The poblem of many societies today is the drive towards total freedom and the denial of moral judgment to anybody.
Ugh.. this is the kind of religious double-talk I've grown to hate.
People ALWAYS tend towards the selfish goal of "total freedom" as you like to call it. It's human nature, buddy.
The reason we have rules is to put a check on this kind of thing. Who makes the rules? we do. If the rules don't work, they eventually change. (And no, I don't mean rules that are good, I mean rules that work)
I'd rather prefer an acknowledgement of a certain right of moral judgment. The moment you've got a judgment you aren't considered tolerant anymore
Tolerant of what? We make our morailty in such a way as to keep our species going. Morality evolves with the society. Obsolete morals die and are replaced with ones more suited to the environment. Sorry to say it, buddy, but the morals of a coded book, etched in stone and immovable, are doomed to die due to their inflexibility.
One possible solution is the general acceptance of a certain faith, because most of them include a certain higher power with, logically, the right to impose his moral on us. It's about the only *logical* way to get a certain basic set of rules into a society.
The only logical way? Are you suggesting that we make up a "higher being" to impose morals on us because that's the only authorative way to do it? How do you suppose the laws and morality about murder work? Well, would you like it if you could be killed on a whim of another person? Hell, no! So in order to be able to function with your fellow selfish man, you both agree on a mutually beneficial plan that you won't slit each others throats in their sleep.
Morality is not spontaneously produced by some higher being; It is produced through human contact with one another (or society, to put a name to this). Theology is simply a convenient tool for those power to quote an absolute authority when the current morality is questioned.
This is a very technical train of thought, I know.
More like naive.
But when we're all individuals who are a result of random fluctuations and are all up to ourselves (say, evolution combined with a lack of any god), the only logical result is total anarchy, nihilism and the right of the strongest.
Try cracking open a history book for once. You might be surprised.
But of course any religion has first and foremost to be examined *not* on it's leaders but on wether it's true or not.
Naturally.
When (personally) proven truth, any resulting moral borders from that faith will most probably prove to be very healty.
Ah, the "personally" clause. I do love this one. It's the last bastion of the faithful once they realize they have no proof.
I believe in God, and I don't really think that we should create life.
Why not? On what do you base this judgement? Where is it written that we should not create life?
It's the same old story time and time again. Once, our religious leaders told us that it is not our place to study the heavens. Once, our religious leaders told us that it is not our place to use glasses that lie (telescopes and microscopes). Once, our religious leaders told us that it is not our place to dissect human beings. Once, our religious leaders told us that it was not our place to go to the southern hemisphere, where great beasts and antipodes lived.
And so here we go for another spin... Sad, really.
Why should they care what the religious leaders think? If God doesn't want us creating life, he'll find a good way to stop us, now won't he? Besides, if all the religions can't even agree on who god is, what qualifies them for moral judgements?
Re:Two words: Embedded Systems
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V2 OS
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· Score: 1
There is quite a market for such mini operating systems. Many such devices use Intel architecture hardware, and of these, most are sufficiently PC-compatible that you can actually boot them under DOS (assuming you can get DOS onto the nonvolatile storage).
A few examples: pSOS, VxWorks, IOS (okay, well, IOS isn't "mini":)
Yes, and the're a fucking pain to work with. I got roped into a pSOS project once and had to pretend this stupid thing was a PC with a disk and ram and a 16550A UART (which, it turns out, was not really a UART but some stupid clone that required me to change all the divisor values to get it to work right).
It was great fun when I had to keep going in and out of protected mode to access the serial port.
It was great fun when the "disk", which was NVR, would get corrupted every time the thing crashed, requiring a complete re-flash of the 3 megabyte disk (yes, 3 fucking megabytes for a tiny app that essentially makes the hardware a smart bump in the cable).
These "PC-like" embedded systems are simply a waste of silicon.
Portability isn't everything. Some people (me) program asm for any and every chip anyways so what's the big deal? all "assembly languages" are relatively the same anyways. Once you learn assembly for one chip learning it for another is like learning PASCAL after learning C and BASIC.
For me, the big deal is that I'm a perfectionist and have a thing for esthetic style.
I don't mind the odd thing like MOVEQ #0, D0 being 2 cycles faster than CLR.L D0 on a 68000. These are like little easter eggs waiting for the astute coder to find them. However, there is a HUGE difference between this and that monstrosity they call the Pentium.
There *WERE* processors of the era that have a much nicer architecture (like the 68000), and many more registers [wow. 8 32-bit data registers, and 7+1 32 bit address registers...]. Yes, I'm biased. I love coding in assembly on a 68k processor.
Amen, brother!
I loved the 68k so much that I wrote an emulator for it in 100% portable ANSI C. It took me 6 months to do, but the end result can be found in the MAME sources.
Unfortunately I am nowhere near as intimately familiar with x86 assembly (I'll debug in x86 asm, but you'd have to pay me a lot to code in it).
Every time I tried it I gave up after discovering 10 million different ways to do the same thing, but each requiring different parts of different registers, different sizes, different execution times, different effects on the pipelines and instruction scheduling... I mean, how are you supposed to write optimized code without spending 10 years studying the manuals first? A nice orthogonal instruction set (and register set) would have done wonders here.
Code is poetry, and there are many bad poets out there.
Maybe once it's done we can port it to wearables [many of whom do use Intel chips] or port to other chipsets...
You should have actually *read* the developer information.
I did.
This OS is hopelessly tied to the x86 and Standard (PoS) PC Architecture (you know, the one with the crap bios and the incredibly S-T-U-P-I-D partition table scheme and ridiculous realmode - yes, you *still* need realmode to program some of the PC hardware - and protected mode environments, not to mention that pathetic excuse of an interrupt system, I mean come on! Do we really need to cling to those outdated PICs anyway?)
...
But I digress...
I must admit that an OS as tiny as this is a wonderful feat, but unfortunately it is stuck with the 386+ PC architecture, and contains a fair number of outdated notions (such as holding on to the 3 char extensions for some odd reason), setting the maximum number of files a disk can hold at format time (instead of just growing the file index table from the back of the partition or some other clever scheme that wouldn't cost in access time), and a few other things.
I've also noticed a fair amount of pollution in the system32 services for fairly frivolous things, as well as a seeming lack of vision for the future in their design.
But these are only minor anoyances that we all live to deal with because those of us who could do better usually just can't be bothered.
Anyway, getting back to the topic at hand, don't expect to see V2OS in anything other than a 386+ PC.
Maybe this is true in America, but not so much in Canada. You want a job? You have to jump through the hoops, and that means bringing up the issue of education. Although there is currently a shortage of qualified people, it sure doesn't make companies any less picky.
Really? It wasn't that hard for me to get a job without a degree, and after the first job it was piss simple to get the next one. I started at 32K (cdn) which was a bit low for Vancouver, and when applying at a new company the next year, I got them to concede to 40K (the squeaky wheel works wonders here). My education did come up because I only had 1 year of work experience, and they were looking for a MINIMUM of 2, but a BCIT computer systems diploma and a quick chat with one of their network coders about data communication theory settled it.
Of course, just prior to the end of our negotiations I told them to stuff it and took off for Japan, but that's another story.
Get the skills to get the job done, and have confidence that you can do it. Employers will pick up on real confidence when you talk to them. Recruiting agencies are generally shit. Go straight to the company, even if they aren't advertizing an opening. If you impress them enough, a job opening will "magically" appear. Know about the company (what they do, what their vision is, how they are doing). There's nothing people like more than hearing about themselves. If they think you're desperate, you're screwed (You'll either get low pay or no job).
Come to my seminar! Only 3 easy installments of $2999.95 for a 3 hour workshop!
I *just* switched from RedHat 6.whatever to slink.
Now that I finally got it running I must say I am very impressed with its stability. Some things to watch out for:
1. Do NOT download their packages online and do a fresh install from them. They do NOT work. I spent 2 weeks trying to get them to run to no avail. Either buy the CDs from somewhere or just download the ISO image from Debian (You only need the first disk)
2. If you have an adaptec SCSI card, you have to download a special install disk and boot from that instead of the CD. There should be a link from Debian's site for the images. I do hope they will fix this soon!
3. dselect is rather un-intuitive and a bit of a pain to learn, but once you have your system installed, it's fairly decent for upgrading your packages. I've heard lots said about using apt to upgrade, so perhaps I'll try that now.
4. You can't get kde from Debian's site. I got them by pointing dselect to kde's site and installing from there.
All in all Debian is the best linux distro I have used yet (I've so far used slackware, redhat, and caldera, redhat being the worst followed closely behind by caldera).
I'm still messing around with it (Yesterday, I finally broke down and got the ISO from their site and it installed with no problems whatsoever) and so I've yet to try the upgrade to potato, but judging from the comments here it shouldn't be that hard to do.
What these distros need now is a "base windowed system" that fits in 50 megs and gives you enough that you can just install and run the programs you want to use rather than having 10,000 programs installed that you don't even know exist, let alone use.
Maybe now they can include KDE. Or will that be for Debian 3 (err Debian 3k at the rate of development.
You could just point apt to kde and grab it there...
Actually, making a friendlier apt that makes it easy to temporarily point to websites besides Debian would be tres cool.
What would be REALLY cool is if they were to add an extension to the packages file so that through file associations you can just go to the webpage of the author, click on the packages file, and have some apt-like program point there and install it on your system.
Of course you'd want to have some sort of security (PGP or the like) to be sure some malicious site doesn't take advantage of that to plant a trojan in your system.
Don't get me wrong - I love grabbing sources and compiling myself (mainly if I want to play with it a bit), but there are times when I just want the stuff installed with no hassles.
We must also consider the caliber of users who will soon be flooding into the linux domain. They most certainly will NOT want to see so much as a shell prompt or any other text-based program on their machine.
And so my wish list remains:
- A minimal install that puts the BARE MINIMUM necessary to boot the system, do some file management and configuration, and install other programs if you want. Debian does this well already, but I think that with a little more tweaking they could get it even smaller.
- A minimal X install that puts enough stuff to boot into KDE or GNOME or some plain old window manager. No games, no funky apps (well, maybe a text editor and a calculator). Can it be done in less than 50 megs? I think so...
- A way to temporarily point to other distribution sources from program authors to get the latest and greatest. This should be able to happen automatically (with the option to turn the feature off, of course), and then have the distrib pointer point back to debian again when it has installed the package.
- A nice touchy-feely GUI apt program that my grandmother could use.
- a centralized way to configure all of the significant programs that tend to make up the "operating" system such as user management, mail, ftp, http, printer services, network config, hardware management and the like. NT does this fairly decently, though I think that it could be done much better. This would, of course, require some centralized body to devise sane standards for all to follow...
but how do you decide who you should watch? Or just wait till it's too late and they kill have the school?
Right. Think about how many times this kind of thing has happened. Ever.
Now think about how many students out of the MILLIONS of students out there act violently causing serious harm or death. Can you even get to 0.1%? 0.01%?
Now, even if 1 in 10,000 students acts out violently during his school career, does this give school administrators license to round up the 20% of students who "act strangely" or are "different", branding them with a stigma that will affect them during the most important years of their lives? Does this imply a need for flakey cash-grab programs such as Mosaic 2000?
The fact is: Shit happens. Shit has always happened. Shit will happen again.
Every now and again you get some Jack the Ripper who strikes terror into the community, and then just as quickly, he's gone. Nobody knows where he came from or what caused him to do what he did. And nothing happens again for a long, long time.
These are the kinds of things that you CANNOT prevent. They are freak episodes, claiming the lowest rung in death statistics. If you're interested in preventing death, try educating Fat America about their sugar intake.
The "society" he should have been removed from was the classroom. He should have been moved to a councellor's office, who should have then proceeded to figure out what was wrong with the little tyke. And yes, I assert that something is, in fact, wrong with him.
Hmm, there must be something wrong with me then since I found his piece rather humorous, although a bit crude. Too bad I'm not in school anymore, eh? Guess I'll just have to buy me a gun and start hunting people down.
Oops! That was a violent threat! Quick! Call the thought police!
"Come see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!"
Also, even though it may be morally hard for some people to deal with, his point is correct. To make one person suffer injustly to stop two or more people from suffering injustly is a good thing.
Actually, no. The American justice system was set up in a manner so as to minimize unjust punishment of the innocent. This is why you have "innocent until proven guilty" rather than the other way around as it is in France.
One thing I am curious about: When my father was a kid, he had a gun of his own which he used for hunting in the woods from time to time. He had no firearms license since he didn't need one. He went to school, hated his teachers, got in fights, and essentially did what most other kids did in school.
Now tell me this: What has changed so much that we now need to arrest kids for wrong think?
That's in reference to the difficulty of the installation. Interesting, but installation on Red Hat 5.1 (to give a reference on why I don't see installation as being ``insurmountable'', although configuration can be a pain.. yes I know RH != Debian, but come on) really wasn't all that difficult (for me).
The main problem with RedHat (and most other distributions for that matter) is all the crap that gets installed on your machine. About 98% of the software that gets automatically installed in any given linux distribution will never be used by 90% of users.
I originally came from an Amiga background. I would install the base OS in one partition (2 megs), and then use assign to make shadows of the system directories on other drives. This allowed me to keep the official OS intact in case something went wrong when a new library was installed or the like.
What I'm looking for in a linux distro is a basic install that has enough to get the system running and start up a TCP/IP stack, as well as a windowing environment (such as KDE).
Debian does the base install quite well (36 megs. I'm impressed!), but it all falls apart if I want to install X. Suddenly I am faced with scanning through hundreds of packages in the dselect program (which, while being a fairly decent, though not very intuitive text based installer, still suffers the limitations of text based installers), and then having all the scripts fail because dselect didn't get the dependancies right, or having hidden dependancies in the packages that fail because the configuration of one package expected another package to be present (dhcpcd is one example of this). I mean, come on! Do I really need 450 megs of software installed in order to do C/C++ development, run StarCraft under WINE, and play with themes in KDE? Am I ever going to use text based newsreaders, mail clients, gopher clients and such? Hell no! Am I really going to use ImageMagik when I can just download the latest version of GIMP? Hell no! Will I ever use giftrans? Will I really be making TeX documents? Must I have XPaint and all those crappy utils installed? Do I really want to have 10 different text-based text editors? Do I really need 10 different image viewers? Do I really need all those different shells?
I for one would welcome a distro that gives me The Basic Package, where I have just enough shell commands, X, and a desktop manager like KDE. This is how all operating systems have been distributed in the past. You don't see them including 2 gigabytes of miscellaneous freeware and shareware packages and thrusting them all in the user's face during the installation when all he wants is to get the damn thing installed without all this extra stuff he'll never use anyway (How many desktop users will use sendmail? Care to guess what gets installed in EVERY environment?).
The installer should: - Install what is required to get the system up and get networking up. - install ONE shell. Let the user decide which one if he wants to. - Install X but let the user select not to. - Install ONE desktop environment, but let the user decide which one if he wants to. - Get everything into a safe configuration that lets the OS boot up and start the desktop environment.
Now reboot.
Now let the user configure his desktop, network stuff etc etc, and then if he REALLY wants to, he can have a look at the other goodies on the Linux CD and install some of it.
It's a hell of a lot easier to learn how an OS works when there's 30 megs of stuff rather than 1 gig of stuff scattered all over the system directories.
The main annoyance with GNU/Linux is having to fool around with PnP (which is easily solved.. get an external modem and use the almighty serial port).
This is the mentality that must be squashed if you ever expect Linux to be accepted by the 99.9% of people who make up the regular users. They want to turn the computer on and be presented with a desktop. They want to click the pretty icon and have Wordperfect load up. They want to go to the control panel and change how fast the mouse moves, or make a custom mouse pointer, or change their screen resolution on the fly, or change their network settings (including things such as dhcp). They don't want to have to load a bunch of cryptic text-based configuration files and spend hours reading poorly written documentation in order to change their keyboard mapping or install a new network card or add new fonts. They don't want to replace their hardware (and why should they? it works, doesn't it?). Telling them to use an external modem because Linux can't handle PnP properly is pathetic.
Take a close look at the Windows installer and its configuration system. Annoying crashes and reboots aside, it is an excellent system in concept. This is what users will look for when they put the Linux CD in their drive.
I saw it on TV when it was first released out here in Japan. You really do need to understand what they are saying in order to fully appreciate the movie. I just hope for you guys that they do a decent job of dubbing for a change. Believe it or not, bad dubbing was one of the reasons I started to learn Japanese =)
They need a real director who can find voices that match the characters, and actors who can act. If Disney can do it, why can't they?
Either way, I'm adding this film to my Miazaki favorite list, along with Kiki's delivery service, Laputa, and Tonari no Totoro.
The worst part is the propaganda they have on the mosaic 2000 site.
For example:
Another system, MOSAIC-20, is used by police departments all over the country for identifying which domestic violence perpetrators are most likely to escalate their violence. It has been credited with major improvements in the safety of domestic violence victims. (See Los Angeles Times article, October 21st, 1996.)
Oh, so it was in the LA Times was it? Wow! it MUST be true then! Of course since we don't have access to the newspaper (since it's 3 years old!) I guess we'll just have to take their word for it.
It gets even better:
Can the system brand a student as dangerous?
Most often, MOSAIC-2000 will help establish that a student does not pose an elevated risk of violence.
Give me a break! If they have to do this much spin-doctoring on their own site, what makes you think their system is all that it's cracked up to be?
And now my personal favorite. They really like using very small and simple words and oversimplified concepts:
Yes/No checklists do not work for assessments of human behavior. Imagine being asked to describe a movie you saw last night, but being required to answer by saying either: BEST MOVIE I EVER SAW, or WORST MOVIE I EVER SAW Those answers wouldn't produce a very fair appraisal of your opinion about the movie - and situations involving human beings are far more complex than movies. A range of answers is far more likely to stimulate accuracy fairness, and completeness. For example, if asking about firearms, a Yes/No question could not stimulate as fair or complete an exploration as a range: __No known possession of a firearm __Friends known to have ready access to a firearm __There are firearms in the home __There are firearms in a home frequented by the student __The student owns his own firearm __The student recently acquired a firearm
Hmm.. I see... So since I am a member of a gun club in my local community and recently bought a colt for the cowboy shoots, play D&D (the occult! oh no!), listen to goth and heavy metal music, and really hate my teacher and write bad poetry about him, I'm in the high risk category. And since I'm behaving erratically (wearing dark clothes and all), I get sent so that MOSAIC can "guide" school officials in "establishing that I do not pose an elevated risk of violence."
Have a look at their site http://www.gdbinc.com/mosaic2000.htm
his is a valid point, don't I have the option of telling my daughter "metal detectors are a necessary evil, they infringe on your privacy but I think the deterrent affect they provide is more important"?
They don't really provide that much of a deterrant. If someone has decided that they will attack someone else, but there is a metal detector, they won't simply say "Oh well. Guess I can't do that now". They will do it when the guy is walking home from school, or during lunch break. They will break into the equipment room and get a bat or a golf club.
You may be bringing down the number of shootings that occur INSIDE of the school, but you certainly are not bringing down the number of shootings themselves. About the best you could do is stop the victims from bringing weapons to defend themselves.
One thing that leaps to mind is the recent legislation in South Africa that makes it legal to shoot car thieves. Strangely enough, car theft dropped sharply after that.
"it's too easy for guards to become nannies! It's too easy for a guard to abuse the power and start cracking down on being different!" I don't think this will happen because, as I said before, of the very well defined line between being a criminal and just being different. And you can always punish a guard for abusing his/her power.
You seem to have forgotten the hellmouth stories already. Don't you remember the student who was taken to the office by security guards (rather than simply sent by the teacher) because she was wearing (GASP) a TRENCHCOAT! You're basing your entire argument on the assumption that the system will work and will not be abused. Experience teaches otherwise.
As far as metal detectors in the schools go, they're only a temporary solution to a serious problem. Unless you can deter the students from bringing weapons in the first place, you're simply going to have rule upon rule upon rule, further restricting the students' rights and their confidence. I used to carry a swiss army knife with me to school because it was just so handy to have around (and I still carry it with me). In today's school I'd probably be expelled and sent to heavy counselling.
As you further spiral down this slippery slope, you add computer profiling to weed out the bad seeds before they sprout. Then mode of dress is added, then choice of recreational activities, then what you do in your spare time. At the end of this slope is a very rigid and inflexible school environment where everyone is paranoid of someone who says or does or appears to think that is different from the rest. This person, who is doing things differently, is at risk. The people who behave like everyone else would NEVER go to violence, so we're okay with them but WHOA watch out if you behave differently!
Oh, and incidentally, I once buried a bunch of chickens as a child (Don't ask me why. I don't know). I also experimented with explosives. The amount of torment our cat went through before I reached the age of 15 I no longer care to think about. My "potential" for violence would probably have been off-the-scale, even though I had a very hard time bringing myself to hit my fellow man no matter how much he deserved it.
One big problem I'm seeing here is that most of these arguments are heavily colored with American moral thinking, which is flawed to begin with.
It doesn't matter how it works. Remember, GIGO. All it can possibly look for is previously-identified indicators--in other words, for things we already know about. It doesn't matter what the selection factors are.
Quite correct.
I can still remember when I was in highschool how they were so hopped up about this new program that would identify for the students what they were good at and what their future held.
I got social worker.
Needless to say I chose programming instead.
If they can't even build a computer that can play chess intelligently, how can they expect to build a computer to root out "troubled kids"?
Hey, if you liked that one, I got another one for ya:
The whole earth suffers from a virus, a disease known as sin. This sin blinds the people, so they cannot see the One True God (tm), or even see the fact that they suffer this disease, and are doomed to perish in everlasting fire and brimstone because the tarnished cannot enter His Holiness.
But fear not, my fellow man! There is hope! Repent of your sins and embrace Jesus Christ and blindly believe all that he and the prophets tell you (conveniently written in our Holy Scriptures for your perusal).
How do we know that the world is diseased? Why, just look at the state of things! Wars and famine and nature that is very contrary to the way that the One True God (tm) intended it to be! You can find out about all of this by reading our Holy Scriptures. There, you have proof now!
Order today and you'll receive absolutely free this piece of the One True Cross!
>I guess this is where the "Is it freedom" question comes in. Is it freedom if they told you to do it or they wanted you to do it? Is it freedom if they say one way is good or one way is bad?
I stretched a bit, but I was trying to find way to throw my 2 cents in =)
I liked the rest its a really good oration on the way the world works and is viewed if you beleive the assumption that there is no divine authority.
Actually, my view is not that there is no "divine authority" or "god" per se, just that if our universe was created by a superior being, that being's interest in us is simply in observing, not interfering, as can be inferred by his/her/its/their total lack of communication with us.
This leaves us to ourselves, to come up with our own morality and ethics which we need in order to survive as a society.
And another thing, I don't believe that a person can only hurt themself.
The imaginary world I described in my previous message had the caveat: You are the ONLY person alive. It was for demonstration purposes only.
My belief in God comes strongly from an influence that I feel, that lets me know I am connected. It heals, enables and enriches my life.
This is what I can't understand. How can you be so sure that something exists without testing it or hearing any logical, plausible, and likely explanation, so much as to base a large part of your life from it?
There is a huge difference between thinking that something is likely true and gathering empirical evidence which can confirm or deny it, and implicitly taking what someone else said as gospel or running on a subjective feeling.
How come whenever something about Christianity on/., everyone assumes that all Christendom is behind it
We know hat all christendom is not behind it because they are too busy fighting amongst themselves to get organized. The ones behind the proverbial "it" are the ones in power, and they speak for all christians whether you like it or not.
As far as this game is concerned, it's a cash grab and we all know it. Whether the guy really is christian or not is irrelevant. The christian reaction, however, is.
Sorry to crush a collective dillusion, but Christians _are_ capable of independent thought
So long as it doesn't go against accepted dogma. Seen any T-O maps, lately?
There is not a commandment that says "thou shall not laugh."
Unless you're a puritan.
And then we get the comment "Religion and freedom have never really gotten along."
They don't. Religion is a tool used to maintain social order. Maintaining social order infringes upon freedom by definition. We need rules in order to survive as a society. Rules take away freedom.
Religion becomes a problem, however, when it holds more than its fair share of control upon the people. The most often cited examples of this are the Dark Ages and the Crusades, however there are countless other examples (for example certain friars who took a certain passage in Galatians a bit too much to heart and made it a requirement for all members of their fold to be castrated).
Like any other social construct, they become corrupt when given too much power without accountability.
Nice tie, but it doesn't explain a few people like Gangis Kahn, Napolean, or Hitler (who prosecuted the Jewish RACE much more so than the religion).
I don't see what relevance this has to the discussion at hand. Of course they committed atrocities, but does the fact that they were not religious mean that religion has nothing to do with encroachment upon freedom? That religion has nothing to do with massacres and atrocities?
I am sorry, I guess it is just more 'fun' to live with a severly outdated, extremely prejudicial view of the religious.
I guess it's easier to ignore the garbage in your own back yard.
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One thing about life is that it is persistant. I can see us easily making something we cannot deal well with or get rid of easily.
As long as they don't try to make more bees, I'm happy =P
Also, The only way to put food on the table other than stealing from others (socialism, included) is to embrace capitalism.
Really? Tell that to the third world countries upon whose backs the capitalists live.
There will always be a few haves and a shitload of have-nots.
The trick is to be one of the haves.
The poblem of many societies today is the drive towards total freedom and the denial of moral judgment to anybody.
Ugh.. this is the kind of religious double-talk I've grown to hate.
People ALWAYS tend towards the selfish goal of "total freedom" as you like to call it.
It's human nature, buddy.
The reason we have rules is to put a check on this kind of thing. Who makes the rules? we do. If the rules don't work, they eventually change. (And no, I don't mean rules that are good, I mean rules that work)
I'd rather prefer an acknowledgement of a certain right of moral judgment. The moment you've got a judgment you aren't considered tolerant anymore
Tolerant of what?
We make our morailty in such a way as to keep our species going. Morality evolves with the society. Obsolete morals die and are replaced with ones more suited to the environment.
Sorry to say it, buddy, but the morals of a coded book, etched in stone and immovable, are doomed to die due to their inflexibility.
One possible solution is the general acceptance of a certain faith, because most of them include a certain higher power with, logically, the right to impose his moral on us. It's about the only *logical* way to get a certain basic set of rules into a society.
The only logical way?
Are you suggesting that we make up a "higher being" to impose morals on us because that's the only authorative way to do it?
How do you suppose the laws and morality about murder work?
Well, would you like it if you could be killed on a whim of another person? Hell, no! So in order to be able to function with your fellow selfish man, you both agree on a mutually beneficial plan that you won't slit each others throats in their sleep.
Morality is not spontaneously produced by some higher being; It is produced through human contact with one another (or society, to put a name to this).
Theology is simply a convenient tool for those power to quote an absolute authority when the current morality is questioned.
This is a very technical train of thought, I know.
More like naive.
But when we're all individuals who are a result of random fluctuations and are all up to ourselves (say, evolution combined with a lack of any god), the only logical result is total anarchy, nihilism and the right of the strongest.
Try cracking open a history book for once. You might be surprised.
But of course any religion has first and foremost to be examined *not* on it's leaders but on wether it's true or not.
Naturally.
When (personally) proven truth, any resulting moral borders from that faith will most probably prove to be very healty.
Ah, the "personally" clause. I do love this one. It's the last bastion of the faithful once they realize they have no proof.
I believe in God, and I don't really think
that we should create life.
Why not?
On what do you base this judgement?
Where is it written that we should not create life?
It's the same old story time and time again.
Once, our religious leaders told us that it is not our place to study the heavens.
Once, our religious leaders told us that it is not our place to use glasses that lie (telescopes and microscopes).
Once, our religious leaders told us that it is not our place to dissect human beings.
Once, our religious leaders told us that it was not our place to go to the southern hemisphere, where great beasts and antipodes lived.
And so here we go for another spin... Sad, really.
Why should they care what the religious leaders think? If God doesn't want us creating life, he'll find a good way to stop us, now won't he? Besides, if all the religions can't even agree on who god is, what qualifies them for moral judgements?
There is quite a market for such mini operating systems. Many such devices use Intel architecture hardware, and of these, most are sufficiently PC-compatible that you can actually boot them under DOS (assuming you can get DOS onto the nonvolatile storage).
A few examples: pSOS, VxWorks, IOS (okay, well, IOS isn't "mini"
Yes, and the're a fucking pain to work with. I got roped into a pSOS project once and had to pretend this stupid thing was a PC with a disk and ram and a 16550A UART (which, it turns out, was not really a UART but some stupid clone that required me to change all the divisor values to get it to work right).
It was great fun when I had to keep going in and out of protected mode to access the serial port.
It was great fun when the "disk", which was NVR, would get corrupted every time the thing crashed, requiring a complete re-flash of the 3 megabyte disk (yes, 3 fucking megabytes for a tiny app that essentially makes the hardware a smart bump in the cable).
These "PC-like" embedded systems are simply a waste of silicon.
Portability isn't everything. Some people (me) program asm for any and every chip anyways so what's the big deal? all "assembly languages" are relatively the same anyways. Once you learn assembly for one chip learning it for another is like learning PASCAL after learning C and BASIC.
For me, the big deal is that I'm a perfectionist and have a thing for esthetic style.
I don't mind the odd thing like MOVEQ #0, D0 being 2 cycles faster than CLR.L D0 on a 68000. These are like little easter eggs waiting for the astute coder to find them.
However, there is a HUGE difference between this and that monstrosity they call the Pentium.
There *WERE* processors of the era that have a much nicer architecture (like the 68000), and many more registers [wow. 8 32-bit data registers, and 7+1 32 bit address registers...]. Yes, I'm biased. I love coding in assembly on a 68k processor.
Amen, brother!
I loved the 68k so much that I wrote an emulator for it in 100% portable ANSI C. It took me 6 months to do, but the end result can be found in the MAME sources.
Unfortunately I am nowhere near as intimately familiar with x86 assembly (I'll debug in x86 asm, but you'd have to pay me a lot to code in it).
Every time I tried it I gave up after discovering 10 million different ways to do the same thing, but each requiring different parts of different registers, different sizes, different execution times, different effects on the pipelines and instruction scheduling... I mean, how are you supposed to write optimized code without spending 10 years studying the manuals first?
A nice orthogonal instruction set (and register set) would have done wonders here.
Code is poetry, and there are many bad poets out there.
Maybe once it's done we can port it to wearables [many of whom do use Intel chips] or port to other chipsets...
You should have actually *read* the developer information.
I did.
This OS is hopelessly tied to the x86 and Standard (PoS) PC Architecture (you know, the one with the crap bios and the incredibly S-T-U-P-I-D partition table scheme and ridiculous realmode - yes, you *still* need realmode to program some of the PC hardware - and protected mode environments, not to mention that pathetic excuse of an interrupt system, I mean come on! Do we really need to cling to those outdated PICs anyway?)
...
But I digress...
I must admit that an OS as tiny as this is a wonderful feat, but unfortunately it is stuck with the 386+ PC architecture, and contains a fair number of outdated notions (such as holding on to the 3 char extensions for some odd reason), setting the maximum number of files a disk can hold at format time (instead of just growing the file index table from the back of the partition or some other clever scheme that wouldn't cost in access time), and a few other things.
I've also noticed a fair amount of pollution in the system32 services for fairly frivolous things, as well as a seeming lack of vision for the future in their design.
But these are only minor anoyances that we all live to deal with because those of us who could do better usually just can't be bothered.
Anyway, getting back to the topic at hand, don't expect to see V2OS in anything other than a 386+ PC.
Maybe this is true in America, but not so much in Canada. You want a job? You have to jump through the hoops, and that means bringing up the issue of education. Although there is currently a shortage of qualified people, it sure doesn't make companies any less picky.
Really? It wasn't that hard for me to get a job without a degree, and after the first job it was piss simple to get the next one. I started at 32K (cdn) which was a bit low for Vancouver, and when applying at a new company the next year, I got them to concede to 40K (the squeaky wheel works wonders here).
My education did come up because I only had 1 year of work experience, and they were looking for a MINIMUM of 2, but a BCIT computer systems diploma and a quick chat with one of their network coders about data communication theory settled it.
Of course, just prior to the end of our negotiations I told them to stuff it and took off for Japan, but that's another story.
Get the skills to get the job done, and have confidence that you can do it. Employers will pick up on real confidence when you talk to them.
Recruiting agencies are generally shit. Go straight to the company, even if they aren't advertizing an opening. If you impress them enough, a job opening will "magically" appear.
Know about the company (what they do, what their vision is, how they are doing). There's nothing people like more than hearing about themselves.
If they think you're desperate, you're screwed (You'll either get low pay or no job).
Come to my seminar! Only 3 easy installments of $2999.95 for a 3 hour workshop!
I *just* switched from RedHat 6.whatever to slink.
Now that I finally got it running I must say I am very impressed with its stability.
Some things to watch out for:
1. Do NOT download their packages online and do a fresh install from them. They do NOT work. I spent 2 weeks trying to get them to run to no avail.
Either buy the CDs from somewhere or just download the ISO image from Debian (You only need the first disk)
2. If you have an adaptec SCSI card, you have to download a special install disk and boot from that instead of the CD. There should be a link from Debian's site for the images. I do hope they will fix this soon!
3. dselect is rather un-intuitive and a bit of a pain to learn, but once you have your system installed, it's fairly decent for upgrading your packages. I've heard lots said about using apt to upgrade, so perhaps I'll try that now.
4. You can't get kde from Debian's site. I got them by pointing dselect to kde's site and installing from there.
All in all Debian is the best linux distro I have used yet (I've so far used slackware, redhat, and caldera, redhat being the worst followed closely behind by caldera).
I'm still messing around with it (Yesterday, I finally broke down and got the ISO from their site and it installed with no problems whatsoever) and so I've yet to try the upgrade to potato, but judging from the comments here it shouldn't be that hard to do.
What these distros need now is a "base windowed system" that fits in 50 megs and gives you enough that you can just install and run the programs you want to use rather than having 10,000 programs installed that you don't even know exist, let alone use.
Maybe now they can include KDE. Or will that be for Debian 3 (err Debian 3k at the rate of development.
You could just point apt to kde and grab it there...
Actually, making a friendlier apt that makes it easy to temporarily point to websites besides Debian would be tres cool.
What would be REALLY cool is if they were to add an extension to the packages file so that through file associations you can just go to the webpage of the author, click on the packages file, and have some apt-like program point there and install it on your system.
Of course you'd want to have some sort of security (PGP or the like) to be sure some malicious site doesn't take advantage of that to plant a trojan in your system.
Don't get me wrong - I love grabbing sources and compiling myself (mainly if I want to play with it a bit), but there are times when I just want the stuff installed with no hassles.
We must also consider the caliber of users who will soon be flooding into the linux domain. They most certainly will NOT want to see so much as a shell prompt or any other text-based program on their machine.
And so my wish list remains:
- A minimal install that puts the BARE MINIMUM necessary to boot the system, do some file management and configuration, and install other programs if you want. Debian does this well already, but I think that with a little more tweaking they could get it even smaller.
- A minimal X install that puts enough stuff to boot into KDE or GNOME or some plain old window manager. No games, no funky apps (well, maybe a text editor and a calculator). Can it be done in less than 50 megs? I think so...
- A way to temporarily point to other distribution sources from program authors to get the latest and greatest. This should be able to happen automatically (with the option to turn the feature off, of course), and then have the distrib pointer point back to debian again when it has installed the package.
- A nice touchy-feely GUI apt program that my grandmother could use.
- a centralized way to configure all of the significant programs that tend to make up the "operating" system such as user management, mail, ftp, http, printer services, network config, hardware management and the like. NT does this fairly decently, though I think that it could be done much better.
This would, of course, require some centralized body to devise sane standards for all to follow...
but how do you decide who you should watch? Or just wait till it's too late and they kill have the school?
Right.
Think about how many times this kind of thing has happened. Ever.
Now think about how many students out of the MILLIONS of students out there act violently causing serious harm or death.
Can you even get to 0.1%? 0.01%?
Now, even if 1 in 10,000 students acts out violently during his school career, does this give school administrators license to round up the 20% of students who "act strangely" or are "different", branding them with a stigma that will affect them during the most important years of their lives?
Does this imply a need for flakey cash-grab programs such as Mosaic 2000?
The fact is: Shit happens.
Shit has always happened.
Shit will happen again.
Every now and again you get some Jack the Ripper who strikes terror into the community, and then just as quickly, he's gone.
Nobody knows where he came from or what caused him to do what he did. And nothing happens again for a long, long time.
These are the kinds of things that you CANNOT prevent. They are freak episodes, claiming the lowest rung in death statistics.
If you're interested in preventing death, try educating Fat America about their sugar intake.
The "society" he should have been removed from was the classroom. He should have been moved to a councellor's office, who should have then proceeded to figure out what was wrong with the little tyke. And yes, I assert that something is, in fact, wrong with him.
Hmm, there must be something wrong with me then since I found his piece rather humorous, although a bit crude.
Too bad I'm not in school anymore, eh?
Guess I'll just have to buy me a gun and start hunting people down.
Oops! That was a violent threat! Quick! Call the thought police!
"Come see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!"
Also, even though it may be morally hard for some people to deal with, his point is correct. To make one person suffer injustly to stop two or more people from suffering injustly is a good thing.
Actually, no.
The American justice system was set up in a manner so as to minimize unjust punishment of the innocent. This is why you have "innocent until proven guilty" rather than the other way around as it is in France.
One thing I am curious about:
When my father was a kid, he had a gun of his own which he used for hunting in the woods from time to time. He had no firearms license since he didn't need one.
He went to school, hated his teachers, got in fights, and essentially did what most other kids did in school.
Now tell me this:
What has changed so much that we now need to arrest kids for wrong think?
Well that would certainly discourage legislators from passing bad laws, now wouldn't it?
I vote for a similar system in the patent office!
That's in reference to the difficulty of the installation. Interesting, but installation on Red Hat 5.1 (to give a reference on why I don't see installation as being ``insurmountable'', although configuration can be a pain.. yes I know RH != Debian, but come on) really wasn't all that difficult (for me).
The main problem with RedHat (and most other distributions for that matter) is all the crap that gets installed on your machine.
About 98% of the software that gets automatically installed in any given linux distribution will never be used by 90% of users.
I originally came from an Amiga background.
I would install the base OS in one partition (2 megs), and then use assign to make shadows of the system directories on other drives. This allowed me to keep the official OS intact in case something went wrong when a new library was installed or the like.
What I'm looking for in a linux distro is a basic install that has enough to get the system running and start up a TCP/IP stack, as well as a windowing environment (such as KDE).
Debian does the base install quite well (36 megs. I'm impressed!), but it all falls apart if I want to install X.
Suddenly I am faced with scanning through hundreds of packages in the dselect program (which, while being a fairly decent, though not very intuitive text based installer, still suffers the limitations of text based installers), and then having all the scripts fail because dselect didn't get the dependancies right, or having hidden dependancies in the packages that fail because the configuration of one package expected another package to be present (dhcpcd is one example of this).
I mean, come on! Do I really need 450 megs of software installed in order to do C/C++ development, run StarCraft under WINE, and play with themes in KDE?
Am I ever going to use text based newsreaders, mail clients, gopher clients and such? Hell no!
Am I really going to use ImageMagik when I can just download the latest version of GIMP? Hell no!
Will I ever use giftrans?
Will I really be making TeX documents?
Must I have XPaint and all those crappy utils installed?
Do I really want to have 10 different text-based text editors?
Do I really need 10 different image viewers?
Do I really need all those different shells?
I for one would welcome a distro that gives me The Basic Package, where I have just enough shell commands, X, and a desktop manager like KDE.
This is how all operating systems have been distributed in the past.
You don't see them including 2 gigabytes of miscellaneous freeware and shareware packages and thrusting them all in the user's face during the installation when all he wants is to get the damn thing installed without all this extra stuff he'll never use anyway (How many desktop users will use sendmail? Care to guess what gets installed in EVERY environment?).
The installer should:
- Install what is required to get the system up and get networking up.
- install ONE shell. Let the user decide which one if he wants to.
- Install X but let the user select not to.
- Install ONE desktop environment, but let the user decide which one if he wants to.
- Get everything into a safe configuration that lets the OS boot up and start the desktop environment.
Now reboot.
Now let the user configure his desktop, network stuff etc etc, and then if he REALLY wants to, he can have a look at the other goodies on the Linux CD and install some of it.
It's a hell of a lot easier to learn how an OS works when there's 30 megs of stuff rather than 1 gig of stuff scattered all over the system directories.
The main annoyance with GNU/Linux is having to fool around with PnP (which is easily solved.. get an external modem and use the almighty serial port).
This is the mentality that must be squashed if you ever expect Linux to be accepted by the 99.9% of people who make up the regular users.
They want to turn the computer on and be presented with a desktop.
They want to click the pretty icon and have Wordperfect load up.
They want to go to the control panel and change how fast the mouse moves, or make a custom mouse pointer, or change their screen resolution on the fly, or change their network settings (including things such as dhcp).
They don't want to have to load a bunch of cryptic text-based configuration files and spend hours reading poorly written documentation in order to change their keyboard mapping or install a new network card or add new fonts.
They don't want to replace their hardware (and why should they? it works, doesn't it?). Telling them to use an external modem because Linux can't handle PnP properly is pathetic.
Take a close look at the Windows installer and its configuration system.
Annoying crashes and reboots aside, it is an excellent system in concept.
This is what users will look for when they put the Linux CD in their drive.
I saw it on TV when it was first released out here in Japan.
You really do need to understand what they are saying in order to fully appreciate the movie.
I just hope for you guys that they do a decent job of dubbing for a change. Believe it or not, bad dubbing was one of the reasons I started to learn Japanese =)
They need a real director who can find voices that match the characters, and actors who can act. If Disney can do it, why can't they?
Either way, I'm adding this film to my Miazaki favorite list, along with Kiki's delivery service, Laputa, and Tonari no Totoro.
For example:
Oh, so it was in the LA Times was it? Wow! it MUST be true then! Of course since we don't have access to the newspaper (since it's 3 years old!) I guess we'll just have to take their word for it.
It gets even better:
Can the system brand a student as dangerous?
Give me a break! If they have to do this much spin-doctoring on their own site, what makes you think their system is all that it's cracked up to be?
And now my personal favorite. They really like using very small and simple words and oversimplified concepts:
Hmm.. I see... So since I am a member of a gun club in my local community and recently bought a colt for the cowboy shoots, play D&D (the occult! oh no!), listen to goth and heavy metal music, and really hate my teacher and write bad poetry about him, I'm in the high risk category.
And since I'm behaving erratically (wearing dark clothes and all), I get sent so that MOSAIC can "guide" school officials in "establishing that I do not pose an elevated risk of violence."
Have a look at their site
http://www.gdbinc.com/mosaic2000.htm
It's the most disgusting shit I've seen yet.
his is a valid point, don't I have the option of telling my daughter "metal detectors are a necessary evil, they infringe on your privacy but I think the deterrent affect they provide is more important"?
They don't really provide that much of a deterrant.
If someone has decided that they will attack someone else, but there is a metal detector, they won't simply say "Oh well. Guess I can't do that now". They will do it when the guy is walking home from school, or during lunch break.
They will break into the equipment room and get a bat or a golf club.
You may be bringing down the number of shootings that occur INSIDE of the school, but you certainly are not bringing down the number of shootings themselves.
About the best you could do is stop the victims from bringing weapons to defend themselves.
One thing that leaps to mind is the recent legislation in South Africa that makes it legal to shoot car thieves.
Strangely enough, car theft dropped sharply after that.
Remember: They prey on the weak.
"it's too easy for guards to become nannies! It's too easy for a guard to abuse the power and start cracking down on being different!" I don't think this will happen because, as I said before, of the very well defined line between being a criminal and just being different. And you can always punish a guard for abusing his/her power.
You seem to have forgotten the hellmouth stories already.
Don't you remember the student who was taken to the office by security guards (rather than simply sent by the teacher) because she was wearing (GASP) a TRENCHCOAT!
You're basing your entire argument on the assumption that the system will work and will not be abused.
Experience teaches otherwise.
As far as metal detectors in the schools go, they're only a temporary solution to a serious problem. Unless you can deter the students from bringing weapons in the first place, you're simply going to have rule upon rule upon rule, further restricting the students' rights and their confidence.
I used to carry a swiss army knife with me to school because it was just so handy to have around (and I still carry it with me). In today's school I'd probably be expelled and sent to heavy counselling.
As you further spiral down this slippery slope, you add computer profiling to weed out the bad seeds before they sprout. Then mode of dress is added, then choice of recreational activities, then what you do in your spare time.
At the end of this slope is a very rigid and inflexible school environment where everyone is paranoid of someone who says or does or appears to think that is different from the rest. This person, who is doing things differently, is at risk. The people who behave like everyone else would NEVER go to violence, so we're okay with them but WHOA watch out if you behave differently!
Oh, and incidentally, I once buried a bunch of chickens as a child (Don't ask me why. I don't know). I also experimented with explosives.
The amount of torment our cat went through before I reached the age of 15 I no longer care to think about.
My "potential" for violence would probably have been off-the-scale, even though I had a very hard time bringing myself to hit my fellow man no matter how much he deserved it.
One big problem I'm seeing here is that most of these arguments are heavily colored with American moral thinking, which is flawed to begin with.
It doesn't matter how it works. Remember, GIGO. All it can possibly look for is previously-identified indicators--in other words, for things we already know about. It doesn't matter what the selection factors are.
Quite correct.
I can still remember when I was in highschool how they were so hopped up about this new program that would identify for the students what they were good at and what their future held.
I got social worker.
Needless to say I chose programming instead.
If they can't even build a computer that can play chess intelligently, how can they expect to build a computer to root out "troubled kids"?
The whole earth suffers from a virus, a disease known as sin.
This sin blinds the people, so they cannot see the One True God (tm), or even see the fact that they suffer this disease, and are doomed to perish in everlasting fire and brimstone because the tarnished cannot enter His Holiness.
But fear not, my fellow man! There is hope! Repent of your sins and embrace Jesus Christ and blindly believe all that he and the prophets tell you (conveniently written in our Holy Scriptures for your perusal).
How do we know that the world is diseased? Why, just look at the state of things! Wars and famine and nature that is very contrary to the way that the One True God (tm) intended it to be!
You can find out about all of this by reading our Holy Scriptures. There, you have proof now!
Order today and you'll receive absolutely free this piece of the One True Cross!
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What is "that freedom argument"?
From your original message:
>I guess this is where the "Is it freedom" question comes in. Is it freedom if they told you to do it or they wanted you to do it? Is it freedom if they say one way is good or one way is bad?
I stretched a bit, but I was trying to find way to throw my 2 cents in =)
I liked the rest its a really good oration on the way the world works and is viewed if you beleive the assumption that there is no divine authority.
Actually, my view is not that there is no "divine authority" or "god" per se, just that if our universe was created by a superior being, that being's interest in us is simply in observing, not interfering, as can be inferred by his/her/its/their total lack of communication with us.
This leaves us to ourselves, to come up with our own morality and ethics which we need in order to survive as a society.
And another thing, I don't believe that a person can only hurt themself.
The imaginary world I described in my previous message had the caveat: You are the ONLY person alive. It was for demonstration purposes only.
My belief in God comes strongly from an influence that I feel, that lets me know I am connected. It heals, enables and enriches my life.
This is what I can't understand.
How can you be so sure that something exists without testing it or hearing any logical, plausible, and likely explanation, so much as to base a large part of your life from it?
There is a huge difference between thinking that something is likely true and gathering empirical evidence which can confirm or deny it, and implicitly taking what someone else said as gospel or running on a subjective feeling.
How come whenever something about Christianity on
We know hat all christendom is not behind it because they are too busy fighting amongst themselves to get organized.
The ones behind the proverbial "it" are the ones in power, and they speak for all christians whether you like it or not.
As far as this game is concerned, it's a cash grab and we all know it. Whether the guy really is christian or not is irrelevant. The christian reaction, however, is.
Sorry to crush a collective dillusion, but Christians _are_ capable of independent thought
So long as it doesn't go against accepted dogma.
Seen any T-O maps, lately?
There is not a commandment that says "thou shall not laugh."
Unless you're a puritan.
And then we get the comment "Religion and freedom have never really gotten along."
They don't. Religion is a tool used to maintain social order.
Maintaining social order infringes upon freedom by definition. We need rules in order to survive as a society. Rules take away freedom.
Religion becomes a problem, however, when it holds more than its fair share of control upon the people. The most often cited examples of this are the Dark Ages and the Crusades, however there are countless other examples (for example certain friars who took a certain passage in Galatians a bit too much to heart and made it a requirement for all members of their fold to be castrated).
Like any other social construct, they become corrupt when given too much power without accountability.
Nice tie, but it doesn't explain a few people like Gangis Kahn, Napolean, or Hitler (who prosecuted the Jewish RACE much more so than the religion).
I don't see what relevance this has to the discussion at hand. Of course they committed atrocities, but does the fact that they were not religious mean that religion has nothing to do with encroachment upon freedom? That religion has nothing to do with massacres and atrocities?
I am sorry, I guess it is just more 'fun' to live with a severly outdated, extremely prejudicial view of the religious.
I guess it's easier to ignore the garbage in your own back yard.