I don't know how many times I have to say this to the people who say "We don't need frickin' Exchange, because OSS can do IMAP/LDAP/FTP with Outlook", so I'll say it once more, slowly:
** FREE/BUSY IS NOT SHARED CALENDARING. **
While you're trying to schedule a meeting using free/busy, ask yourself this: "What is the guy who I'm trying to schedule a meeting with doing at the times when his free/busy info says he's busy?" Is he flexible then? Is he on a conference call with a vendor that could be rescheduled at any time? Or is it his daughter's piano recital that cannot, under any circumstances, be rescheduled?"
Free/busy tells you, well, when someone is free or when they are busy. That's it, and nothing more. It is not shared calendaring. Openmail does shared calendaring with Outlook, more or less just like Exchange. You can actually see the other person's calendar (if they let you). You can even do group calendaring using Bulleting Boards! If you refuse to use Exchange, and you want your groupware to run on UNIX, and your clients insist on using Outlook on the desktop, then Openmail (soon-to-be Samsung Contact) is really the only way to go.
Keep an eye on the Samsung information page to stay up-to-date on the progress of the HP-to-Samsung Openmail/Contact transfer.
Belloc
Happy Openmail-on-Linux customer since 2000.
So, once again HP makes something innovative, OpenMail, and promptly bails out of the marketplace.
Whoa there, Chester. Check your facts before spouting. They didn't "promptly" bail out of anything. Openmail is the most popular UNIX-based corporate mail software on the market, and has been for something like 12 years. They have in the tens of millions of seats worldwide.
The reason that it's not more widely known, despite its widespread use is that it falls into a curious niche among mail solutions. Shops with mostly MS-based servers don't run Openmail, because it would require administrators to learn to use their keyboards (Openmail is CLI-administered). But smallish shops with UNIX-familiar admins can easily drop in a Linux box with a Free (speech/beer) mail solution.
Openmail finds its use somewhere in between: in UNIX environments that need highly-scalable solutions where some degree of collaboration is necessary. Openmail includes support for corporate directories, bulletin boards, Outlook MAPI, and some other features where OSS just doesn't cut it. I know, because I worked for three years trying to stay fully open source before I finally had to break down and install Openmail. LDAP just doesn't have functionality we needed (not LDAP's fault, Outlook just doesn't play nicely with it), and we needed some Public Folders functionality within Outlook, which we couldn't get on a large scale with any open source stuff. And there was no way in hell I was going to install Exchange.
The last thing is that, as reported in the./ blurb, Openmail's support will continue for five years. Five years is an eternity in this market. If you're a sysadmin right now, think about what your organization's mail solution was five years ago. If you even had your current job five years ago, which is statistically unlikely (as if there's any other kind of unlikeliness), it is even more unlikely that your current mail setup is the same as it was five years ago.
Lots can happen in five years. They could decide to spin it off, they could decide to open-source it, they could change their minds and keep it, the government could discover some insidious MS plot to get rid of Openmail, etc. Their long-time corporate customers are pissed at this announcement, and might be able to sway them into taking one of the above courses of action. In fact, I'm pretty hopeful about it.
Openmail kicks ass, I love it, if you couldn't tell. I can support any mail user in my organization so easily, it's not even thinkable to move to Exchange, or back to sendmail/exim/qmail/whatever. Outlook clients, IMAP, POP, LDAP, it's fantastic. I know what I'll be using for (at least) the next three-four years, even if they aren't working on version 8.
Belloc
(I don't work for HP, just a satisfied customer)
Imagine: a government doing something to help poor people get access to the internet.
And then Taco turns right around and crushes their national soul, bringing their web servers to their knees by posting this story. Nice going, once again, Slashdot (Motto: What, Your Webservers Can't Handle 100,000 hits/sec?).
Can someone explain where the general address "people" comes from -- as in "think people!"
Let's see, the word `people' itself has several meanings, one of which is the plural of `person'. Now, person means `an individual substance of a rational nature'. For humanists, that definition includes human beings alone. For spiritualists, that includes both humans and angels/demons. For Christians, that means humans, angels/demons, and the persons of the Trinitarian Godhead.
So, by addressing a group as `people', one is calling particular attention to both their individuality and rationality. Now, this rationality can be called to attention in a straightforward, complimentary way, or in a sarcastic, perjorative way. So, if a group is being disorderly and irrational (as in the above example), one might use the term `people' in a sarcastic and ironic way to reflect that they, despite having a rational nature, are in fact behaving irrationally, both as individuals and as a group.
No matter what you believe, get out and vote tomorrow.
Actually, for those who haven't heard, there's been a change in the scheduling. Due to the expected crunch at the polls, voters are being asked to stagger their voting times to allow for the additional capacity. Republicans should vote on Tuesday, November 7, Democrats and Independents on Wednesday, November 8.
To say that he was a sort of shallow thinker (No it doesn't type) doesn't do him justice.
I didn't mean to imply that Hume was shallow, I just don't see that his argument against causality carries the weight of refutation that many philosophers tend to give it. Hume earned his place in modern philosophical history for believable arguments against a long-held doctrine (namely, our topic) that was used as a principle in the demonstration of theism for a very long time. Interestingly enough, this (in a very general way) can be said about most modern philosophers.
Your example justified Hume in a different way. Those who claim universal causation are making an assumption which cannot be proven.
My example doesn't justify Hume, it justifies you. Hume claimed that we cannot know causality at all, my example gives one case in which we can, and therefore refutes Hume. I conceded to you that it doesn't prove universal causality at all. And since I don't know the first thing about quantum mechanics, I conveniently can't begin to dispute with you on those grounds.:)
This thread isn't really off topic. It tends to come up every time evolution is mentioned...
Yeah, it does, though I'm not sure that evolution should be the counterpoint to theism that it is made out to be. I got into this thread because it wandered out of quantum mechanics and into philosophy, a field in which I have a little more grounding.
But now that we're on it, I just wanted to point out that I think that theists use evolution as the badguy for theism, when really it is the proper antithesis to 6000-year-old-earth creationism (which I don't hold) instead. The antithesis of theism is atheism; this is the position I'd rather tackle. That's why I thought our discussions were a bit off topic...
I think that St. Thomas (and those from whom he received his doctrines, Aristotle via the Arabs) presents relevant and demonstrable arguments for the existence of God (not necessarily any particular God, nor even one God for that matter) in his Five Ways. He demonstrates God as primary mover, first efficient cause, uncaused necessary being, most noble being, and final cause, using only the first principles of natural philosophy (as opposed to using revealed principles, to which most anti-evolutionists are forced to resort at one time or another). I think that theism is an unavoidable (natural) philosophical position, if looked at with integrity. I'm not talking about the Bible or the Koran or anything here, I'm talking about using well-founded logic based upon principles induced from common sense experience.
I was pretty sure you were thinking of Hume. Hume's "refutation" of efficient causality boils down to answering the claim that things must have causes by saying "No they don't," and not much more.
Actually, what Hume argues (through his pool-ball contact example) is that you can't know whether efficient causality exists. I.e., just because it looks like something causes something else (e.g., local motion), doesn't mean that it does.
But, like I said, you can't argue with a "No it doesn't" type of philosopher, except to say, "Yes, it does" right back at him.
The best argument I've heard for coming back at Hume as as follows (though this doesn't speak to universal causality): there is one case when we can be absolutely certain that efficient causality exists: when WE OURSELVES are the efficient cause. When my will moves something through the operation of my hand, I know that I have caused its motion, because if I hadn't willed it there and then, it wouldn't have moved, except accidentally to my will.
Again, that doesn't claim that everything is caused, only things that we cause. However, it does at least refute Hume's claim that we cannot know efficient causality at all.
It's easy to be misled by the fact that just because this argument (in the form I quoted it) comes from a medieval Catholic theologian that it must be an argument for the God of the Catholics.
Remember, this isn't an argument for the Christian God, or the Jewish God, or the Islamic God, or Yoda's God, it is simply for the existence of that (attribute of God) which we call "First Efficient Cause". The argument was first presented in this logical form by Aristotle, c. 300 BC.
In fact, this argument doesn't necessarily even prove that there is one God (gasp!). It simply shows that if things exist (which many people believe that they do:) ), then they must have a proximate (aka immediate) cause for their existence. But since that proximate cause exists, it also must have its own proximate cause. Follow this causal chain to the beginning, and you have (ta-da!) the First Efficient Cause. Call it God, Allah, Zeus, The Force, what you will. Since there may be many chains of efficient causality, there may be many Gods (see note below).
So you're right, this is more of a "defining your terms" type argument. (The medievals called it a "demonstratio quia"). It simply answers those skepics that answer "Why are things here?" with "They just popped into existence from Nothing."
-----
N.B. St. Thomas does actually later give an argument that there is only one God, but I just wanted to point out that this wasn't it.
Actually, your annunciation of the argument isn't quite right. I'm not posting this to fight with you about the existence of God, I just want you to know that you don't have the logic down quite right. Since you refuted the logic of the First Efficient Cause argument, I thought it would be appropriate for you to see the *actual* logical formulation of the argument so that you can know that the argument that you refuted isn't the argument that you claim was "demolished ove 200 years ago". Also, I'd like to know who you claim demolished the argument, if you don't mind too much.
Below is one English translation of the argument for the existence of God from the philosophical concept of First Efficient Cause (as opposed to material, formal, or final cause) as annunciated by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologia, Part I, Question 2, Article 3 (c. 1270 AD). St. Thomas gives five philosophical proofs of the existence of God in this Article of the Summa, of which this is only one:
"The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God."
Thank you, Mr. Wong, for writing this. As soon as I saw the Galileo issue appear on/. I knew that there was going to be a stir, so I began to compose my own response. I began to say almost exactly what you said in your post, but I didn't say it quite as well. I figured that there had to be SOMEONE on/. that held a historically accurate view of the Galileo Controversy, so I thought I'd browse some of the posts before sending my own.
Thanks for doing your part to the record straight. Myths and half-truths abound about this difficult and heated issue, and it is important that the facts be presented so that neither Galileo nor the Church is villified unjustly. You have presented a brief but (from what I have read about the issue) historically accurate and balanced view of the matter.
Haters of religion (or just of the Catholic religion) place the blame on the Church and its ignorance; haters of science place the blame on Galileo and his audacity; the right-minded man will weigh the actions of both within the historical context of the events, and he will come to the same conclusion that you have. Thanks again.
"Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language." -- Hilaire Belloc
Do you think that Pepsi is the only company with practices that you don't approve of? If you TRULY lived your life on this principle, and were honest and particular about it in every way, you'd live in a hole, naked. Please don't be a hypocrite.
Glad you asked. "Romans" in Latin: Romani (Vocative Plural:-] ) .
Ok, so it's just a quote from the "Brian" sketch, but I couldn't help the (somewhat loose) opportunity to plug a free software program.
"Words" for Linux is a free Latin dictionary program. It was written in Ada for DOS PCs a long time ago, ported to Linux last year using Gnat. Check http://users.erols.com/whitaker/wordslux.htm for details. (It's fair to plug a FREE program that I'm not associated with, right...?)
Sample output:
=>romanum
roman.um N 2 1 ACC S M P roman.um N 2 1 GEN P M P uncommon romanus, romani Roman; the Romans (pl.)
"If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off."
God, sometimes I think that things are posted on/. just to see the "Oh my god, this is injustice of the worst kind, worse than ethnic cleansing" people scurry out from under their refrigerators when the light goes on. It's refreshing to see the (usually only) one voice of reason that gets posted in response to these "Look out, mind control is coming to get you" stories.
These stories, usually taken out of context, almost always have very specific issues being challenged, as "loader" here has very calmly pointed out. Thank you for doing that.
Please try to find out all of the information about it before replying to a story like this. In this particular situation, you don't need to freak out, your "rights" (whatever that means) are not being threatened, it's just one specialized case in sweden that hasn't even been tried yet.
Big Brother is not on your computer; he's at least a few hops away...
Look, the 19 links thing was an average, given any two pages on the web. You people didn't even read the article, you just saw "19 clicks away" and jumped to conclusions.
The average means this: given any two pages at random, they will be ON AVERAGE 19 links away. That means that sometimes they will be one link away, and sometimes they will be hundreds of links away, but on average, they will be 19 links away.
Not only is it weird, not wierd (that's the second time in two days on that one, Taco), but 'tis leeching, not leaching. Dammit, can someone get Rob a spell checker?
belloc
[If all the Chinese simultaneously jumped into the Pacific off a 10 foot platform erected 10 feet off their coast, it would cause a tidal wave that would destroy everything in this country west of Nebraska.]
Are we just taking this guy's word for it? I work on a LAN that uses CyberPatrol not for censorship, but for limiting the hours which each employee can spend on the internet. It's a productivity thing: my company wouldn't provide each employee with a desktop television set so they can watch TV all day long, so why should they provide 24-7 internet access for them to surf their days away instead of doing their jobs? Internet access is provided for a few hours a day, and for all business-related websites.
Anyway, all defensiveness aside, I asked my administrator to crank up my restrictions policies to maximize web filtering/censorship. After he did this, not only was I able to hit this guy's ISP, but I was able to hit his webpage, and many other users' web pages at his ISP.
Before we start whaling on censorship and on CyberPatrol in particular, why don't we get the facts straight? God, some issues (um, censorship, for one) just set people off into an irrational fit....
This message is brought to you courtesy of the "let's group all slashdot readers into the 'computer nuts who don't know anything about biology' - but I do so nyah nyah nyah" department.
Aristotle would agree that any attempt at calculation of "capacity" of the brain (or the soul, as the Ancients called our faculty for intellection) would be futile.
In his commentary "De Anima" (On The Soul), he identifed the soul as an immaterial form to the body's matter. The intellective soul (or the mind) has the potential to hold within itself the forms of bodies outside itself without the matter. The intellect gathers universals about things by first holding sensual forms in the sensitive faculties, then retaining the sensual forms in imagination after the sensible objects are no longer present.
Since the soul is without matter, its "capacity", in the sense of bits and bytes is a somewhat meaningless concept.
I'd encourage anyone interested to read "De Anima", Books II and III (they're short...) on this matter. It's quite fascinating.
yep - i have two ibm mail servers running linux with just two cords coming out the back...power and network. the ibm bios allows you to set it to keyboardless use, and i just run it w/o monitor and keyboard. however, since they are mail servers (and they ARE running linux) i never need to reboot them - these two have been up for six months or so. so, if for some reason you have need to reboot your headless box frequently, there might be some issues with that.
Slashdot Mirror
To set up your Free/Busy information
I don't know how many times I have to say this to the people who say "We don't need frickin' Exchange, because OSS can do IMAP/LDAP/FTP with Outlook", so I'll say it once more, slowly:
** FREE/BUSY IS NOT SHARED CALENDARING. **
While you're trying to schedule a meeting using free/busy, ask yourself this: "What is the guy who I'm trying to schedule a meeting with doing at the times when his free/busy info says he's busy?" Is he flexible then? Is he on a conference call with a vendor that could be rescheduled at any time? Or is it his daughter's piano recital that cannot, under any circumstances, be rescheduled?"
Free/busy tells you, well, when someone is free or when they are busy. That's it, and nothing more. It is not shared calendaring. Openmail does shared calendaring with Outlook, more or less just like Exchange. You can actually see the other person's calendar (if they let you). You can even do group calendaring using Bulleting Boards! If you refuse to use Exchange, and you want your groupware to run on UNIX, and your clients insist on using Outlook on the desktop, then Openmail (soon-to-be Samsung Contact) is really the only way to go.
Keep an eye on the Samsung information page to stay up-to-date on the progress of the HP-to-Samsung Openmail/Contact transfer.
Belloc
Happy Openmail-on-Linux customer since 2000.
So, once again HP makes something innovative, OpenMail, and promptly bails out of the marketplace.
Whoa there, Chester. Check your facts before spouting. They didn't "promptly" bail out of anything. Openmail is the most popular UNIX-based corporate mail software on the market, and has been for something like 12 years. They have in the tens of millions of seats worldwide.
The reason that it's not more widely known, despite its widespread use is that it falls into a curious niche among mail solutions. Shops with mostly MS-based servers don't run Openmail, because it would require administrators to learn to use their keyboards (Openmail is CLI-administered). But smallish shops with UNIX-familiar admins can easily drop in a Linux box with a Free (speech/beer) mail solution.
Openmail finds its use somewhere in between: in UNIX environments that need highly-scalable solutions where some degree of collaboration is necessary. Openmail includes support for corporate directories, bulletin boards, Outlook MAPI, and some other features where OSS just doesn't cut it. I know, because I worked for three years trying to stay fully open source before I finally had to break down and install Openmail. LDAP just doesn't have functionality we needed (not LDAP's fault, Outlook just doesn't play nicely with it), and we needed some Public Folders functionality within Outlook, which we couldn't get on a large scale with any open source stuff. And there was no way in hell I was going to install Exchange.
The last thing is that, as reported in the ./ blurb, Openmail's support will continue for five years. Five years is an eternity in this market. If you're a sysadmin right now, think about what your organization's mail solution was five years ago. If you even had your current job five years ago, which is statistically unlikely (as if there's any other kind of unlikeliness), it is even more unlikely that your current mail setup is the same as it was five years ago.
Lots can happen in five years. They could decide to spin it off, they could decide to open-source it, they could change their minds and keep it, the government could discover some insidious MS plot to get rid of Openmail, etc. Their long-time corporate customers are pissed at this announcement, and might be able to sway them into taking one of the above courses of action. In fact, I'm pretty hopeful about it.
Openmail kicks ass, I love it, if you couldn't tell. I can support any mail user in my organization so easily, it's not even thinkable to move to Exchange, or back to sendmail/exim/qmail/whatever. Outlook clients, IMAP, POP, LDAP, it's fantastic. I know what I'll be using for (at least) the next three-four years, even if they aren't working on version 8.
Belloc (I don't work for HP, just a satisfied customer)
Imagine: a government doing something to help poor people get access to the internet.
And then Taco turns right around and crushes their national soul, bringing their web servers to their knees by posting this story. Nice going, once again, Slashdot (Motto: What, Your Webservers Can't Handle 100,000 hits/sec?).
Belloc
Let's see, the word `people' itself has several meanings, one of which is the plural of `person'. Now, person means `an individual substance of a rational nature'. For humanists, that definition includes human beings alone. For spiritualists, that includes both humans and angels/demons. For Christians, that means humans, angels/demons, and the persons of the Trinitarian Godhead.
So, by addressing a group as `people', one is calling particular attention to both their individuality and rationality. Now, this rationality can be called to attention in a straightforward, complimentary way, or in a sarcastic, perjorative way. So, if a group is being disorderly and irrational (as in the above example), one might use the term `people' in a sarcastic and ironic way to reflect that they, despite having a rational nature, are in fact behaving irrationally, both as individuals and as a group.
Hilaire Belloc
No matter what you believe, get out and vote tomorrow.
Actually, for those who haven't heard, there's been a change in the scheduling. Due to the expected crunch at the polls, voters are being asked to stagger their voting times to allow for the additional capacity. Republicans should vote on Tuesday, November 7, Democrats and Independents on Wednesday, November 8.
Step 1. Flip on ESPN2.
Step 2. Watch NASCAR race.
Step 3. Notice how moronic announcer pronounces "tire" or "oil".
Step 4. Note to self how words that people using a more common English dialect pronounce with two syllables can in some dialects be pronounced as one.
Step 5. Apply to Haiku in question.
To say that he was a sort of shallow thinker (No it doesn't type) doesn't do him justice.
I didn't mean to imply that Hume was shallow, I just don't see that his argument against causality carries the weight of refutation that many philosophers tend to give it. Hume earned his place in modern philosophical history for believable arguments against a long-held doctrine (namely, our topic) that was used as a principle in the demonstration of theism for a very long time. Interestingly enough, this (in a very general way) can be said about most modern philosophers.
Your example justified Hume in a different way. Those who claim universal causation are making an assumption which cannot be proven.
My example doesn't justify Hume, it justifies you. Hume claimed that we cannot know causality at all, my example gives one case in which we can, and therefore refutes Hume. I conceded to you that it doesn't prove universal causality at all. And since I don't know the first thing about quantum mechanics, I conveniently can't begin to dispute with you on those grounds. :)
This thread isn't really off topic. It tends to come up every time evolution is mentioned...
Yeah, it does, though I'm not sure that evolution should be the counterpoint to theism that it is made out to be. I got into this thread because it wandered out of quantum mechanics and into philosophy, a field in which I have a little more grounding.
But now that we're on it, I just wanted to point out that I think that theists use evolution as the badguy for theism, when really it is the proper antithesis to 6000-year-old-earth creationism (which I don't hold) instead. The antithesis of theism is atheism; this is the position I'd rather tackle. That's why I thought our discussions were a bit off topic...
I think that St. Thomas (and those from whom he received his doctrines, Aristotle via the Arabs) presents relevant and demonstrable arguments for the existence of God (not necessarily any particular God, nor even one God for that matter) in his Five Ways. He demonstrates God as primary mover, first efficient cause, uncaused necessary being, most noble being, and final cause, using only the first principles of natural philosophy (as opposed to using revealed principles, to which most anti-evolutionists are forced to resort at one time or another). I think that theism is an unavoidable (natural) philosophical position, if looked at with integrity. I'm not talking about the Bible or the Koran or anything here, I'm talking about using well-founded logic based upon principles induced from common sense experience.
I was pretty sure you were thinking of Hume. Hume's "refutation" of efficient causality boils down to answering the claim that things must have causes by saying "No they don't," and not much more.
Actually, what Hume argues (through his pool-ball contact example) is that you can't know whether efficient causality exists. I.e., just because it looks like something causes something else (e.g., local motion), doesn't mean that it does.
But, like I said, you can't argue with a "No it doesn't" type of philosopher, except to say, "Yes, it does" right back at him.
The best argument I've heard for coming back at Hume as as follows (though this doesn't speak to universal causality): there is one case when we can be absolutely certain that efficient causality exists: when WE OURSELVES are the efficient cause. When my will moves something through the operation of my hand, I know that I have caused its motion, because if I hadn't willed it there and then, it wouldn't have moved, except accidentally to my will.
Again, that doesn't claim that everything is caused, only things that we cause. However, it does at least refute Hume's claim that we cannot know efficient causality at all.
Anyway, this has strayed off topic far enough...
It's easy to be misled by the fact that just because this argument (in the form I quoted it) comes from a medieval Catholic theologian that it must be an argument for the God of the Catholics.
Remember, this isn't an argument for the Christian God, or the Jewish God, or the Islamic God, or Yoda's God, it is simply for the existence of that (attribute of God) which we call "First Efficient Cause". The argument was first presented in this logical form by Aristotle, c. 300 BC.
In fact, this argument doesn't necessarily even prove that there is one God (gasp!). It simply shows that if things exist (which many people believe that they do
So you're right, this is more of a "defining your terms" type argument. (The medievals called it a "demonstratio quia"). It simply answers those skepics that answer "Why are things here?" with "They just popped into existence from Nothing."
-----
N.B. St. Thomas does actually later give an argument that there is only one God, but I just wanted to point out that this wasn't it.
Actually, your annunciation of the argument isn't quite right. I'm not posting this to fight with you about the existence of God, I just want you to know that you don't have the logic down quite right. Since you refuted the logic of the First Efficient Cause argument, I thought it would be appropriate for you to see the *actual* logical formulation of the argument so that you can know that the argument that you refuted isn't the argument that you claim was "demolished ove 200 years ago". Also, I'd like to know who you claim demolished the argument, if you don't mind too much.
Below is one English translation of the argument for the existence of God from the philosophical concept of First Efficient Cause (as opposed to material, formal, or final cause) as annunciated by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologia, Part I, Question 2, Article 3 (c. 1270 AD). St. Thomas gives five philosophical proofs of the existence of God in this Article of the Summa, of which this is only one:
"The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God."
Thank you, Mr. Wong, for writing this. As soon as I saw the Galileo issue appear on
Thanks for doing your part to the record straight. Myths and half-truths abound about this difficult and heated issue, and it is important that the facts be presented so that neither Galileo nor the Church is villified unjustly. You have presented a brief but (from what I have read about the issue) historically accurate and balanced view of the matter.
Haters of religion (or just of the Catholic religion) place the blame on the Church and its ignorance; haters of science place the blame on Galileo and his audacity; the right-minded man will weigh the actions of both within the historical context of the events, and he will come to the same conclusion that you have. Thanks again.
"Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language."
-- Hilaire Belloc
You have a worse dilemma than this, my friend.
Do you think that Pepsi is the only company with practices that you don't approve of? If you TRULY lived your life on this principle, and were honest and particular about it in every way, you'd live in a hole, naked. Please don't be a hypocrite.
Glad you asked. "Romans" in Latin: Romani (Vocative Plural :-] ) .
Ok, so it's just a quote from the "Brian" sketch, but I couldn't help the (somewhat loose) opportunity to plug a free software program.
"Words" for Linux is a free Latin dictionary program. It was written in Ada for DOS PCs a long time ago, ported to Linux last year using Gnat. Check http://users.erols.com/whitaker/wordslux.htm for details. (It's fair to plug a FREE program that I'm not associated with, right...?)
Sample output:
=>romanum
roman.um N 2 1 ACC S M P
roman.um N 2 1 GEN P M P uncommon
romanus, romani
Roman; the Romans (pl.)
"If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off."
God, sometimes I think that things are posted on /. just to see the "Oh my god, this is injustice of the worst kind, worse than ethnic cleansing" people scurry out from under their refrigerators when the light goes on. It's refreshing to see the (usually only) one voice of reason that gets posted in response to these "Look out, mind control is coming to get you" stories.
These stories, usually taken out of context, almost always have very specific issues being challenged, as "loader" here has very calmly pointed out. Thank you for doing that.
Please try to find out all of the information about it before replying to a story like this. In this particular situation, you don't need to freak out, your "rights" (whatever that means) are not being threatened, it's just one specialized case in sweden that hasn't even been tried yet.
Big Brother is not on your computer; he's at least a few hops away...
Look, the 19 links thing was an average, given any two pages on the web. You people didn't even read the article, you just saw "19 clicks away" and jumped to conclusions.
The average means this: given any two pages at random, they will be ON AVERAGE 19 links away. That means that sometimes they will be one link away, and sometimes they will be hundreds of links away, but on average, they will be 19 links away.
Sheesh.
My favorite fridge option is:
.ra box gets un /.'d ...
4) Food Management
Sounds like an undergrade degree at a state university.
Looks like we'll have to wait a few hours until their
Not only is it weird, not wierd (that's the second time in two days on that one, Taco), but 'tis leeching, not leaching. Dammit, can someone get Rob a spell checker?
belloc
[If all the Chinese simultaneously jumped into the Pacific off a 10 foot
platform erected 10 feet off their coast, it would cause a tidal wave
that would destroy everything in this country west of Nebraska.]
Are we just taking this guy's word for it? I work on a LAN that uses CyberPatrol not for censorship, but for limiting the hours which each employee can spend on the internet. It's a productivity thing: my company wouldn't provide each employee with a desktop television set so they can watch TV all day long, so why should they provide 24-7 internet access for them to surf their days away instead of doing their jobs? Internet access is provided for a few hours a day, and for all business-related websites.
Anyway, all defensiveness aside, I asked my administrator to crank up my restrictions policies to maximize web filtering/censorship. After he did this, not only was I able to hit this guy's ISP, but I was able to hit his webpage, and many other users' web pages at his ISP.
Before we start whaling on censorship and on CyberPatrol in particular, why don't we get the facts straight? God, some issues (um, censorship, for one) just set people off into an irrational fit....
This message is brought to you courtesy of the "let's group all slashdot readers into the 'computer nuts who don't know anything about biology' - but I do so nyah nyah nyah" department.
Belloc
Aristotle would agree that any attempt at calculation of "capacity" of the brain (or the soul, as the Ancients called our faculty for intellection) would be futile.
In his commentary "De Anima" (On The Soul), he identifed the soul as an immaterial form to the body's matter. The intellective soul (or the mind) has the potential to hold within itself the forms of bodies outside itself without the matter. The intellect gathers universals about things by first holding sensual forms in the sensitive faculties, then retaining the sensual forms in imagination after the sensible objects are no longer present.
Since the soul is without matter, its "capacity", in the sense of bits and bytes is a somewhat meaningless concept.
I'd encourage anyone interested to read "De Anima", Books II and III (they're short...) on this matter. It's quite fascinating.
Belloc
Thank you for proving his point. Pierre is the capital of SD.
yep - i have two ibm mail servers running linux with just two cords coming out the back...power and network. the ibm bios allows you to set it to keyboardless use, and i just run it w/o monitor and keyboard. however, since they are mail servers (and they ARE running linux) i never need to reboot them - these two have been up for six months or so. so, if for some reason you have need to reboot your headless box frequently, there might be some issues with that.