What you are describing is not a case of technical superiority of FreeBSD over Slackware, but rather problems in Linux that stop it from working well on your system.
Really, if your file systems get repeatedly corrupted under Linux, and your system reboots spontaneously, then Linux is failing to achieve the basic functionality it is intended to provide (and which it actually _does_ provide for millions of boxes). You should (a) check your hardware, (b) check your kernel setup, and if this still is not the problem, (c) file a bug report against Linux.
If you're interested in stuff like Natural Language Processing, these places are very good. If you are seeking a CS major (rather than linguistics) with a specialization on NLP, I would recommend UPenn as a bit above Stanford (though the opposite would go if you were a linguistics major interested in NLP). As a matter of fact, Stanford this year was looking for a new junior professor for computational linguistics, and of the 6 candidates, 3 were from UPenn, that's how good they are in that area.
I visited both places this year and they're very good. They both do LOTS of very good research in the area, so you'll definitely get chances to do very interesting work. At UPenn, also, lots of CS, Linguistics and Psychology majors hang around the same research center, and take classes in each other's areas, making for a great interdisciplinary approach.
The Church-Turing thesis is a Turing Machine (Halting problem) statement of Godel's theorem, and one can be derived from the other (it's a bit non-trivial!).
Wait. I think there is a fundamental misstep here. The CTT is a statement about all computational models, not the halting problem for a particular one like Turing machines. It is one thing to take one such well defined computational model, say Turing machines, and to derive from Godel's theorem the unsolvability of in that model of its own halting problem. Once you do that for Turing machines, the result extends to all Turing-equivalent computational models, like the lambda calculus or Semi-Thue processes, for example. Since any of these is equivalent to Turing machines, it can solve its halting problems iff Turing machines can solve it (the other model's halting problem); yet if a TM could solve it, it would also be able to solve its (the Turing machine's) own halting problem; thus we would end up in a contradiction!
This, we have seen, is doable for particualr computational models. However, it is another thing altogether to do this for all plausible computational models. But this is what you would have to do to prove the CTT. At least according to the definitions of the CTT I have (see Davis, Sigal and Weyuker, Computability, Complexity and Languages, pp. 68-69, for the source I had in mind for my earlier post).
Socialism, by definition, involves the use of coercion. If it didn't, it wouldn't be socialism; it'd be charity.
Wonderful trick. You say socialism involves coercion by definition, yet you haven't defined socialism. I'll have to remeber this trick;-)
So now you end up having to explain to us how come a society in which the producers themselves own and control the means of production ("socialism") necessarily involves coercion.
I can tell you that in twenty years of reading about libertarianism, discussing the philosophy with others (worldwide) via FidoNet, Usenet, etc., that the mainstream usage of "libertarian" is indeed that of someone opposed to using coercion to achieve political goals. Certainly, the meaning differs around the world; outside the U.S., libertarians are less purist. The main difference I've seen is that "Euro-libertarians" don't care much for firearms, as most Europeans seem to be hoplophobic.
But why should we give you any more credit than we give them? Even admitting as valid what you have experienced, there is no reason why anyone should not believe the two posters who have stated that outside the US "libertarian" means something different.
Once you decide that the free market is the problem, and that some sort of governmental body must step in to achieve goals that the free market is not achieving, and use coercion towards those ends, you cease being a libertarian, and begin being a statist.
And once you decide that the free market and coercive hierarchical institutions in general (government, corporations, capitalist private property rights) are the problem, you become an anarchist, or "libertarian socialist": a defender of the stateless form of socialism.
I concur with the previous poster. I believe you are taking socialism to mean "state socialism" only.
Well, I suppose there's really no point in discussing this any further. People such as yourself are so obviously convinced that Americans are dolts, and of your own infallibility, that no amount of evidence is going to convince you otherwise.
I think your reaction is unwarranted. The poster you replied to merely pointed out that "libertarian" is used differently in the US and the rest of the world.
The interesting thing is although the CTT is probably true, we can never be sure, unless someone shows it to be false, in which case we now know that know less than we previously thought that we knew (something like that...).
I think, however, the CTT is in as much of a good standing (and even perhaps better!) as say, quantum mechanics. If you have read Karl Popper (philosopher of science), you will have seen the argument that natural science never strictly proves its theories, but rather holds on to them as far as they can go without being either falsified or improved upon by a simpler/more general theory. So if we hold our natural science theories to be on good standing, we should do the same for the CTT:-)
[Nerds] have failed to prove the Church-Turing Thesis.
Uh, isn't the CTT an unprovable statement? Or even more precisely, how could one possibly formalize it in order to prove it? I mean, you would have to show that each and every one of the infinitely (indenumerably?) many possible computational methods that meet the relevant criteria (i.e., computing functions using only a finite number of definite steps, each involving only a finite amount of work) turns out to compute the same class of functions?
You could refute the CTT, though, if you found just one counterexample:-)
Distributing XFS as a plug-in file system separately wouldn't work for M$. You can't use it alone, without the main program. Hence, not "considered independent and separate works in themselves".
I was not talking about the NT kernel, but some BSD kernel. If you took a BSD kernel, and added some compilation option to build it with the GPL XFS code, by using that option you would create a composite work you must distribute under the terms of the GPL. This you can do, since the BSD license allows you to sublicense the source code under the GPL. And because a BSD kernel is something you can use without the XFS code, it is a separate and independent work from the XFS code.
I'll ignore the "truely [sic] free" part and just concentrate on the license issues.
I'll quote the GPL, section 2:
If identifiable sections of that [composite] work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when youdistribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
What this means is the following:
If someone were to integrate the BSD kernel with GPL XFS code, and distribute this as a single package, that particular BSD kernel package would have to be distributed in compliance both with the terms of the GPL and BSD licenses at once. In practice this is doable (and the FSF has done it, BTW); it's just a GPL + a BSD advertising clause.
If someone were to create an add-on package that allowed people to take the BSD kernel package + a XFS package for it, distributed under the GPL, and compile BSD kernels with XFS support, this could not affect the distribution terms of the GPL code. Stuff like this is done all the time -- look at all the non-GPL free programs that allow you to optionally link them to GPL libraries like Readline (Python and the Haskell interpreter Hugs come to mind).
Thus, GPL XFS code could be integrated into BSD without tainting its license, since the BSD code is a separate work. What you can't do is distribute the combination under terms incompatible with the GPL.
I ran Red Hat for a year, then switched to Debian, so I've used both.
Really, just as package manager programs, none of them really beats the other.
But, when you inspect the quality of the average RPM package (BTW, stay away from contrib!) vs the average deb file, Debian comes out far on top. This is not because of dpkg features, but because of Debian policy. Debian packages are built according to a set of guidelines, which give you more consistency in your system -- all configuration files have to be in/etc. Every package has to have copyright, documentation, changelogs and optional packager notes in/usr/doc; this is the first place I go whenever I install a new package, to look for a README.Debian file, which will detail any Debian-specific details about the package. The/usr/doc dir also frequently includes an examples directory, where you can find sample configuration files and such.
Debian packages generally do an excellent job of configuring themselves when installed. Many have a config script, which asks you questions to change the package configuration.
Also, Debian shows a great deal of attention towards making stuff work together. For example, all the different emacs packages are coordinated by a required meta-package, emacsen, which provides methods to install emacs extension packages for all of the installed emacs versions. This means, that if I have emacs 19, 20 and xemacs 21 all installed, and if I install an extension package like AUC TeX, it will detect which versions of emacs are installed, and automatically byte-compile itself for all of them. If I deinstall one of the emacsen, for example emacs 19, the extension packages will automatically deinstall themselves for that version, too.
Thus, a lot of what is superior about debs over RPMs is in the packages themselves.
First of all, I was just quoting someone else who wrote something short, concise and forceful enough to be quotable.
Second, never did I say that everyone should know how their computers work.
The sentiment I think the quote I gave transmits, when placed in its proper context (read the message I replied to for that) is what I know many people who owned as kids during the 80s share-- that nowadays kids have a much smaller chance of learning the workings of the machine, than some of the computers in the 80s provided (think computers like the C64/C128, Apple ][, Tandy Color Computer, and so on).
I remember that some slashdot poster once put this point across very forcefully and briefly. I'll paraphrase it:
"A generation of kids is growing up that isn't learning how their computers work. Isn't that scary?"
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Re:Shocking example of Industry gone awry.
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I just posted a huge reply to your other post before reading this one. Perhaps you want to email me better, this slashdot story must already be off the front page.
Yes, I spent so much time arguing with you that I actually haven't looked at the main page:-).
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Re:Shocking example of Industry gone awry.
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I guess you've never heard of organically grown (and certified) food. If pesticides bother you then put your money where your mouth is and buy organic food.
Personally I know people who live on a subsistence salary. Subsistence means they have to buy the cheapest goods available in order to survive.
If enough people do this then the organic producers will make more money and more producers will "go organic" and show that there are profits to be made.
Simplistic. There are many possible responses from the non-organic producers, only one of them being "going organic". And this last one is not the most desirable one -- it involves higher production costs, and possibly a decrease in output. So they will look at other possiblities. Instead of "going organic", they might choose on going "organic" -- big promotional campaigns on half-hearted, ineffective "green" measures, paying for "scientific studies" on the "exaggerated claims" of the organic producers and so on. If the body of non-organic producers is bigger enough than that of organic producers, they have a very good chance of keeping the status quo intact. You can have an Association of Food Producers to pool combined resources into this kind of measure.
This might sound like the kind of thing a monopoly does, and it is quite similar. The point is that if a large group of companies' profits is threatened by changes to the status quo, they can take action to stop those changes from being done, without the aid of the government.
And the argument that its too expensive doesn't really hold water either, if its important enough to you then you will spend the money on it (the difference isn't that huge).
For the people who can't genuinely afford it, it is by definition too expensive. I this includes the majority of Earth's population.
The same argument is used by people that want to use recycled paper but don't want the added expense. It costs more money so you have to be willing to deal with it.
These people are doing what is expected of them in a capitalist economy -- to maximize their profits.
But anyway, that argument would be nice to tell to companies polluting the environment and hurting innocent people in the third world because it's cheaper. The opposite, doing what's socially better, "costs more money so you have to be willing to deal with it". Hmm, somehow I feel I'm not gonna sit around to wait for them to decrease their profits to "deal with it".
The American government as all the right in the world to watch and record and analyze and study the dataflows on the Internet, just like anyone else has. If the FBI wants to act as an online security consultant, then that is completly fine with me.
Let's just change this a bit:
The American government as all the right in the world to watch and record and analyze and study the dataflows on the telephone network, just like anyone else has. If the FBI wants to act as an telephone security consultant, then that is completly fine with me.
Would you agree with this statement? I don't think there is any important difference between the original and the new one. We are talking about networks that span the whole globe, where data is normally transmitted without encryption, and in which by tapping at the right place, you may intercept lots of communications. However, it is an invasion of privacy for the government to wiretap phones without a court order. Why should it be any different for, say, email or TCP connections in general?
Given that the these two huge holes in our human rights go away, I will gladly assume that every information generated by me on Internet (be it a random Telnet package or a slashdot post) falls into everybody's hands (including the American, Iraqee, and Chinese governments).
This may be true of/. posts, but I don't see how if I email you this would get into chinese gov't hands. (I can traceroute the path between our mailservers and see, but I don't think this will be necessary.) Same if I telnet to my university computer from a home dialup connection.
Yes, of couse, wern't those the guys who advocated terrorism beacuse they knew they could never achive what they wanted through a true democratic process?
There's a couple of unstated assumptions here that are worth challenging.
First, that of "true democratic process". I would like to know which "democratic process" you refer to when talking about terrorist organizations. I hope you don't mean the U.S. "democratic" system (where power is wielded by a bureacracy, the elected officials get to where they are because of corporate support, and there has been historically political persecution against people who oppose corporate power).
Also the word "terrorism". Well, I am against terrorism, but I happen to oppose it regardless of who is doing it, whether it be by Islamic fundamentalists or U.S. government agents. The latter, of course, call what they do not "terrorism", but rather "counterinsurgency".
Let's take a look at your message again:
Yes, of couse, wern't those the guys who advocated terrorism beacuse they knew they could never achive what they wanted through a true democratic process?
And now, let us take "the US government" as the referent for "they", and recognize such doublespeak as "counterinsurgency", "defense from internal attack", or "stabilization" for what they really are when the U.S. gov't has used them, and think of cases like:
Vietnam;
Guatemala;
El Salvador;
Nicaragua;
Chile
and many others.
In that context, your message could very well be talking about the way the U.S. government has conducted its post-WWII international relations.
Well, we were studying McCarthyism in my college US government class yesterday...
Yeah... spooky stuff, isn't it? And it wasn't only McCarthy involved. Everyone realized back then he was a loon, and fell into disgrace. But most other people who were involved in this suffered no ill effects. In fact, some went on to greater things, like Nixon and Reagan...
I also happen to be a Anarchist and spend a lot of my time visiting left and anarchist websites, as well as being on several mailing lists. This is very very very evil. All I can hope is that a bunch of Anonymous filtering websites come up that let you visit sites "anonymously" as well as send and receive email anonymously.
And not be corvertly set up by the gov't, as well. Don't you realize that such an "anonymizer" is perfect for surveillance? That way you can easily gather a good database of juicy info on people who use it. Even info on people you're not after is useful-- you can blackmail people into falsely testifying against people you're after. The FBI is known to have used such tactics.
Many people have also been observing student protests, and many protests in general have really been rising recently, and many new people have been joining existing organizations (say NOW for instance).
And you can be sure that among the people joining there will be agents, which can serve to gather info or as provocateurs. I did my BA at the Universtiy of Puerto Rico, where there's a very long story of that. Though nowadays it's cooled down somewhat, people I know who went there in the 70s can tell you the stories about the left organizations getting infiltrated. For example, in the mid 80s, when government files on political opponents were made public, one could see that many of the most violent, extremist "radicals" who were always calling for violence against the state were actually agents...
I'm wondering if they're planning on cracking down on government/corporate resistance. They're probably aware of the increases themselves. And the Internet has been a very usefull tool to unite organizations and struggles from all over the world. This is very f-cking scary.
That's what the FBI has historically dedicated itself to, and there's no real indicator that this has changed.
Really, this thing about monitoring the net is just extending current civillian surveillance to email messages and such.
Anyone who wants to know more about the FBI's history of surveillance and sabotage of civillian organizations, check out this page on COINTELPRO. The material there is actual declassified FBI documents.
Also, I've noticed that a couple of messages above show their posters to be completely ignorant with respect to Anarchism. I would suggest them to go check out the Anarchist FAQ Webpage.
And don't bother applying for a government or a government-contractor job: "We see you engaged in some patterns of behaviour that could point to illegal activity on your part. Be thankful we don't prosecute you. Next, please..." [...] This is fiction right now, but it could easily become reality.
Scenarios like this are definitely not fiction. In fact, the FBI has been doing stuff like this for years. It's their bread and butter.
One of my best friend's uncles found out when he was in his 40s that in all the local government jobs he had applied to in his 20s he had been rejected for political reasons, despite his being top candidate for some of them. The government of Puerto Rico and the FBI used to keep (and probably still do) files of people considered to be "subversives"; those people were continuously harrassed by the authorities in many different manners. The criteria for being a "subversive" was opposing U.S. domination of Puerto Rico, and who was considered a subversive was established by means of surveillance, paid informers and covert agents, which also did sabotage operations.
This is all very well documented since both PR government and FBI files are now public.
I suggest you look at this page to find out more about COINTELPRO, the FBI's 60s-70s civillian surveillance program.
See, indenting lisp is even easier. You put parens around the blocks and then hit TAB and it indents for you. If it indents in a way you weren't expecting, add and remove brackets until it does.
Yeah, I've used lisp too (scheme), so I've tried it. It's good, but somewhat messier than just using the indentation, IMHO. For example, when you are deleting/replacing code, it's not easiy to see right away which parenthesis goes with which one when you have a string of them. Though I would just delete the whole bunch of them and reenter them, trusting emacs match-paren feature.
I keep coming up with this thing about the (supposedly silly) French Language Academy and their silly measures to stop loanwords from coming into French.
Any frenchmen out there can tell me how much of it is true and how much U.S. urban legend?
From my experience with the Spanish Language Academy, if the French one were to be similar, I would conclude that the stories are mainly legend (or at the very least exagerations, or citing a few kooks or reactionaries as an example). However, I know very little about the French Academy.
Don't worry, I certainly know C is useful. How much of my system software is written in it?:-)
I think I dind't make the implicit explicit on my original post. There is a certain range of programming tasks that fall under my interests. I am not a programmer or computer scientist, after all; I am a computer-savvy linguistics student. If I'm gonna write a program myself, and it's not performance-critical, Python is an optimal tool. If it is performance critical, well, though I did learn C, I was never too good at it; but I can try finding good C programmers to help out, and I can understand their code, so the end result is not a black art to me:-)
I've heard good things about Python, but I just can't get past the fact that horizontal whitespace is syntactically significant. That's just insane.
It isn't. When I first heard of such a feature, it was in another language, and I though the exact same thing about it. But when I tried it with Python, it felt just right. Actually, it felt better than having to match braces or forgetting semicolons. What I experienced, simply, was having one less thing to worry about. You just indent your code uniformly (which is good practice, anyway). If you need an expression to span more than one line, you just put it in parenthesis. Python figures out what goes with what.
Well, I _do_ envy Perl's thosands of library modules. The language just hasn't felt right to me. I know it's a very useful language, but the syntax just seems insane, and I'm quite happy with Python anyway.
Though I still plan to look harder at Perl; maybe next year.
There are two communities who apply the same word to themselves. The American leftists call themselves liberals and so do the European libertarians. Big deal.
I think you hit the point far more precisely than you seem to show. The fight over the meaning of the word 'hacker' is not semantical, but political. It is not about what words actually mean (as ascertained by looking at the use of words in communities), but about what words whould mean.
Personally, I support not calling computer criminals 'hackers', no matter how much some people reply (correctly, but not satisfactory, IMHO) that it is usage that determines meaning, and that in general usage 'hacker' by now means 'computer criminal'. So what. There is a certain outlook on life, a certain world view, in general, a certain set of values that hackers attach to the word 'hacker', that I don't want to be silenced by a mass of script kiddies who have taken over the word, with the aid of a sensationalist and ignorant press.
I'm not shure if we can have a definition of what is a compiler that does no include some degree of arbitrariness.
For example, is TeX a compiler? I personally think not; however, it is built very nearly like a compiler is. Lexical analysis, syntactic analysis, semantical analysis, and then synthesis and code generation (I don't know if some analogue to optimization is present; I think not).
The difference is in the "meaning" of the sources processed by TeX; they specify boxes in a page, rather than actions. But technically speaking, it is not different from a compiler.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, if your file systems get repeatedly corrupted under Linux, and your system reboots spontaneously, then Linux is failing to achieve the basic functionality it is intended to provide (and which it actually _does_ provide for millions of boxes). You should (a) check your hardware, (b) check your kernel setup, and if this still is not the problem, (c) file a bug report against Linux.
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Computational Linguistics (AI-related):
If you're interested in stuff like Natural Language Processing, these places are very good. If you are seeking a CS major (rather than linguistics) with a specialization on NLP, I would recommend UPenn as a bit above Stanford (though the opposite would go if you were a linguistics major interested in NLP). As a matter of fact, Stanford this year was looking for a new junior professor for computational linguistics, and of the 6 candidates, 3 were from UPenn, that's how good they are in that area.
I visited both places this year and they're very good. They both do LOTS of very good research in the area, so you'll definitely get chances to do very interesting work. At UPenn, also, lots of CS, Linguistics and Psychology majors hang around the same research center, and take classes in each other's areas, making for a great interdisciplinary approach.
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Wait. I think there is a fundamental misstep here. The CTT is a statement about all computational models, not the halting problem for a particular one like Turing machines. It is one thing to take one such well defined computational model, say Turing machines, and to derive from Godel's theorem the unsolvability of in that model of its own halting problem. Once you do that for Turing machines, the result extends to all Turing-equivalent computational models, like the lambda calculus or Semi-Thue processes, for example. Since any of these is equivalent to Turing machines, it can solve its halting problems iff Turing machines can solve it (the other model's halting problem); yet if a TM could solve it, it would also be able to solve its (the Turing machine's) own halting problem; thus we would end up in a contradiction!
This, we have seen, is doable for particualr computational models. However, it is another thing altogether to do this for all plausible computational models. But this is what you would have to do to prove the CTT. At least according to the definitions of the CTT I have (see Davis, Sigal and Weyuker, Computability, Complexity and Languages, pp. 68-69, for the source I had in mind for my earlier post).
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Wonderful trick. You say socialism involves coercion by definition, yet you haven't defined socialism. I'll have to remeber this trick ;-)
So now you end up having to explain to us how come a society in which the producers themselves own and control the means of production ("socialism") necessarily involves coercion.
I can tell you that in twenty years of reading about libertarianism, discussing the philosophy with others (worldwide) via FidoNet, Usenet, etc., that the mainstream usage of "libertarian" is indeed that of someone opposed to using coercion to achieve political goals. Certainly, the meaning differs around the world; outside the U.S., libertarians are less purist. The main difference I've seen is that "Euro-libertarians" don't care much for firearms, as most Europeans seem to be hoplophobic.
But why should we give you any more credit than we give them? Even admitting as valid what you have experienced, there is no reason why anyone should not believe the two posters who have stated that outside the US "libertarian" means something different.
Once you decide that the free market is the problem, and that some sort of governmental body must step in to achieve goals that the free market is not achieving, and use coercion towards those ends, you cease being a libertarian, and begin being a statist.
And once you decide that the free market and coercive hierarchical institutions in general (government, corporations, capitalist private property rights) are the problem, you become an anarchist, or "libertarian socialist": a defender of the stateless form of socialism.
I concur with the previous poster. I believe you are taking socialism to mean "state socialism" only.
Well, I suppose there's really no point in discussing this any further. People such as yourself are so obviously convinced that Americans are dolts, and of your own infallibility, that no amount of evidence is going to convince you otherwise.
I think your reaction is unwarranted. The poster you replied to merely pointed out that "libertarian" is used differently in the US and the rest of the world.
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I think, however, the CTT is in as much of a good standing (and even perhaps better!) as say, quantum mechanics. If you have read Karl Popper (philosopher of science), you will have seen the argument that natural science never strictly proves its theories, but rather holds on to them as far as they can go without being either falsified or improved upon by a simpler/more general theory. So if we hold our natural science theories to be on good standing, we should do the same for the CTT :-)
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Uh, isn't the CTT an unprovable statement? Or even more precisely, how could one possibly formalize it in order to prove it? I mean, you would have to show that each and every one of the infinitely (indenumerably?) many possible computational methods that meet the relevant criteria (i.e., computing functions using only a finite number of definite steps, each involving only a finite amount of work) turns out to compute the same class of functions?
You could refute the CTT, though, if you found just one counterexample :-)
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Readline is under GPL, not LGPL.
Distributing XFS as a plug-in file system separately wouldn't work for M$. You can't use it alone, without the main program. Hence, not "considered independent and separate works in themselves".
I was not talking about the NT kernel, but some BSD kernel. If you took a BSD kernel, and added some compilation option to build it with the GPL XFS code, by using that option you would create a composite work you must distribute under the terms of the GPL. This you can do, since the BSD license allows you to sublicense the source code under the GPL. And because a BSD kernel is something you can use without the XFS code, it is a separate and independent work from the XFS code.
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I'll quote the GPL, section 2:
What this means is the following:
Thus, GPL XFS code could be integrated into BSD without tainting its license, since the BSD code is a separate work. What you can't do is distribute the combination under terms incompatible with the GPL.
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Really, just as package manager programs, none of them really beats the other.
But, when you inspect the quality of the average RPM package (BTW, stay away from contrib!) vs the average deb file, Debian comes out far on top. This is not because of dpkg features, but because of Debian policy. Debian packages are built according to a set of guidelines, which give you more consistency in your system -- all configuration files have to be in /etc. Every package has to have copyright, documentation, changelogs and optional packager notes in /usr/doc; this is the first place I go whenever I install a new package, to look for a README.Debian file, which will detail any Debian-specific details about the package. The /usr/doc dir also frequently includes an examples directory, where you can find sample configuration files and such.
Debian packages generally do an excellent job of configuring themselves when installed. Many have a config script, which asks you questions to change the package configuration.
Also, Debian shows a great deal of attention towards making stuff work together. For example, all the different emacs packages are coordinated by a required meta-package, emacsen, which provides methods to install emacs extension packages for all of the installed emacs versions. This means, that if I have emacs 19, 20 and xemacs 21 all installed, and if I install an extension package like AUC TeX, it will detect which versions of emacs are installed, and automatically byte-compile itself for all of them. If I deinstall one of the emacsen, for example emacs 19, the extension packages will automatically deinstall themselves for that version, too.
Thus, a lot of what is superior about debs over RPMs is in the packages themselves.
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First of all, I was just quoting someone else who wrote something short, concise and forceful enough to be quotable.
Second, never did I say that everyone should know how their computers work.
The sentiment I think the quote I gave transmits, when placed in its proper context (read the message I replied to for that) is what I know many people who owned as kids during the 80s share-- that nowadays kids have a much smaller chance of learning the workings of the machine, than some of the computers in the 80s provided (think computers like the C64/C128, Apple ][, Tandy Color Computer, and so on).
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Yes, I spent so much time arguing with you that I actually haven't looked at the main page :-).
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I guess you've never heard of organically grown (and certified) food. If pesticides bother you then put your money where your mouth is and buy organic food.
Personally I know people who live on a subsistence salary. Subsistence means they have to buy the cheapest goods available in order to survive.
If enough people do this then the organic producers will make more money and more producers will "go organic" and show that there are profits to be made.
Simplistic. There are many possible responses from the non-organic producers, only one of them being "going organic". And this last one is not the most desirable one -- it involves higher production costs, and possibly a decrease in output. So they will look at other possiblities. Instead of "going organic", they might choose on going "organic" -- big promotional campaigns on half-hearted, ineffective "green" measures, paying for "scientific studies" on the "exaggerated claims" of the organic producers and so on. If the body of non-organic producers is bigger enough than that of organic producers, they have a very good chance of keeping the status quo intact. You can have an Association of Food Producers to pool combined resources into this kind of measure.
This might sound like the kind of thing a monopoly does, and it is quite similar. The point is that if a large group of companies' profits is threatened by changes to the status quo, they can take action to stop those changes from being done, without the aid of the government.
And the argument that its too expensive doesn't really hold water either, if its important enough to you then you will spend the money on it (the difference isn't that huge).
For the people who can't genuinely afford it, it is by definition too expensive. I this includes the majority of Earth's population.
The same argument is used by people that want to use recycled paper but don't want the added expense. It costs more money so you have to be willing to deal with it.
These people are doing what is expected of them in a capitalist economy -- to maximize their profits.
But anyway, that argument would be nice to tell to companies polluting the environment and hurting innocent people in the third world because it's cheaper. The opposite, doing what's socially better, "costs more money so you have to be willing to deal with it". Hmm, somehow I feel I'm not gonna sit around to wait for them to decrease their profits to "deal with it".
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The American government as all the right in the world to watch and record and analyze and study the dataflows on the Internet, just like anyone else has. If the FBI wants to act as an online security consultant, then that is completly fine with me.
Let's just change this a bit:
Would you agree with this statement? I don't think there is any important difference between the original and the new one. We are talking about networks that span the whole globe, where data is normally transmitted without encryption, and in which by tapping at the right place, you may intercept lots of communications. However, it is an invasion of privacy for the government to wiretap phones without a court order. Why should it be any different for, say, email or TCP connections in general?
Given that the these two huge holes in our human rights go away, I will gladly assume that every information generated by me on Internet (be it a random Telnet package or a slashdot post) falls into everybody's hands (including the American, Iraqee, and Chinese governments).
This may be true of /. posts, but I don't see how if I email you this would get into chinese gov't hands. (I can traceroute the path between our mailservers and see, but I don't think this will be necessary.) Same if I telnet to my university computer from a home dialup connection.
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There's a couple of unstated assumptions here that are worth challenging.
First, that of "true democratic process". I would like to know which "democratic process" you refer to when talking about terrorist organizations. I hope you don't mean the U.S. "democratic" system (where power is wielded by a bureacracy, the elected officials get to where they are because of corporate support, and there has been historically political persecution against people who oppose corporate power).
Also the word "terrorism". Well, I am against terrorism, but I happen to oppose it regardless of who is doing it, whether it be by Islamic fundamentalists or U.S. government agents. The latter, of course, call what they do not "terrorism", but rather "counterinsurgency".
Let's take a look at your message again:
Yes, of couse, wern't those the guys who advocated terrorism beacuse they knew they could never achive what they wanted through a true democratic process?
And now, let us take "the US government" as the referent for "they", and recognize such doublespeak as "counterinsurgency", "defense from internal attack", or "stabilization" for what they really are when the U.S. gov't has used them, and think of cases like:
- Vietnam;
- Guatemala;
- El Salvador;
- Nicaragua;
- Chile
and many others.In that context, your message could very well be talking about the way the U.S. government has conducted its post-WWII international relations.
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Yeah... spooky stuff, isn't it? And it wasn't only McCarthy involved. Everyone realized back then he was a loon, and fell into disgrace. But most other people who were involved in this suffered no ill effects. In fact, some went on to greater things, like Nixon and Reagan...
I also happen to be a Anarchist and spend a lot of my time visiting left and anarchist websites, as well as being on several mailing lists. This is very very very evil. All I can hope is that a bunch of Anonymous filtering websites come up that let you visit sites "anonymously" as well as send and receive email anonymously.
And not be corvertly set up by the gov't, as well. Don't you realize that such an "anonymizer" is perfect for surveillance? That way you can easily gather a good database of juicy info on people who use it. Even info on people you're not after is useful-- you can blackmail people into falsely testifying against people you're after. The FBI is known to have used such tactics.
Many people have also been observing student protests, and many protests in general have really been rising recently, and many new people have been joining existing organizations (say NOW for instance).
And you can be sure that among the people joining there will be agents, which can serve to gather info or as provocateurs. I did my BA at the Universtiy of Puerto Rico, where there's a very long story of that. Though nowadays it's cooled down somewhat, people I know who went there in the 70s can tell you the stories about the left organizations getting infiltrated. For example, in the mid 80s, when government files on political opponents were made public, one could see that many of the most violent, extremist "radicals" who were always calling for violence against the state were actually agents...
I'm wondering if they're planning on cracking down on government/corporate resistance. They're probably aware of the increases themselves. And the Internet has been a very usefull tool to unite organizations and struggles from all over the world. This is very f-cking scary.
That's what the FBI has historically dedicated itself to, and there's no real indicator that this has changed.
Really, this thing about monitoring the net is just extending current civillian surveillance to email messages and such.
Anyone who wants to know more about the FBI's history of surveillance and sabotage of civillian organizations, check out this page on COINTELPRO. The material there is actual declassified FBI documents.
Also, I've noticed that a couple of messages above show their posters to be completely ignorant with respect to Anarchism. I would suggest them to go check out the Anarchist FAQ Webpage.
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Scenarios like this are definitely not fiction. In fact, the FBI has been doing stuff like this for years. It's their bread and butter.
One of my best friend's uncles found out when he was in his 40s that in all the local government jobs he had applied to in his 20s he had been rejected for political reasons, despite his being top candidate for some of them. The government of Puerto Rico and the FBI used to keep (and probably still do) files of people considered to be "subversives"; those people were continuously harrassed by the authorities in many different manners. The criteria for being a "subversive" was opposing U.S. domination of Puerto Rico, and who was considered a subversive was established by means of surveillance, paid informers and covert agents, which also did sabotage operations.
This is all very well documented since both PR government and FBI files are now public.
I suggest you look at this page to find out more about COINTELPRO, the FBI's 60s-70s civillian surveillance program.
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Yeah, I've used lisp too (scheme), so I've tried it. It's good, but somewhat messier than just using the indentation, IMHO. For example, when you are deleting/replacing code, it's not easiy to see right away which parenthesis goes with which one when you have a string of them. Though I would just delete the whole bunch of them and reenter them, trusting emacs match-paren feature.
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Any frenchmen out there can tell me how much of it is true and how much U.S. urban legend?
From my experience with the Spanish Language Academy, if the French one were to be similar, I would conclude that the stories are mainly legend (or at the very least exagerations, or citing a few kooks or reactionaries as an example). However, I know very little about the French Academy.
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Don't worry, I certainly know C is useful. How much of my system software is written in it? :-)
I think I dind't make the implicit explicit on my original post. There is a certain range of programming tasks that fall under my interests. I am not a programmer or computer scientist, after all; I am a computer-savvy linguistics student. If I'm gonna write a program myself, and it's not performance-critical, Python is an optimal tool. If it is performance critical, well, though I did learn C, I was never too good at it; but I can try finding good C programmers to help out, and I can understand their code, so the end result is not a black art to me :-)
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It isn't. When I first heard of such a feature, it was in another language, and I though the exact same thing about it. But when I tried it with Python, it felt just right. Actually, it felt better than having to match braces or forgetting semicolons. What I experienced, simply, was having one less thing to worry about. You just indent your code uniformly (which is good practice, anyway). If you need an expression to span more than one line, you just put it in parenthesis. Python figures out what goes with what.
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Though I still plan to look harder at Perl; maybe next year.
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I think you hit the point far more precisely than you seem to show. The fight over the meaning of the word 'hacker' is not semantical, but political. It is not about what words actually mean (as ascertained by looking at the use of words in communities), but about what words whould mean.
Personally, I support not calling computer criminals 'hackers', no matter how much some people reply (correctly, but not satisfactory, IMHO) that it is usage that determines meaning, and that in general usage 'hacker' by now means 'computer criminal'. So what. There is a certain outlook on life, a certain world view, in general, a certain set of values that hackers attach to the word 'hacker', that I don't want to be silenced by a mass of script kiddies who have taken over the word, with the aid of a sensationalist and ignorant press.
I won't lose sleep over this, anyway.
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I'm not shure if we can have a definition of what is a compiler that does no include some degree of arbitrariness.
For example, is TeX a compiler? I personally think not; however, it is built very nearly like a compiler is. Lexical analysis, syntactic analysis, semantical analysis, and then synthesis and code generation (I don't know if some analogue to optimization is present; I think not).
The difference is in the "meaning" of the sources processed by TeX; they specify boxes in a page, rather than actions. But technically speaking, it is not different from a compiler.
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