I don't know enough about steam engines and manufacturing to comment on your first point, but the guy who wrote the book I referenced seemed to think patents helped drive innovation. As to your second point,
I am not sure if the situation back then, and the situation we have now work in the same way.
For one there were a lot fewer patents, so it was a lot easier to do something without running into one. These days there are enough that it's near impossible to figure out if you're infringing or not on something. That on its own creates a chilling effect, because you need a patent lawyer if you want to get into that business.
And even that is not new, as your paper mentions:
Foreshadowing the Sewing Machine War that was right around the corner, Wilson also had the unfortunate distinction of being the first sewing machine patentee threatened with litigation for infringing another sewing machine patent. After Wilson invented a double-pointed shuttle in 1848, A.P. Kline and Edward Lee, the owners of the Bradshaw patent,82 threatened Wilson with a lawsuit for infringing their patent. Lacking the funds to defend himself, Wilson sold his patent rights to this particular invention to Kline and Lee to settle the dispute.
So there you go, even back then moving into an area where there were any patents was dangerous business, and having a patent yourself did you no good if you didn't have money for the lawyers.
assuming you are serious about learning about this issue, and your post wasn't merely written to make yourself feel good, you should check out this paper. It is clear that improvements can be made even though an item is under patent, it happens all the time today. In any case there is a lot of discussion (among those who care about such things) about what happens when an area of invention becomes too encumbered by patents. That paper examines some related historical evidence.
I lack the time right now to read that paper fully, but scanning it a bit I see mentions of: lots and lots of litigation, people being forced to let go their patent due to not having money for lawyers (quoted above), patent trolling, the troll (Howe) making lots of money from the litigation though it wasn't he who solved the final problems (it was Singer), and he wasn't manufacturing anything, a patent pool and a resulting cartel, and I'm probably missing something because I've not read the entire thing.
Overall I don't see absolutely anything good in any of that. It's full of everything that's wrong with the entire patent system, and shows it's been wrong since pretty much from the start. An enormous amount of money goes into litigation, then a patent pool is created resulting in a cartel able to keep competitors out, none of which serves the original goal of encouraging innovation. Instead of being busy competing all those people spent enormous amounts of time and money on arguments, politics and lawyers, and created a system that could effectively stop further competition.
The patent pool isn't a positive outcome of the whole ordeal, it's a perversion and sign that things reached a breaking point. It's more or less a sign of people agreeing "this isn't going anywhere, so let's stop caring about each other's patents", except lots of money had to be spent there, and now they form a large entity that can exclude further competition.
I'll read it in more detail later, but so far I fail to see anything there that convinces me that patents are a good thing.
First, I don't think patents were the issue with getting the steam engine started, as much as the lack of need for it, and the lack of infrastructure. The first engines pumped water out of mines, you don't need such a thing if you don't have a deep mine. Manufacturing a good steam engine was probably beyond Greece's capabilities at the time as well.
The bigger problem in your argument is that patents ensured for a time that improvements to the steam engine (condender and use of high pressure) would not be combined until the patents expired, thus actually retarding progress.
Everybody with half a brain does their weird stuff under an alias, and uses their real name only for things a potential employer won't mind seeing.
The especially careful ones may be posting under impossible to google real names, like "Alice" or "John Smith", adopting ridiculously common nicknames like "Naruto", and having a separate identity for each community that they belong to.
This is something most people figured out many years ago, and not just because of employment. Many children don't want their parents coming across the stuff they do online, and I for instance made sure of it.
1) yes, the data indicates so 2) yes, the data indicates so 3) yes, if we're doing it, we certainly can stop doing it. There's the question of whether we started a runwaway effect or not, but in that case we still could slow things down. And in this case, the speed at which it happens is most important.
Until you can explain the equally obvious global warming on Mars at present as somehow caused by human activity don't ask me to destroy my lifestyle over something I can't actually affect anyway.
Two things:
First, the current consensus seems to be against the idea of global warming on Mars, and on the Sun causing it.
Second, your lifestyle doesn't have a damn thing to do with global warming. It either exist or it doesn't, no matter how convenient or inconvenient would that be for you, me, or anybody else.
RMS knows software, so he talks about software. It's not possible to have everybody work on "the world's largest problems", whatever you think those are, because people have very different competencies. I don't think RMS would make a good social worker for instance.
BTW, if you believe people's subjugation is such an urgent matter, what are you doing arguing with me here? Go do something to fix it already. Exactly the same thing your're criticizing him for is applicable to you, right now.
I didn't say war wouldn't happen, I said it'd happen less.
Religion was the tool they used to get people to do their bidding.
And that's something I consider a problem. Religion is sometimes a good backup reason when no other good justification is available. Some things would be harder to justify if a good reason had to be provided, and the excuse wasn't available.
Also, for the record, when I say "religion" I don't just mean the god of abrahamic religions, but the general set of irrational belifs that can't be questioned. Personality cults are included as well.
And they sell their data to spammers, unfortunately.
I registered some time back with an emusic@domain.com email address (I make a new alias for every website), and regularly get spam mailed to it. And I don't mean emusic advertisements, or even some sort of partner thing. It's viagra and xanax spam.
I only went as far as getting a trial account, and due to this will never go any further.
If they're honestly sorry for what they did and promise not to kill people again, I'm all for second chances. Then again, if they're aware that what they did was wrong and regret it, they might agree that a prison sentence is only fair. In the end, though, they're not my enemy, nor did they wrong me in any way, so it's not really up to me to forgive them. If the family of their victims forgive them, who am I to object?
Who said anything about killing people? I said "burn abortion clinics". Certainly, people can die from things like that, but there are more things to it.
Actions like these are a kind of terrorism. The intent is not just to harm a single person/place, but to intimidate a group of people. Even if the main target forgives the perpetrator, there's plenty harm that remains, and I don't think it's possible to have a large and largely undetermined mass of people forgive something. In the US it's also a federal crime, and no amount of forgiveness from the direct victims will stop the government from going ahead with the process.
IMO, it makes for an interesting question precisely for that reason. You can't just say "I would forgive" and be done. What about the harm to the society?
By the way, secular law is not invalid in any way. There's nothing wrong with following the law. Well, unless that law is wrong, of course. (I'm also a strong believer in civil disobedience.)
Certainly not, but your reply was most curious. First you profess a religious position, then when I ask what would you do seem to forget about what you just said, and answer just like an atheist might. It's like you're religious in theory but not in practice.
It's a flexible book in some areas. Use what works for you. It leaves a lot of room for personal judgment (and the NT is quite clear about that too). In any case, there's no fundamental reason why women should not ever hold important positions in a church, though. Other than "because Paul said so", but considering the core tenets of the bible, that's not a terribly strong argument.
This and the next few paragraphs are interesting. Do you ever worry you might overstep your bounds and go to hell as a result, or the right intention is all that matters? And with such a tolerant doctrine, is belief needed at all, or good deeds would be sufficient?
All the way where exactly? The fact that I can think for myself doesn't automatically imply God has no validity anymore. I'm sure there are people who need God more than I do (ooh, a hint of hubris there), but that doesn't mean I don't need him at all.
Where exactly you'll know better than I. Secular humanism maybe.
But given all this, what do you need a god for, why does it have validity, and what do you find in the bible or any other such source that you can't find somewhere else?
Well, that's the problem with it. Agnosticism is saying "the existence or inexistence of god is unknownable". IMO you don't reach such a conclusion by "who gives a shit?", that's better described as apatheism.
I'm not aware of any in my country, but I'm all for giving them a fair trial and then locking them up for a good long time.
That seems to conflict with the previous idea of loving your enemy and forgiving them. Or is jail a form of forgiveness? Also that's a very secular approach.
Deacon is one literally mentioned. My minister/vicar/preacher (or whatever it's called) claims there were more, though.
That seems to be a contentious issue. As far as I gather, the bible contains arguments both for and against, people pick whatever they like more. Note how the site mentions that women should still be restricted by the limitations mentioned by Paul.
Not for today perhaps, but for those days, everything he wrote was incredibly progressive.
Ok, so why still have it in the current bible?
I'm not sure those limits are really imposed by christianity, but I'm all for removing limits.
How do you decide which limits are okay to remove?
I fully agree there.
So why do you need religion at all? If you'd tell to your own God, "wait a sec, what am I doing this for?" then clearly you're exercising judgement that's not coming from your religion. Your sense of right and wrong therefore doesn't have a divine source to it. Might as well go all the way then.
I'm not offended, but I think agnosticism is more work.
It seems to me that to say you're agnostic you must look at the mountains of arguments from both sides, ponder on it for a while, then decide "I don't think it's possible to tell which side is right".
On the other hand atheism is easy: When god descends from heaven and says hi, then I will believe. Meanwhile I'll stick to the default of not believing in things until it's proven otherwise.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that religion provides reasons for war. At best, it provides excuses. Politics provides reasons. Abolishing religion and keeping politics is not going to reduce the number of wars in any way.
Well, of course since I'm not religious I consider any scripture based justification for war an excuse.
Still, the less excuses that will do, the better, and the whole "promised land" deal created quite a bit of trouble.
Not judging people, not hating them for being different, accepting their shortcomings, etc. Of course this can vary quite a lot by religion, but Christianity's core scriptures are pretty big on loving your enemy, forgiving everything, not taking vengeance, considering all humans of equal value. Radical notions at that time, and in fact, they still are. They go rather against human nature, but I consider them very positive.
Like Gandhi said, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
If that's how it's supposed to be, you've get the hell of a job to do to fix things.
On the other hand, I'm not sure this way of doing things is the best idea. If you love your enemy and forgive everything, how do you fight against those you consider that interpret your religion really wrong? For instance, with a mindset like that you're probably not on the side of those who burn abortion clinics, do you try to do anything about them? And does it work?
In other letters, Paul proposes women for church functions, so it's not as clear-cut as that. It's a popular verse in patriarchical societies, however.
Which functions you mean? Paul wrote quite a few things on women in churches, but I don't remember seeing anything very progressive. Also, see below.
Yet lots of churches do ordain women and accept gay marriages.
Which? The Vatican declared that ordaining women is a crime. For a start, please tell me of which denominations comply with the Bechdel Test for Religion:
(1) at least one woman in a position of authority; (2) who plays a formal, recognized role in shaping doctrine or practice; (3) that is binding on male members of that religion.
Please try to stick to ones of a reasonable size, if there are lots then it shouldn't be difficult.
Also it seems a schizm is going to happen over the ordaining gays issue.
Note though that the position of women was pretty awful in for example ancient Greece, before the arrival of Christianity.
So it got better. Why not make it better still by removing the limits that christianity imposes? There's no reason why improvements can only happen once.
You're confusing blind obedience with trust. Trust is not mutually exclusive with critical thought. The bible contains quite a bit of philosophical works, and at some point commands to "examine all things and keep the good".
Please. God demands blind obedience repeatedly. Also I'm not sure what trust even means in this context. With Job for instance its demonstrated that God is perfectly willing to kill children just to make a point, so I don't think the "never mind that" at the last moment was guaranteed by any measure.
For me at least, a command like "kill somebody" is never valid on its own and must be questioned. I'm not of the sort that would never, ever in any circumstances take a life, but what I'd definitely never do is doing it without an excellent explanation for why it's needed. No amount of trust overrides that.
You're picking and choosing very specific verses that suit your argument. If you want to do honest criticism, you should read the rest too. And keep an eye on the historical context. (Not something a lot of people are good at, I admit.)
Heheh, but so do you, and so does everybody else. According to Wikipedia there are about 38000 christian denominations. So what makes you think you've got a more accurate view of it than I do?
Slight disagreement: the modern translation is "you shall not murder", not "you shall not kill". The bible certainly contains a lot of killing in it, divinely mandated too. The "you shall not kill" taken seriously would turn christians into buddhist monks that make sure not to harm even an ant, and that clearly isn't happening.
I can have more of that without religion than with it.
peace: without a religion, many wars cease to exist, since there's no "promised land" to fight over, no divine commands to wage war that would otherwise not be necessary. There's no holy war, and no infidels to conquer or convert, no crusades to wage. Certainly, war doesn't disappear completely if you remove religion, but the amount of reasons to wage it shrinks considerably.
acceptance: of what you mean more specifically? But generally I'm a very "whatever floats your boat" kind of person. I think that all victimless crimes should be decriminalized. Religion isn't very accepting of many kinds of those, though.
equality: The bible isn't big on this, especially regarding women, who for instance may not speak in church (Corinthians 14:34). Religion is very much coming in conflict with equality. For instance, the opposition to gay marriage and ordaining women.
taking good care of your family: I don't think there's been a single society on this planet that thought differently. Of course the standards for what "taking good care of your family" means exactly vary widely, but everybody seems to agree on that it's a must.
critical thought: right. Critical thought and blind obedience are mutually exclusive. Did Abraham exericse a lot of critical thought in pondering whether to sacrifice his son? Now of course he was stopped at the last moment, but the whole event is a show of the complete lack of any kind of thought. When told to sacrifice he does, and when told to stop he does.
responsibility: more details on this is needed, but about the same deal as the family one if I understood you correctly.
I'd check for things like filesystem corruption, disk problems and other hardware issues or network problems if over the network. Try "dmesg" and see if there's anything unusual in the log when the problem happens. If it's none of that, it may be that the program is indeed running into a kernel bug somewhere. Trying a newer/older kernel to see if it makes any difference could clarify something in such a case. And if it looks like a kernel issue, report it to the kernel developers.
Processes sleep in a way that can't be interrupted in some cases. For instance, when writing to a file. The logic of that that if it was possible, the application would have to retry the interrupted call, and since a write is assumed to be uninterruptible nobody tries to check if it was interrupted.
This ocassionally creates problems, like when something in the disk subsystem goes wonky, and a write call never returns, leaving the process sleeping and unkillable forever.
There was a patch to create a killable state, that allows fatal signals to be processed in such cases, since the process would die immediately anyway. I'm not sure how fully is this integrated, but while I remember unkillable processes in the past, I don't think I had any in the last couple of years.
Well, I've seen him speak, and based on that can tell you two things:
1. He's very strange. As in socially awkward, and this is obvious within less than 5 minutes from when he shows up.
2. He's very true to what he believes in, and as far as I can tell what he professes is very internally consistent.
JA: What about the programmers... Richard Stallman: What about them? The programmers writing non-free software? They are doing something antisocial. They should get some other job.
This for example has a quite consistent explanation. The way I understand it, in his view, the current copyright enforcement infringes on what he considers to be basic human decency. It forbids helping your fellow man.
For instance, it'd be rather odd to claim that your neighbour must buy his own drill if he needs a hole made somewhere, and that there would be something deeply wrong about borrowing it from you. Most people would also think you'd be a bit of a jerk to refuse on the grounds that each tool must be owned and used by one person only, and that it'd be wrong to deprive the company of the profit it would have if everybody who ever needed a drill even for a short time had to buy one. And of course, the idea of the government making it illegal to lend tools without the company's permission would be deeply offensive to most people.
So what if instead of a drill your neighbour has to write a letter and is in need of a word processor?
So for him, basically it goes against basic decency to refuse to help a friend in the name of a corporation's profits.
This way of seeing things may not agree with the way things works currently, but I don't think that there's anything especially crazy about it. So taking this further, if you participate in this system you're yourself doing evil by helping perpetuate something that's antisocial.
When your main figurehead/Most Illustrious Prophet tells the world that people who don't like his particular brand of Kool-aid are sociopaths because they get paid to write closed-source software, you've moved beyond "working to advance" anything and are firmly entrenched in the "raving fucking nutter" zone.
Free Software isn't a religion, and RMS isn't its prophet. I'm a member of the FSF and never spoke to the guy and haven't looked at anything he wrote in the last few years, simply because of a lack of need. He did a fine job of starting things, and at this point everything seems to be working fine on its own.
Which is why the "correct" solution in this case is to chain load GRUB from the Windows bootloader (if you choose GRUB at all).
Point.
It's okay to extend a partition into empty space. It's not okay to use space for storage while it's not part of any partition.
That depends on exactly what empty space you mean, IMO. The most interesting to me seems the space between the MBR and the first partition, which exists due to legacy alignment. I can see 3 possibilities:
A. It's off-bounds to everybody. It can't be used by the bootloader, it can't be used by any programs, and it may not ever be allocated by anything. It's deemed permanently reserved to be kept empty. Doing anything else with it is officially forbidden and invokes nasal demons. B. The thing that has the most rights to claim it is the bootloader. Either it can use it outright, or it can unilaterally change the partition table to officially make a partition from it. Either way, anything else has to tolerate that state of affairs. C. Anything can use it for any purpose, but beware of the consequences.
IMO, your claim comes closest to B. If it's okay for the bootloader to go and create a partition in there without any questions, then whatever else might want to use it has to roll over. But in such a case the boot loader really owns the area already, whether it's explicitly reserved or not.
It's not open source we mock. It's the hardline element of the open source community.
The hardline is entirely the point of it for a lot of people. And to me, it makes sense. The defining characteristic of being a vegetarian is not eating meat. The defining characteristic of open source is not being closed. You don't compromise on your most central reason for being, you work to advance it.
Whatever lens you get with the camera isn't going to be a very good one. Good lenses can easily cost more than the camera itself, so of course that's not what they're going to bundle with it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very interesting article, thanks. I tried to find a citation for my statement, but was in a bit of a hurry.
I am not sure if the situation back then, and the situation we have now work in the same way.
For one there were a lot fewer patents, so it was a lot easier to do something without running into one. These days there are enough that it's near impossible to figure out if you're infringing or not on something. That on its own creates a chilling effect, because you need a patent lawyer if you want to get into that business.
And even that is not new, as your paper mentions:
So there you go, even back then moving into an area where there were any patents was dangerous business, and having a patent yourself did you no good if you didn't have money for the lawyers.
I lack the time right now to read that paper fully, but scanning it a bit I see mentions of: lots and lots of litigation, people being forced to let go their patent due to not having money for lawyers (quoted above), patent trolling, the troll (Howe) making lots of money from the litigation though it wasn't he who solved the final problems (it was Singer), and he wasn't manufacturing anything, a patent pool and a resulting cartel, and I'm probably missing something because I've not read the entire thing.
Overall I don't see absolutely anything good in any of that. It's full of everything that's wrong with the entire patent system, and shows it's been wrong since pretty much from the start. An enormous amount of money goes into litigation, then a patent pool is created resulting in a cartel able to keep competitors out, none of which serves the original goal of encouraging innovation. Instead of being busy competing all those people spent enormous amounts of time and money on arguments, politics and lawyers, and created a system that could effectively stop further competition.
The patent pool isn't a positive outcome of the whole ordeal, it's a perversion and sign that things reached a breaking point. It's more or less a sign of people agreeing "this isn't going anywhere, so let's stop caring about each other's patents", except lots of money had to be spent there, and now they form a large entity that can exclude further competition.
I'll read it in more detail later, but so far I fail to see anything there that convinces me that patents are a good thing.
Disagree with you on the steam engine.
First, I don't think patents were the issue with getting the steam engine started, as much as the lack of need for it, and the lack of infrastructure. The first engines pumped water out of mines, you don't need such a thing if you don't have a deep mine. Manufacturing a good steam engine was probably beyond Greece's capabilities at the time as well.
The bigger problem in your argument is that patents ensured for a time that improvements to the steam engine (condender and use of high pressure) would not be combined until the patents expired, thus actually retarding progress.
Everybody with half a brain does their weird stuff under an alias, and uses their real name only for things a potential employer won't mind seeing.
The especially careful ones may be posting under impossible to google real names, like "Alice" or "John Smith", adopting ridiculously common nicknames like "Naruto", and having a separate identity for each community that they belong to.
This is something most people figured out many years ago, and not just because of employment. Many children don't want their parents coming across the stuff they do online, and I for instance made sure of it.
1) yes, the data indicates so
2) yes, the data indicates so
3) yes, if we're doing it, we certainly can stop doing it. There's the question of whether we started a runwaway effect or not, but in that case we still could slow things down. And in this case, the speed at which it happens is most important.
Two things:
First, the current consensus seems to be against the idea of global warming on Mars, and on the Sun causing it.
Second, your lifestyle doesn't have a damn thing to do with global warming. It either exist or it doesn't, no matter how convenient or inconvenient would that be for you, me, or anybody else.
RMS knows software, so he talks about software. It's not possible to have everybody work on "the world's largest problems", whatever you think those are, because people have very different competencies. I don't think RMS would make a good social worker for instance.
BTW, if you believe people's subjugation is such an urgent matter, what are you doing arguing with me here? Go do something to fix it already. Exactly the same thing your're criticizing him for is applicable to you, right now.
I didn't say war wouldn't happen, I said it'd happen less.
And that's something I consider a problem. Religion is sometimes a good backup reason when no other good justification is available. Some things would be harder to justify if a good reason had to be provided, and the excuse wasn't available.
Also, for the record, when I say "religion" I don't just mean the god of abrahamic religions, but the general set of irrational belifs that can't be questioned. Personality cults are included as well.
And they sell their data to spammers, unfortunately.
I registered some time back with an emusic@domain.com email address (I make a new alias for every website), and regularly get spam mailed to it. And I don't mean emusic advertisements, or even some sort of partner thing. It's viagra and xanax spam.
I only went as far as getting a trial account, and due to this will never go any further.
Who said anything about killing people? I said "burn abortion clinics". Certainly, people can die from things like that, but there are more things to it.
Actions like these are a kind of terrorism. The intent is not just to harm a single person/place, but to intimidate a group of people. Even if the main target forgives the perpetrator, there's plenty harm that remains, and I don't think it's possible to have a large and largely undetermined mass of people forgive something. In the US it's also a federal crime, and no amount of forgiveness from the direct victims will stop the government from going ahead with the process.
IMO, it makes for an interesting question precisely for that reason. You can't just say "I would forgive" and be done. What about the harm to the society?
Certainly not, but your reply was most curious. First you profess a religious position, then when I ask what would you do seem to forget about what you just said, and answer just like an atheist might. It's like you're religious in theory but not in practice.
This and the next few paragraphs are interesting. Do you ever worry you might overstep your bounds and go to hell as a result, or the right intention is all that matters? And with such a tolerant doctrine, is belief needed at all, or good deeds would be sufficient?
Where exactly you'll know better than I. Secular humanism maybe.
But given all this, what do you need a god for, why does it have validity, and what do you find in the bible or any other such source that you can't find somewhere else?
Well, that's the problem with it. Agnosticism is saying "the existence or inexistence of god is unknownable". IMO you don't reach such a conclusion by "who gives a shit?", that's better described as apatheism.
And if it doesn't work?
That seems to conflict with the previous idea of loving your enemy and forgiving them. Or is jail a form of forgiveness? Also that's a very secular approach.
That seems to be a contentious issue. As far as I gather, the bible contains arguments both for and against, people pick whatever they like more. Note how the site mentions that women should still be restricted by the limitations mentioned by Paul.
Ok, so why still have it in the current bible?
How do you decide which limits are okay to remove?
So why do you need religion at all? If you'd tell to your own God, "wait a sec, what am I doing this for?" then clearly you're exercising judgement that's not coming from your religion. Your sense of right and wrong therefore doesn't have a divine source to it. Might as well go all the way then.
I'm not offended, but I think agnosticism is more work.
It seems to me that to say you're agnostic you must look at the mountains of arguments from both sides, ponder on it for a while, then decide "I don't think it's possible to tell which side is right".
On the other hand atheism is easy: When god descends from heaven and says hi, then I will believe. Meanwhile I'll stick to the default of not believing in things until it's proven otherwise.
Well, of course since I'm not religious I consider any scripture based justification for war an excuse.
Still, the less excuses that will do, the better, and the whole "promised land" deal created quite a bit of trouble.
Like Gandhi said, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
If that's how it's supposed to be, you've get the hell of a job to do to fix things.
On the other hand, I'm not sure this way of doing things is the best idea. If you love your enemy and forgive everything, how do you fight against those you consider that interpret your religion really wrong? For instance, with a mindset like that you're probably not on the side of those who burn abortion clinics, do you try to do anything about them? And does it work?
Which functions you mean? Paul wrote quite a few things on women in churches, but I don't remember seeing anything very progressive. Also, see below.
Which? The Vatican declared that ordaining women is a crime. For a start, please tell me of which denominations comply with the Bechdel Test for Religion:
(1) at least one woman in a position of authority;
(2) who plays a formal, recognized role in shaping doctrine or practice;
(3) that is binding on male members of that religion.
Please try to stick to ones of a reasonable size, if there are lots then it shouldn't be difficult.
Also it seems a schizm is going to happen over the ordaining gays issue.
So it got better. Why not make it better still by removing the limits that christianity imposes? There's no reason why improvements can only happen once.
Please. God demands blind obedience repeatedly. Also I'm not sure what trust even means in this context. With Job for instance its demonstrated that God is perfectly willing to kill children just to make a point, so I don't think the "never mind that" at the last moment was guaranteed by any measure.
For me at least, a command like "kill somebody" is never valid on its own and must be questioned. I'm not of the sort that would never, ever in any circumstances take a life, but what I'd definitely never do is doing it without an excellent explanation for why it's needed. No amount of trust overrides that.
Heheh, but so do you, and so does everybody else. According to Wikipedia there are about 38000 christian denominations. So what makes you think you've got a more accurate view of it than I do?
here
Slight disagreement: the modern translation is "you shall not murder", not "you shall not kill". The bible certainly contains a lot of killing in it, divinely mandated too. The "you shall not kill" taken seriously would turn christians into buddhist monks that make sure not to harm even an ant, and that clearly isn't happening.
I can have more of that without religion than with it.
peace: without a religion, many wars cease to exist, since there's no "promised land" to fight over, no divine commands to wage war that would otherwise not be necessary. There's no holy war, and no infidels to conquer or convert, no crusades to wage. Certainly, war doesn't disappear completely if you remove religion, but the amount of reasons to wage it shrinks considerably.
acceptance: of what you mean more specifically? But generally I'm a very "whatever floats your boat" kind of person. I think that all victimless crimes should be decriminalized. Religion isn't very accepting of many kinds of those, though.
equality: The bible isn't big on this, especially regarding women, who for instance may not speak in church (Corinthians 14:34). Religion is very much coming in conflict with equality. For instance, the opposition to gay marriage and ordaining women.
taking good care of your family: I don't think there's been a single society on this planet that thought differently. Of course the standards for what "taking good care of your family" means exactly vary widely, but everybody seems to agree on that it's a must.
critical thought: right. Critical thought and blind obedience are mutually exclusive. Did Abraham exericse a lot of critical thought in pondering whether to sacrifice his son? Now of course he was stopped at the last moment, but the whole event is a show of the complete lack of any kind of thought. When told to sacrifice he does, and when told to stop he does.
responsibility: more details on this is needed, but about the same deal as the family one if I understood you correctly.
It shouldn't be a program's fault.
I'd check for things like filesystem corruption, disk problems and other hardware issues or network problems if over the network. Try "dmesg" and see if there's anything unusual in the log when the problem happens. If it's none of that, it may be that the program is indeed running into a kernel bug somewhere. Trying a newer/older kernel to see if it makes any difference could clarify something in such a case. And if it looks like a kernel issue, report it to the kernel developers.
No, the grandparent means uninterruptible sleep.
Processes sleep in a way that can't be interrupted in some cases. For instance, when writing to a file. The logic of that that if it was possible, the application would have to retry the interrupted call, and since a write is assumed to be uninterruptible nobody tries to check if it was interrupted.
This ocassionally creates problems, like when something in the disk subsystem goes wonky, and a write call never returns, leaving the process sleeping and unkillable forever.
There was a patch to create a killable state, that allows fatal signals to be processed in such cases, since the process would die immediately anyway. I'm not sure how fully is this integrated, but while I remember unkillable processes in the past, I don't think I had any in the last couple of years.
Well, I've seen him speak, and based on that can tell you two things:
1. He's very strange. As in socially awkward, and this is obvious within less than 5 minutes from when he shows up.
2. He's very true to what he believes in, and as far as I can tell what he professes is very internally consistent.
This for example has a quite consistent explanation. The way I understand it, in his view, the current copyright enforcement infringes on what he considers to be basic human decency. It forbids helping your fellow man.
For instance, it'd be rather odd to claim that your neighbour must buy his own drill if he needs a hole made somewhere, and that there would be something deeply wrong about borrowing it from you. Most people would also think you'd be a bit of a jerk to refuse on the grounds that each tool must be owned and used by one person only, and that it'd be wrong to deprive the company of the profit it would have if everybody who ever needed a drill even for a short time had to buy one. And of course, the idea of the government making it illegal to lend tools without the company's permission would be deeply offensive to most people.
So what if instead of a drill your neighbour has to write a letter and is in need of a word processor?
So for him, basically it goes against basic decency to refuse to help a friend in the name of a corporation's profits.
This way of seeing things may not agree with the way things works currently, but I don't think that there's anything especially crazy about it. So taking this further, if you participate in this system you're yourself doing evil by helping perpetuate something that's antisocial.
Please feel free to, I don't mind.
Free Software isn't a religion, and RMS isn't its prophet. I'm a member of the FSF and never spoke to the guy and haven't looked at anything he wrote in the last few years, simply because of a lack of need. He did a fine job of starting things, and at this point everything seems to be working fine on its own.
You do, because you believe the tradeoff is worth it. Things done for the sake of principles are rarely easy.
Fortunately in this area it's possible and quite easy to make a contribution and help fix the problems.
Point.
That depends on exactly what empty space you mean, IMO. The most interesting to me seems the space between the MBR and the first partition, which exists due to legacy alignment. I can see 3 possibilities:
A. It's off-bounds to everybody. It can't be used by the bootloader, it can't be used by any programs, and it may not ever be allocated by anything. It's deemed permanently reserved to be kept empty. Doing anything else with it is officially forbidden and invokes nasal demons.
B. The thing that has the most rights to claim it is the bootloader. Either it can use it outright, or it can unilaterally change the partition table to officially make a partition from it. Either way, anything else has to tolerate that state of affairs.
C. Anything can use it for any purpose, but beware of the consequences.
IMO, your claim comes closest to B. If it's okay for the bootloader to go and create a partition in there without any questions, then whatever else might want to use it has to roll over. But in such a case the boot loader really owns the area already, whether it's explicitly reserved or not.
The hardline is entirely the point of it for a lot of people. And to me, it makes sense. The defining characteristic of being a vegetarian is not eating meat. The defining characteristic of open source is not being closed. You don't compromise on your most central reason for being, you work to advance it.
Whatever lens you get with the camera isn't going to be a very good one. Good lenses can easily cost more than the camera itself, so of course that's not what they're going to bundle with it.
For me it's already tarnished enough that any product made by Apple is outright not worth considering.