absence of information, and absence of relevant information, fills me with an absence of confidence, and it's one reason I'm not going to switch my laptop from Debian stable.)
My post should've been read as saying "if there's a problem, this wouldn't solve it".
Wait. So if I pay a researcher a trillion dollars to do some research that interests me, and he also got a single cent from the government, I should suddenly lose all my interest in the matter? Why is my trillion dollars worth less than the government's cent? If you had've given that researcher that one cent, you probably would be pleased to get an email letting you know it's done but wouldn't expect anything in return. No-one would ever pay for research again; it'd come down to government money and philanthropists.
It is absurd to suppose the government's money is magic. It is also absurd to suppose that the researcher hasn't made a massive investment. That "douche bag professor" made a massive sacrifice to educate himself to give you all the benefits he produces. He should be reimbursed for that --- fully. The salary he receives is a pittance compared to the benefits he brings to society (if he's capable of profiting hand over fist from his research, I mean). The added incentive of a decent return on investment will mean he generates more to the benefit of society. It's how capitalism works.
(Incidentally, your arguments, taken through to their logical conclusion, lead only to communism for the whole of society. We could save a mint by not building one![1] At least one cent of government money has gone into your education, so all your education is public domain and everything you produced because of it is public domain. If we bring that in retrospectively, nothing will be outside of the public domain; if we grandfather it in, it will be incredibly hard to stay outside the public domain.)
[1]: LOL! :)