Means Someone's going to be pissed when He comes back. "What? Why aren't there any trees left? Did you really think 'dominion' meant 'destruction'? Silly humans. No eternity for you!"
Free wireless access is absolutely un-American and the bill in question is absolutely on the right track. What good is information, after all, if someone isn't profiting from access to it? Might as well let people borrow newly published books for free from a public institution, or get their education for free! What are these liberals thinking?
Actually, when I'm stuck on a Windows box, I use Cygwin quite a lot. I had no idea that you could run KDE on Windows under Cygwin, though. I'm definitely going to check that out. Though right now I don't have any Windows computers to test it out on.
Windows XP still won't let me open up an explorer window to a remote server over an SSH connection, along with another window to a remote FTP server, and let me drag files back and forth to transfer them. KDE is an absolute godsend in this regard. I can't imagine going back. Windows is seriously hampered by the fact that you can't switch desktop environments if you find that the default doesn't work for you; and you certainly don't have the option to turn it off to save valuable resources. I mean, seriously; under Windows XP, the GUI runs all the time and you can never shut it off.
This notion of avoiding death by downloading your brain always makes me think of Woody Allen's line: "Some people want to achieve immortality through art or their children; I want to achieve immortality by not dying."
If you download your brain into a computer before you die, have you really transferred your consciousness into that computer? No, of course you haven't. When I duplicated my laptop's hard drive into my tower computer, did that make my tower into a laptop computer? Of course not.
So when you duplicate your brain into a computer, you don't survive; all you wind up with is a computer that *thinks* it's you. You are still dead. This method is only for those egomaniacs who think that the world couldn't possibly survive without their presence; and the number of people for whom that is true is exactly zero.
Not that there wouldn't be some interesting applications of the technology. But it is not by any stretch of the imagination immortality.
Well, the point is that if M$ buys Red Hat, it wouldn't be the first time that dozens of high paying enterprise customers were left out in the cold when the product they were using suddenly disappears in an overeager expression of capitalism. When Oracle bought PeopleSoft, many corporations were left out in the cold, including several Universities. Sure, Oracle supports PeopleSoft. Kinda.
I remember taking AP computer science back in 1984 and studying Pascal. Anyone else remember Oh! Pascal? I can't remember a thing about the language now, but I remember having a lot of fun playing with it on one of those old Commodore CBM machines. And since the computer I had at home was a TRS-80 CoCo 2 which didn't talk Pascal at all, I contented myself with trying to structure my BASIC programs (back then, BASIC had line numbers) like Pascal programs. Hard to do in a language that doesn't have a concept of modular programming.
Course, back then, Fortran was barely even Threetran, and we had to walk fifteen miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways.
And I'm sure it's been said a dozen times already, and I'm just too lazy to look.
So, which State are these Democrats located in? Or they could be judges, I guess.
(No disrespect to those who really DO live in oppressive regimes throughout the world. I can only imagine what it's like to live in places like that; and contrary to what my fellow liberals and Democrats might think, the US is not one of those places.)
But installing Gentoo from a live CD onto an ancient SunBlade 100 with a Sparc64 architecture was one of the proudest moments of my life! Okay, more like the most painful ten hours of my life, but still.
Back in my day, there was a word for governments which would do things like prevent opposing viewpoints from being heard at inernational conventions, or preventing opposing government officials from having substantial say in government affairs. Seems to me the US spent a lot of time making sure folks like that stayed on their side of the Iron Curtain.
Gosh, what was that word again?
Gotta tell you, between this sort of thing and nutjobs like Frist and DeLay, I've never felt more disenfranchised from my own nation. I used to be proud of America, even under other Republican presidents; the current administration has turned our nation into a joke of democracy.
I drive half an hour to work every day. Not a bad commute, but man I wish I could take public transit (the process of switching from bus to bus and then from bus to light rail means that it would take 2.5 hours to get to work). Google Rides sounds like a spiffy idea (I used it to get to the coffee shop this morning) but would it have killed them to include public transit in their database as well?
Good idea: A global, decentralized communications tool which anyone can have access to and participate in.
Bad idea: Putting it in the hands of the UN. Or any government agency, for that matter.
Don't get me wrong. I'm an old school, dyed-in-the-wool Protestant liberal who is pro-UN and all that. I just don't trust *anyone* to be in control of the Internet (if such a thing is possible, anyway). Special interests in the US are trying hard enough to seize control of the Internet as it is, and some US companies are even contributing to software that censors the Internet in other countries (is there a more blatant violation of American values?). If we let the UN have control over it, more nations will find reasons to censor parts of the Internet and simply tear it apart.
Hm. On the other hand, the UN might just get so bogged down in their own quagmire of argumentation and endless debate that maybe nothing would ever happen anyway.
For a moment, I thought the parents were going to have to take responsibility for their children! Thank God the state is willing to step in. Now maybe we can undo the legacy of those annoying activist judges in the 18th century.
The thing about these fundies is that they're really no different from certain other extremist groups. Though they'd hotly deny it, the only difference between their ideal American state and, say, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is the name of the God that they claim to worship.
I've got a couple of papers (nothing professional, mind you, just short grad school papers on the use of open source technologies in public libraries) and a short story all licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Most of the writing I do, however, I'm not licensing yet. I need to see how the rights that mainstream magazine and anthology publishers want to buy work alongside Creative Commons licenses. Some of us still want to make money off our writing someday (well, we can dream, at least).
This is just more proof that the Internet is the worst thing that could have ever happened to our civilization. No, really. It'll all end in tears and heartbreak.
"Lawful Access", "Clear Skies", "No Child Left Behind", etc. Governments everywhere are getting better and better at Orwellian double-speak, but the main lesson we're learning is that when you get people in power, all they want is to stay in power. Pretty pathetic. It would be nice to see a government that had the best interests of the governed at heart, but that's not going to happen as long as human beings are involved.
(Damn, I overdosed on my cynicism pills this morning!)
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Means Someone's going to be pissed when He comes back. "What? Why aren't there any trees left? Did you really think 'dominion' meant 'destruction'? Silly humans. No eternity for you!"
Free wireless access is absolutely un-American and the bill in question is absolutely on the right track. What good is information, after all, if someone isn't profiting from access to it? Might as well let people borrow newly published books for free from a public institution, or get their education for free! What are these liberals thinking?
Actually, when I'm stuck on a Windows box, I use Cygwin quite a lot. I had no idea that you could run KDE on Windows under Cygwin, though. I'm definitely going to check that out. Though right now I don't have any Windows computers to test it out on.
Sweet. I need to find one of those for when our IT guys make me switch back to a Windows desktop.
D"oh! I'd forgotten all about WinSCP. And I was such a heavy user of it back in my Windows days. And FileZilla's pretty good too.
I still much prefer KDE's interface, though.
Windows XP still won't let me open up an explorer window to a remote server over an SSH connection, along with another window to a remote FTP server, and let me drag files back and forth to transfer them. KDE is an absolute godsend in this regard. I can't imagine going back. Windows is seriously hampered by the fact that you can't switch desktop environments if you find that the default doesn't work for you; and you certainly don't have the option to turn it off to save valuable resources. I mean, seriously; under Windows XP, the GUI runs all the time and you can never shut it off.
My front door has a lock which can be opened only with my key. Therefore, I am hiding something reprehensible inside my house.
Logic, people, logic!
This notion of avoiding death by downloading your brain always makes me think of Woody Allen's line: "Some people want to achieve immortality through art or their children; I want to achieve immortality by not dying."
If you download your brain into a computer before you die, have you really transferred your consciousness into that computer? No, of course you haven't. When I duplicated my laptop's hard drive into my tower computer, did that make my tower into a laptop computer? Of course not.
So when you duplicate your brain into a computer, you don't survive; all you wind up with is a computer that *thinks* it's you. You are still dead. This method is only for those egomaniacs who think that the world couldn't possibly survive without their presence; and the number of people for whom that is true is exactly zero.
Not that there wouldn't be some interesting applications of the technology. But it is not by any stretch of the imagination immortality.
Not just for Godless anti-American hippie communist atheist freaks anymore!
Oh, wait...
Well, the point is that if M$ buys Red Hat, it wouldn't be the first time that dozens of high paying enterprise customers were left out in the cold when the product they were using suddenly disappears in an overeager expression of capitalism. When Oracle bought PeopleSoft, many corporations were left out in the cold, including several Universities. Sure, Oracle supports PeopleSoft. Kinda.
I remember taking AP computer science back in 1984 and studying Pascal. Anyone else remember Oh! Pascal? I can't remember a thing about the language now, but I remember having a lot of fun playing with it on one of those old Commodore CBM machines. And since the computer I had at home was a TRS-80 CoCo 2 which didn't talk Pascal at all, I contented myself with trying to structure my BASIC programs (back then, BASIC had line numbers) like Pascal programs. Hard to do in a language that doesn't have a concept of modular programming.
Course, back then, Fortran was barely even Threetran, and we had to walk fifteen miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways.
How would react businesses currently using Red Hat?
I dunno. Let's ask all of those corporations using PeopleSoft. Oh, wait...
And I'm sure it's been said a dozen times already, and I'm just too lazy to look.
So, which State are these Democrats located in? Or they could be judges, I guess.
(No disrespect to those who really DO live in oppressive regimes throughout the world. I can only imagine what it's like to live in places like that; and contrary to what my fellow liberals and Democrats might think, the US is not one of those places.)
But installing Gentoo from a live CD onto an ancient SunBlade 100 with a Sparc64 architecture was one of the proudest moments of my life! Okay, more like the most painful ten hours of my life, but still.
Back in my day, there was a word for governments which would do things like prevent opposing viewpoints from being heard at inernational conventions, or preventing opposing government officials from having substantial say in government affairs. Seems to me the US spent a lot of time making sure folks like that stayed on their side of the Iron Curtain.
Gosh, what was that word again?
Gotta tell you, between this sort of thing and nutjobs like Frist and DeLay, I've never felt more disenfranchised from my own nation. I used to be proud of America, even under other Republican presidents; the current administration has turned our nation into a joke of democracy.
I did it myself. Admittedly it required that the previous administrator had:
a. Aliased rm to follow symbolic links; and
b. Put a symbolic link to / in his home directory.
It was still amazing that I got to keep my job, though.
I drive half an hour to work every day. Not a bad commute, but man I wish I could take public transit (the process of switching from bus to bus and then from bus to light rail means that it would take 2.5 hours to get to work). Google Rides sounds like a spiffy idea (I used it to get to the coffee shop this morning) but would it have killed them to include public transit in their database as well?
Good idea: A global, decentralized communications tool which anyone can have access to and participate in.
Bad idea: Putting it in the hands of the UN. Or any government agency, for that matter.
Don't get me wrong. I'm an old school, dyed-in-the-wool Protestant liberal who is pro-UN and all that. I just don't trust *anyone* to be in control of the Internet (if such a thing is possible, anyway). Special interests in the US are trying hard enough to seize control of the Internet as it is, and some US companies are even contributing to software that censors the Internet in other countries (is there a more blatant violation of American values?). If we let the UN have control over it, more nations will find reasons to censor parts of the Internet and simply tear it apart.
Hm. On the other hand, the UN might just get so bogged down in their own quagmire of argumentation and endless debate that maybe nothing would ever happen anyway.
I'm sure someone just clicked on the wrong mod category. Or they didn't like my sig line. ;-)
For a moment, I thought the parents were going to have to take responsibility for their children! Thank God the state is willing to step in. Now maybe we can undo the legacy of those annoying activist judges in the 18th century.
The thing about these fundies is that they're really no different from certain other extremist groups. Though they'd hotly deny it, the only difference between their ideal American state and, say, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is the name of the God that they claim to worship.
God wants us to give up our sins. Not our brains.
I've got a couple of papers (nothing professional, mind you, just short grad school papers on the use of open source technologies in public libraries) and a short story all licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Most of the writing I do, however, I'm not licensing yet. I need to see how the rights that mainstream magazine and anthology publishers want to buy work alongside Creative Commons licenses. Some of us still want to make money off our writing someday (well, we can dream, at least).
This is just more proof that the Internet is the worst thing that could have ever happened to our civilization. No, really. It'll all end in tears and heartbreak.
Well, I for one...
Eh. You know the joke.
"Lawful Access", "Clear Skies", "No Child Left Behind", etc. Governments everywhere are getting better and better at Orwellian double-speak, but the main lesson we're learning is that when you get people in power, all they want is to stay in power. Pretty pathetic. It would be nice to see a government that had the best interests of the governed at heart, but that's not going to happen as long as human beings are involved.
(Damn, I overdosed on my cynicism pills this morning!)