First link: the site of "Zionist Organization of America", not the "Christian Zionists".
Second link: defines "Christian Zionism" as a movement, not an organization.
I'll stand by my claim. The original source says that DeLay is "a self-declared member of the Christian Zionists", as though such an organization exists for one to be a member of.
House Majority Leader Tom Delay -- a self-declared member of the Christian Zionists, an End-Time faction numbering 20 million Americans
Full-stop. Considering that:
I'm an American and have never heard of this organization that 1 out of 15 of my countrymen are a member of (yes: "member" implies "formal organization" - you don't hear someone described as a "member of the Cat Lovers" unless that's an actual group), and
Google doesn't find the web site for such a 20-million member group (but every 5-person scrapbooking club has a home page),
I am forced to conclude that your source, "Intervention Magazine", is making stuff up off the top of their head. Having a source's credibility shredding in the second clause of the first sentence is pretty bad even by Slashdot standards.
BS. The climate has not changed that quickly, but your interpretation and memory of it has. Maybe you're remembering a freak snowstorm you experienced as a kid - when you didn't realize that it was out of the norm - and subconsciously expecting every winter to be like that. The weather segment of our local newscast compares the day's weather to the historic record for that particular day, and the record high or low might have been 120 years ago or last year. There's no set pattern that I've ever noticed.
It's natural to remember how awful the winters were when you were a kid, because 4 inches of snow when you're 3 feet tall is pretty impressive. It's not such a big deal when you're older.
In other words, you value OSS but don't value Free Software. That's your decision - you're free to make up your own mind - but you should realize that Free software (as opposed to OSS) really is that important to many of us.
See, personally, I have zero use for OSS, but I use Free software extensively and contribute to it whenever I can. An OSS or proprietary alternative to Free software would have to be much better before I'd be willing to give up my freedoms by using it. This might sound strange to you, but I guarantee you that the number of people like me is growing constantly.
Don't believe me? OK, try this. Do you really think that Linux 1.0 was better than the DEC, HP, or Sun Unixes available at that time? No - it was pretty lame by comparison in pretty much an metric you'd like to use. Developers flocked to it in droves anyway, though, because it was Free and they could shape it as they saw fit. By the same token, many of us have been using Mozilla for years, even though a gratis version of Opera was available.
Frankly, I have the discretionary income to shell out some $$$ for a good browser. I don't, not because I can't, but because "cheap" or "gratis" has little value to me in this context.
they good people at Opera still have to put food on their own tables and roofs above their heads so I and others will continue to appreciate the hard work they put into what many people regard as the best browser (with in-built mail client, RSS reader, etc) available by putting our money where our mouths are.
Meanwhile, the good people at the Mozilla project live in happy-magic land where they don't have to eat or live somewhere. Oh, wait - they still have to do that stuff, but have managed to make a browser that many people regard as the best ever written and give it away to whoever wants a copy.
I have no problem with Opera selling a browser or people buying it. I do have a problem with your lame "but they have to eat!" justification for charging for a product that the competition is giving away. Just come out and say that they're selling and you're buying and you're both happy, but don't pretend that they're the underdog slaving away under conditions noone else is subject to.
Someone needs to call MS on this -- software, after all, does not wear out.
BS.
Software wears out when the inputs presented to it no longer conform to the assumptions made when it was being written. For example, a JPEG codec written in 1993 might not have been designed with the expectation that people would be using it to compress 10"x14"x1200dpi scanned images, but may work perfectly well with the kinds of files floating around in the mid '90s. That's not necessarily a flaw, particularly if replacing the smaller, bounded algorithms with infinitely-scalable routines would have cost a lot of money with little return, and made the end product run like crap on the processors available at the time.
Furthermore, you can't always blame ancient security vulnerabilities on bad code by the standards present when it was written. New exploits and vectors pop up all the time, and it's hard to fault someone for opening a hole in their code written ten years ago that wasn't even dreamed up until last week. I absolutely guarantee you that ten years from now, we'll be looking at the stuff we consider to be relatively secure today with disgust that we could have been so naive.
I am hardly a Microsoft apologist, but it's not necessarily reasonable to evaluate their ancient code against current best practices. Do you really want to hold RedHat 4 accountable to those standards?
What a coincidence! I've been hosting a file server on a quad-homed NT box with DS3 connectivity for over five years now, and as long as we limit the number of incoming connections so that NT doesn't fall over, it merrily churns out gigs of porn, warez, and spam 24/7/365.
"Conservative economically" has little to do with "conservative socially", and I was referring to the former. Their payroll could be packed with a rainbow of ethnicities and beliefs, but the general public would still see them as the computer guys in business suits who never do anything unless they know it'll work. Whether that perception is accurate is another discussion, but that's their reputation.
Well, right, but that's still a strong piece of counterevidence to the hypothesis.
My father-in-law is a retired furnace repairman who doesn't believe me when I tell him that warm air can hold more moisture than cold air. He doesn't care what kind of "fancy learnin'" they taught me in college - he's worked on furnaces, so he's an expert in gas behavior. To him, the world is very cut-and-dried. If he knows that IBM gave stuff away in expectation of getting stuff back, then that means that writing Free software is always a good thing to him.
Side note: I have a full-time, well-paying respectable job but he still finds a way to bitch about my hobby. In this one area of life, I'm perfectly happy to tell him that I share programs (in both directions) with IBM and leave it at that.
That's my whole point. IBM is doing it because they hope to make money off of it, which is a pretty huge endorsement for F/OSS. If Ben & Jerry "gave away" a few patents, everyone would talk about how they're such generous souls for helping their fellow man at their own expense. When IBM does something like this, though, you know it means that they've run the numbers and decided that this is good for their bottom line.
I don't want to hear another word from Bill Gates and his ilk about how only Communists want to share with their neighbors. This is the best news I've heard for those of us trying to explain the issues to our relatives and employers:
Father-in-law: You can't just give away your work! That doesn't make any sense!
Me: Maybe not to you, but IBM likes the idea so much that they're even letting us use their patents for free.
FIL: IBM? Really? Huh - they're not exactly a pack of hippies, are they?
One of the most conservative companies in the USA has publically and loudly proclaimed that sharing IP with your friends, neighbors, and even competitors is a good thing for profits (as long as you do it on level terms). Every time I hear some proprietary advocate spouting about how you can't make money by giving things away, I'm going to respond with "IBM says you're wrong" until they shut up or go away.
What a great way to make a state that already has a backwoods reputation seem even more backwoods.
You mean like THE FREAKIN' COVERED WAGONS on our new license plates? I mean, our old plates are hideous (I thought the deep-orange ball was an orange the first time I saw them, and not the setting sun) but at least THEY DON'T HAVE COVERED WAGONS ON THEM.
Ain't no way I'm ever driving my own car to an out-of-state tech conference. I'll proudly show up with my Hertz econobox before I let any new friends laugh at my tags.
All things considered, though, I'd trade a state full of tattooed for last week's snowblowing in the -13F (-25C) temperature (plus windchill - in a state with a steady 20 mile per hour wind you can never forget windchill). I'd tattoo flames on my butt if I thought it'd make me slightly warmer.
That's not quite true. The signatory nations of the Antarctic Treaty have agreed that noonee owns the continent or portions of it. A few of the countries actually do have staked claims, but they don't actually defend them or reasonably expect anyone else to. See http://tea.rice.edu/deaton/12.2.2004.html for more info.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't have said it quite like that, but yeah, I agree with you. Honestly, I just don't give a rat's butt about low-level optimization anymore.
I work mostly in Python now. Rather than deciding on whether to use a shift instead of multiplying by a power of 2 (and weighing the odds of the multiplication factor changing to a non-power-of-2 a few months down the road and having to re-code that bit of the program), I can concentrate on making my programs algorithmically sound. I try to use idiomatic Python whenever possible so that I can let the interpreter do the hard work instead of my high-level code, but that's my main concession to optimization - other than compiling Python with -march=athlon-thunderbird in the first place.
Know what? I wouldn't change it for the world. It's far cheaper for my boss to buy a faster CPU than to pay me to hand-tune my code, and we've reached a level of compiler development that I doubt I could do a better job anyway. I still value efficient code, but I'd rather get it by analyzing the problem at hand and designing a reasonable solution than by picking away at every last wasted cycle.
That's for Windows systems. Since these aren't useful for running Windows long-term (hence the whole reason for this article's existence), they'll probably be reformatted as Unix servers, the plural of which is boxen.
Not quite. The RIAA would say: "The public is evil, that's 34.5 million MP3s, so each of these drives costs us 223.47 million dollars". Then, reporters would lurch on about the dastardly teenagers and their "fear-to-fear" networks (that spread spam, viruses, and Linux to your own computer, right under your very nose!).
Your original quotes were far too logical - and mathematically accurate - to ever originate from the RIAA.
Even worse, AT&T could claim that the drive could store 897 copies of an old telephone manual and sue Neal Stephenson for $13.5 billions dollars (the total cost of all equipment and labor ever used to produce the equipment that one of them was written on, times 897) in losses. The EFF would have to save the day by pointing out that AT&T sold the exact same manual for a buck fifty on eBay last month.
Although I'm sure you can find plenty of definitions of "WMD" that include "capable of mass destruction", I can also find plenty that don't. For example, the California Penal Code defines a few relevant terms:
11417. (a) For the purposes of this article, the following terms
have the following meanings:
(1) "Weapon of mass destruction" includes chemical warfare agents,
weaponized biological or biologic warfare agents, restricted
biological agents, nuclear agents, radiological agents, or the
intentional release of industrial agents as a weapon, or an aircraft,
vessel, or vehicle, as described in Section 34500 of the Vehicle
Code, which is used as a destructive weapon.
(2) "Chemical Warfare Agents" includes, but is not limited to, the
following weaponized agents, or any analog of these agents:
(A) Nerve agents, including Tabun (GA), Sarin (GB), Soman (GD),
GF, and VX.
Now, I won't pretend to refer to the California Penal Code as the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes a WMD, but it does seem to exemplify a somewhat widely used definition of the term.
Honestly, I really don't want to come across as a member of the lunatic fringe who expects the President to announce the finding of a large cache of nukes and biologicals any moment now!, so please don't take it that way. However, for someone to state that "no WMDs were found in Iraq" they have to have chosen their definitions of "no" and "WMDs". I mainly wanted to point out that by a strict interpretation of "no", and a common definition of "WMDs", that statement is false.
Side rant: I was particularly cheesed by that pre-election report that "proved" that Republicans are unintelligent because a large percentage of them believed that there were WMDs. Frankly, I think I could have made a fact-based defense of either position, but one of the answers would have placed me in the pollster's "uninformed mouth-breather" category while the other would not. It seemed like a flashback to those IQ tests that ask whether the next number in the series "3 5 7" is "9" or "11"; one is the next odd number and one is the next prime number, but only one of the answers gives you credit for rational analysis.
Dioxins are also largely man-made, and they are widely believed to cause cancer. "If dioxins are man-made, we would have found a cure for the cancer they cause by now" is not a logical truth.
From a different angle, it's generally much easier to create entropy than order. I think that the poster is a nutcase, but I wouldn't necessarily use your idea as proof.
Go back and track the story. The shells were over 20 years old and the chemicals mainly degraded. And guess who the supplier of them to Iraq was...
Those may or may not be true, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether WMDs were found in Iraq.
Framed another way, the original poster basically said that no WMDs were found in Iraq. That statement is provably not true, to the best of my knowledge.
Do you have a citation for that? I googled for "sarin artillery shell" and found no such answer in the first three pages of results. I'm not disputing your statement, but I haven't seen that for myself.
One thing: we did find at least one artillery shell with traces of Sarin gas, so there were, strictly speaking, WMDs found in Iraq.
Did we find many? No. Are we 100% certain that Iraq actually made the shell? Not that I know of (although I haven't tracked the story in months). Was it more than a miniscule amount? No. Does (found-wmds-p "Iraq") evaluate to t? Yes.
Although I cut my Unix teeth with it, I don't use Bash anymore. Give my new favorite, Zsh, a try before giving up on Unix shells.
You may love it or hate it; that's perfectly OK either way. To me it feels like someone took Bash, threw away all the crufty parts I didn't realize were crufty, and added a lot of new features I didn't realize that I needed. Give it a shot. At the worst, you'll lose half an hour of experimentation and go back to Bash. Alternatively, you might a new tool that changes the way you interact with your computer - I did.
I am completely ignorant of such things, but wouldn't that mean that GCC basically gets a free pass on such methods? I mean, if the patent explicitly states that GCC has been doing this for years, then don't they have a pretty strong legal basis for being allowed to continue to do so?
What I write to a newspaper, or in a blog, in my own time, is none of my boss's damned business. Period.
So if you write:
"How to steal office supplies"
"My boss is teh suck"
"I think my company is ripping people off"
"Here's what I'd like to do to that girl in Accounting"
"We charge Customer A 75% more than Customer B"
at home, then you boss should take no interest whatsoever and you shouldn't be expect to be held responsible for it? That's... amazing. Have you ever actually had a job, or is the position that you plan to take when you first get one?
Slashdot Mirror
Second link: defines "Christian Zionism" as a movement, not an organization.
I'll stand by my claim. The original source says that DeLay is "a self-declared member of the Christian Zionists", as though such an organization exists for one to be a member of.
Full-stop. Considering that:
- I'm an American and have never heard of this organization that 1 out of 15 of my countrymen are a member of (yes: "member" implies "formal organization" - you don't hear someone described as a "member of the Cat Lovers" unless that's an actual group), and
- Google doesn't find the web site for such a 20-million member group (but every 5-person scrapbooking club has a home page),
I am forced to conclude that your source, "Intervention Magazine", is making stuff up off the top of their head. Having a source's credibility shredding in the second clause of the first sentence is pretty bad even by Slashdot standards.It's natural to remember how awful the winters were when you were a kid, because 4 inches of snow when you're 3 feet tall is pretty impressive. It's not such a big deal when you're older.
See, personally, I have zero use for OSS, but I use Free software extensively and contribute to it whenever I can. An OSS or proprietary alternative to Free software would have to be much better before I'd be willing to give up my freedoms by using it. This might sound strange to you, but I guarantee you that the number of people like me is growing constantly.
Don't believe me? OK, try this. Do you really think that Linux 1.0 was better than the DEC, HP, or Sun Unixes available at that time? No - it was pretty lame by comparison in pretty much an metric you'd like to use. Developers flocked to it in droves anyway, though, because it was Free and they could shape it as they saw fit. By the same token, many of us have been using Mozilla for years, even though a gratis version of Opera was available.
Frankly, I have the discretionary income to shell out some $$$ for a good browser. I don't, not because I can't, but because "cheap" or "gratis" has little value to me in this context.
Meanwhile, the good people at the Mozilla project live in happy-magic land where they don't have to eat or live somewhere. Oh, wait - they still have to do that stuff, but have managed to make a browser that many people regard as the best ever written and give it away to whoever wants a copy.
I have no problem with Opera selling a browser or people buying it. I do have a problem with your lame "but they have to eat!" justification for charging for a product that the competition is giving away. Just come out and say that they're selling and you're buying and you're both happy, but don't pretend that they're the underdog slaving away under conditions noone else is subject to.
BS.
Software wears out when the inputs presented to it no longer conform to the assumptions made when it was being written. For example, a JPEG codec written in 1993 might not have been designed with the expectation that people would be using it to compress 10"x14"x1200dpi scanned images, but may work perfectly well with the kinds of files floating around in the mid '90s. That's not necessarily a flaw, particularly if replacing the smaller, bounded algorithms with infinitely-scalable routines would have cost a lot of money with little return, and made the end product run like crap on the processors available at the time.
Furthermore, you can't always blame ancient security vulnerabilities on bad code by the standards present when it was written. New exploits and vectors pop up all the time, and it's hard to fault someone for opening a hole in their code written ten years ago that wasn't even dreamed up until last week. I absolutely guarantee you that ten years from now, we'll be looking at the stuff we consider to be relatively secure today with disgust that we could have been so naive.
I am hardly a Microsoft apologist, but it's not necessarily reasonable to evaluate their ancient code against current best practices. Do you really want to hold RedHat 4 accountable to those standards?
Thanks unfirewalled-NT 4.0!
"Conservative economically" has little to do with "conservative socially", and I was referring to the former. Their payroll could be packed with a rainbow of ethnicities and beliefs, but the general public would still see them as the computer guys in business suits who never do anything unless they know it'll work. Whether that perception is accurate is another discussion, but that's their reputation.
My father-in-law is a retired furnace repairman who doesn't believe me when I tell him that warm air can hold more moisture than cold air. He doesn't care what kind of "fancy learnin'" they taught me in college - he's worked on furnaces, so he's an expert in gas behavior. To him, the world is very cut-and-dried. If he knows that IBM gave stuff away in expectation of getting stuff back, then that means that writing Free software is always a good thing to him.
Side note: I have a full-time, well-paying respectable job but he still finds a way to bitch about my hobby. In this one area of life, I'm perfectly happy to tell him that I share programs (in both directions) with IBM and leave it at that.
That's my whole point. IBM is doing it because they hope to make money off of it, which is a pretty huge endorsement for F/OSS. If Ben & Jerry "gave away" a few patents, everyone would talk about how they're such generous souls for helping their fellow man at their own expense. When IBM does something like this, though, you know it means that they've run the numbers and decided that this is good for their bottom line.
Father-in-law: You can't just give away your work! That doesn't make any sense!
Me: Maybe not to you, but IBM likes the idea so much that they're even letting us use their patents for free.
FIL: IBM? Really? Huh - they're not exactly a pack of hippies, are they?
One of the most conservative companies in the USA has publically and loudly proclaimed that sharing IP with your friends, neighbors, and even competitors is a good thing for profits (as long as you do it on level terms). Every time I hear some proprietary advocate spouting about how you can't make money by giving things away, I'm going to respond with "IBM says you're wrong" until they shut up or go away.
You mean like THE FREAKIN' COVERED WAGONS on our new license plates? I mean, our old plates are hideous (I thought the deep-orange ball was an orange the first time I saw them, and not the setting sun) but at least THEY DON'T HAVE COVERED WAGONS ON THEM.
Ain't no way I'm ever driving my own car to an out-of-state tech conference. I'll proudly show up with my Hertz econobox before I let any new friends laugh at my tags.
All things considered, though, I'd trade a state full of tattooed for last week's snowblowing in the -13F (-25C) temperature (plus windchill - in a state with a steady 20 mile per hour wind you can never forget windchill). I'd tattoo flames on my butt if I thought it'd make me slightly warmer.
That's not quite true. The signatory nations of the Antarctic Treaty have agreed that noonee owns the continent or portions of it. A few of the countries actually do have staked claims, but they don't actually defend them or reasonably expect anyone else to. See http://tea.rice.edu/deaton/12.2.2004.html for more info.
I work mostly in Python now. Rather than deciding on whether to use a shift instead of multiplying by a power of 2 (and weighing the odds of the multiplication factor changing to a non-power-of-2 a few months down the road and having to re-code that bit of the program), I can concentrate on making my programs algorithmically sound. I try to use idiomatic Python whenever possible so that I can let the interpreter do the hard work instead of my high-level code, but that's my main concession to optimization - other than compiling Python with -march=athlon-thunderbird in the first place.
Know what? I wouldn't change it for the world. It's far cheaper for my boss to buy a faster CPU than to pay me to hand-tune my code, and we've reached a level of compiler development that I doubt I could do a better job anyway. I still value efficient code, but I'd rather get it by analyzing the problem at hand and designing a reasonable solution than by picking away at every last wasted cycle.
That's for Windows systems. Since these aren't useful for running Windows long-term (hence the whole reason for this article's existence), they'll probably be reformatted as Unix servers, the plural of which is boxen.
Your original quotes were far too logical - and mathematically accurate - to ever originate from the RIAA.
Even worse, AT&T could claim that the drive could store 897 copies of an old telephone manual and sue Neal Stephenson for $13.5 billions dollars (the total cost of all equipment and labor ever used to produce the equipment that one of them was written on, times 897) in losses. The EFF would have to save the day by pointing out that AT&T sold the exact same manual for a buck fifty on eBay last month.
How many times are you going to submit the same post? How many times will the mods mark it up all the way?
Honestly, I really don't want to come across as a member of the lunatic fringe who expects the President to announce the finding of a large cache of nukes and biologicals any moment now!, so please don't take it that way. However, for someone to state that "no WMDs were found in Iraq" they have to have chosen their definitions of "no" and "WMDs". I mainly wanted to point out that by a strict interpretation of "no", and a common definition of "WMDs", that statement is false.
Side rant: I was particularly cheesed by that pre-election report that "proved" that Republicans are unintelligent because a large percentage of them believed that there were WMDs. Frankly, I think I could have made a fact-based defense of either position, but one of the answers would have placed me in the pollster's "uninformed mouth-breather" category while the other would not. It seemed like a flashback to those IQ tests that ask whether the next number in the series "3 5 7" is "9" or "11"; one is the next odd number and one is the next prime number, but only one of the answers gives you credit for rational analysis.
From a different angle, it's generally much easier to create entropy than order. I think that the poster is a nutcase, but I wouldn't necessarily use your idea as proof.
Those may or may not be true, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether WMDs were found in Iraq.
Framed another way, the original poster basically said that no WMDs were found in Iraq. That statement is provably not true, to the best of my knowledge.
Do you have a citation for that? I googled for "sarin artillery shell" and found no such answer in the first three pages of results. I'm not disputing your statement, but I haven't seen that for myself.
Did we find many? No. Are we 100% certain that Iraq actually made the shell? Not that I know of (although I haven't tracked the story in months). Was it more than a miniscule amount? No. Does (found-wmds-p "Iraq") evaluate to t? Yes.
You may love it or hate it; that's perfectly OK either way. To me it feels like someone took Bash, threw away all the crufty parts I didn't realize were crufty, and added a lot of new features I didn't realize that I needed. Give it a shot. At the worst, you'll lose half an hour of experimentation and go back to Bash. Alternatively, you might a new tool that changes the way you interact with your computer - I did.
For a quick start, you can try my .zshrc file.
I am completely ignorant of such things, but wouldn't that mean that GCC basically gets a free pass on such methods? I mean, if the patent explicitly states that GCC has been doing this for years, then don't they have a pretty strong legal basis for being allowed to continue to do so?
So if you write:
- "How to steal office supplies"
- "My boss is teh suck"
- "I think my company is ripping people off"
- "Here's what I'd like to do to that girl in Accounting"
- "We charge Customer A 75% more than Customer B"
at home, then you boss should take no interest whatsoever and you shouldn't be expect to be held responsible for it? That's... amazing. Have you ever actually had a job, or is the position that you plan to take when you first get one?