I'm not knocking Burgett in the least. It's an extremely useful project for all the reasons you and others have said.
I was just amazed by the OP's comment (and someone else agreeing with him) that saving one of our closest relatives from extinction is such a ridiculous activity as to deserve a faux-cynical expression of surprise that it was deemed less important than putting some old Pentiums back into service.
How do you figure protecting half the world's mountain gorillas, at constant risk of being killed himself, isn't "useful"? With all due respect to Ubuntu, that strikes me as at least as important as supervising a bunch of Linux installs.
Ummm, maybe it would have made sense to hold off on this story until it's found to be true, instead of telling us that "sources report" something that's not in the linked article? Far be it from me to doubt Alexander Graham Cracker's "sources", but just on principle...
Maybe drilling hole into people's heads is about as useful as calling a witch doctor to perform magical healing rituals.
That's the distinction I made between Hippocrates and the Cro-Magnons: Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus and the Muslims who learned from them were doing real brain surgery, not just cutting holes in the skull to let demons out.
Hippocrates was "successfully performing neurosurgery" a thousand years before that. And Cro-Magnons long before that, although they probably only "succeeded" in the sense of some patients surviving.
In general, the scientific sophistication of ancient peoples in deeply underrated.
Anyway, who says making and supporting a Linux client isn't hard? Just because it's easy to demand it (as if the people making the demand actually wrote the kernel themselves) doesn't mean it's "a tiny little something" when some Slackware user wants his problems fixed.
C'mon -- he's got a Wikipedia page a mile long, with a single instance where he even *claims* someone semi-important listened to him? ("Helped" how, exactly?) I do appreciate your pointing me to that, but I still say the guy is a nonentity outside of the hatred of gamers.
Actually it's you guys who have been tricked, but thanks for your concern.
Here's Google News on Thompson. I got three pages in, finding a single non-negative reference to him. If someone has the energy to dig deeper, please let me know where all the "interviews" and "lawmakers" come in.
Sorry, kids, but if you want to Do Something Really Important, it's going to have to be more ambitious than ridiculing this irritating but unfortunate guy.
In fact, that's exactly correct. The guy is mentally ill, is not in any way a policymaker and the only reason why he keeps getting attention here and from the gam3r media is that they think it's amusing to kick around a mentally incompetent person.
Focusing on implications is even worse! How many stories do you see here claiming that a cure for cancer, zettabyte hard drives or time travel is right around the corner?
The scientists themselves know what the results are. But they have wildly exaggerated ideas about the practical implications (the principle of "anything I don't know how to do must be easy") and the stories are filtered through university PR offices who love to exaggerate even more.
At a minimum, I don't see why sending this information is so "alarming", even if it's inappropriate. Are your $_SERVER env variables such a sensitive bit of information?
It refers to both. Out of curiosity, why can't you RTFA? If you're getting it blocked at work and are wondering why MSNBC is suddenly objectionable, I suspect it's because the second and third sentence each contain a word that's setting off your filters. (Or maybe you work at CNN or Fox?)
I thought I remember seeing pocket proectors being useful in containing ball point pen explosions in one's shirt pocket.
Exactly. Fountain pens and early ballpoint pens used to leak; thus pocket protectors. No one uses them anymore because modern pens are wildly unlikely to leak in your pocket.
I'm not sure why you think Gates has ever been motivated primarily by money. Dropping out of Harvard to sell software to a market of maybe 75 people isn't something you do to make money. Gates loves software, as much if not more than any rabid Lunix fanboy does.
Incidentally, how many of you people have ever seen a "pocket protector" or even know why they used to be used? Can't this ludicrously anachronistic trope be dropped at some point?
One academic went through a sex change, submitted the same papers under both identities, and found that papers were accepted from a man but were rejected when they came from a woman...
That's certainly more commitment to testing a hypothesis than I've ever displayed!
Look up the Whaling Commission on Wikipedia as an example.
I'm not sure what your point is. The IWC isn't a UN body, and has accomplished an end I support through vote-buying and member-packing that I'd hate to see applied to the Internet.
The problem of sharing a forum with all the nations like the UN, is that until world peace is achieved, necessarily you will find nations there that are not friendly to each other.
The reason I mentioned Taiwan and not Israel (besides the fact that bringing up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict never does anything but stir up a mindless flamefest) is that the country that makes pretty much everything inside your computer and much of what connects it to my computer does *not* share a "forum with all the nations". It's excluded from the ITU and would be similarly excluded from any UN-run Internet bodies and structures.
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What country are you in? I've never heard that usage before and a web search didn't turn up anything.
I think Taco and Hemos would up getting a lot richer than Ryan did, though.
CnD was a top-hit on AltaVista for "WindowMaker" and "Enlightenment".
Ironically, Enlightenment probably is less functional today than it was then.
I was just amazed by the OP's comment (and someone else agreeing with him) that saving one of our closest relatives from extinction is such a ridiculous activity as to deserve a faux-cynical expression of surprise that it was deemed less important than putting some old Pentiums back into service.
That people don't consciously think something, let alone admit to thinking something, doesn't mean their behavior isn't driven by it.
What use do you plan to put thousands of new Linux users to? At least no one is outsourcing gorillas.
(Yet, anyway. I suppose if the Rwandan economy continues to pick up, they might get undercut by orangutans.)
There are some things even starving children won't eat, though.
How do you figure protecting half the world's mountain gorillas, at constant risk of being killed himself, isn't "useful"? With all due respect to Ubuntu, that strikes me as at least as important as supervising a bunch of Linux installs.
Ummm, maybe it would have made sense to hold off on this story until it's found to be true, instead of telling us that "sources report" something that's not in the linked article? Far be it from me to doubt Alexander Graham Cracker's "sources", but just on principle...
That's the distinction I made between Hippocrates and the Cro-Magnons: Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus and the Muslims who learned from them were doing real brain surgery, not just cutting holes in the skull to let demons out.
In general, the scientific sophistication of ancient peoples in deeply underrated.
Anyway, who says making and supporting a Linux client isn't hard? Just because it's easy to demand it (as if the people making the demand actually wrote the kernel themselves) doesn't mean it's "a tiny little something" when some Slackware user wants his problems fixed.
I submitted this yesterday, but apparently a working link to the story is considered bad form.
C'mon -- he's got a Wikipedia page a mile long, with a single instance where he even *claims* someone semi-important listened to him? ("Helped" how, exactly?) I do appreciate your pointing me to that, but I still say the guy is a nonentity outside of the hatred of gamers.
Here's Google News on Thompson. I got three pages in, finding a single non-negative reference to him. If someone has the energy to dig deeper, please let me know where all the "interviews" and "lawmakers" come in.
Sorry, kids, but if you want to Do Something Really Important, it's going to have to be more ambitious than ridiculing this irritating but unfortunate guy.
In fact, that's exactly correct. The guy is mentally ill, is not in any way a policymaker and the only reason why he keeps getting attention here and from the gam3r media is that they think it's amusing to kick around a mentally incompetent person.
The scientists themselves know what the results are. But they have wildly exaggerated ideas about the practical implications (the principle of "anything I don't know how to do must be easy") and the stories are filtered through university PR offices who love to exaggerate even more.
At a minimum, I don't see why sending this information is so "alarming", even if it's inappropriate. Are your $_SERVER env variables such a sensitive bit of information?
It refers to both. Out of curiosity, why can't you RTFA? If you're getting it blocked at work and are wondering why MSNBC is suddenly objectionable, I suspect it's because the second and third sentence each contain a word that's setting off your filters. (Or maybe you work at CNN or Fox?)
Exactly. Fountain pens and early ballpoint pens used to leak; thus pocket protectors. No one uses them anymore because modern pens are wildly unlikely to leak in your pocket.
That has absolutely nothing to do with Windows. It's poor design in a Windows/WINE-only application.
Incidentally, how many of you people have ever seen a "pocket protector" or even know why they used to be used? Can't this ludicrously anachronistic trope be dropped at some point?
That's certainly more commitment to testing a hypothesis than I've ever displayed!
I'm not sure what your point is. The IWC isn't a UN body, and has accomplished an end I support through vote-buying and member-packing that I'd hate to see applied to the Internet.
The reason I mentioned Taiwan and not Israel (besides the fact that bringing up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict never does anything but stir up a mindless flamefest) is that the country that makes pretty much everything inside your computer and much of what connects it to my computer does *not* share a "forum with all the nations". It's excluded from the ITU and would be similarly excluded from any UN-run Internet bodies and structures.
Absolutely! They'll be glad to crack the whip on registrars of non-countries like the Soviet Union and Taiwan.