You're not thinking at all, it was about the Spanish civil war, not WW2.
I'm not sure what movie you were watching, but it was "about" the trauma women (or at least some of them) go through when losing their virginity. The whole Spanish civil war + mythical beings thing was there to make you think it was about something else.
Or did you miss the giant representation of the female reproductive system on the
movie poster?
Although I can understand how the point might be lost on the slashdot crowd.
Honors Courses and "Gifted" idiocy...
on
Failing Our Geniuses
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· Score: 0, Troll
This is more general idiocy about public education, perpetrated by rich conservatives who all think their kids are "gifted" and need to be in "honors" courses. (My experience with honors courses is that it's the same damn course as the non-honors courses. The only difference is that pampered rich kids get a 4.0 if they get straight B's in their honors courses.) Now the conservatives need to show how the public schools that they ensure are underfunded are "failing" the kids that likely voters think they have.
The public schools are forced to pay for all the Special Ed. kids that the private schools won't take. Let's force them now to spend money on the kids that don't need it. Anything to deprive normal kids of an education. An educated populace is a threat to conservative ideology.
If you are gifted you make your own education regardless of what is being provided. I have yet to find a teacher that won't let a truly gifted student move beyond what the class is learning. If you aren't "being challenged" as Sylvan puts it, you probably aren't gifted. You're probably just a rich Special Ed. kid. Even in elite colleges it seems that so-called gifted students think that education is something they are given rather than something that they do for themselves. It's the "A+ entitlement" mentality. There is an assumption that if they do the work they deserve an A. If they do it AND turn it in on time, they think that it should be an A+.
They have used a minimalistic wrapper around the main executable.
That makes no difference unless the wrapper can be removed and the executable extracted without needing to be a subscriber. Otherwise it's the same as linking in my book. And if I'm an author, it's my book that counts.
Regardless of the article the issue has not been resolved, and I hope gpl-violations.org presses the issue.
Not distributing the license text with the binary was only one issue, and a minor one at that. The larger issue is that they are distributing a modified and copy protected DOSBox without providing the modified source code, and the build files required to build the version they distribute. That's a definite violation of the GPL that still needs to be remedied.
The modified DOSBox binary is also linked with proprietary libraries that are required for operation of the program. Those libraries would also need to be released under a GPL compatible license in order for this distribution to comply with the GPL. Last time I checked, DOSBox contained some code from another GPL DOS emulator project to which I have contributed. It's possible that I have legal standing regarding this issue whether other contributors to DOSBox wish to press the point or not.
I think it's unlikely that the issue will be resolved any time soon without major changes to the way DOSBox is distributed via Steam.
"When this merger is complete, this will be one of the biggest galaxies in the universe," said study team member Kenneth Rines of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Ummm, Ken, aren't these galaxies 5 billion light years away? Wouldn't that imply that the merger is already complete?
Each of the four galaxies is at least the size of the Milky Way, and each is home to billions of stars.
The galaxies will eventually merge into a single, colossal galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way
And there is your proof that 4 is nearly equal to 10. Well, I guess that they needed to come up with a bigger number than 5, since M87 in the (relatively) nearby Virgo cluster is 5 times the mass of the Milky Way.
As a recently graduated CS student, I find this type of thinking to be incredibly infuriating at times. Companies only want to hire people with experience. Yet to gain this experience, I need a job. The circular logic goes round and round until you have a brain aneurism.
Don't forget that they are also looking for 10 years of experience with a tech that has only existed for 3 years. They also don't want anyone older than 40, because someone that old wouldn't know about new shit and might want to get paid more than ten cents on the dollar.
Your best bet, and possibly your only bet, is networking. Find a friend who graduated two years ago ask what might be available at their company. Sending in a resume for an advertised position almost never works. Knowing someone on the inside does.
If that doesn't work you can always move to India and work at a call center.
Personally, I sort of doubt that this could have been prevented. It's one of those one-in-a-billion sort of odds that unfortunately caught up with us...
It's more like one-in-a-few-thousand odds. We don't have a billion bridges in this country, and a collapse seems to happen every couple years or so. And like it or not, it is a political calculation regarding how much we are willing to spend to prevent such things. Thus far the answer is that we are willing to spend enough that we don't have a collapse every month, but not so much that we would only have a collapse every 20 years.
... in that respect it's very similar to having to produce "papers" at checkpoints...
No, it is very different. You are not stopped or otherwise interfered with.
Sure. You aren't stopped or interfered with... until, of course, your plate shows up in the vicinity of three liquor stores that were robbed. Or worse, in the neighborhoods where two children were abducted.
Welcome to the police state. You are now a person of interest. If you're lucky, you'll only lose your career and your family.
The new version of the GPL is more complex, and it's troublesome when some of that added complexity is devoted to targeting particular uses of software. I thought this was supposed to be about "freedom", but different rules for different players sure doesn't feel like "freedom" to me. That's why I think the GPLv2 is a better license.
This quote alone shows that you don't understand either GPL version because you don't even understand what "using software" or "uses of software" mean in the context of the GPL.
Users "use software" and the GPL is about the freedom the copyright holders give them. People who distribute software they didn't write are not "users" and what they want is immaterial.
When you read the GPL, you may spend your time thinking "how can I distribute this software in a way that allows me to make money from it while simultaneously preventing others from doing the same."
That is not "using" the software... It's using and abusing the people who developed it in the first place. GPL2 had loopholes that allowed this abuse. GPL3 closes those loopholes. It's not "different rules for different players," it's a change of the letter of the rules to match the intended spirit.
Don't go to KU. Several things influence decisions on what schools to go to, this one would rank very highly on my list of reasons NOT to attend KU.
It's a good idea to avoid Kansas entirely. Most Kansans know that computers are an instrument of the devil anyway. Merely touching one might make you believe in evolution.
Note to the sane person to leave: remember to turn out the lights. They can have the dark ages...
You don't need a network connection to get truly random numbers...
Without a connected read your computer's audio input device with the input gain turned up. High pass filter it to remove low frequency components and the DC offset, if the filtered value is positive put a 1 bit into the output stream, if it is negative put a zero in the output stream. Compress the data stream with a lossless compressor, dropping the header info. Compress again with a second algorithm, dropping the header info.
If that doesn't give you enough bits per second, attach a microphone.
If that still doesn't do it, attach an op amp and greatly amplify the noise across a resistor. Or hook up a radio, tune away from a channel and turn up the volume.
If 20kbps of randomness isn't fast enough, you'll need to sample at higher speed. You can attach a comparator to a bit of a parallel port, or 8 comparators to a bits of a parallel port. You'll need to tune your trigger levels to get the optimum triggering on resistor noise. Then you can sample at whatever rate your parallel port can handle.
If the code isn't yours (i.e. you don't hold copyright), you can't change it to V2 only. The license states that you can't change the terms in such a way that grants less rights than you were given when you received the code. A change to V2 only would restrict the right of people to use an "or later" license.
You could contact the copyright holder(s) and they might give you permission to do so. But you require their permission for this change.
I'm paricularly against the "Tivoization" clause and cannot for the life of me see what benefits it gives to the copyright holder or user of the code. All it seems to do as far as I can see is take away the freedom to use my code in the way I originally granted.
The purpose of the "Tivoization" clause is to allow users of the software to modify it. From your comment, I would guess you will be happy if I take your code and make a modified version that only runs on computers I sell with my customized BIOS and will only run on those if I have signed the binary.
If you are OK with that, assume my company is named "American BIOS Company (ABC)" and that I have run the rest of the PC BIOS makers out of business. How would you feel if only American BIOS signed code will run on a PC with an ABC BIOS? How much are you willing to pay for an ABC signed Linux kernel binary? But don't worry, the source code is free and you can compile it to your heart's content. You just can't run what you compile. Of course the signed kernel binary will only run signed code. How much will you be willing to pay ABC for the service of signing the binaries you compile?
Congratulations, you've just handed full control of the software you distribute to ABC.
Preventing that is exactly what the Tivoization clause is about. It's about preserving rights you granted, not removing them. It prevents someone from using technological measures to remove the rights granted by the license.
What "2 only" products do you plan to distribute? I might want to avoid them...
That's because in spite of band-aids like Yum, the user experience for RPM still sucks.
I've never had yum decide the mkinitrd package was no longer necessary during a kernel upgrade. The second time that happened, I left Ubuntu and feel no compunction to go back to a dpkg based distribution. Yum/rpm gives you dependency errors because it is systematically checking dependencies. With Ubuntu, either the package maintainers get lazy and drop some necessary dependencies, or the tools decide to ignore dependencies on their own. I don't know which, and it's just not worth my effort to find out.
You are right. Ubuntu "just works" out of the box. It also "just works" if you never update your packages. If you do regular updates, at some point it "just stops." I'll take a dependency error from yum over a machine that won't boot any day.
As much as I'm supportive of any program that might, conceivably, provide a partial alternative to our petroleum addiction, I have seen several pieces lately about ethanol vs. biodiesel, which seem to indicate that biodiesel is a much more realistic alternative to gasoline than ethanol is, but that its major shortcoming is that it doesn't reward corn production.
It's not so much ADM alone that's the problem. They probably don't care whether you make ethanol or corn oil out of their corn. I'm sure they'll even sell you patented seeds for other oil producing crops. The major drawback of biodiesel is the lack of a bridge product in the US between current gasoline formulations and biodiesel.
Most cars in the U.S. are capable of running on E20 (20% ethanol, 80% gasoline) and many of them do (especially in the winter months). Many are capable of running on E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline). If we just increased the fraction of ethanol in the fuel formulation, we could get off of gasoline by just changing the requirements of new cars to run off of ethanol.
On the other hand, there's a problem with U.S. diesel that the rest of the world might not understand: U.S. diesel is high sulfur diesel. When it burns it gives off thick black smoke that makes a coal burning locomotive look clean. Because we don't have the infrastructure to make biodiesel in quantity, in order to switch over to biodiesel, first you need to get people to switch to diesel. If that happens we'll all be coughing up black lung-butter. So before that happens you need to mandate low-sulfur diesel. You know... that stuff they use in Europe... Now you've pissed off the oil companies because they'll need to spend some of their record profits refitting their refineries to produce low-sulfur diesel from crappy high sulfur crude. I'm sure congress will do that any day now. And if they do, I'm sure the president will sign the bill.
I looked at biodiesel when I bought my last car. The threat of having to use normal diesel on long trips made up my mind for me.
However I still am intellectually honest enough to admit that it isn't 100% positive proof.
Of course. It's not even possible to be 100% positive that the universe exists. Or that it did 15 minutes ago. Or that it will 25 nanoseconds from now. But the probability that it doesn't or didn't or won't is so small that it can safely be ignored. Much like the probability that gods exist could be safely be ignored. That is, if there weren't people out there willing to kill you because you ignore that unlikely possibility. The damage that is done by these mistaken beliefs exists with nearly 100% probability and therefore it cannot be safely ignored.
Also, I should note that I find your comment ironic, considering your username.
I have never said I believe extraterrestrial intelligence exists. I only believe that it's worth looking. And there, too, I will consider continued absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. And that in and of itself is a result worth pursuing. Assuming that only one answer to a question has scientific value is somewhat unscientific, isn't it? Some might even consider the answer "Yes, we are alone" to be more profound than the converse.
Since we've searched about.00005% if the Galaxy in about 0.002% of the usable EM spectrum (both numbers are overestimates), I'll reserve judgement for the time being.
A theory that includes a creator needs to explain both the existence and formation of the universe AND the existence and formation of a creator prior to the formation of the universe.
So it's an extra layer of "no evidence"...is that completelackofevidence++? If you've hit zero, you've hit zero....there are layers that have to be explained with all the other "scientific" origins speculation that goes on...not just with the idea of god.
The layers are significant as each layer adds unnecessary complexity. I'll as you, the believer, to answer the following questions:
Which is more complex, the universe or God?
If you said the universe is more complex, how can God be capable of controlling and understanding something more complex than he is?
If you said God is more complex, why is it that the universe could not have arisen without being created, but somehow its more complex creator did?
Religion: You ARE incompatible with science. You are incompatible with reality. You've caused far more problems than you've solved. The solace you offer the suffering is more than offset by the suffering of the wars you cause. We don't need you any more and we probably never did. You are the disease. Knowledge is the cure and the thing you fear most. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
Isn't it sufficient enough for these science types to believe in god because it is a "safe bet?"
Athiesm IS the safe bet.
OK, lets suppose you believe in a god. Which pisses your god off more, not believing in any gods, or believing in one of his competitors?
Now place your bet. Which god are you going to believe in? Now, if you're like most people you'll choose the one you were indoctrinated to believe in. In the history of the world, far more people have not believed in your god than have. Even right now more people don't believe in your god than do.
Better do your research. You'd better read up on all the gods that have ever been worshipped to make sure you pick the right one. Assuming you only choose a single one and that there is only one god, rather than a pantheon, your chances are probably about 1 in 10,000 you'll get it right.
You'll waste a good fraction of your life on this fruitless search. That's pretty high stakes in this bet.
You would think that an all powerful god would make the choice obvious. If you think the choice is obvious, feel free to stand on a box in St. Peters Basilica, at the great mosque in Mecca, at the temple of Tirupati, at the Wailing Wall, any of the thousands of temples to the god you didn't pick, and explain to them why they picked the wrong god. If you picked the right one, I'm sure he will protect you. After all, there are no true believers in a foxhole, because what would a true believer need a foxhole for?
Since the choice isn't obvious, more logical assumption is that either there isn't a god, or he doesn't give a damn who you worship or even if you worship.
Very pleased to hear the government come out and and state what by far the majority of the country would assume anyway, nice to have it made official.
You might be surprised.....
Britons unconvinced on evolution:
Just under half of Britons accept the theory of evolution as the best description for the development of life, according to an opinion poll.
Furthermore, more than 40% of those questioned believe that creationism or intelligent design (ID) should be taught in school science lessons.
Im assuming that such an objective, clear-headed individual such as yourself as some empirical evidence of that?
Yes, the same evidence that we all have. The same huge lack of evidence we have for the existence of ghosts, unicorns, pixies, leprochans, fire-breathing dragons, and invisible elephants under our chairs producing intestinal gases. There is insufficient evidence to believe in any of them, much like there is neither evidence of nor a purpose to believing in a creator god. And despite what some people will tell you, total lack of evidence for the existence of something, despite 10,000 years of continual searching, is pretty good evidence that the thing does not exist.
The reason I ask is because (and I speak as one of those unwashed masses I think your post was aimed at), all of the scientific theories Ive heard for the origins of the universe sound just about as implausible as the idea that a god of some sort created everything.
Sorry, there is one huge thing that makes any theory of the formation of the universe that doesn't rely on a creator infinitely more plausible than any theory involving a creator. A theory of the formation of the universe sans creator only needs to explain the existence and formation of the universe. A theory that includes a creator needs to explain both the existence and formation of the universe AND the existence and formation of a creator prior to the formation of the universe.
The height of our achievement was putting a couple of glorified RC cars on Mars and putting a telescope in orbit. And both those missions were a pittance compared to the wasted billions of dollar spent on projects which went nowhere and accomplished nothing.
NASA's vision comes from the top. If you want to fix it, you know where to start.
But this service is specifically intended for fields which are not covered by Arxiv.org.
The reason there are fields not covered by arXiv.org or a similar preprint server is not that there aren't preprint server, it's the heinous copyright restrictions that are typical in some fields. Some journals will require that you certify that the work will not be made available in electronic form or they may require that you sign all distribution rights over to them. Such Journals do exist in astronomy, too. I don't submit articles to them if that precludes uploading to arXiv.org.
Many organizations have their own "$15 an article or $2 per page" preprint servers, and are unwilling to give up the revenue stream from desperate graduate students trying to finish their theses.
So now Nature has a preprint server.... Is this going to convince the "International Insititute for Llama Research" to give up their pay-per-view copyright policy?
Ubuntu: I had a lot of hope for this one. That is till it failed to start up after installing because the kernel was not compatible with my system (via epia). Of course this has been known for 6 months, no solutions were given anywhere and no notices were given during the install itself. I do not have time to recompile a kernel so I said F it.
It could be worse. It could have worked. I decided to try Ubuntu on my new home backup server. Setup was easy enough the first time around. I was able to set up a mirrored root drive an a 5 disk RAID-5 with BackupPC running. Other than minor annoyances (like the init.d scripts lacking options found on other distributions) it was just fine. Until apt-get apparently decided that it needed to uninstall the mkinitrd package in order to do a kernel upgrade. Even that was fine until a power failure forced a reboot. No problem, just a boot to rescue mode to reinstall an initrd image.
Unfortunately the new initrd image doesn't seem to contain the RAID-5 metadevice driver. So reboot to rescue mode and manually mount the initrd image and add the appropriate module. Unfortunately this one comes up to an ash prompt complaining that there aren't any LVM volumes. Search around to find that mdadm thinks that there are two devices called/dev/md2, each with a different UUID. A bit of snooping revealed which one was bogus and which partition was fooling mdadm. A simple wipe of the partition (a hot swap partition that should have belonged to the root device) fixed the problem. Another reboot and we're back to the ash prompt, again complaining about missing LVM volumes.
So I take the Ubuntu install disk and make some sparks in the microwave with it. I grab the Fedora 7 rescue disk and do a network Fedora 7 install (which requires knowing what to enter for the repository URL and directory). It recognizes the RAID groups and LVM volumes immediately. Boots fine and we're back up and running with only a day or so wasted.
The moral of this story is that I wouldn't expect the average computer user to be able to fix a problem with either Ubuntu or Fedora. I wouldn't even expect the average computer user to be capable of doing a network install of Fedora. I wouldn't install either on my wife's computer. Is PC-BSD any better? Maybe I'll take the time to try. But not on a machine I need.
Slashdot Mirror
Or did you miss the giant representation of the female reproductive system on the movie poster?
Although I can understand how the point might be lost on the slashdot crowd.
This is more general idiocy about public education, perpetrated by rich conservatives who all think their kids are "gifted" and need to be in "honors" courses. (My experience with honors courses is that it's the same damn course as the non-honors courses. The only difference is that pampered rich kids get a 4.0 if they get straight B's in their honors courses.) Now the conservatives need to show how the public schools that they ensure are underfunded are "failing" the kids that likely voters think they have.
The public schools are forced to pay for all the Special Ed. kids that the private schools won't take. Let's force them now to spend money on the kids that don't need it. Anything to deprive normal kids of an education. An educated populace is a threat to conservative ideology.
If you are gifted you make your own education regardless of what is being provided. I have yet to find a teacher that won't let a truly gifted student move beyond what the class is learning. If you aren't "being challenged" as Sylvan puts it, you probably aren't gifted. You're probably just a rich Special Ed. kid. Even in elite colleges it seems that so-called gifted students think that education is something they are given rather than something that they do for themselves. It's the "A+ entitlement" mentality. There is an assumption that if they do the work they deserve an A. If they do it AND turn it in on time, they think that it should be an A+.
That makes no difference unless the wrapper can be removed and the executable extracted without needing to be a subscriber. Otherwise it's the same as linking in my book. And if I'm an author, it's my book that counts.
Not distributing the license text with the binary was only one issue, and a minor one at that. The larger issue is that they are distributing a modified and copy protected DOSBox without providing the modified source code, and the build files required to build the version they distribute. That's a definite violation of the GPL that still needs to be remedied.
The modified DOSBox binary is also linked with proprietary libraries that are required for operation of the program. Those libraries would also need to be released under a GPL compatible license in order for this distribution to comply with the GPL. Last time I checked, DOSBox contained some code from another GPL DOS emulator project to which I have contributed. It's possible that I have legal standing regarding this issue whether other contributors to DOSBox wish to press the point or not.
I think it's unlikely that the issue will be resolved any time soon without major changes to the way DOSBox is distributed via Steam.
+5 Insightful
Your best bet, and possibly your only bet, is networking. Find a friend who graduated two years ago ask what might be available at their company. Sending in a resume for an advertised position almost never works. Knowing someone on the inside does.
If that doesn't work you can always move to India and work at a call center.
Sure. You aren't stopped or interfered with... until, of course, your plate shows up in the vicinity of three liquor stores that were robbed. Or worse, in the neighborhoods where two children were abducted.
Welcome to the police state. You are now a person of interest. If you're lucky, you'll only lose your career and your family.
+25 Insightful.
This quote alone shows that you don't understand either GPL version because you don't even understand what "using software" or "uses of software" mean in the context of the GPL.
Users "use software" and the GPL is about the freedom the copyright holders give them. People who distribute software they didn't write are not "users" and what they want is immaterial.
When you read the GPL, you may spend your time thinking "how can I distribute this software in a way that allows me to make money from it while simultaneously preventing others from doing the same."
That is not "using" the software... It's using and abusing the people who developed it in the first place. GPL2 had loopholes that allowed this abuse. GPL3 closes those loopholes. It's not "different rules for different players," it's a change of the letter of the rules to match the intended spirit.
Note to the sane person to leave: remember to turn out the lights. They can have the dark ages...
You could contact the copyright holder(s) and they might give you permission to do so. But you require their permission for this change.
If you are OK with that, assume my company is named "American BIOS Company (ABC)" and that I have run the rest of the PC BIOS makers out of business. How would you feel if only American BIOS signed code will run on a PC with an ABC BIOS? How much are you willing to pay for an ABC signed Linux kernel binary? But don't worry, the source code is free and you can compile it to your heart's content. You just can't run what you compile. Of course the signed kernel binary will only run signed code. How much will you be willing to pay ABC for the service of signing the binaries you compile?
Congratulations, you've just handed full control of the software you distribute to ABC.
Preventing that is exactly what the Tivoization clause is about. It's about preserving rights you granted, not removing them. It prevents someone from using technological measures to remove the rights granted by the license.
What "2 only" products do you plan to distribute? I might want to avoid them...
I've never had yum decide the mkinitrd package was no longer necessary during a kernel upgrade. The second time that happened, I left Ubuntu and feel no compunction to go back to a dpkg based distribution. Yum/rpm gives you dependency errors because it is systematically checking dependencies. With Ubuntu, either the package maintainers get lazy and drop some necessary dependencies, or the tools decide to ignore dependencies on their own. I don't know which, and it's just not worth my effort to find out.
You are right. Ubuntu "just works" out of the box. It also "just works" if you never update your packages. If you do regular updates, at some point it "just stops." I'll take a dependency error from yum over a machine that won't boot any day.
Most cars in the U.S. are capable of running on E20 (20% ethanol, 80% gasoline) and many of them do (especially in the winter months). Many are capable of running on E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline). If we just increased the fraction of ethanol in the fuel formulation, we could get off of gasoline by just changing the requirements of new cars to run off of ethanol.
On the other hand, there's a problem with U.S. diesel that the rest of the world might not understand: U.S. diesel is high sulfur diesel. When it burns it gives off thick black smoke that makes a coal burning locomotive look clean. Because we don't have the infrastructure to make biodiesel in quantity, in order to switch over to biodiesel, first you need to get people to switch to diesel. If that happens we'll all be coughing up black lung-butter. So before that happens you need to mandate low-sulfur diesel. You know... that stuff they use in Europe... Now you've pissed off the oil companies because they'll need to spend some of their record profits refitting their refineries to produce low-sulfur diesel from crappy high sulfur crude. I'm sure congress will do that any day now. And if they do, I'm sure the president will sign the bill.
I looked at biodiesel when I bought my last car. The threat of having to use normal diesel on long trips made up my mind for me.
Of course. It's not even possible to be 100% positive that the universe exists. Or that it did 15 minutes ago. Or that it will 25 nanoseconds from now. But the probability that it doesn't or didn't or won't is so small that it can safely be ignored. Much like the probability that gods exist could be safely be ignored. That is, if there weren't people out there willing to kill you because you ignore that unlikely possibility. The damage that is done by these mistaken beliefs exists with nearly 100% probability and therefore it cannot be safely ignored.
Also, I should note that I find your comment ironic, considering your username.
I have never said I believe extraterrestrial intelligence exists. I only believe that it's worth looking. And there, too, I will consider continued absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. And that in and of itself is a result worth pursuing. Assuming that only one answer to a question has scientific value is somewhat unscientific, isn't it? Some might even consider the answer "Yes, we are alone" to be more profound than the converse.
Since we've searched about .00005% if the Galaxy in about 0.002% of the usable EM spectrum (both numbers are overestimates), I'll reserve judgement for the time being.
Religion: You ARE incompatible with science. You are incompatible with reality. You've caused far more problems than you've solved. The solace you offer the suffering is more than offset by the suffering of the wars you cause. We don't need you any more and we probably never did. You are the disease. Knowledge is the cure and the thing you fear most. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
Athiesm IS the safe bet.
OK, lets suppose you believe in a god. Which pisses your god off more, not believing in any gods, or believing in one of his competitors?
Now place your bet. Which god are you going to believe in? Now, if you're like most people you'll choose the one you were indoctrinated to believe in. In the history of the world, far more people have not believed in your god than have. Even right now more people don't believe in your god than do.
Better do your research. You'd better read up on all the gods that have ever been worshipped to make sure you pick the right one. Assuming you only choose a single one and that there is only one god, rather than a pantheon, your chances are probably about 1 in 10,000 you'll get it right. You'll waste a good fraction of your life on this fruitless search. That's pretty high stakes in this bet.
You would think that an all powerful god would make the choice obvious. If you think the choice is obvious, feel free to stand on a box in St. Peters Basilica, at the great mosque in Mecca, at the temple of Tirupati, at the Wailing Wall, any of the thousands of temples to the god you didn't pick, and explain to them why they picked the wrong god. If you picked the right one, I'm sure he will protect you. After all, there are no true believers in a foxhole, because what would a true believer need a foxhole for?
Since the choice isn't obvious, more logical assumption is that either there isn't a god, or he doesn't give a damn who you worship or even if you worship.
Read Kissing Hank's Ass for an alternative look at Pascal's wager.
You might be surprised.....
Many organizations have their own "$15 an article or $2 per page" preprint servers, and are unwilling to give up the revenue stream from desperate graduate students trying to finish their theses.
So now Nature has a preprint server.... Is this going to convince the "International Insititute for Llama Research" to give up their pay-per-view copyright policy?
It could be worse. It could have worked. I decided to try Ubuntu on my new home backup server. Setup was easy enough the first time around. I was able to set up a mirrored root drive an a 5 disk RAID-5 with BackupPC running. Other than minor annoyances (like the init.d scripts lacking options found on other distributions) it was just fine. Until apt-get apparently decided that it needed to uninstall the mkinitrd package in order to do a kernel upgrade. Even that was fine until a power failure forced a reboot. No problem, just a boot to rescue mode to reinstall an initrd image.
Unfortunately the new initrd image doesn't seem to contain the RAID-5 metadevice driver. So reboot to rescue mode and manually mount the initrd image and add the appropriate module. Unfortunately this one comes up to an ash prompt complaining that there aren't any LVM volumes. Search around to find that mdadm thinks that there are two devices called /dev/md2, each with a different UUID. A bit of snooping revealed which one was bogus and which partition was fooling mdadm. A simple wipe of the partition (a hot swap partition that should have belonged to the root device) fixed the problem. Another reboot and we're back to the ash prompt, again complaining about missing LVM volumes.
So I take the Ubuntu install disk and make some sparks in the microwave with it. I grab the Fedora 7 rescue disk and do a network Fedora 7 install (which requires knowing what to enter for the repository URL and directory). It recognizes the RAID groups and LVM volumes immediately. Boots fine and we're back up and running with only a day or so wasted.
The moral of this story is that I wouldn't expect the average computer user to be able to fix a problem with either Ubuntu or Fedora. I wouldn't even expect the average computer user to be capable of doing a network install of Fedora. I wouldn't install either on my wife's computer. Is PC-BSD any better? Maybe I'll take the time to try. But not on a machine I need.