The Morris worm wasn't a virus but a worm. Viruses spread from file to file, generally because the OS is fooled into executing code when it attempts to read a file. Trojan horses are individual programs manually executed by a foolish user and which do evil things. Worms spread from host to host over a network.
Viruses are possible under Unix, but you'd have to trick root into running them.
The DO NOT DUPLICATE isn't that much of a problem--one can generally find a locksmith who'll do it for a little extra consideration. That's the way the world works.
But lockpicks are several orders of magnitudes cooler.
The actual language of the GPL talks about the preferred source form. Thus, if you really truly prefer to work in machine code or assembler, such a work would be quite welcome under the GPL. Why you'd do such a thing is your own lookout.
Stallman has repeatedly tried to exert pressure on people including McVoy to license things under *his* GPL, and complaining loudly when it doesn't happen. In other words Stallman is making an effort to limit their freedom with their own product.
You demonstrate a remarkable lack discernment. Stallman recognises their freedom and is not trying to limit it. He is trying to persuade them to use that freedom in a certain fashion--that is all. You may agree or disagree with what he wants, but you certainly cannot say that he is trying to limit their freedom.
Note also that in his philosophy it is both wrong and harmful to others to release proprietary software. That is, he considers proprietary software to be immoral and would no doubt like to see it made illegal, in exactly the same sense that murder, rape and theft are immoral and illegal.
I don't follow him that far, but there is a certain amount of logical consistency to his arguments.
* Elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule; common citizens needn't be consulted. They may only choose which elite to follow.
Yes, most certainly yes. Most people are far too stupid to be entrusted with running a state. Watch that bit on Leno where he asks folks easy questions. Who lost the American Civil War? Here's a hint: it wasn't the East. Take a look at any of a number of tests and surveys which conclusively demonstrate that the average American, Briton, Frenchman or German is a moron.
# `Good' elites should act on their subjective whims, without evidence, argument or accountability.
Brin slants his statement. But it is true that men should act according to their judgement. I use the instance of the law. The moral man neither obeys nor disobeys the law; it is as nothing to him. He does that which is moral, and does not do that which is immoral. Legality doesn't enter into the equation.
Certainly, if the moral thing he does is illegal, he will be apprehended, tried, convicted and punished. But that does not prevent him from doing it.
# Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you are important enough.
Any amount of sin can be forgiven, period. We know this to be true.
# True leaders are born. It's genetic. The right to rule is inherited.
There's a reason that men have kings and lords. We can breed dogs (for looks, intelligence, speed, whatever)--certainly we can breed men.
* Justified human emotions can turn a good person evil.
Can it be denied? Anger can become hatred, and that can quite easily become evil. It may be necessary to destroy a man, but it is never necessary to hate.
There are two types of people in the world: Star Trek people and Star Wars people. Star Wars people are realistic: there is good, and there is evil (well, actually, there's good and lack-of-good...). Star Trek people are utopian twits who think we can all just get along and denying man's fundamentally fallen nature.
I agree--the film makers were looking for a way to turn the story of the Bletchley Park codebreakers into a romance, so "obviously" the leading man had to go after the girl.
Hey--most of us are heterosexual. Guys don't want to see two guys falling in love; gals don't want to see two gals falling in love. Why waste money on such a thing? I want to see some a guy and a girl fall in love. And so do the vast majority of men and women.
Now, turning it into a romance in the first place is the bit I find dubious. Why bother? Why must every movie have a love interest?
The so-called standard terminology to which you refer ranks among the dumber ideas of history. Metriphiles--world-reknowned for their foolishness as it is--cannot grasp the fact that a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, a megabyte 1,024*1,024 bytes and so on. Naturally, any sane person can deal with this, but there is a tiny-minded sort which cannot.
The solution is to label hard drives in accordance with the rest of computer technology. A kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, not 1,000. The kibibyte does not exist!
Why the *$&% was the parent modded up? The day any sane person (as opposed to a hypocephilic metriphile) uses kibibye, mebibyte, gibibyte or any of those thrice-accursed neologisms is the day that the world begins to end.
Intelligent people have no problem with the idea that a kilobyte has 1,024 characters. Hard drive manufacturers always have, but they are hardly paragons worthy of emulation.
Stop out the kibibyte nonsense now, before it gets any further.
Ah, xtank. The reason I got a D my fourth semester of German. Sigh. That was one good game. The source is still out there, but it doesn't compile. I once tried to sit down and get it all fixed up, but I never managed to do it.
Bolo was another great networked game from the Dark Ages, and unlike netrek and xtank, originated on the BBC Micro and migrated to the Macintosh. Still IMHO the single best multiplayer arcade-style game for a personal computer. I have PC using cousins who played it half a decade ago and still talk about it--it was that good!
It's not so much the IVF that I object to (although it's unnatural) as the subsequent destruction of the huiman being so produced when harvesting stem cells. When used to impregnate, one cannot complain on ethical grounds. Although one can complain about the destruction of any `superfluous' embryos so created.
There are moral arguments to IVF in general, but a) they're off-topic and b) I've no real formed opinion on them.
I didn't mention abortion in that particular comment. Creating an embryo, killing it and extracting its cells is murder, despite it not being an abortion (i.e., there never was a pregnancy). The post wasn't an apology for abortion--it was an apology for murder. IMHO, of course
The parent post had discussed why it is still important to collect totipotent stem cells. The only current source being embryos, it was thus proposing exactly what I argued against.
Regarding your proposed cut-off--that's exactly why even some atheists consider are against abortion. There is a clear cut-off: when the sperm fertilises the egg. Everything after that is hazy.
My post wasn't a troll-it was a serious comment on an important subject. Many folks have been arguing for embryonic stem cell collection because of the benefits to mankind. The Nazis irradiated, sterilised and murdered because they thought it was to the benefit of mankind. `Benefit to mankind' is not a sufficient reason to murder. Self defense and punishment are the only two justifications for murder that I can agree with.
But of course, if the embryo is not human that it's not murder to kill it. Read the arguments at Libertarians for Life; they address the many reasons why an embryo is as human as you & I.
A `religious nut' wouldn't argue that fat cells have souls. And an atheist can be quite opposed to abortion. Take a look at Libertarians for Life, which present an atheist argument against abortion (and hence, against aborting human beings to collect their stem cells).
The argument is essentially that there is no dividing line between embryo and human, but rather a continuous progression, just as there is no clear dividing line between infant and man, no point on one side of which we have a baby and on the other side of which we have a productive member of society. Thus abortion is the killing of a human being--one who did not ask to be placed where he is--and thus murder. There is, however, a clear line between gametes and zygote/embryo, and thus contraception is not murder.
The argument against cloning is essentially that it requires the production of massive number of horribly damaged and diseased men for every whole man it makes. That's not an ethical thing to do.
So far as organ cloning--who cares? It's a good idea, and I cannot wait until we can do it.
Who cares if the retail economies were gutted? Wal-Mart is better (more selection, less cost) than those old economies. I went to school in Sherman, Tx., aka Nowheresville. The Wal-Mart was great. Food (even lobster!), home & garden supplies, tools, bicycles: everything.
Rather than keeping Wal-Mart out, small towns should welcome it in. It provides a valuable service. And if it ever got too big for its britches, someone else would come in and undercut it.
No--it's actually slightly different. (something...) == <something>...<something>. The first is easier to write a parser for and much more elegant, to boot.
What more could you want from a data storage standard?
Efficiency. XML is essentially uglified, hard-parse S-expressions. Think how much nicer this:
(html (head (title "A page") (meta "keywords" "stuff")) (body #:bgcolor "#ffffff" (h1 "Title" (p "And here we have some text" (h2 "A Section" (p "And even more text")))))
is than the equivalent. And it gets worse and worse as more data is involved.
Part of the key to preventing this from happening is to set your browser's home page to something that won't distract you from your work (google groups).
Usenet something that won't distract one?!? Man have times changed...
Why in God's name was I modded down as a troll (see parent)? It was an honest post--I use mutt, it's freer than pine and more usable than Outlook. And I gave the reason that I use a CLI client.
You are sick. Those slain men were, most importantly, men: they had fathers and mothers, they had hopes and dreams, they quite possibly had sons and daughters of their own. And now they lie dead in a dark hallway, murdered (there's no other word for shooting unarmed men). It's not funny. It's not right. And whoever gave modded you up should be banned.
Yeah--Utah is a nasty place to live. It's illegal to homebrew, the state's run by Mormons, and AFAICT the entire place is about as dead as the rock which makes up most of the state.
I'd rather have offices in North Carolina or southern Virginia.
Gee, anyone want to take a nice leisurely, eleven and a half day cruise, scrapping along the bottom of the ocean, in a diesel powered tin can?
Yep. Sign me up--it'd be a great vacation. The sort of person this sort of thing is aimed at has the time and leisure to take life easy and enjoy the little things.
Heck, it'd be worth it to be able to avoid storms alone. Add in the ability to observe marine life and it should be a lot of fun.
Try mutt. It's truly free (unlike pine) and it comes loaded to the gills with features. Features which are actually usable, unlike Outhouse.
Fetchmail to retrieve the mail, procmail to filter it and mutt to read it: a beautiful combination. There's no real reason to use GUI mail--I do enough remote access that it's easier to learn the CLI client once and for all time.
Some of the open source mail clients are promising, but there are so many secondary issues. Many refuse to support rich text, citing security or bandwith issues.
I agree with much of what you write, but cannot agree with that above. Rich text does not belong in email. SMTP is not meant for that. There are other, better ways to achieve the end of document exchange (e.g. HTTP). Email should not be used for over-large documents--honestly, a 32K limit should be enforced: if it's larger than 32K then put it on a web page, or an FTP site, or something along those lines.
If one wishes to transfer formatted documents, use LaTeX, PostScript, HTML, PDF, even Word. Attach them. Or--much better--put them on a web page.
Slashdot Mirror
Viruses are possible under Unix, but you'd have to trick root into running them.
But lockpicks are several orders of magnitudes cooler.
The actual language of the GPL talks about the preferred source form. Thus, if you really truly prefer to work in machine code or assembler, such a work would be quite welcome under the GPL. Why you'd do such a thing is your own lookout.
You demonstrate a remarkable lack discernment. Stallman recognises their freedom and is not trying to limit it. He is trying to persuade them to use that freedom in a certain fashion--that is all. You may agree or disagree with what he wants, but you certainly cannot say that he is trying to limit their freedom.
Note also that in his philosophy it is both wrong and harmful to others to release proprietary software. That is, he considers proprietary software to be immoral and would no doubt like to see it made illegal, in exactly the same sense that murder, rape and theft are immoral and illegal.
I don't follow him that far, but there is a certain amount of logical consistency to his arguments.
* Elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule; common citizens needn't be consulted. They may only choose which elite to follow.
Yes, most certainly yes. Most people are far too stupid to be entrusted with running a state. Watch that bit on Leno where he asks folks easy questions. Who lost the American Civil War? Here's a hint: it wasn't the East. Take a look at any of a number of tests and surveys which conclusively demonstrate that the average American, Briton, Frenchman or German is a moron.
# `Good' elites should act on their subjective whims, without evidence, argument or accountability.
Brin slants his statement. But it is true that men should act according to their judgement. I use the instance of the law. The moral man neither obeys nor disobeys the law; it is as nothing to him. He does that which is moral, and does not do that which is immoral. Legality doesn't enter into the equation.
Certainly, if the moral thing he does is illegal, he will be apprehended, tried, convicted and punished. But that does not prevent him from doing it.
# Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you are important enough.
Any amount of sin can be forgiven, period. We know this to be true.
# True leaders are born. It's genetic. The right to rule is inherited.
There's a reason that men have kings and lords. We can breed dogs (for looks, intelligence, speed, whatever)--certainly we can breed men.
* Justified human emotions can turn a good person evil.
Can it be denied? Anger can become hatred, and that can quite easily become evil. It may be necessary to destroy a man, but it is never necessary to hate.
There are two types of people in the world: Star Trek people and Star Wars people. Star Wars people are realistic: there is good, and there is evil (well, actually, there's good and lack-of-good...). Star Trek people are utopian twits who think we can all just get along and denying man's fundamentally fallen nature.
Hey--most of us are heterosexual. Guys don't want to see two guys falling in love; gals don't want to see two gals falling in love. Why waste money on such a thing? I want to see some a guy and a girl fall in love. And so do the vast majority of men and women.
Now, turning it into a romance in the first place is the bit I find dubious. Why bother? Why must every movie have a love interest?
The solution is to label hard drives in accordance with the rest of computer technology. A kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, not 1,000. The kibibyte does not exist!
Intelligent people have no problem with the idea that a kilobyte has 1,024 characters. Hard drive manufacturers always have, but they are hardly paragons worthy of emulation.
Stop out the kibibyte nonsense now, before it gets any further.
Bolo was another great networked game from the Dark Ages, and unlike netrek and xtank, originated on the BBC Micro and migrated to the Macintosh. Still IMHO the single best multiplayer arcade-style game for a personal computer. I have PC using cousins who played it half a decade ago and still talk about it--it was that good!
There are moral arguments to IVF in general, but a) they're off-topic and b) I've no real formed opinion on them.
The parent post had discussed why it is still important to collect totipotent stem cells. The only current source being embryos, it was thus proposing exactly what I argued against.
My post wasn't a troll-it was a serious comment on an important subject. Many folks have been arguing for embryonic stem cell collection because of the benefits to mankind. The Nazis irradiated, sterilised and murdered because they thought it was to the benefit of mankind. `Benefit to mankind' is not a sufficient reason to murder. Self defense and punishment are the only two justifications for murder that I can agree with.
But of course, if the embryo is not human that it's not murder to kill it. Read the arguments at Libertarians for Life; they address the many reasons why an embryo is as human as you & I.
Why the hell was my post modded down? How can it be over-rated when it's not even rated? The moderators need to quit with the crack...
The argument is essentially that there is no dividing line between embryo and human, but rather a continuous progression, just as there is no clear dividing line between infant and man, no point on one side of which we have a baby and on the other side of which we have a productive member of society. Thus abortion is the killing of a human being--one who did not ask to be placed where he is--and thus murder. There is, however, a clear line between gametes and zygote/embryo, and thus contraception is not murder.
The argument against cloning is essentially that it requires the production of massive number of horribly damaged and diseased men for every whole man it makes. That's not an ethical thing to do.
So far as organ cloning--who cares? It's a good idea, and I cannot wait until we can do it.
Why not say what this really means?
It was important to the German government of the early '40s to collect data on radiation by exposing people thereto. Doesn't make it right to do so.
And no, this doesn't Godwin because it's a very apt comparison.
Rather than keeping Wal-Mart out, small towns should welcome it in. It provides a valuable service. And if it ever got too big for its britches, someone else would come in and undercut it.
No--it's actually slightly different. (something ...) == <something>...<something>. The first is easier to write a parser for and much more elegant, to boot.
Efficiency. XML is essentially uglified, hard-parse S-expressions. Think how much nicer this:
(html (head (title "A page") (meta "keywords" "stuff")) (body #:bgcolor "#ffffff" (h1 "Title" (p "And here we have some text" (h2 "A Section" (p "And even more text")))))
is than the equivalent. And it gets worse and worse as more data is involved.
Usenet something that won't distract one?!? Man have times changed...
Moderators on crack again...
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Yeah--Utah is a nasty place to live. It's illegal to homebrew, the state's run by Mormons, and AFAICT the entire place is about as dead as the rock which makes up most of the state.
I'd rather have offices in North Carolina or southern Virginia.
Yep. Sign me up--it'd be a great vacation. The sort of person this sort of thing is aimed at has the time and leisure to take life easy and enjoy the little things.
Heck, it'd be worth it to be able to avoid storms alone. Add in the ability to observe marine life and it should be a lot of fun.
Try mutt. It's truly free (unlike pine) and it comes loaded to the gills with features. Features which are actually usable, unlike Outhouse.
Fetchmail to retrieve the mail, procmail to filter it and mutt to read it: a beautiful combination. There's no real reason to use GUI mail--I do enough remote access that it's easier to learn the CLI client once and for all time.
I agree with much of what you write, but cannot agree with that above. Rich text does not belong in email. SMTP is not meant for that. There are other, better ways to achieve the end of document exchange (e.g. HTTP). Email should not be used for over-large documents--honestly, a 32K limit should be enforced: if it's larger than 32K then put it on a web page, or an FTP site, or something along those lines.
If one wishes to transfer formatted documents, use LaTeX, PostScript, HTML, PDF, even Word. Attach them. Or--much better--put them on a web page.