I very much want the US to become more democratic.
I don't--democracy is simply mob rule, the tyranny of the majority. The advantage of a constitutional federal republic is that the people have a voice, but it is hopefully muted significantly, such that the majority cannot oppress the minority. In a true democracy, there are no safeguards: the will of the majority is the law. As Jonah Goldberg once wrote, in a democracy 51% of the people can vote to piss in the cornflakes of the oter 49%.
I do support instant run-off voting and other methods, because they would go a certain way towards breaking the two-party dichotomy without the nastiness involved in proportional representation.
Who invented zero?... We don't have his name...>/em>
This article credits one Muhammad Bin Ahmad in the tenth century. I've seen a couple of other references to an individual inventor of the concept, although I cannot be certain the name was the same in each case.
If it's bad to put a little rubber thingy on your John Thomas to prevent kids, it is just as wrong to prevent them in another way.
I agree, and that is in fact what the Orthodox bioethicist Engelhardt has pointed out. The Romans have some sort of idea that sperm are potential life or something, and that it's bad to spill them without chance of conception, or something (c.f. Onan in the Old Testament). I think it's all very silly (what about, for example, eggs: the vast majority are produced and discarded), but within the philosophical framework of the Roman Church, it apparently makes sense.
I'd say that it's probably morally better to not use contraception, as it is more natural, but I'd not argue that contraceptive use is sinful in and of itself. The motives, certainly, could be, but that's another matter.
No, the Catholics have a rationale for their opposition to contraception and infanticide. I happen to disagree with their ideas regarding contraception, at least to some extent, but I'm not a Catholic and it's hardly my business. Pew-filling doesn't enter into it.
Catholic priests, sure--but not Anglican or Orthodox priests who are married (or, in the case of Anglicans these days, not at all, apparently). It's rather more common for an Orthodox priest to be married than not, actually.
While I like the idea of blaming those people (and they are somewhat responsible), the obvious villain is religious ideology, and most prominently, the Catholic Church and it's[sic] anti-birth control stance.
Nonsense. There's more than enough capacity to produce food for everyone on earth. The problem is two-fold: socialism and kleptocracy. These combine to prevent the efficient allocation of resources. And as for birth control, the Catholics do support it: the rhythm method is just as much a form of birth control as any other. So's just plain abstinence. Sex is not a precondition to satisfaction.
Men will not be free until the last King is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
My father's a priest, and I find your advocacy of his disembowellment loathsome in the extreme.
By the way, US goverment is not any better than Syrian or Iran goverments.
We willingly harbour terrorists? We torture our citizens? We suppress peaceful protests? We have no respect at all for civil rights?
We're not perfect (although, so far as I can tell, Colorado has every other polity on the globe beat), but we're far better than elsewhere, particularly Syria & Iran, which are far worse than elsewhere.
It probably has more to do with fear that hats could be taken as gang symbols, or alternatively that it's simply not stylish in adult circles at this point in time for men to wear hats. Remember, school administrators are of a generation which doesn't really think about hat-wearing indoors as being rude.
Both browsers have session management, so these pages open up when I start my system.
Mozilla has session management?!? I'd like to see that--every time I quit and restart, I get a blank window. I believe that it's possible to open the same tabs each start-up, but what I want is to open all the tabs, with history intact, I had open when I quit.
Ummm, all finding a walking path would be, would be Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. The travelling salesman problem is NP complete, but IIRC shortest-path isn't. It shouldn't be too difficult, I'd imagine.
Well then how about the "open source guys" shoudl stop posting articles about how much better linux is than windows.
That's a non sequitur. If one wishes folks to stop using Windows, then pointing that an alternative is better is an excellent way to do so. I understand how you might wish for more work to be put into cross-platform projects, but honestly once one has left Windows it's just not a priority. If Windows users wish to port a piece of software, they have the source, after all.
There are projects which provide free software for Windows users. GnuWin II provides such a service well.
I don't think that Windows users are evil, or even that proprietary software is evil. I do believe that proprietary software is less moral than free software, and I've no wish to make it more pleasant to use.
I should note that free OSes typically have the problem that software is not ported to; why then should programmers devote effort porting from them?
Were I you, I'd get a box, slap RedHat 9 on it and go from there. That's what I use at home, and I've never once wished I'd Windows.
Of course, not everyone in the world is unlucky enough to live in or visit Manhattan. While non-grid system cities are often easier to travel by foot in, they are also generally a nuisance to learn. A program which would generete efficient walking routes therefor would be pretty cool.
Of course, I haven't seen a coherent plan out of the military since we started in Iraq
We make the single most amazing military advance in history and conquer a nation the size of California, and you claim there was no coherent plan? Or are you merely annoyed that you weren't privy thereto?
The Septuagint was translated by 72 individual scholars for the library of Alexandria. Each was locked up and made his translation independently of the others, in order that the different versions could be compared and the best selected. But all 72 produced the exact same text--which to me seems the result of divine influence. Thus I'll take the Septuagint as error-free.
I understand that the recently unearthed pre-Jamnian Hebrew texts agree with the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic and other versions.
The KJV has plenty of problems, but avoiding the Hebrew Scriptures is not one of them; rather, its problem is that it incorrectly assumed that the 17th century Jewish Old Testament was an intact version of the 1st century Old Testament (a faulty assumption common to many Protestants). Such things as screwed up Psalm numbering &c. were thereby introduced.
No, to translate the Bible one need only have a good working knowledge of Greek: the Septuagint, miraculously translated identically by 72 Jewish scholars for one of the (IIRC) Ptolemies; and the New Testament, preserved intact by the Church since it was first codified. The Masoretic and other versions are horribly full of errors.
It's not that bad. IIRC, at the time Christians weren't allowed to lend money for interest, and so `borrow...from Jews' was the same as `borrow...from a bank' would be today. The provision simply means that (say I'm an adolescent) if my father dies with a loan outstanding, I needn't pay interest until I've achieved my majoroty. It protects a minor from poor guardians.
And the reason Christians weren't allowed to lend for interest had nothing to do with fear of economic activity, and plenty to do with legislating morality. It was considered wrong to practice usury, and it was thus made illegal. Yet another example that legislating morals is dumb.
Kernel == OS, for purposes of this discussion. Read a book on OS design sometime...
Applications can be written for Linux which don't require glibc. It would be a pain, but it's quite doable. Applications can be statically linked, and not need GNU ld, or one could replace GNU ld with one's own.
The OS wasn't `complete before open source ever existed'; it's not even complete now. You'll notice that kernel development continues even today.
Then you'd be foolish. All an operating system does is provide resource allocation; everything else is the domain of applications. Obviously most OS vendors also ship their operating systems with applications which run on them (although not all, I imagine: embedded OSes don't necessarily need anything other than the one application they'll run).
What an OS is, is a matter for technical definition. Read a Computer Science textbook on OS design--you'll read about scheduling, about virtual memory, about filesystem design, about microkernels, about message passing &c. You won't read about graphics, about user interface (except perhaps the specialised field of API design, which is a kind of user interface meant for programmers' code), about anything which is in the application domain.
Linux is the operating system. An OS is a bit of code responsible for the allocation of resources: CPU, RAM, disk, hardware.
The GNU tools are even the only thing in the basic operating environment, although they are a large part of what makes it so grand. The GNU project should get credit for its great work, but so too should XFree86, Postgresql, KDE (I dislike it myself, but...), nethack and so on.
Probably the best credit that can be given is to call what Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake and friends distribute a free software/open source system.
Red Hat do not distribute a GNU system. Debian do not distribute a GNU system. SuSE do not distribute a GNU system. AFAICT, no-one distributes a GNU system. Not even Debian HURD.
What all the above distribute (save Debian HURD, of course) is the Linux operating system, with an operating environment consisting of an awful lot of tools, including the GNU environment. But there's a lot additional: KDE; XFree86; Apache; Postgresql; Mozilla and more. I will grant that the base operating evironment is mostly GNU: bash, GNU ls, GNU tar, GNU this & GNU that.
An operating system is just a bit of code which manages resources. Linux is an operating system; GNU HURD is an operating system; the Darwin kernel is an operating system; the Windows kernel is an operating system. Red Hat Linux is not an operating system; Debian/HURD is not an operating system; Mac OS X, despite its name, is not an operating system; Windows is not an operating system. What they all are is distributions of OSes and certain apps, particular to each, which sit atop the OS.
I'll admit, though, that I understand the FSF's frustration. It is highly annoying when people speak of Linux and really mean the wonderful GNU toolset. It's rather infuriating, and it's unfair to the GNU Project that it not get credit for all its work. But it would be just as unfair to all the other developers and projects who have contributed to making the average Linux distro so cool to simply call a distro GNU/Linux.
U.S. or more commonly Imperial measures were mostly from the British Empire.
This is a commonly-retold lie (although I'm sure that you are unaware of the fact). The system of measures common to Western Civilisation has been surprisingly consistent: 7 days to the week; 24 hours to the day; 60 minutes to the hour; 60 seconds to the minute; 360 degrees to the circle; twelve inches to the foot and so on. Two things did happen to prevent all of Europe, the Near East &c. from using the same system. First of all was natural change: the original pound was twelve ounces (the word for ounce and inch are both from the Latin uncia, for thumb--a thumb weighs about an inch and measures about an inch), but was expanded to 16 a) because the original was too small and b) because 16 is more amenable to measurement of mass. The second reason for change was greedy rulers (whether kings or parliaments, they're all a bunch of rotters): rather than raising the tax on beer from 1 penny a barrel, simply decrease the size of a barrel by one cup. No-one notices, but the coffers swell.
Our system is no less simple than those devised by the French.
Temperature: take 0 as the freezing point of brine and 100 as human body temperature, and divide into hundredths. Only the guy mis-measured and so human body temperature is actuall 98.6... I'd rescale it, which is no less painful than switching to a new system. Less, actually, since for man-sized measures the slight difference is immaterial. And it's all arbitrary, anyway. Rankine and Kelvin are the only reasonable systems anyway:-)
Mass is based on liquid measures, same as in the French system. One pint weighs one pound, ideally. Sadly, both American and British systems screwed it up when they were codified. The French system is no more directly related to atomic numbers than any other would be: Avogadro's number is arbitrary: it's the number of atoms in 0.012 kilogram of carbon-12. It's derived from the French system, not the other way around.
Liquid measure: 1 ounce (weighs one ounce!) = 1/2 jack = 1/4 jill = 1/8 cup = 1/16 pint = 1/32 quart = 1/64 pottle = 1/128 gallon...
That everyone uses French units is immaterial. They are demonstrably inferior for actual measurement, while, admittedly, demonstrably superior for performing decimal calculations on paper in base-10--an endeavour I do, to a first approximation, never. This advantage evaporates, considering that one should be doing calculations on a computer (where they're done in base-2 and it's impossible to represent.2 (base-10) properly). Meanwhile, the original system (which is not American, or British, or even European) retains its advantages for actual measurement. If everyone else leapt from a bridge, would you? Of course not. If everyone else uses an inferior system of measurement, why should the US switch?
An epiphany, perhaps? An apostrophe is a punctuation mark: '. It is also a figure of speech (speaking to an absent or imaginary person, or personified abstraction, particularly in the midst of normal speech).
And [sic] is used in print when quoting the incorrect spelling (or, less commonly, grammar) used by another. It's a method of indicating that the mistake is not one's own. Sic, of course, is Latin for 'thus'; you are writing that the original quote was thus.
If you are unsure of the proper spelling of a word, and wish to indicate this (an admirable goal), it is common online to use '<?<' or a similar variation; there's no counterpart in traditional publishing.
There is, so far as I know, no short-hand for indicating that doesn't know which word one is seeking. Normally I suppose one would just use a parenthetical comment.
Ugh--I loathe wheel mice. Don't see the point, myself. It's nearly impossible to get a real mouse these days (I don't wish to even see the loathsome wheel).
Now, give me a three-button mouse. That's where it's really at. Left for manipulation, right for actions, middle to paste. That makes life very nice indeed.
...though these systems are often referred to as "Linux", they are more accurately called GNU/Linux systems.
And even more accurately called GNU/BSD/XFree86/KDE/Red Hat/Bell/Linux systems...
Although I'm beginning to sympathise with the FSF's viewpoint. One of my teammates recently referred to `Linux tools for Windows'; he meant Cygwin, which is GNU tools for Windows. It must be annoying to see one's work finally become popular and get precious little credit.
OTOH, the FSF had its chance. The HURD sucks. It has sucked. It will suck, and is likely to forever suck. Nothing would make me happier to be proven wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.
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I don't--democracy is simply mob rule, the tyranny of the majority. The advantage of a constitutional federal republic is that the people have a voice, but it is hopefully muted significantly, such that the majority cannot oppress the minority. In a true democracy, there are no safeguards: the will of the majority is the law. As Jonah Goldberg once wrote, in a democracy 51% of the people can vote to piss in the cornflakes of the oter 49%.
I do support instant run-off voting and other methods, because they would go a certain way towards breaking the two-party dichotomy without the nastiness involved in proportional representation.
This article credits one Muhammad Bin Ahmad in the tenth century. I've seen a couple of other references to an individual inventor of the concept, although I cannot be certain the name was the same in each case.
I agree, and that is in fact what the Orthodox bioethicist Engelhardt has pointed out. The Romans have some sort of idea that sperm are potential life or something, and that it's bad to spill them without chance of conception, or something (c.f. Onan in the Old Testament). I think it's all very silly (what about, for example, eggs: the vast majority are produced and discarded), but within the philosophical framework of the Roman Church, it apparently makes sense.
I'd say that it's probably morally better to not use contraception, as it is more natural, but I'd not argue that contraceptive use is sinful in and of itself. The motives, certainly, could be, but that's another matter.
No, the Catholics have a rationale for their opposition to contraception and infanticide. I happen to disagree with their ideas regarding contraception, at least to some extent, but I'm not a Catholic and it's hardly my business. Pew-filling doesn't enter into it.
Catholic priests, sure--but not Anglican or Orthodox priests who are married (or, in the case of Anglicans these days, not at all, apparently). It's rather more common for an Orthodox priest to be married than not, actually.
Nonsense. There's more than enough capacity to produce food for everyone on earth. The problem is two-fold: socialism and kleptocracy. These combine to prevent the efficient allocation of resources. And as for birth control, the Catholics do support it: the rhythm method is just as much a form of birth control as any other. So's just plain abstinence. Sex is not a precondition to satisfaction.
Men will not be free until the last King is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
My father's a priest, and I find your advocacy of his disembowellment loathsome in the extreme.
We willingly harbour terrorists? We torture our citizens? We suppress peaceful protests? We have no respect at all for civil rights?
We're not perfect (although, so far as I can tell, Colorado has every other polity on the globe beat), but we're far better than elsewhere, particularly Syria & Iran, which are far worse than elsewhere.
How many French unit users actually weigh themselves in Newtons? Heck, even units equates pounds and grammes.
It probably has more to do with fear that hats could be taken as gang symbols, or alternatively that it's simply not stylish in adult circles at this point in time for men to wear hats. Remember, school administrators are of a generation which doesn't really think about hat-wearing indoors as being rude.
Mozilla has session management?!? I'd like to see that--every time I quit and restart, I get a blank window. I believe that it's possible to open the same tabs each start-up, but what I want is to open all the tabs, with history intact, I had open when I quit.
Ummm, all finding a walking path would be, would be Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. The travelling salesman problem is NP complete, but IIRC shortest-path isn't. It shouldn't be too difficult, I'd imagine.
That's a non sequitur. If one wishes folks to stop using Windows, then pointing that an alternative is better is an excellent way to do so. I understand how you might wish for more work to be put into cross-platform projects, but honestly once one has left Windows it's just not a priority. If Windows users wish to port a piece of software, they have the source, after all.
There are projects which provide free software for Windows users. GnuWin II provides such a service well.
I don't think that Windows users are evil, or even that proprietary software is evil. I do believe that proprietary software is less moral than free software, and I've no wish to make it more pleasant to use.
I should note that free OSes typically have the problem that software is not ported to; why then should programmers devote effort porting from them?
Were I you, I'd get a box, slap RedHat 9 on it and go from there. That's what I use at home, and I've never once wished I'd Windows.
Of course, not everyone in the world is unlucky enough to live in or visit Manhattan. While non-grid system cities are often easier to travel by foot in, they are also generally a nuisance to learn. A program which would generete efficient walking routes therefor would be pretty cool.
We make the single most amazing military advance in history and conquer a nation the size of California, and you claim there was no coherent plan? Or are you merely annoyed that you weren't privy thereto?
I understand that the recently unearthed pre-Jamnian Hebrew texts agree with the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic and other versions.
No, to translate the Bible one need only have a good working knowledge of Greek: the Septuagint, miraculously translated identically by 72 Jewish scholars for one of the (IIRC) Ptolemies; and the New Testament, preserved intact by the Church since it was first codified. The Masoretic and other versions are horribly full of errors.
And the reason Christians weren't allowed to lend for interest had nothing to do with fear of economic activity, and plenty to do with legislating morality. It was considered wrong to practice usury, and it was thus made illegal. Yet another example that legislating morals is dumb.
Applications can be written for Linux which don't require glibc. It would be a pain, but it's quite doable. Applications can be statically linked, and not need GNU ld, or one could replace GNU ld with one's own.
The OS wasn't `complete before open source ever existed'; it's not even complete now. You'll notice that kernel development continues even today.
What an OS is, is a matter for technical definition. Read a Computer Science textbook on OS design--you'll read about scheduling, about virtual memory, about filesystem design, about microkernels, about message passing &c. You won't read about graphics, about user interface (except perhaps the specialised field of API design, which is a kind of user interface meant for programmers' code), about anything which is in the application domain.
Linux is the operating system. An OS is a bit of code responsible for the allocation of resources: CPU, RAM, disk, hardware.
The GNU tools are even the only thing in the basic operating environment, although they are a large part of what makes it so grand. The GNU project should get credit for its great work, but so too should XFree86, Postgresql, KDE (I dislike it myself, but...), nethack and so on.
Probably the best credit that can be given is to call what Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake and friends distribute a free software/open source system.
What all the above distribute (save Debian HURD, of course) is the Linux operating system, with an operating environment consisting of an awful lot of tools, including the GNU environment. But there's a lot additional: KDE; XFree86; Apache; Postgresql; Mozilla and more. I will grant that the base operating evironment is mostly GNU: bash, GNU ls, GNU tar, GNU this & GNU that.
An operating system is just a bit of code which manages resources. Linux is an operating system; GNU HURD is an operating system; the Darwin kernel is an operating system; the Windows kernel is an operating system. Red Hat Linux is not an operating system; Debian/HURD is not an operating system; Mac OS X, despite its name, is not an operating system; Windows is not an operating system. What they all are is distributions of OSes and certain apps, particular to each, which sit atop the OS.
I'll admit, though, that I understand the FSF's frustration. It is highly annoying when people speak of Linux and really mean the wonderful GNU toolset. It's rather infuriating, and it's unfair to the GNU Project that it not get credit for all its work. But it would be just as unfair to all the other developers and projects who have contributed to making the average Linux distro so cool to simply call a distro GNU/Linux.
This is a commonly-retold lie (although I'm sure that you are unaware of the fact). The system of measures common to Western Civilisation has been surprisingly consistent: 7 days to the week; 24 hours to the day; 60 minutes to the hour; 60 seconds to the minute; 360 degrees to the circle; twelve inches to the foot and so on. Two things did happen to prevent all of Europe, the Near East &c. from using the same system. First of all was natural change: the original pound was twelve ounces (the word for ounce and inch are both from the Latin uncia, for thumb--a thumb weighs about an inch and measures about an inch), but was expanded to 16 a) because the original was too small and b) because 16 is more amenable to measurement of mass. The second reason for change was greedy rulers (whether kings or parliaments, they're all a bunch of rotters): rather than raising the tax on beer from 1 penny a barrel, simply decrease the size of a barrel by one cup. No-one notices, but the coffers swell.
Our system is no less simple than those devised by the French.
Temperature: take 0 as the freezing point of brine and 100 as human body temperature, and divide into hundredths. Only the guy mis-measured and so human body temperature is actuall 98.6... I'd rescale it, which is no less painful than switching to a new system. Less, actually, since for man-sized measures the slight difference is immaterial. And it's all arbitrary, anyway. Rankine and Kelvin are the only reasonable systems anyway:-)
Mass is based on liquid measures, same as in the French system. One pint weighs one pound, ideally. Sadly, both American and British systems screwed it up when they were codified. The French system is no more directly related to atomic numbers than any other would be: Avogadro's number is arbitrary: it's the number of atoms in 0.012 kilogram of carbon-12. It's derived from the French system, not the other way around.
Liquid measure: 1 ounce (weighs one ounce!) = 1/2 jack = 1/4 jill = 1/8 cup = 1/16 pint = 1/32 quart = 1/64 pottle = 1/128 gallon...
That everyone uses French units is immaterial. They are demonstrably inferior for actual measurement, while, admittedly, demonstrably superior for performing decimal calculations on paper in base-10--an endeavour I do, to a first approximation, never. This advantage evaporates, considering that one should be doing calculations on a computer (where they're done in base-2 and it's impossible to represent .2 (base-10) properly). Meanwhile, the original system (which is not American, or British, or even European) retains its advantages for actual measurement. If everyone else leapt from a bridge, would you? Of course not. If everyone else uses an inferior system of measurement, why should the US switch?
An epiphany, perhaps? An apostrophe is a punctuation mark: '. It is also a figure of speech (speaking to an absent or imaginary person, or personified abstraction, particularly in the midst of normal speech).
And [sic] is used in print when quoting the incorrect spelling (or, less commonly, grammar) used by another. It's a method of indicating that the mistake is not one's own. Sic, of course, is Latin for 'thus'; you are writing that the original quote was thus.
If you are unsure of the proper spelling of a word, and wish to indicate this (an admirable goal), it is common online to use '<?<' or a similar variation; there's no counterpart in traditional publishing.
There is, so far as I know, no short-hand for indicating that doesn't know which word one is seeking. Normally I suppose one would just use a parenthetical comment.
Now, give me a three-button mouse. That's where it's really at. Left for manipulation, right for actions, middle to paste. That makes life very nice indeed.
And even more accurately called GNU/BSD/XFree86/KDE/Red Hat/Bell/Linux systems...
Although I'm beginning to sympathise with the FSF's viewpoint. One of my teammates recently referred to `Linux tools for Windows'; he meant Cygwin, which is GNU tools for Windows. It must be annoying to see one's work finally become popular and get precious little credit.
OTOH, the FSF had its chance. The HURD sucks. It has sucked. It will suck, and is likely to forever suck. Nothing would make me happier to be proven wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.