There are several problems with this argument. First and foremost, they'll need to learn this stuff at some point, and the earlier the better. If your early beliefs aren't challenged until you get to university then you're going to have a much harder time of it than if you had people throwing different theories at you left right and centre for most of your life.
Commensurate with that is the fact that people learn how to think by example, as with everything else. Learning theories, and how those theories were developed, is one of the best ways out for you to learn to think. If you look at the development of physics, it's really easy to learn Newton, and it's very instructive to learn about how he arrived at his theories. This makes it easier to learn about later theories that built on Newton, and it introduces the type of thought process that goes into scientific endeavour. So you can't really separate learning to think from learning theories about the world.
And finally there's the precedent in this: if one place decides to take this path, then more will follow, and once that starts happening you'll end up undoing a large chunk of the good work done in the last fifty years to raise the general public's awareness of this sort of thing. That ain't good . . .
Evolution (or more correctly the Theory of Evolution [ie, the theory that uses evolution driven by natural selection and genetic drift to explain the development of speciation(sp?)]) has been considered a sound theory for so long that almost all of modern biology is based on it. The only people who don't think it's up to scratch are the people who's world view is destroyed by it: fundamentalist christians, young-earth christian scientists and probably one or two more obscure groups. The scientific community as a whole actually considers evolution in general to be one of the most successful theories ever.
I would recomend that you read the talk.origins FAQs to get a bit more insight into the current state of things. It is a really good resource.
Oh, and another thing: creationism doesn't even rate as a hypothesis. You see, it isn't actually falsifiable (it isn't even a coherent hypothesis, really), and if you can't prove a hypothesis to be wrong it's essentially worthless to science. You can never prove something _true_ in science, so if you can't prove it false then there's nothing much to work with. And, of course, an experiment to verify something is boring - it's much more fun to set out to find clear evidence _against_ a hypothesis (and it generally makes you more famous).
In any case, the only point of comparison between evolutionary theory and creationism is the fact that they both try to explain part of how the world works. Other than that, creationism just isn't in the same league.
Carbon dating (using the ratio between [I think] carbon 14 and nitrogen 14[?] to determine how long it has been since atmospheric carbon was deposited in the sample) is only useful for samples up to about 40-50,000 (4e+4 - 5e+4) years. These lipid traces were found in rock that is 2.6-2.7 BILLION years (2.6e+_9_). That is _five_ orders of magnitude greater. I think we can rest assured that they didn't rely on carbon dating for these figures.
What is far more likely is that they dated the _rocks_ that the traces were found, which could be done quite reliably (using a number of independant methods). That sort of dating (probably using some form of radioactive decay) is reliable, when done correctly, and if the methodology is published that correctness can easily be established. I would suggest that you refrain from trashing this research until you've actually found out what they did, and how reliably they did it. But that's a bit unreasonable, isn't it? You might have to do some research, and maybe even learn something (heaven forbid).
If you want to make it painfully obvious that you really are an idiot, then go right ahead and post more crud like this. If you want to seem even moderately intelligent I'd recomend not posting anything that you haven't at least thought for a few minutes about.
Of course, you did put your name to it, which puts you at least one rung up from the bottom feeders that all too often plague this place.
himi Think before posting. And _always_ preview . . .
"As humans, how much pain and lives have been saved by having penicillin? In 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered an 'accidental' mold in one of his petri dishes that would save countless lives. Both in war and peace. If you are looking for sheer numbers of people affected by one thing, that would have to be close to the top. "
I'm sorry, but that is pure crap. Yes, Fleming discovered penicillin mold and it's properties, but he thought it was just a curiosity, not worth anything. It was Howard Florey and Ernst Chain who turned penicillin into a medicine. If it hadn't been for them, it could easily have taken far longer for someone to rediscover the effects of antibiotics and to actually use them. If you're going to argue for people's inclusion in this list on the basis of their effect on this century, you could hardly go much further than the people who essentially destroyed the world's fear of illness - prior to penicillin people could easily die from complications to minor illnesses (even the common cold): consequently people lived in genuine fear of illness. Since the advent of antibiotics minor ailments are exactly that: minor. No one worries that they might die if they don't get over their cold in a week.
The last fifty years would have been a very different time if it hadn't been for the work of Florey and Chain in making use of Fleming's fortuitous discovery.
Of course, since this "Man of the Century" thing seems to be a popular vote, it will probably end up going to someone who was either popular or well known for no good reason, or someone who had a reasonably large, but very *visible* effect (eg Hitler), rather than to the people who had the massive but largely invisibile effects. Popularity polls always put forward popular people, but rarely are the really important people popular.
So hey, lets all vote for Linus. It's more fun than voting for Florey, Chain or Salk and having your suggestions upstaged by "Entertainers" who never did anything with their lives. Elvis? That makes me sick. So I'll laugh it off, and vote for someone I think would apreciate the joke.
Telstra currently owns the infrastructure and at the same time is the largest user of that infrastructure. Anyone who wanted to compete with them would have two choices: pay billions of dollars to set up a competing infrastructure, or pay through the nose to telstra to use their wire. That's where the problem lies - Telstra has control of the thing that everyone needs to provide their service.
What really has to happen is something along these lines: The part of Telstra that maintains the actual infrastructure has to be broken away from Telstra the service provider. The service provider side can be sold to the highest bidder, funding whatever our current bloody stupid govt. wants today. The infrastructure side really must stay in public hands - that way it's possible for them to be forced to give a certain level of service everywhere, be it the capital cities or some outstation in Arnhem Land. If Telstra is privatised, or is forced to compete as it is, then those expensive, non-profitable services will get dropped. They are simply too expensive for a commercial entity to support, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to (hey, it's not real competition if you handicap one player). Asking Telstra to be both commercially competitive and to provide (much needed but) expensive, unprofitable services is ridiculous.
So break them up. It would give us Australian taxpayers some certainty in the services provided us (because of the govt. control of the infrastructure), and it would allow real competition on a completely level playing field (apologies for the cliche). And the govt. could still rake in masses of cash from charging the telco's for using their wires . . . I think it'd be a win-win situation, but even if it set Telstra the company back it'd be way better for the country, and that's far more important.
I haven't got a problem laughing at RMS (have you ever heard that song of his? Cringemaking, but funny). However, I do have a problem with something that amounts to a personal attack on the man.
"Good" humour should _not_ be based on trying to hurt someone else, and that's what this thing is. If you read Tom Christiansen's posts in the RMS thread last week you'd probably look at this a bit differently - it's basically a reworking of what he was saying there, only done so that no one can argue with his point ("Hey, it's just a joke!"). If you read all of that thread you'd have found at least one other post where he verbally attacked someone, and one person who'd actually tried to discuss things with him. The resulting 'dialogue' ended with tc killfiling the poor bastard who'd dared to disagree with him!
Sure, in a completely different situation and with different people involved this could be humour in slightly bad taste. As things stand, I can't see it as anything other than a personal attack.
ESR wasn't saying that id had turned into an open source company, he was saying that Doom, the product itself, had changed from being something that was better as closed source to something that would be better off as open source. He wasn't saying anything about id, just about the game.
His argument was that software goes through a sort of life-cycle, shifting over time from new and unique and very profitable to old hat, and with just about no money value. He was saying that it's perfectly sensible to make the thing closed source while it's new, because that's the best way to milk it for money, but after it gets to be old hat it's far easier to turn it into open source. Doom was merely an example of that kind of software.
"All of these trends raised the payoff from opening the source. At some point the payoff curves crossed over and it became economically rational for id to open up the Doom source and shift to making money in secondary markets such as game-scenario anthologies. And sometime after this point, it actually happened. The full source for Doom was released in late 1997."
This quote is perhaps a little bit confusing, but it's still talking about Doom, rather than id as a whole. id switched from making money from Doom by selling it to making money from Doom by selling other stuff related to Doom, and then they gave up on it altogether and switched over to Quake . . .
He's talking about strategies for each bit of software, rather than for the company as a whole.
. . . just the ramblings of a tired and confused mind . . .
It's interesting, but it's pretty much a rehash of ideas that have been discussed almost to death everywhere over the last six months or so. I'd say ESR's basically out to round all of that discussion off and summarise the results: I think we need that, particularly from someone as respected as ESR. This is the kind of article that you'd want to point your boss at, but it doesn't really say much that's new.
That said, it is a good summary of the ideas, and though it isn't as revolutionary as CatB was in it's day, it should serve the role it was designed for.
ESR as econosocioanthropologist . . . it works for me . . .
At the time of WW2, Australia had a population of less than ten million, to defend a coastline that comes to about 35,000 kilometers. If anyone actually thought that we could do that all on our own, then they were complete morons. Self reliance is a nice idea, but it doesn't work in the real world unless you're very big.
And you should really try and understand the difference between WW2 and somthing like the American war of independance. The American war of indendance was fought to throw out a colonial power that wasn't treating the colonials fairly. WW2 was fought to stop brutal regimes from taking over large parts of the world. If Japan had been able to invade Australia, then they would have taken away our freedom, yes. But can't you see the difference? They were an invading force, not our own government! And the people whou fought them were not carrying the guns that they owned themselves: they were armed and trained by that very same government that you seem to think we should arm ourselves against! And yes, we got plenty of help from America, because we needed it: we were and are a small country, and the countries that threatened us then were far larger and more powerful than us. Is it so unreasonable to want help? I mean, didn't Britain request help, and get it? Didn't France? Both of those countries were far larger and better armed than Australia was, and yet they didn't feel they could finish the war on their own. I think you are being rather stupid here.
The point that all of this is completely concealing is that despite the fact that most countries need armed forces of some sort, to protect themselves in times of war, the vast majority of those countries (in the first world, at least) do not need to have as many guns in the community as there are people. Only America seems to think that this is necessary. Why? Is it perhaps because enough Americans are fundamentally stupid, and incapable of seeing the reasoning behind most countries control of the supply of guns? Is it maybe the fact that Americans in general are incapable of rational thought? Or is it all those Americans who actually believe that Aliens stole Elvis, or that there was a man behind the grassy knoll, or whatever completly insane thing you might want to mention. Why? Are you beyond reason?
AAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And yes, I know this is flamebait, and I hope it get moderated down to about minus ten, along with the post I'm replying to!
Apologies to all those nice, sensible, reasonable, intelligent Americans out there who might have been offended by this. You know who you are, and I hope that most of you might just agree with come of what I say: if so, then there is some hope for the world.
Freedom isn't having the power to overthrow some bad government if you don't like what they are doing to you. Freedom is mostly a stat of mind, where you know that you can live without having to give up your humanity. And no, guns are not part of your humanity.
If you have to fight to keep your freedom, then you aren't really free. To be free, you have to be free of the need to fight for it. I'm not saying that there might not be times when you do have to fight for your freedom (WW2, for example), but you shouldn't be fighting your government or other people in your country. If you want to be free you have to have a government that you can trust not to take your freedom away from you. Getting that kind of government is simply part of achieving a mature, democratic state. If Americans are so terrified of their government that they don't trust it not to try and become a tyrant, then I really don't think that they are free. But then, most americans are probably fine about that sort of thing. They don't fear their government, they are simply wary of what it can do, and know that it is generally stupid and incompetent, and all that sort of thing. But they don't fear it. If they did, they wouldn't be free: they would be suffering from a form of tyranny, in their own minds, but tyranny none the less.
I'm rambling here, I know, but I do have a point: freedom is much more a state of mind (in the first world, at least) than an actual degree of liberty. It is about personal empowerment through the knowledge that you don't have to fear the world. If you don't have that, then any freedom that you claim to have is dubious at best. And feeling that you have to own a gun in order to empower yourself is a sign that you do fear the world, and that you aren't as free as you like to think.
I am as free as anyone on the planet, because I know that my governemnt, though they might fuck with me in many ways, won't take away my personal freedoms, and can't take them away. Because I know that I don't have to fear anything in the world. And because I believe that I am free. Don't take your belief in freedom from the power that you might have over other people (and governments are made up of people). Take it from the fact that you don't have any more power over other people than they have over you. Take it from the fact that you have options other than the gun for redressing problems (like voting, say). And please don't try and tell me that I could lose my freedom any moment because I have no gun, and most of my country's population has no guns. Because _my_ country doesn't need guns in order to stay free, and has never needed guns to stay free. My country didn't need guns to achieve freedom - we merely had to ask for it. My country is founded on trust, not paranoia.
I don't really think IRIX will disappear until Linux has assimilated all of those nice features IRIX has and Linux doesn't. This move is much more about finding a replacement for NT than finding a replacement for IRIX.
Think about it: SGI have put ten years (or however long it is) into IRIX, and they have made it into one of the best Unices around, particularly in some particular areas. Those areas are where SGI has been targeting their sales. They have far too much committed to IRIX now for them to just give up on it and move to Linux, particularly when they know that Linux in no way compares in the really high end, where they have been targeting alot of their stuff.
What we probably will see is SGI taking the stuff that they want from IRIX and putting it in Linux, things like (hopefully) good smp, improved graphics, etc. But that will take several years, most likely, and at the end of it they will still have lots of stuff that they either didn't or couldn't, for one reason or another, include in Linux. That stuff will be where IRIX comes in, probably on the really high end hardware, and in really specialised applications where they have been developing IRIX for years. They will want to leverage their current technologies in their Linux strategy, but the fact that Linux is Open Source means that there will be some things that they won't want to give away.
I imagine that all the current proprietary Unices will go that way, marginalised by Linux but still worth enough to their creators to keep around. The only problem with that is that I can see Linux heading towards an incredible amount of "creeping featurism" down that road, as all the Unix vendors try to make use of Linux for their own things, by shifting their technologies from their own Unices to Linux. How well all this comes out in the end will depend entirely on how well the Linux Kernel developers can maintain control, and how well Linus can filter out the best bits of the proprietary technologies and integrate them into Linux. If he can do a really good job, I reckon Linux will end up being the yardstick by which every other OS in existence is measured. If Linux absorbs the best of everything, then we'll have an incredible base to start with when it's time to develop the next great OS (Unix is great, but will it cope with things like quantum computing, say? Probably not, so we _will_ need a new type of OS in the future).
May Linus, and Linux, Live Long and Prosper!
. . . just the ramblings of a sick mind at two thirty in the morning . . .
I haven't found any (at least, I couldn't when I was in that part of the market - I don't have any difficulty finding British English dictionaries and the like [which are actually the 'right' ones for Australian English, mostly] for open source stuff). The only good thing about MS software in that sense is that they actually allow you to change the date format around to the non-American way. There certainly isn't anything put out by Microsoft specifically for a market as small and insignificant as Australia (a mere three or four million users . ..).
But then, I'm sure there are plenty of people in America that think that Australia is exactly the same as America, culturally . . . which is as much of a joke as saying that we're just like the British.
The problem here is that there is a clash between the idea of freedom of expression or speech and stopping someone who is harassing people. It sounds to me like this bloke's lawyer argued on "freedom of speech" grounds what should have simply been a case of harassment. Not that I would know what of I speak, not being a lawyer.
How to make that distinction? I wouldn't have a clue. But really, if someone was making obscene or offensive phonecalls to people at a company that they had been sacked from, would that person be able to argue that stopping him was a violation of his human rights? Not bloody likely - he'd be hit with criminal charges. That is what I think should have happened here (IMNSHO).
"Children - AND THIS INCLUDES TEENAGERS - don't comprehend the implications of their actions. It isn't part of their thinking process yet."
I'm sorry, but you are making a very serious mistake here. Firstly, you are assuming that children are not capable of reasoning out the consequences of their actions. This is a stupid assertion. Children are as capable of reason as you or I am: the difference is that children generally lack the experience that "mature" people have, so they quite often don't take their reasoning to it's "correct" conclusion. This is inexperience, not a fundamental inability to reason. And given that, why would you want to minimise your children's chances at gaining experience?
Secondly, and most importantly, when do you stop? At what point do you decide that your child is actually capable of "comprehending the implications of their actions"? Is it when they can vote? When they can drive? When they first go out and get a job? When?
Children are _not_ unable to comprehend things. They can think and reason, and often they are as responsible (if not more) as many adults. What they tend to lack is experience. Parents who hide the world from their children, because they believe that they couldn't comprehend it, are merely ensuring that they have no chance to learn about the world. If a child has not had a chance to learn about the world, then they are almost certainly not capable of dealing with it. So your policy of protecting them actually leaves them completely un-protected when you are no longer in a position to continue protecting.
I cannot emphasise this enough: children *MUST* be given the opportunity to learn about the world. The role of parents is to provide guidance as they learn, not to say that they can only learn certain things until they are old enough to "comprehend" them. Let them learn as freely as their interest dictates: in the end, they'll learn far more, and far better, than anyone could possibly teach them.
I'm from Australia, and I really do find all of this utterly amazing.
I can relate to some of the things that people talk about, like being different (I mean who here _wasn't_ different?), and not being popular, and things like that, but pretty much nothing else.
I was top of my year several times, generally way above most of the rest of the school academically, but that didn't make me a target for the kind of bullying and torture that seems to be common in the descriptions that I have been reading. I wasn't ostracised: I was merely ignored, or left out of things. That was pretty bad at times, but never anything like the dehumanising treatment that people have been describing. And I was going to a "bad" school, probably one of the worst schools in the area.
I could easily be completely wrong here, but I think that part of the difference is simply cultural: being different in Australia is generally accepted (at least, it is in my experience). I don't know why, or why that would be different to America, but from the sound of it conformancy is _very_ highly valued there. That is not the case here.
Which is not to say that everything is sweetnes and light: children and teenagers everywhere are probably pretty much the same in that they tend to be very cliquey (sp?). But cliques are just a way of defining yourself, not everyone else. I don't think this is anywhere near as destructive as the descriptions of the American situation.
If you want to make claims like that, you really should a) back them up (ie, examples where you can provide some _evidence_), and b) try getting an account, so that you, too, can be responsible for what you say.
Posting this sort of thing as an AC just makes people start thinking of ways to stop AC's from posting. I don't want that, and I suppose you don't, so either take responsibility for your claims, or put up and shut up.
Not that it's something to be proud of, but it can be fun:)
The problem with this legislation is that very few people in Australia have really formed an opinion about this issue. When we do reach that point, the government will pretty much have to follow that. The thing is, how long will it take for people to get informed enough to have a real opinion?
What really needs to happen here is a campaign by one of the big newspapers to fight this sort of censorship. That would get people thinking about it, and it would force the government to be much more open about their deliberations. Once that happens, they'll have to slow down, and inertia might just win in the end! But it needs to be big, not just the sort of thing that you get with a national day of action.
Anyone want to write a really good letter to the Age? I would, but I can't write that well . . .
I was beginning to think that all Americans were completely rabid gun lovers/haters. I hadn't thought about this in that context - it does explain things a bit.
There's a wonderful long rant about rights somewhere back up the page . . . ranting is VERY good for your health:)
But this is about freedom of speech in Australia.
Freedom of Speech is a right that is granted to people in a society, by that society. It isn't something that you have to fight for, it is something that the large group of people that you live in decide is important enough to let you have. Saying that if you give up the right to bear arms you will inevitably end up losing the right to say whatever you want to without fear of reprisal is basically stupid.
I think part of the problem that you Americans have with this idea is the fact that you fought a war in order to be able to define you own society. The problem stems from the fact that you thought it was the war that meant that you could do that, rather than the fact that you had simply made a much better definition of the group that you were including in your society. That is essentially what a war of independance amounts to: one group says that they want to define their society one way, the other group resists. It's called a war of independance when one side is far more powerful (as the British were in the American war of independance), but it still amounts to saying that we don't want to be part of your society, we want to form our own. anyway, the problem with that is that Americans tend to think that you only get the rights that you fight for. And that is wrong. Here in Australia we have many, many rights, most of them essentially the same as those that you have in the US. But, we didn't get those rights by fighting for them, we got them because we all agreed that they were inportant to us. We didn't need to fight for them, we don't need to own guns in order to stop the government from taking those rights away from us, and we also don't need to fear that our government will _try_ to take those rights away from us. This present situation is essentially an aberation (a worrying one, I admit, but an aberation). Australian governments are just as inane as those you get anywhere, but they are also made up Australians, and as such they tend to share the same beliefs about important rights as the general populace. Things like censorship of the Internet are areas where most of the population are rather hazy: we haven't raelly made u our minds, so the government can get away with trying to do things like this. This situation will go away in a little while, when the poulation actually makes up their minds on this issue. I only hope the government hasn't done any serious damage in the meantime.
Oh, and incidentally, would you mind enumerating those freedoms that have been stripped away? I haven't noticed myself being censored yet, and I haven't seen anyone trying to stop me from voting (but Americans don't really care about that, do they? Otherwise more people would actually do it). I still have to right to go to a political rally that features people burning the prime minister in effigy, and if I wanted to I could run for parliament. Now, where have I lost any freedom?
"If you let them take your firearms you are completely at their mercy, no matter what they decide."
This is utter crap. The reality is that it is governments that are at the mercy of the people who elect them, if you have a genuine democratic system. I don't know about America, but here in Australia we are _not_ at the mercy of the government, and never will be. We elect them, we whinge about what they are doing, we generally manage to make them do what _we_ want, even if it takes a while, and then we get sick of them and vote them out. We DO NOT need anything other than our democratic system of government to ensure that our rights are protected. We DO NOT need guns to protect our rights. We DO NOT need guns to provide us with self defence (the general order of our society is proof of that: we have a much lower murder rate than you do in the US, and that isn't because we're all too lazy to go out and do those MACHO gun things).
Why can't all you Americans get this into you brains: rights are something granted by the society that you live in. There are some things that any reasonable society consider to be fundamental rights: things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from persecution, freedom from poverty, all those sorts of things. Those are things that almost every society has eventually come to believe are essential for humanity. But things like "the right to bear arms" are completely different. If you were in a situation like the people in Kosovo, then it could easily be argued that the right to bear arms is an essential part of life, quite possibly a necessary one. But are you living in Kosovo? Are you living in a war zone? No? Why does that not surprise me? Or did you answer yes? Maybe you live in some terrible inner city nightmare in some place like New York, or whatever. Is that a war zone? Maybe. But if the availability of guns in America was restricted, it would probably not be, or at the least it would be far less serious.
But back to the subject of rights. Rights in the real world are something that a society allows you to have, because the society thinks that those rights are important. Your society gives rights, but it also takes them away. Does anyone in any reasonable society have the right to kill? No. This is because all reasonable societies believe that killing is antisocial (in the strongest sense of the term). No reasonable society allows parents to torture their children, for the same reason. There are a whole host of things that you are not "allowed" to do if you are a member of a reasonable society. But do Americans get stressed out about this sort of thing? No. Is that not just a little bit inconsitent?
Rights are not things that are handed down on tablets of stone, or from some founding fathers, or anywhere else. They are something that result from the general push and pull of living in a large group of people, all of whom have to live together. The rights that you actually end up having are those that allow the society to function in a way that it deems satisfactory. If you start to assume that you can only have rights if you fight for them, or if they are written down in a Bill of Rights somewhere, then you are setting yourself up for a really big fall. Because eventually you'll reach a point where you don't have any rights other than those in your Bill of Rights, and that is the opint where your society either completely stagnates (at best), or breaks down into anarchy, because people don't look to themselves for their rights, but to some higher authority. That is something that gives me nightmares, especially after I have spent an hour or so reading/. threads that just keep on coming back to the notion that people need guns to ensure their rights. That is not only stupid, suicidal and terribly destructive, it is just plain wrong.
Sorry for the rant. (Well, I'm not really sorry, but it wasn't aimed specifically at you, more at the entire group of you that think that way.)
However, you have a point. VMware sounds like a wonderful idea, until you read the fine print (ie, you need a hefty system to be able to run it, it doesn't do lots of things, it doesn't run things very fast, all that sort of thing). In reality VMware is probably only useful to a minority of people.
But, and this is a big but, it is VERY useful for those people. I'm running linux exclusively, having changed from a dual boot system when I realised that I hadn't booted into windows for several months. The problem is, I have lots of backups of windows stuff, which I have difficulty transferring over to linux (things like word files, excel files, etcetera). I recently trashed my system, and the only backups that I had of a few very important things were old ones in windows formats. It would be almost impossible for me to access them if it wasn't for the fact that I have VMware.
This is just an example, and I know it is caused by my nonexistent backup regime, but it makes a point; sometimes there are things that can only be done using a different os to the one that you have installed. What VMware does is it allows you to choose linux, and not have to go back on it if and when you find that there is something you absolutely have to do, but can't do with linux. And what that means is that the existence of VMware or something like it will allow people to choose linux, who might otherwise not have been able to. That will have a more significant impact on the future of linux than if the few people who use their programming skils on a free alternative to VMware were to switch over to GNOME.
I don't know what the original idea behind VMware was, but it's effect is to give people more choices than they had, and to reduce the risks inherent in those choices. In practice it has it's problems, but the choices that it gives you outwiegh those problems, IMNSHO.
"The enlightenement came about because of Christian thought, people in the middle ages began to study the world because it is God's creation and as such, is good. And because people began to observe the world, the scientific method was developed from people looking at God's creation and trying to understand it."
Dream on! The scientific method, in the sense that it exists now, was not developed until people stopped following the Christian line of thinking and tried to reason for themselves. One of the fundamental tenets of Christianity is this idea that I think is called 'absolute truth'. The church has a direct line to God, and thus what the church says is self-evidently true, because, coming from the church, it must have come direct from God (is it just me, or is there a problem here?). The thing is, up until the rise of the secular world (since the enlightenment, by a strange coincidence), the church was able to impose it's absolute truth on the rest of the European world, by force of arms, or by sending in the Inquisition. People don't realise it these days, but the church in the middle ages was not just a political entity, but one of the most powerful political entities in that part of the world. The renaisance started the rot, by creating a group of people with a lot of money, gained by trading. This money (and the resultant power that they had) started to shift the balance from the church to the secular world. The Enlightenment came about when the secular world became powerful enough to really break with the church, and no longer had to worry about being burnt at the stake for saying things the church didn't like. Once that happened people were free to start thinking for themselves, and they did. That was when science as we know it now began. Christianity was the enemy of science in the early days, in fact was the reason that science did not start up much earlier (the Arab world did masses of very important research long before even the wealthy in the Chistian world were literate).
Please, if you want to defend Christianity, don't do so by claiming that it encouraged the development of science. Christianity has been probably the single greatest impediment to the development of science in history.
I think the idea is that the users have rights, just like the developers.
And anyway, what does it matter that 99.9% of the human race wouldn't know source code from a bar of soap, or have the skills to modify or improve it - refusing to give them the option is hardly likely to change that situation. One of the most important things about the open source movement (IMNSHO) is the enormous body of code out there in the open. Most computer users probably don't even know what source code is, because they have never had the option of learning about it. Give them the option, and many of them will learn, because it is interesting, a new challenge, a way to impress people, whatever. Saying that people are ignorant, so why bother teaching them, is basically stupid (I could use worse terms, but I'm not in that sort of mood).
"I think for myself, and I choose God"? "think for myself" and "God" in the same sentence is ridiculous - religion is entirely about letting other people think for you, so that you can have your nice little black and white world, with nothing to challenge your intellect, or worry you, or anything like that. I'm surprised you're even prepared to learn how to use a God-less machine like a computer . . . The least you could do is go somewhere where you won't sicken those who actually DO think for themselves, rather than merely say that they do.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several problems with this argument. First and foremost, they'll need to learn this stuff at some point, and the earlier the better. If your early beliefs aren't challenged until you get to university then you're going to have a much harder time of it than if you had people throwing different theories at you left right and centre for most of your life.
Commensurate with that is the fact that people learn how to think by example, as with everything else. Learning theories, and how those theories were developed, is one of the best ways out for you to learn to think. If you look at the development of physics, it's really easy to learn Newton, and it's very instructive to learn about how he arrived at his theories. This makes it easier to learn about later theories that built on Newton, and it introduces the type of thought process that goes into scientific endeavour. So you can't really separate learning to think from learning theories about the world.
And finally there's the precedent in this: if one place decides to take this path, then more will follow, and once that starts happening you'll end up undoing a large chunk of the good work done in the last fifty years to raise the general public's awareness of this sort of thing. That ain't good . . .
himi
Evolution (or more correctly the Theory of Evolution [ie, the theory that uses evolution driven by natural selection and genetic drift to explain the development of speciation(sp?)]) has been considered a sound theory for so long that almost all of modern biology is based on it. The only people who don't think it's up to scratch are the people who's world view is destroyed by it: fundamentalist christians, young-earth christian scientists and probably one or two more obscure groups. The scientific community as a whole actually considers evolution in general to be one of the most successful theories ever.
I would recomend that you read the talk.origins FAQs to get a bit more insight into the current state of things. It is a really good resource.
Oh, and another thing: creationism doesn't even rate as a hypothesis. You see, it isn't actually falsifiable (it isn't even a coherent hypothesis, really), and if you can't prove a hypothesis to be wrong it's essentially worthless to science. You can never prove something _true_ in science, so if you can't prove it false then there's nothing much to work with.
And, of course, an experiment to verify something is boring - it's much more fun to set out to find clear evidence _against_ a hypothesis (and it generally makes you more famous).
In any case, the only point of comparison between evolutionary theory and creationism is the fact that they both try to explain part of how the world works. Other than that, creationism just isn't in the same league.
himi
Carbon dating (using the ratio between [I think] carbon 14 and nitrogen 14[?] to determine how long it has been since atmospheric carbon was deposited in the sample) is only useful for samples up to about 40-50,000 (4e+4 - 5e+4) years. These lipid traces were found in rock that is 2.6-2.7 BILLION years (2.6e+_9_). That is _five_ orders of magnitude greater. I think we can rest assured that they didn't rely on carbon dating for these figures.
What is far more likely is that they dated the _rocks_ that the traces were found, which could be done quite reliably (using a number of independant methods). That sort of dating (probably using some form of radioactive decay) is reliable, when done correctly, and if the methodology is published that correctness can easily be established.
I would suggest that you refrain from trashing this research until you've actually found out what they did, and how reliably they did it. But that's a bit unreasonable, isn't it? You might have to do some research, and maybe even learn something (heaven forbid).
If you want to make it painfully obvious that you really are an idiot, then go right ahead and post more crud like this. If you want to seem even moderately intelligent I'd recomend not posting anything that you haven't at least thought for a few minutes about.
Of course, you did put your name to it, which puts you at least one rung up from the bottom feeders that all too often plague this place.
himi
Think before posting. And _always_ preview . . .
"As humans, how much pain and lives have been saved by having penicillin? In 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered an 'accidental'
mold in one of his petri dishes that would save countless lives. Both in war and peace. If you are looking for sheer numbers of people
affected by one thing, that would have to be close to the top. "
I'm sorry, but that is pure crap. Yes, Fleming discovered penicillin mold and it's properties, but he thought it was just a curiosity, not worth anything. It was Howard Florey and Ernst Chain who turned penicillin into a medicine. If it hadn't been for them, it could easily have taken far longer for someone to rediscover the effects of antibiotics and to actually use them.
If you're going to argue for people's inclusion in this list on the basis of their effect on this century, you could hardly go much further than the people who essentially destroyed the world's fear of illness - prior to penicillin people could easily die from complications to minor illnesses (even the common cold): consequently people lived in genuine fear of illness. Since the advent of antibiotics minor ailments are exactly that: minor. No one worries that they might die if they don't get over their cold in a week.
The last fifty years would have been a very different time if it hadn't been for the work of Florey and Chain in making use of Fleming's fortuitous discovery.
Of course, since this "Man of the Century" thing seems to be a popular vote, it will probably end up going to someone who was either popular or well known for no good reason, or someone who had a reasonably large, but very *visible* effect (eg Hitler), rather than to the people who had the massive but largely invisibile effects. Popularity polls always put forward popular people, but rarely are the really important people popular.
So hey, lets all vote for Linus. It's more fun than voting for Florey, Chain or Salk and having your suggestions upstaged by "Entertainers" who never did anything with their lives. Elvis? That makes me sick. So I'll laugh it off, and vote for someone I think would apreciate the joke.
himi
Linus 4PM!
Telstra currently owns the infrastructure and at the same time is the largest user of that infrastructure. Anyone who wanted to compete with them would have two choices: pay billions of dollars to set up a competing infrastructure, or pay through the nose to telstra to use their wire. That's where the problem lies - Telstra has control of the thing that everyone needs to provide their service.
What really has to happen is something along these lines: The part of Telstra that maintains the actual infrastructure has to be broken away from Telstra the service provider. The service provider side can be sold to the highest bidder, funding whatever our current bloody stupid govt. wants today. The infrastructure side really must stay in public hands - that way it's possible for them to be forced to give a certain level of service everywhere, be it the capital cities or some outstation in Arnhem Land.
If Telstra is privatised, or is forced to compete as it is, then those expensive, non-profitable services will get dropped. They are simply too expensive for a commercial entity to support, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to (hey, it's not real competition if you handicap one player). Asking Telstra to be both commercially competitive and to provide (much needed but) expensive, unprofitable services is ridiculous.
So break them up. It would give us Australian taxpayers some certainty in the services provided us (because of the govt. control of the infrastructure), and it would allow real competition on a completely level playing field (apologies for the cliche). And the govt. could still rake in masses of cash from charging the telco's for using their wires . . . I think it'd be a win-win situation, but even if it set Telstra the company back it'd be way better for the country, and that's far more important.
My 2% of a Universal Currency Unit . . .
himi
I haven't got a problem laughing at RMS (have you ever heard that song of his? Cringemaking, but funny). However, I do have a problem with something that amounts to a personal attack on the man.
"Good" humour should _not_ be based on trying to hurt someone else, and that's what this thing is. If you read Tom Christiansen's posts in the RMS thread last week you'd probably look at this a bit differently - it's basically a reworking of what he was saying there, only done so that no one can argue with his point ("Hey, it's just a joke!"). If you read all of that thread you'd have found at least one other post where he verbally attacked someone, and one person who'd actually tried to discuss things with him. The resulting 'dialogue' ended with tc killfiling the poor bastard who'd dared to disagree with him!
Sure, in a completely different situation and with different people involved this could be humour in slightly bad taste. As things stand, I can't see it as anything other than a personal attack.
himi
ESR wasn't saying that id had turned into an open source company, he was saying that Doom, the product itself, had changed from being something that was better as closed source to something that would be better off as open source. He wasn't saying anything about id, just about the game.
His argument was that software goes through a sort of life-cycle, shifting over time from new and unique and very profitable to old hat, and with just about no money value. He was saying that it's perfectly sensible to make the thing closed source while it's new, because that's the best way to milk it for money, but after it gets to be old hat it's far easier to turn it into open source. Doom was merely an example of that kind of software.
"All of these trends raised the payoff from opening the source. At some point the payoff curves crossed over and it became economically rational for id to open up the Doom source and shift to making money in secondary markets such as game-scenario anthologies. And sometime after this point, it actually happened. The full source for Doom was released in late 1997."
This quote is perhaps a little bit confusing, but it's still talking about Doom, rather than id as a whole. id switched from making money from Doom by selling it to making money from Doom by selling other stuff related to Doom, and then they gave up on it altogether and switched over to Quake . . .
He's talking about strategies for each bit of software, rather than for the company as a whole.
. . . just the ramblings of a tired and confused mind . . .
himi
It's interesting, but it's pretty much a rehash of ideas that have been discussed almost to death everywhere over the last six months or so. I'd say ESR's basically out to round all of that discussion off and summarise the results: I think we need that, particularly from someone as respected as ESR. This is the kind of article that you'd want to point your boss at, but it doesn't really say much that's new.
That said, it is a good summary of the ideas, and though it isn't as revolutionary as CatB was in it's day, it should serve the role it was designed for.
ESR as econosocioanthropologist . . . it works for me . . .
himi
At the time of WW2, Australia had a population of less than ten million, to defend a coastline that comes to about 35,000 kilometers. If anyone actually thought that we could do that all on our own, then they were complete morons. Self reliance is a nice idea, but it doesn't work in the real world unless you're very big.
And you should really try and understand the difference between WW2 and somthing like the American war of independance. The American war of indendance was fought to throw out a colonial power that wasn't treating the colonials fairly. WW2 was fought to stop brutal regimes from taking over large parts of the world. If Japan had been able to invade Australia, then they would have taken away our freedom, yes. But can't you see the difference? They were an invading force, not our own government! And the people whou fought them were not carrying the guns that they owned themselves: they were armed and trained by that very same government that you seem to think we should arm ourselves against! And yes, we got plenty of help from America, because we needed it: we were and are a small country, and the countries that threatened us then were far larger and more powerful than us. Is it so unreasonable to want help? I mean, didn't Britain request help, and get it? Didn't France? Both of those countries were far larger and better armed than Australia was, and yet they didn't feel they could finish the war on their own. I think you are being rather stupid here.
The point that all of this is completely concealing is that despite the fact that most countries need armed forces of some sort, to protect themselves in times of war, the vast majority of those countries (in the first world, at least) do not need to have as many guns in the community as there are people. Only America seems to think that this is necessary. Why? Is it perhaps because enough Americans are fundamentally stupid, and incapable of seeing the reasoning behind most countries control of the supply of guns? Is it maybe the fact that Americans in general are incapable of rational thought? Or is it all those Americans who actually believe that Aliens stole Elvis, or that there was a man behind the grassy knoll, or whatever completly insane thing you might want to mention. Why? Are you beyond reason?
AAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And yes, I know this is flamebait, and I hope it get moderated down to about minus ten, along with the post I'm replying to!
Apologies to all those nice, sensible, reasonable, intelligent Americans out there who might have been offended by this. You know who you are, and I hope that most of you might just agree with come of what I say: if so, then there is some hope for the world.
himi
Freedom isn't having the power to overthrow some bad government if you don't like what they are doing to you. Freedom is mostly a stat of mind, where you know that you can live without having to give up your humanity. And no, guns are not part of your humanity.
If you have to fight to keep your freedom, then you aren't really free. To be free, you have to be free of the need to fight for it. I'm not saying that there might not be times when you do have to fight for your freedom (WW2, for example), but you shouldn't be fighting your government or other people in your country. If you want to be free you have to have a government that you can trust not to take your freedom away from you. Getting that kind of government is simply part of achieving a mature, democratic state. If Americans are so terrified of their government that they don't trust it not to try and become a tyrant, then I really don't think that they are free.
But then, most americans are probably fine about that sort of thing. They don't fear their government, they are simply wary of what it can do, and know that it is generally stupid and incompetent, and all that sort of thing. But they don't fear it. If they did, they wouldn't be free: they would be suffering from a form of tyranny, in their own minds, but tyranny none the less.
I'm rambling here, I know, but I do have a point: freedom is much more a state of mind (in the first world, at least) than an actual degree of liberty. It is about personal empowerment through the knowledge that you don't have to fear the world. If you don't have that, then any freedom that you claim to have is dubious at best. And feeling that you have to own a gun in order to empower yourself is a sign that you do fear the world, and that you aren't as free as you like to think.
I am as free as anyone on the planet, because I know that my governemnt, though they might fuck with me in many ways, won't take away my personal freedoms, and can't take them away. Because I know that I don't have to fear anything in the world. And because I believe that I am free.
Don't take your belief in freedom from the power that you might have over other people (and governments are made up of people). Take it from the fact that you don't have any more power over other people than they have over you. Take it from the fact that you have options other than the gun for redressing problems (like voting, say).
And please don't try and tell me that I could lose my freedom any moment because I have no gun, and most of my country's population has no guns. Because _my_ country doesn't need guns in order to stay free, and has never needed guns to stay free. My country didn't need guns to achieve freedom - we merely had to ask for it. My country is founded on trust, not paranoia.
himi
I don't really think IRIX will disappear until Linux has assimilated all of those nice features IRIX has and Linux doesn't. This move is much more about finding a replacement for NT than finding a replacement for IRIX.
Think about it: SGI have put ten years (or however long it is) into IRIX, and they have made it into one of the best Unices around, particularly in some particular areas. Those areas are where SGI has been targeting their sales. They have far too much committed to IRIX now for them to just give up on it and move to Linux, particularly when they know that Linux in no way compares in the really high end, where they have been targeting alot of their stuff.
What we probably will see is SGI taking the stuff that they want from IRIX and putting it in Linux, things like (hopefully) good smp, improved graphics, etc. But that will take several years, most likely, and at the end of it they will still have lots of stuff that they either didn't or couldn't, for one reason or another, include in Linux. That stuff will be where IRIX comes in, probably on the really high end hardware, and in really specialised applications where they have been developing IRIX for years. They will want to leverage their current technologies in their Linux strategy, but the fact that Linux is Open Source means that there will be some things that they won't want to give away.
I imagine that all the current proprietary Unices will go that way, marginalised by Linux but still worth enough to their creators to keep around. The only problem with that is that I can see Linux heading towards an incredible amount of "creeping featurism" down that road, as all the Unix vendors try to make use of Linux for their own things, by shifting their technologies from their own Unices to Linux.
How well all this comes out in the end will depend entirely on how well the Linux Kernel developers can maintain control, and how well Linus can filter out the best bits of the proprietary technologies and integrate them into Linux. If he can do a really good job, I reckon Linux will end up being the yardstick by which every other OS in existence is measured. If Linux absorbs the best of everything, then we'll have an incredible base to start with when it's time to develop the next great OS (Unix is great, but will it cope with things like quantum computing, say? Probably not, so we _will_ need a new type of OS in the future).
May Linus, and Linux, Live Long and Prosper!
. . . just the ramblings of a sick mind at two thirty in the morning . . .
himi
I haven't found any (at least, I couldn't when I was in that part of the market - I don't have any difficulty finding British English dictionaries and the like [which are actually the 'right' ones for Australian English, mostly] for open source stuff). The only good thing about MS software in that sense is that they actually allow you to change the date format around to the non-American way. There certainly isn't anything put out by Microsoft specifically for a market as small and insignificant as Australia (a mere three or four million users . . .).
But then, I'm sure there are plenty of people in America that think that Australia is exactly the same as America, culturally . . . which is as much of a joke as saying that we're just like the British.
himi
The problem here is that there is a clash between the idea of freedom of expression or speech and stopping someone who is harassing people. It sounds to me like this bloke's lawyer argued on "freedom of speech" grounds what should have simply been a case of harassment. Not that I would know what of I speak, not being a lawyer.
How to make that distinction? I wouldn't have a clue. But really, if someone was making obscene or offensive phonecalls to people at a company that they had been sacked from, would that person be able to argue that stopping him was a violation of his human rights? Not bloody likely - he'd be hit with criminal charges. That is what I think should have happened here (IMNSHO).
himi
"Children - AND THIS INCLUDES TEENAGERS - don't
comprehend the implications of their actions.
It isn't part of their thinking process yet."
I'm sorry, but you are making a very serious mistake here. Firstly, you are assuming that children are not capable of reasoning out the consequences of their actions. This is a stupid assertion. Children are as capable of reason as you or I am: the difference is that children generally lack the experience that "mature" people have, so they quite often don't take their reasoning to it's "correct" conclusion. This is inexperience, not a fundamental inability to reason. And given that, why would you want to minimise your children's chances at gaining experience?
Secondly, and most importantly, when do you stop? At what point do you decide that your child is actually capable of "comprehending the implications of their actions"? Is it when they can vote? When they can drive? When they first go out and get a job? When?
Children are _not_ unable to comprehend things. They can think and reason, and often they are as responsible (if not more) as many adults. What they tend to lack is experience. Parents who hide the world from their children, because they believe that they couldn't comprehend it, are merely ensuring that they have no chance to learn about the world. If a child has not had a chance to learn about the world, then they are almost certainly not capable of dealing with it. So your policy of protecting them actually leaves them completely un-protected when you are no longer in a position to continue protecting.
I cannot emphasise this enough: children *MUST* be given the opportunity to learn about the world. The role of parents is to provide guidance as they learn, not to say that they can only learn certain things until they are old enough to "comprehend" them. Let them learn as freely as their interest dictates: in the end, they'll learn far more, and far better, than anyone could possibly teach them.
himi
I'm from Australia, and I really do find all of this utterly amazing.
I can relate to some of the things that people talk about, like being different (I mean who here _wasn't_ different?), and not being popular, and things like that, but pretty much nothing else.
I was top of my year several times, generally way above most of the rest of the school academically, but that didn't make me a target for the kind of bullying and torture that seems to be common in the descriptions that I have been reading. I wasn't ostracised: I was merely ignored, or left out of things. That was pretty bad at times, but never anything like the dehumanising treatment that people have been describing. And I was going to a "bad" school, probably one of the worst schools in the area.
I could easily be completely wrong here, but I think that part of the difference is simply cultural: being different in Australia is generally accepted (at least, it is in my experience). I don't know why, or why that would be different to America, but from the sound of it conformancy is _very_ highly valued there. That is not the case here.
Which is not to say that everything is sweetnes and light: children and teenagers everywhere are probably pretty much the same in that they tend to be very cliquey (sp?). But cliques are just a way of defining yourself, not everyone else. I don't think this is anywhere near as destructive as the descriptions of the American situation.
himi
If you want to make claims like that, you really should a) back them up (ie, examples where you can provide some _evidence_), and b) try getting an account, so that you, too, can be responsible for what you say.
Posting this sort of thing as an AC just makes people start thinking of ways to stop AC's from posting. I don't want that, and I suppose you don't, so either take responsibility for your claims, or put up and shut up.
himi
Not that it's something to be proud of, but it can be fun :)
The problem with this legislation is that very few people in Australia have really formed an opinion about this issue. When we do reach that point, the government will pretty much have to follow that. The thing is, how long will it take for people to get informed enough to have a real opinion?
What really needs to happen here is a campaign by one of the big newspapers to fight this sort of censorship. That would get people thinking about it, and it would force the government to be much more open about their deliberations. Once that happens, they'll have to slow down, and inertia might just win in the end! But it needs to be big, not just the sort of thing that you get with a national day of action.
Anyone want to write a really good letter to the Age? I would, but I can't write that well . . .
himi
I was beginning to think that all Americans were completely rabid gun lovers/haters. I hadn't thought about this in that context - it does explain things a bit.
himi
There's a wonderful long rant about rights somewhere back up the page . . . ranting is VERY good for your health :)
But this is about freedom of speech in Australia.
Freedom of Speech is a right that is granted to people in a society, by that society. It isn't something that you have to fight for, it is something that the large group of people that you live in decide is important enough to let you have. Saying that if you give up the right to bear arms you will inevitably end up losing the right to say whatever you want to without fear of reprisal is basically stupid.
I think part of the problem that you Americans have with this idea is the fact that you fought a war in order to be able to define you own society. The problem stems from the fact that you thought it was the war that meant that you could do that, rather than the fact that you had simply made a much better definition of the group that you were including in your society. That is essentially what a war of independance amounts to: one group says that they want to define their society one way, the other group resists. It's called a war of independance when one side is far more powerful (as the British were in the American war of independance), but it still amounts to saying that we don't want to be part of your society, we want to form our own.
anyway, the problem with that is that Americans tend to think that you only get the rights that you fight for. And that is wrong. Here in Australia we have many, many rights, most of them essentially the same as those that you have in the US. But, we didn't get those rights by fighting for them, we got them because we all agreed that they were inportant to us. We didn't need to fight for them, we don't need to own guns in order to stop the government from taking those rights away from us, and we also don't need to fear that our government will _try_ to take those rights away from us. This present situation is essentially an aberation (a worrying one, I admit, but an aberation). Australian governments are just as inane as those you get anywhere, but they are also made up Australians, and as such they tend to share the same beliefs about important rights as the general populace. Things like censorship of the Internet are areas where most of the population are rather hazy: we haven't raelly made u our minds, so the government can get away with trying to do things like this. This situation will go away in a little while, when the poulation actually makes up their minds on this issue. I only hope the government hasn't done any serious damage in the meantime.
Oh, and incidentally, would you mind enumerating those freedoms that have been stripped away? I haven't noticed myself being censored yet, and I haven't seen anyone trying to stop me from voting (but Americans don't really care about that, do they? Otherwise more people would actually do it). I still have to right to go to a political rally that features people burning the prime minister in effigy, and if I wanted to I could run for parliament. Now, where have I lost any freedom?
himi
"If you let them take your firearms you are completely at their mercy, no matter what they decide."
/. threads that just keep on coming back to the notion that people need guns to ensure their rights. That is not only stupid, suicidal and terribly destructive, it is just plain wrong.
This is utter crap. The reality is that it is governments that are at the mercy of the people who elect them, if you have a genuine democratic system. I don't know about America, but here in Australia we are _not_ at the mercy of the government, and never will be. We elect them, we whinge about what they are doing, we generally manage to make them do what _we_ want, even if it takes a while, and then we get sick of them and vote them out. We DO NOT need anything other than our democratic system of government to ensure that our rights are protected. We DO NOT need guns to protect our rights. We DO NOT need guns to provide us with self defence (the general order of our society is proof of that: we have a much lower murder rate than you do in the US, and that isn't because we're all too lazy to go out and do those MACHO gun things).
Why can't all you Americans get this into you brains: rights are something granted by the society that you live in. There are some things that any reasonable society consider to be fundamental rights: things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from persecution, freedom from poverty, all those sorts of things. Those are things that almost every society has eventually come to believe are essential for humanity. But things like "the right to bear arms" are completely different. If you were in a situation like the people in Kosovo, then it could easily be argued that the right to bear arms is an essential part of life, quite possibly a necessary one. But are you living in Kosovo? Are you living in a war zone? No? Why does that not surprise me?
Or did you answer yes? Maybe you live in some terrible inner city nightmare in some place like New York, or whatever. Is that a war zone? Maybe. But if the availability of guns in America was restricted, it would probably not be, or at the least it would be far less serious.
But back to the subject of rights. Rights in the real world are something that a society allows you to have, because the society thinks that those rights are important. Your society gives rights, but it also takes them away. Does anyone in any reasonable society have the right to kill? No. This is because all reasonable societies believe that killing is antisocial (in the strongest sense of the term). No reasonable society allows parents to torture their children, for the same reason. There are a whole host of things that you are not "allowed" to do if you are a member of a reasonable society. But do Americans get stressed out about this sort of thing? No. Is that not just a little bit inconsitent?
Rights are not things that are handed down on tablets of stone, or from some founding fathers, or anywhere else. They are something that result from the general push and pull of living in a large group of people, all of whom have to live together. The rights that you actually end up having are those that allow the society to function in a way that it deems satisfactory. If you start to assume that you can only have rights if you fight for them, or if they are written down in a Bill of Rights somewhere, then you are setting yourself up for a really big fall. Because eventually you'll reach a point where you don't have any rights other than those in your Bill of Rights, and that is the opint where your society either completely stagnates (at best), or breaks down into anarchy, because people don't look to themselves for their rights, but to some higher authority. That is something that gives me nightmares, especially after I have spent an hour or so reading
Sorry for the rant. (Well, I'm not really sorry, but it wasn't aimed specifically at you, more at the entire group of you that think that way.)
himi
You do sound like you have a bad attitude.
However, you have a point. VMware sounds like a wonderful idea, until you read the fine print (ie, you need a hefty system to be able to run it, it doesn't do lots of things, it doesn't run things very fast, all that sort of thing). In reality VMware is probably only useful to a minority of people.
But, and this is a big but, it is VERY useful for those people. I'm running linux exclusively, having changed from a dual boot system when I realised that I hadn't booted into windows for several months. The problem is, I have lots of backups of windows stuff, which I have difficulty transferring over to linux (things like word files, excel files, etcetera). I recently trashed my system, and the only backups that I had of a few very important things were old ones in windows formats. It would be almost impossible for me to access them if it wasn't for the fact that I have VMware.
This is just an example, and I know it is caused by my nonexistent backup regime, but it makes a point; sometimes there are things that can only be done using a different os to the one that you have installed. What VMware does is it allows you to choose linux, and not have to go back on it if and when you find that there is something you absolutely have to do, but can't do with linux. And what that means is that the existence of VMware or something like it will allow people to choose linux, who might otherwise not have been able to. That will have a more significant impact on the future of linux than if the few people who use their programming skils on a free alternative to VMware were to switch over to GNOME.
I don't know what the original idea behind VMware was, but it's effect is to give people more choices than they had, and to reduce the risks inherent in those choices. In practice it has it's problems, but the choices that it gives you outwiegh those problems, IMNSHO.
himi
"The enlightenement came about because of Christian thought, people in the middle ages began to study the world because it is God's creation and as such, is good. And because people began to observe the world, the scientific method was developed from people looking at God's creation and trying to understand it."
Dream on! The scientific method, in the sense that it exists now, was not developed until people stopped following the Christian line of thinking and tried to reason for themselves.
One of the fundamental tenets of Christianity is this idea that I think is called 'absolute truth'. The church has a direct line to God, and thus what the church says is self-evidently true, because, coming from the church, it must have come direct from God (is it just me, or is there a problem here?). The thing is, up until the rise of the secular world (since the enlightenment, by a strange coincidence), the church was able to impose it's absolute truth on the rest of the European world, by force of arms, or by sending in the Inquisition. People don't realise it these days, but the church in the middle ages was not just a political entity, but one of the most powerful political entities in that part of the world. The renaisance started the rot, by creating a group of people with a lot of money, gained by trading. This money (and the resultant power that they had) started to shift the balance from the church to the secular world. The Enlightenment came about when the secular world became powerful enough to really break with the church, and no longer had to worry about being burnt at the stake for saying things the church didn't like. Once that happened people were free to start thinking for themselves, and they did. That was when science as we know it now began. Christianity was the enemy of science in the early days, in fact was the reason that science did not start up much earlier (the Arab world did masses of very important research long before even the wealthy in the Chistian world were literate).
Please, if you want to defend Christianity, don't do so by claiming that it encouraged the development of science. Christianity has been probably the single greatest impediment to the development of science in history.
I think the idea is that the users have rights, just like the developers.
And anyway, what does it matter that 99.9% of the human race wouldn't know source code from a bar of soap, or have the skills to modify or improve it - refusing to give them the option is hardly likely to change that situation. One of the most important things about the open source movement (IMNSHO) is the enormous body of code out there in the open. Most computer users probably don't even know what source code is, because they have never had the option of learning about it. Give them the option, and many of them will learn, because it is interesting, a new challenge, a way to impress people, whatever. Saying that people are ignorant, so why bother teaching them, is basically stupid (I could use worse terms, but I'm not in that sort of mood).
himi
"I think for myself, and I choose God"? "think for myself" and "God" in the same sentence is ridiculous - religion is entirely about letting other people think for you, so that you can have your nice little black and white world, with nothing to challenge your intellect, or worry you, or anything like that. I'm surprised you're even prepared to learn how to use a God-less machine like a computer . . .
The least you could do is go somewhere where you won't sicken those who actually DO think for themselves, rather than merely say that they do.