So if a researcher doesn't worship at the altar of Darwin, he is denied useful funding? Doesn't that come across as hypocritical?
You're joking, right? Did you read it? From the article:
In its decision to deny the grant, the SSHRC panel said Alters had not supplied "adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct."
You just compared a person praying for a loved one to an alcoholic. Nice job, that was the dumbest thing I've ever read on Slashdot.
It seems presumption to think that you know what people are praying for or what their reasons for praying for it are. Furthermore, it seems remarkably selfish to think that the poster's sister would not feel better if she knew her brother's worry over her illness was made better by prayer. Lastly, the word 'sadistic' called and wanted to you to explain how it could be used to apply to someone worrying about a dying loved one.
I had written a pretty wordy response (about halfway through a point-by-point rebuttal) to the article you wrote and linked to in your site's bio regarding your stance towards evolution, but I decided to delete it all make it more succinct.
Your beliefs on evolution are stupid.
You seem smart, so I hope you see the light at some point. I have no illusions that I will be able to convince you otherwise, as I'm sure you have heard this many times before.
God, now I remember why I don't post here any more.
Do you even have a point? Or did you just want to point out the the original post didn't have an air-tight thesis?
This was the best part:
"I think Paul Graham would disagree that this ratio is the same for all languages. His experience and understanding of programming languages is deep (which lends credence to his thoughts, but obviously doesn't mean he is automatically correct). Is your experience and understanding deep enough to really justify your claim? Can you give the approximate ratio for 3 different programming languages?"
Here you go: Java ratio is 80/20, Python 80/20, C++ 80/20, and VB Script is 80/20. How about that? I also assert that my experience justifies my claims. You can't refute it, if you had the answer, you wouldn't have asked the question in the first place.
Did I even read the Graham article? No. He's a bad writer. Does that mean his point is incorrect? Probably, because a smart person would be capable of better writing.
What about being motivated by conviction? Humans often seem to do what they think is right, even thought it burdens them. Suicide bombers for instance. Your 'enlightened' take on human nature is way to simplistic.
If you think that the suicide murderers are right, then you have no moral center.
The South Vietnamese Buddhist monks that protested through self-immolation had conviction and courage.
Suicide bombers that kill out of hate, and believe in a martyr's paradise in heaven? I don't think so.
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/mena/iraq031103. ht m
He's a monster. He has killed thousands for political beliefs and ethnic repression over the years. That is real. That is documented. If you deny it, you're trying to rewrite history for the benefit of a ruthless dicator.
"Any foodstuff containing aspartame has to be labelled "Contains a source of phenylalanine", which it does. This is because sufferers of phenylketonuria are likely to die if they continually ingest it."
Phenylalanine is an essential amino acid.
People who cannot metabolize it are rare, born with the condition, and must adhere to a very strict diet because it's present in just about everything. Phenylketonurics are "likely to die" if they continually ingest meat, nuts, or beans - let along aspartame (and the major danger of consuming aspartame in quantity is in neural development problems in infants and young children).
Aspartame is half Phenylalanine, half aspartic acid (another amino acid). There is nothing insidious about this, these amino acids are present in nearly all food.
This is impossible for enterprises that need privacy (all of them, for the most part).
For some (any that must be HIPAA compliant), it is probably illegal.
Iron Mountain specializes in this field, and have been doing it forever. This may be a nice intellectual pursuit for a undergrad student, but it really has very little practical value. Shared directories on VPNs are pretty much functionally equivalent and easier to manage.
Do you really think that Redhat, (or for that matter Apple or Microsoft) don't have vicious internal flamewars occasionally? They do, and the only time you hear about them is when a developer resigns in a huff. You should *expect* developers to argue. If they don't, they're not doing their work properly.
That would be fine if their flamewars were about technical issues, not license issues.
This is behaviour that only arises through the complex interactions of many components, and it is not deducable from analysing a single component in isolation.
OK, maybe collect these behaviours and look for similarities between components and emergent behaviours. But it cannot be determined analytically beforehand.
I've heard of it, but seen no real research nor read up on it in any more than a casual way. Frankly, even though I respect Wolfram, I don't buy into it as an explanation for all that exists. And based on my math background, it doesn't sound likely that this behavior can't be determined beforehand.
Just because something is almost intractably complex doesn't mean it _cannot_ be determined beforehand.
I agree with him, we knew how the solarsystem (society)worked long before we knew how atoms (individuals) worked.
You cannot use the knowledge of individuals to analyze society, just as you cannot use the knowledge of society to analyze individuals. If you want to know how society works, study society, not individuals.
Ugh. Please intelligently explain to me how a system of components following well understood rules cannot be studied based on the behavior of the components. If you care to mention how cases like the 3-body problem introduce chaos into the behavior of the system and make it impossible to predict based on observation, please tell me why this difficulty makes it not intellectually worthwhile to study an observed cross-discipline phenomenon. Also, what should be done in cases like physics where the extremely accurate but incompatible theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity describe the macro and micro scale?
There is already a perfectly good term for what Java does, and that is "virtual machine". It's pretty far from an operating system, unless you consider a sophisticated script interpreter that manipulates an object model built around calls to the OS's API's an operating system.
I mean, I'm not writing an MP3 player if I create a new skin for WinAmp...
Yeh, keep bashing him boyo's. He's got a hugo award.
A Hugo award? That must mean that Doctorow is a brilliant writer, then, in spite of the fact that every part of my being says he's overwhelmingly mediocre (granted, I can only read 1/2 of '0wnz0red' - i can almost here him patting himself on the back for being so clever with the title - before i can't go any further). I'll let you know when Avril Levigne sweeps the Grammy's. That will probably mean that she's on par with Mozart.
When was the last time you looked at anything from a search returning 20,000 pages without first refining that search? If I get more than 200 pages, I figure I'm making a poor query.
Why is this? If you think that PageRank is a strong system, then you may want to have as many possible relevant results. If you're too specific, you may disqualify quality pages from the search, and these may have appeared near the top of the list after Google applied the ranking.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Linus was at college when he decided to start his operating system. He had the resource of the University of Helsinki.
He based it off of the already free operating system Minix. Which was written by Professor Tannenbaum while he was teaching a class in operating systems at the Free University of Amsterdam. He wrote it using the GNU tools, done by Stallman while he was in the AI group at MIT.
Also, Mosaic came out of the NCSA, closely affiliated with the University of Illinois. The CERN HTTPd also came out of academia (neither of them is licenced under the GPL, though... I don't know how you got that idea.)
I'm not really sure why you're choosing to bash academia with Microsoft, but the web and free software were born from and incubated in universities and research institutions. You couldn't have picked a _worse_ example to bash academic institutions.
Does anyone seriously believe that without the Free Software Foundation's work on the GNU project, we would have Linux in anything even REMOTELY close to the form it exists today?
What stinking ingratitude. It is equally valid to assert that the GNU project would be long forgotten in Linux hadn't provided a working kernel for their reverse-engineered set of unix based tools. Ignoring both sides of the 'would HURD have ever been released, or just eternally delayed?' question, it wasn't released soon enough, and someone else did the job that GNU couldn't get done. They have no one but themselves to blame.
Rather than building their operating system from scratch, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux development team had followed the old Picasso adage, "good artists borrow; great artists steal." Or as Torvalds himself would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people actually do."
You know, I'm pretty sure that Torvalds has devoted more time than most people to the cause of Free Software. Probably for less financial gain than he could have gotten elsewhere. Such pettiness is very unbecoming of anyone in the Free Software community.
Yeah, you picked one piece of my post, and took it out of context. Try again.
You want to apply what RMS says of software to other works of authorship. If you do, I tend to feel you are right, but, if I remember correctly, when RMS has been questioned on this, he has basiocally said that he does not know if other works should be treated the same as woftware but that he knows that software should be. I think he feels software documentation should be treated like software though.
Yes, this is true. He's self-deluded, but not a hypocrite. Frankly, I think it's still hypocritical, or if you want a nicer terms, logically inconsistent and convenient. Having a digital version of the book available for free redistribution doesn't stop him from charging a fee, does it...?
This is a common misconception with the GPL. If i distribute software under the GPL, I do not have to do so for no charge, I can charge what I like os long as the buyer is willing to pay. If he is not willing to meet my price, I can lower the price to one that he finds acceptable, or I can choose not to let him have a copy. What I cannot do is sell him a binary price at an agreeable price and then try and charge a bunch of money when he asks for a copy of the source.
Wrong, although it is commonly cited by Free software supporters as a misunderstanding by the uninitiated. This is what will happen in the real world: you will spend 3 years of your life developing a piece of software, sell it for $100, someone will buy it and either 1.) resell it for $40 with a mere $100 initial investment and drive you out of business. or 2.) decide your software should be free, put the source up on a file sharing service.
So you see, free redistribution does effectively prevent someone from charging a fee for writing software. Note that I am completely for distribution with source. It's the unrestricted redistribution that leads to problems.
First of all, I don't consider reading all of Stallman's essays online equivalent to reading this book. Second of all, I have seen the posts regarding the notice in the book (it can be copied, redistributed with credit to auther, etc). It doesn't change my opinion, though.
My feeling is that if he believes all software should be GPLed, then GNU Press should release the book in a freely redistributable digital form in addition to paper. Software makers do not have the option of distributing their code in book form, which is much more difficult to copy and redistribute than source files. If he's going to harm the ability of others to earn a living (which the free redistribution clauses definitely do, IMO), then he should make as much personal sacrifice as possible (note: this also wouldn't be so much of an issue to me if the book wasn't clearly priced to make a profit. if i want to donate to GNU or FSF, i would donate). I think it is only honorable, considering he is the one calling for sacrifice.
Again, I'm not saying he's violating rules, just that he should follow them even more zealously than is necessary. I think all of the GNU Press books should be available in this way.
He's making a perfectly reasonable statement as to why source code should be included with software binaries. That's fine.
How is that a thoughtful response to the redistribution argument, though? I'm serious (although perhaps something of a devil's advocate now) - why isn't the book available in a freely redistributable electronic format? I know there is no obligation to do so, but it seems like the most principled thing to do. And again, RMS is an evangelist for FS, and should practice what he preaches as best as possible. Instead it's a $25 book. I have to go back to work.
Slashdot Mirror
"Has there been another recent case where a huge public company so blatantly focused on taking down another public company?"
What about when they bought PeopleSoft?
So if a researcher doesn't worship at the altar of Darwin, he is denied useful funding? Doesn't that come across as hypocritical?
You're joking, right? Did you read it? From the article:
In its decision to deny the grant, the SSHRC panel said Alters had not supplied "adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct."
You just compared a person praying for a loved one to an alcoholic. Nice job, that was the dumbest thing I've ever read on Slashdot.
It seems presumption to think that you know what people are praying for or what their reasons for praying for it are. Furthermore, it seems remarkably selfish to think that the poster's sister would not feel better if she knew her brother's worry over her illness was made better by prayer. Lastly, the word 'sadistic' called and wanted to you to explain how it could be used to apply to someone worrying about a dying loved one.
I had written a pretty wordy response (about halfway through a point-by-point rebuttal) to the article you wrote and linked to in your site's bio regarding your stance towards evolution, but I decided to delete it all make it more succinct.
Your beliefs on evolution are stupid.
You seem smart, so I hope you see the light at some point. I have no illusions that I will be able to convince you otherwise, as I'm sure you have heard this many times before.
God, now I remember why I don't post here any more.
Do you even have a point? Or did you just want to point out the the original post didn't have an air-tight thesis?
This was the best part:
"I think Paul Graham would disagree that this ratio is the same for all languages. His experience and understanding of programming languages is deep (which lends credence to his thoughts, but obviously doesn't mean he is automatically correct). Is your experience and understanding deep enough to really justify your claim? Can you give the approximate ratio for 3 different programming languages?"
Here you go: Java ratio is 80/20, Python 80/20, C++ 80/20, and VB Script is 80/20. How about that? I also assert that my experience justifies my claims. You can't refute it, if you had the answer, you wouldn't have asked the question in the first place.
Did I even read the Graham article? No. He's a bad writer. Does that mean his point is incorrect? Probably, because a smart person would be capable of better writing.
Ugh.
The fact that you pledge allegiance to the flag in schools, should scare you shitless
You're an idiot.
3 steps to enlightenment:
1. Take a course at bad school.
2. Have one bad teacher.
3. Use that experience to make generalizations about the entire education system.
Yeah, Saddam Hussein has been killing them for years, but you don't care about that much either, do you?
What about being motivated by conviction? Humans often seem to do what they think is right, even thought it burdens them. Suicide bombers for instance. Your 'enlightened' take on human nature is way to simplistic.
If you think that the suicide murderers are right, then you have no moral center.
The South Vietnamese Buddhist monks that protested through self-immolation had conviction and courage.
Suicide bombers that kill out of hate, and believe in a martyr's paradise in heaven? I don't think so.
I'll ask when *you* will - propaganda spoon fed spewer of rhetoric.
g MD E?OpenDocument
g /2 7f43cfc8a8247df802568f2005a7622
. ht m
OH MY FUCKING GOD, WHEN HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND???
You're unbelievable. I guess I get my propaganda from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International you GODDAMN STUPID FUCK.
It's one thing to hate Bush, it's one thing to protest the war.
It is HORRIBLE to discount the suffering of the Kurds, Shiites, and Iranian soldiers that Iraq has killed. It's disgusting.
Saddam Husseins treatment of Iraq political dissidents is well known and documented.
http://web.amnesty.org/web/ar2001.nsf/regMDE/re
http://www.web.amnesty.org/web/ar2000web.nsf/re
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/mena/iraq031103
He's a monster. He has killed thousands for political beliefs and ethnic repression over the years. That is real. That is documented. If you deny it, you're trying to rewrite history for the benefit of a ruthless dicator.
"Any foodstuff containing aspartame has to be labelled "Contains a source of phenylalanine", which it does. This is because sufferers of phenylketonuria are likely to die if they continually ingest it."
Phenylalanine is an essential amino acid.
People who cannot metabolize it are rare, born with the condition, and must adhere to a very strict diet because it's present in just about everything. Phenylketonurics are "likely to die" if they continually ingest meat, nuts, or beans - let along aspartame (and the major danger of consuming aspartame in quantity is in neural development problems in infants and young children).
Aspartame is half Phenylalanine, half aspartic acid (another amino acid). There is nothing insidious about this, these amino acids are present in nearly all food.
Let me get this straight.
You think that Bush is good, but Madonna is bad, right? okay....
Terrific. Glad to hear the wisdom and circumspection that your 14 years have afforded you.
This is impossible for enterprises that need privacy (all of them, for the most part).
For some (any that must be HIPAA compliant), it is probably illegal.
Iron Mountain specializes in this field, and have been doing it forever. This may be a nice intellectual pursuit for a undergrad student, but it really has very little practical value. Shared directories on VPNs are pretty much functionally equivalent and easier to manage.
Do you really think that Redhat, (or for that matter Apple or Microsoft) don't have vicious internal flamewars occasionally? They do, and the only time you hear about them is when a developer resigns in a huff. You should *expect* developers to argue. If they don't, they're not doing their work properly.
That would be fine if their flamewars were about technical issues, not license issues.
Heard of emergent behaviours?
This is behaviour that only arises through the complex interactions of many components, and it is not deducable from analysing a single component in isolation.
OK, maybe collect these behaviours and look for similarities between components and emergent behaviours. But it cannot be determined analytically beforehand.
I've heard of it, but seen no real research nor read up on it in any more than a casual way. Frankly, even though I respect Wolfram, I don't buy into it as an explanation for all that exists. And based on my math background, it doesn't sound likely that this behavior can't be determined beforehand.
Just because something is almost intractably complex doesn't mean it _cannot_ be determined beforehand.
I agree with him, we knew how the solarsystem (society)worked long before we knew how atoms (individuals) worked.
You cannot use the knowledge of individuals to analyze society, just as you cannot use the knowledge of society to analyze individuals.
If you want to know how society works, study society, not individuals.
Ugh. Please intelligently explain to me how a system of components following well understood rules cannot be studied based on the behavior of the components. If you care to mention how cases like the 3-body problem introduce chaos into the behavior of the system and make it impossible to predict based on observation, please tell me why this difficulty makes it not intellectually worthwhile to study an observed cross-discipline phenomenon. Also, what should be done in cases like physics where the extremely accurate but incompatible theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity describe the macro and micro scale?
There is already a perfectly good term for what Java does, and that is "virtual machine". It's pretty far from an operating system, unless you consider a sophisticated script interpreter that manipulates an object model built around calls to the OS's API's an operating system.
I mean, I'm not writing an MP3 player if I create a new skin for WinAmp...
Yeh, keep bashing him boyo's. He's got a hugo award.
A Hugo award? That must mean that Doctorow is a brilliant writer, then, in spite of the fact that every part of my being says he's overwhelmingly mediocre (granted, I can only read 1/2 of '0wnz0red' - i can almost here him patting himself on the back for being so clever with the title - before i can't go any further). I'll let you know when Avril Levigne sweeps the Grammy's. That will probably mean that she's on par with Mozart.
When was the last time you looked at anything from a search returning 20,000 pages without first refining that search? If I get more than 200 pages, I figure I'm making a poor query.
Why is this? If you think that PageRank is a strong system, then you may want to have as many possible relevant results. If you're too specific, you may disqualify quality pages from the search, and these may have appeared near the top of the list after Google applied the ranking.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Linus was at college when he decided to start his operating system. He had the resource of the University of Helsinki.
He based it off of the already free operating system Minix. Which was written by Professor Tannenbaum while he was teaching a class in operating systems at the Free University of Amsterdam. He wrote it using the GNU tools, done by Stallman while he was in the AI group at MIT.
Also, Mosaic came out of the NCSA, closely affiliated with the University of Illinois. The CERN HTTPd also came out of academia (neither of them is licenced under the GPL, though... I don't know how you got that idea.)
I'm not really sure why you're choosing to bash academia with Microsoft, but the web and free software were born from and incubated in universities and research institutions. You couldn't have picked a _worse_ example to bash academic institutions.
Does anyone seriously believe that without the Free Software Foundation's work on the GNU project, we would have Linux in anything even REMOTELY close to the form it exists today?
What stinking ingratitude. It is equally valid to assert that the GNU project would be long forgotten in Linux hadn't provided a working kernel for their reverse-engineered set of unix based tools. Ignoring both sides of the 'would HURD have ever been released, or just eternally delayed?' question, it wasn't released soon enough, and someone else did the job that GNU couldn't get done. They have no one but themselves to blame.
Rather than building their operating system from scratch, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux development team had followed the old Picasso adage, "good artists borrow; great artists steal." Or as Torvalds himself would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people actually do."
You know, I'm pretty sure that Torvalds has devoted more time than most people to the cause of Free Software. Probably for less financial gain than he could have gotten elsewhere. Such pettiness is very unbecoming of anyone in the Free Software community.
Yeah, you picked one piece of my post, and took it out of context. Try again.
You want to apply what RMS says of software to other works of authorship. If you do, I tend to feel you are right, but, if I remember correctly, when RMS has been questioned on this, he has basiocally said that he does not know if other works should be treated the same as woftware but that he knows that software should be. I think he feels software documentation should be treated like software though.
Yes, this is true. He's self-deluded, but not a hypocrite. Frankly, I think it's still hypocritical, or if you want a nicer terms, logically inconsistent and convenient. Having a digital version of the book available for free redistribution doesn't stop him from charging a fee, does it...?
This is a common misconception with the GPL. If i distribute software under the GPL, I do not have to do so for no charge, I can charge what I like os long as the buyer is willing to pay. If he is not willing to meet my price, I can lower the price to one that he finds acceptable, or I can choose not to let him have a copy. What I cannot do is sell him a binary price at an agreeable price and then try and charge a bunch of money when he asks for a copy of the source.
Wrong, although it is commonly cited by Free software supporters as a misunderstanding by the uninitiated. This is what will happen in the real world: you will spend 3 years of your life developing a piece of software, sell it for $100, someone will buy it and either 1.) resell it for $40 with a mere $100 initial investment and drive you out of business. or 2.) decide your software should be free, put the source up on a file sharing service.
So you see, free redistribution does effectively prevent someone from charging a fee for writing software. Note that I am completely for distribution with source. It's the unrestricted redistribution that leads to problems.
First of all, I don't consider reading all of Stallman's essays online equivalent to reading this book. Second of all, I have seen the posts regarding the notice in the book (it can be copied, redistributed with credit to auther, etc). It doesn't change my opinion, though.
My feeling is that if he believes all software should be GPLed, then GNU Press should release the book in a freely redistributable digital form in addition to paper. Software makers do not have the option of distributing their code in book form, which is much more difficult to copy and redistribute than source files. If he's going to harm the ability of others to earn a living (which the free redistribution clauses definitely do, IMO), then he should make as much personal sacrifice as possible (note: this also wouldn't be so much of an issue to me if the book wasn't clearly priced to make a profit. if i want to donate to GNU or FSF, i would donate). I think it is only honorable, considering he is the one calling for sacrifice.
Again, I'm not saying he's violating rules, just that he should follow them even more zealously than is necessary. I think all of the GNU Press books should be available in this way.
He's making a perfectly reasonable statement as to why source code should be included with software binaries. That's fine.
How is that a thoughtful response to the redistribution argument, though? I'm serious (although perhaps something of a devil's advocate now) - why isn't the book available in a freely redistributable electronic format? I know there is no obligation to do so, but it seems like the most principled thing to do. And again, RMS is an evangelist for FS, and should practice what he preaches as best as possible. Instead it's a $25 book. I have to go back to work.