I mean, do you have an alternative explanation? If "consciousness" is not the doing of the brain itself, then what is it? Something outside of the physical universe? There's absolutely no evidence of any sort of thing.
The strongest evidence is that you are aware of yourself. That "feelings" that you perceive cannot be described in terms of known physics (you may say feelings can be described as neuron triggers in your brain, but still it doesn't explain why you actually _feel_ it)
The thing is, there is no invisible "you" in there. Your "consciousness" is just a simulation playing out in your brain.
Same argument. Suppose it's possible to simulate your brain in a computer. Suppose I introduce a sensation to the system equivalent to having your arm cut off. Do you believe you will feel the pain?
If your reply is "yes", the next question would be : which is the "real" you? Or do you deny your own "existence"? If you reply is "no", it follows that it is inconsistent to reason that "you" are that "simulation" in your brain.
Science has traditionally been a system of observing natural phenomenon as a passive observer. I doubt that it would have the same effectiveness when you use it to learn about yourself.
" The gender is determined by the chromosome set when sperm and egg fusion. "
I presume you mean "solely determined by". Given that, what makes you think so, other than that it's spoonfed to you by schools and the media?
Believe it or not, there are many "exceptions" in science that we do not yet know about, and who knows if we really messed up some so called "facts"? Remember it was not long ago when people get killed for saying that the Earth is round. And don't forget that "evolution / ID" crap in Uncle Sam (well, luckily I live in a less religious place).....
Keep your mind open. What you know might not be the whole truth. And it will probably never be.
And by the way, science was never meant to be true. It is simply a process of making up theories that fit observations.
GEB is not anything *about* CS or maths or physics. The only reason why there are CS, physics or even maths contents in the book is because they are the basic concepts the author must use to bring out the main theme.
It's about the mind, logic, and the reality of the world we live in. It discusses how a conscious mind comes into being. It tries to shed light on who we are, and why we are here.
The book may seem to be a book on popular science, but it's really "unpopular" philosophy.
There are better books for an introduction to science subjects. In fact, I already *know* most of the concepts used in the book, and yet I am still bewildered at how the author glues all the ideas together to produce his main thesis.
You see, the Chinese language allows different characters (or rather, words) to have exactly the same pronounciation.
The word in Chinese that means "form" is pronounced as "se" (mandarin), but it's not the same word as the "se" in the erotic sense.
The correct word "se" means "color" (the more common use) and also means "erotic" (a tad bit different from lust).
"qing" is "passion", "love", "feeling", etc. I might add it also has the meaning of "situation". (though I'm not exactly sure whether this is entirely correct). The word has no sexual/erotic meanings in itself.
So "se qing" perhaps could be roughly translated as "erotic passion", i.e. "pornographic".
No, the rest of the world would just be locked out.
And as for your point of hijacking existing domains, they CAN do this now if they wanted to: Just force the ISP's to use relay their DNS requests to the government's DNS servers, which selectively hijack "dangerous" domains, and relay the rest to the real TLD nameservers.
Besides, it's not like they're not filtering out stuff already now. They don't need another mechanism for that.
Rather, say the InterNIC locks in the whole world by forcing netizens to use English characters!
There is no reason why people have to learn English to use the internet efficiently, especially where there's more people speaking Chinese (Mandarin) than English.
Open source apps copy features of existing software because: 1. They are well tested and proven to work. 2. People want to work on a familiar environment, and you need to provide one for people to switch.
Besides, it's brain dead stupid if you refuse to implement a good feature in your software simply because it's been done by somebody else. Are you suggesting that Firefox should revert to the featureset of lynx just because Opera already implemented everything?
Copying isn't a problem, as long as what you're copying is (almost) the best solution. Heck, you won't get anywhere if you don't borrow at least some existing ideas to build your new ideas on. The problem is when it's 100% copy and 0% innovation.
If you look at open source software, it's not hard to see innovation here and there. Enlightenment (WM), ReiserFS, Python (the language), Emacs, to name a few.
So, yes, there is innovation in OSS. And yes, I do see your point that there is some kind of hypocrisy regarding the "copying" issue. But hey, don't forget the criticisms when KDE/GNOME puts out a new release with yet-another-feature-copied-from-windows/macosx.
IANAL, but it seems to me that the EULA of a free-as-in-beer software is likely to be enforcable.
The argument of EULA's generally not being enforcable is that the user has already paid for the software, and since he has already paid, there is no reason why he has to comply to additional agreements (usually unknown to the user until he installs it) to use software he already bought.
Technically, in legal terms it's a lack of "consideration", since there the contract (of sale of software) is supposedly complete when user pays for the software. In free-as-in-beer software, the "consideration" can be said to be the EULA, and thus it's likely to be enforcable.
Everybody (that bothers to post here) wants to look 1337. It's no different from the ever changing popular culture, where what's "in" today gets "old" tomorrow.
Regardless of the GFDL, there are many articles that are plagiarized from the web by various "contributors" -- i.e. those content is not eligible to be put under GFDL in the first place.
Not that it isn't a problem now, but it's going to be a bigger problem when Wikipedia tries to profit from the stuff.
there are many exceptions where the point releases really matter: A minor release of GNU's core utilities fixed a major bug where ACLs were not preserved during normal file operations. Want to fix it yourself? You won't be able to use the stable branch version of autoconf and automake. Want to join Windows XP clients to your Debian PDC? Not with the version of Samba that comes with Woody. It's not vanity, developers issue these point releases to fix bugs as often as they do to add features.
In many cases where the server has a specific use, there is really no need for updates to "bugs" or "features".
My way of doing things is this: before a server is put into production, we note whatever features we want to put onto the system, and research on whether the technology is available and stable enough for use. Then we install relevant packages and configuration. We test and monitor it for a while to see whether bugs show up, until we're statisfied of its stability. Then we put it up for production. Except for security updates and very minor bug fixes, we generally don't tinker with the system any more.
If I really had attempted to use ACL's with GNU utilities, I would have probably noticed such an error during the testing phrase, and either a) found a workaround or b) if the issue was serious, abandon the idea or c) wait for a new version and upgrade (either from testing or compiling from source). No complete system upgrade is needed. The risk of introducing new bugs and errors is too high for the trouble.
You may have a point on debian stable missing out features, but usually you only need one or two bleeding edge packages, and it's easily done either by grabbing it from testing or compiling it yourself.
I have a server running a beta version of Samba 3.0 (I needed the winbind feature badly) on a Woody system, and it's been running flawlessly for almost 3 years. I didn't upgrade when Samba 3.0 was finally released, and I don't see any reason to do so until the whole system is overhauled -- if it ain't broke, why fix it?
You may not care about downtime with your system of less than a dozen users, but when you're managing a server with thousands of users, you'd want to be more careful. Besides, there's more to life (and to computing/tech really) than to waste precious hours fixing problems caused by needless system upgrades.
> (advertisers don't spend billions of dollars a year because they have too much money). So it > stands to reason that no releases means declining interest.
This really depends on who you're talking about. If you mean declining interests in PHB's, you probably have a point, but given that most PHB's don't know what Debian is anyway, there's not much to lose.
Debian has never really opted for awareness in the business field in the same manner like RH and SUSE, etc. Rather, its appeal is to more hardcore tech people who knows what they're doing, and choose their distribution on technological merits than buzzwords. As long as Debian maintains its quality of releases, I don't see any "declining" interest as you mentioned.
> we're hardwired to be attracted/interested in > the newest, flashiest and best things
I, for one, wouldn't want the newest, flashiest things on any production server. I manage half a dozen servers that are still running Debian Woody and chugging along without any problems at all.
Even if Sarge became stable today, I wouldn't rush to upgrade the servers... unless either the security updates for Woody are dropped, or unless I have a lot of time to fix any potential problems that may arise during the update. You may have a lot of time on your hands, but some people just don't have the luxury of upgrading the system for the sake of it.
Speaking of that, I've just changed all "stable" to "woody" in my/etc/apt/sources.list, in case the whole system gets upgraded accidentally once Sarge is "released"...
But equally, M can't stop the owners of X continueing to work on the code under the old licence
Heck if so the original authors could have used the BSD license then.
I thought the whole point of the GPL was to avoid open code become proprietary? Obviously, people who release their code under the GPL don't want deriative works to become close-sourced, but that is *exactly* what is happening the situation described in my previous post. Not pretty, I'd say.
IANAL, but isn't this "choice" available by the user of the program instead of the copyright owner of the program? i.e. users can choose to accept v2 OR v3, v4...etc of the GPL.
From GPL (9): Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation."
Note that the "you" here refers to the licensee, i.e. the one that received the program with the license and not the one that holds copyright to the program.
Take for example, Program X is released under GPLv2 "or any subsequent license". Evil company, M gains control of FSF and releasess GPLv99 which says "Company M can do whatever it wishes with the code", and proceeds to re-distribute the code in proprietary terms. When owners of X tries to sue M, M points out that they chose to accept GPLv99, and under the above clause they theoretically could do so.
Btw, if this really happens, then Evil Company M will basically have the right to do anything with the code of GPL'd software as it pleases. That's the problem the grandparent is talking about.
The Basic Law (something akin to a constitution) of Hong Kong provides in Article 8 that:
The laws previously in force in Hong Kong, that is, the common law, rules of equity, ordinances, subordinate legislation and customary law shall be maintained, except for any that contravene this Law, and subject to any amendment by the legislature of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
So basically Hong Kong has the same laws and legal system as it did before 1997.
Yes, the laws of Hong Kong and mainland China are radically different, and will probably stay that way.
If you're really interested, you might want to check out the Basic Law of Hong Kong.
Bragging rights to be the first to arrest a Bittorrent PIRATE!!
Or perhaps the *AA just realized that they could use Hong Kong as a testing ground before they do it back in the U.S. Seriously, nobody here in Hong Kong really cares about the legal consequences and the only thing they're interested in is how we are going to elect the new Chief Executive in '08.
last I checked, the perchild-MPM is still highly experimental.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/perchild.ht ml
This module is not functional. Development of this module is not complete and is not currently active. Do not use perchild unless you are a programmer willing to help fix it.
Just curious, but how is PHP better in code gluing?
I thought Java's inherit OOP design would make it easier to integrate code, whereas PHP only recently supported "real" OOP in PHP5.
And about type-casting, I find the exact opposite. After coding Java for a few months, I got uneasy at the loose types in PHP. Perhaps it's my fault of not scrutinizing the interpretter;-p Or worse, perhaps I'm the one coding a guestbook using autoglobals;-p
PHP is straightforward and easy, and most distributions have their own packages for it. Whereas with Java, the initial set up is overwhelming for beginners.
I learnt PHP years ago by myself, and it wasn't really that hard. Yet a few months ago when I was finally required to learn Java, the complexity of the Java frameworks (Hibernate, Spring, etc) tortured me for days before I actually knew what was going on. And it doesn't help when all the frameworks gives such a "bulky" feeling.
The learning curve of Java is definitely much higher than PHP.
Of course, I do agree that Java is much better suited for large scale web programming than PHP. It's much easier to do things cleanly in Java, and although PHP's loose typing is great for a simple 1 page script, I'd rather have the strict typing of Java when it comes to large scale projects.
How come people cannot simply accept that there is no morally "right" and "wrong" when it comes to things like war? You may put a glamorous name on top of it, but war is still war, people are still killed, homes and families are still destroyed, and it still fucks up people's lives, both for the invaders and the invaded.
It's just sick when people discuss how war "should" be engaged, and who "should" invade who, as if it were casual things like where to have lunch.
There is never, ever a right to invade. Does anybody have the right to kill? And the right to kill hundreds of thousands of people?
It takes so much work to put restrictions on people, to me it's just not worth it. And besides, I don't even get any satisfaction from enslaving people.
To get satisfaction from making people obey your orders is a sign of weakness and insecurity.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, do you have an alternative explanation? If "consciousness" is not the doing of the brain itself, then what is it? Something outside of the physical universe? There's absolutely no evidence of any sort of thing.
The strongest evidence is that you are aware of yourself. That "feelings" that you perceive cannot be described in terms of known physics (you may say feelings can be described as neuron triggers in your brain, but still it doesn't explain why you actually _feel_ it)
The thing is, there is no invisible "you" in there. Your "consciousness" is just a simulation playing out in your brain.
Same argument. Suppose it's possible to simulate your brain in a computer. Suppose I introduce a sensation to the system equivalent to having your arm cut off. Do you believe you will feel the pain?
If your reply is "yes", the next question would be : which is the "real" you? Or do you deny your own "existence"? If you reply is "no", it follows that it is inconsistent to reason that "you" are that "simulation" in your brain.
Science has traditionally been a system of observing natural phenomenon as a passive observer. I doubt that it would have the same effectiveness when you use it to learn about yourself.
" The gender is determined by the chromosome set when sperm and egg fusion. "
I presume you mean "solely determined by". Given that, what makes you think so, other than that it's spoonfed to you by schools and the media?
Believe it or not, there are many "exceptions" in science that we do not yet know about, and who knows if we really messed up some so called "facts"? Remember it was not long ago when people get killed for saying that the Earth is round. And don't forget that "evolution / ID" crap in Uncle Sam (well, luckily I live in a less religious place).....
Keep your mind open. What you know might not be the whole truth. And it will probably never be.
And by the way, science was never meant to be true. It is simply a process of making up theories that fit observations.
GEB is not anything *about* CS or maths or physics. The only reason why there are CS, physics or even maths contents in the book is because they are the basic concepts the author must use to bring out the main theme.
It's about the mind, logic, and the reality of the world we live in. It discusses how a conscious mind comes into being. It tries to shed light on who we are, and why we are here.
The book may seem to be a book on popular science, but it's really "unpopular" philosophy.
There are better books for an introduction to science subjects. In fact, I already *know* most of the concepts used in the book, and yet I am still bewildered at how the author glues all the ideas together to produce his main thesis.
That's what GEB is about.
As mentioned by a (currently) 0-score poster, this is Cantonese instead of Mandarin.
;-p
Anyway, I'd like to say that for "Porn Video", the pronounciation is "haam dai" ("dai" rhymes with "fly")
("dai" in this context means "tape".)
Hope that helps
Almost.
You see, the Chinese language allows different characters (or rather, words) to have exactly the same pronounciation.
The word in Chinese that means "form" is pronounced as "se" (mandarin), but it's not the same word as the "se" in the erotic sense.
The correct word "se" means "color" (the more common use) and also means "erotic" (a tad bit different from lust).
"qing" is "passion", "love", "feeling", etc. I might add it also has the meaning of "situation". (though I'm not exactly sure whether this is entirely correct). The word has no sexual/erotic meanings in itself.
So "se qing" perhaps could be roughly translated as "erotic passion", i.e. "pornographic".
No, the rest of the world would just be locked out.
And as for your point of hijacking existing domains, they CAN do this now if they wanted to: Just force the ISP's to use relay their DNS requests to the government's DNS servers, which selectively hijack "dangerous" domains, and relay the rest to the real TLD nameservers.
Besides, it's not like they're not filtering out stuff already now. They don't need another mechanism for that.
Rather, say the InterNIC locks in the whole world by forcing netizens to use English characters!
There is no reason why people have to learn English to use the internet efficiently, especially where there's more people speaking Chinese (Mandarin) than English.
That's lock in.
Open source apps copy features of existing software because:
1. They are well tested and proven to work.
2. People want to work on a familiar environment, and you need to provide one for people to switch.
Besides, it's brain dead stupid if you refuse to implement a good feature in your software simply because it's been done by somebody else. Are you suggesting that Firefox should revert to the featureset of lynx just because Opera already implemented everything?
Copying isn't a problem, as long as what you're copying is (almost) the best solution. Heck, you won't get anywhere if you don't borrow at least some existing ideas to build your new ideas on. The problem is when it's 100% copy and 0% innovation.
If you look at open source software, it's not hard to see innovation here and there. Enlightenment (WM), ReiserFS, Python (the language), Emacs, to name a few.
So, yes, there is innovation in OSS. And yes, I do see your point that there is some kind of hypocrisy regarding the "copying" issue. But hey, don't forget the criticisms when KDE/GNOME puts out a new release with yet-another-feature-copied-from-windows/macosx.
IANAL, but it seems to me that the EULA of a free-as-in-beer software is likely to be enforcable.
The argument of EULA's generally not being enforcable is that the user has already paid for the software, and since he has already paid, there is no reason why he has to comply to additional agreements (usually unknown to the user until he installs it) to use software he already bought.
Technically, in legal terms it's a lack of "consideration", since there the contract (of sale of software) is supposedly complete when user pays for the software. In free-as-in-beer software, the "consideration" can be said to be the EULA, and thus it's likely to be enforcable.
Again, IANAL.
Everybody (that bothers to post here) wants to look 1337. It's no different from the ever changing popular culture, where what's "in" today gets "old" tomorrow.
For me, I'm staying with good ol' Debian.
(Hint to mods: -1 Flamebait)
The question is rather, is the content legal?
Regardless of the GFDL, there are many articles that are plagiarized from the web by various "contributors" -- i.e. those content is not eligible to be put under GFDL in the first place.
Not that it isn't a problem now, but it's going to be a bigger problem when Wikipedia tries to profit from the stuff.
IANAL.
there are many exceptions where the point releases really matter: A minor release of GNU's core utilities fixed a major bug where ACLs were not preserved during normal file operations. Want to fix it yourself? You won't be able to use the stable branch version of autoconf and automake. Want to join Windows XP clients to your Debian PDC? Not with the version of Samba that comes with Woody. It's not vanity, developers issue these point releases to fix bugs as often as they do to add features.
In many cases where the server has a specific use, there is really no need for updates to "bugs" or "features".
My way of doing things is this: before a server is put into production, we note whatever features we want to put onto the system, and research on whether the technology is available and stable enough for use. Then we install relevant packages and configuration. We test and monitor it for a while to see whether bugs show up, until we're statisfied of its stability. Then we put it up for production. Except for security updates and very minor bug fixes, we generally don't tinker with the system any more.
If I really had attempted to use ACL's with GNU utilities, I would have probably noticed such an error during the testing phrase, and either a) found a workaround or b) if the issue was serious, abandon the idea or c) wait for a new version and upgrade (either from testing or compiling from source). No complete system upgrade is needed. The risk of introducing new bugs and errors is too high for the trouble.
You may have a point on debian stable missing out features, but usually you only need one or two bleeding edge packages, and it's easily done either by grabbing it from testing or compiling it yourself.
I have a server running a beta version of Samba 3.0 (I needed the winbind feature badly) on a Woody system, and it's been running flawlessly for almost 3 years. I didn't upgrade when Samba 3.0 was finally released, and I don't see any reason to do so until the whole system is overhauled -- if it ain't broke, why fix it?
You may not care about downtime with your system of less than a dozen users, but when you're managing a server with thousands of users, you'd want to be more careful. Besides, there's more to life (and to computing/tech really) than to waste precious hours fixing problems caused by needless system upgrades.
> (advertisers don't spend billions of dollars a year because they have too much money). So it
/etc/apt/sources.list, in case the whole system gets upgraded accidentally once Sarge is "released"...
> stands to reason that no releases means declining interest.
This really depends on who you're talking about. If you mean declining interests in PHB's, you probably have a point, but given that most PHB's don't know what Debian is anyway, there's not much to lose.
Debian has never really opted for awareness in the business field in the same manner like RH and SUSE, etc. Rather, its appeal is to more hardcore tech people who knows what they're doing, and choose their distribution on technological merits than buzzwords. As long as Debian maintains its quality of releases, I don't see any "declining" interest as you mentioned.
> we're hardwired to be attracted/interested in
> the newest, flashiest and best things
I, for one, wouldn't want the newest, flashiest things on any production server. I manage half a dozen servers that are still running Debian Woody and chugging along without any problems at all.
Even if Sarge became stable today, I wouldn't rush to upgrade the servers... unless either the security updates for Woody are dropped, or unless I have a lot of time to fix any potential problems that may arise during the update. You may have a lot of time on your hands, but some people just don't have the luxury of upgrading the system for the sake of it.
Speaking of that, I've just changed all "stable" to "woody" in my
But equally, M can't stop the owners of X continueing to work on the code under the old licence
Heck if so the original authors could have used the BSD license then.
I thought the whole point of the GPL was to avoid open code become proprietary? Obviously, people who release their code under the GPL don't want deriative works to become close-sourced, but that is *exactly* what is happening the situation described in my previous post. Not pretty, I'd say.
IANAL, but isn't this "choice" available by the user of the program instead of the copyright owner of the program? i.e. users can choose to accept v2 OR v3, v4...etc of the GPL.
From GPL (9):
Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation."
Note that the "you" here refers to the licensee, i.e. the one that received the program with the license and not the one that holds copyright to the program.
Take for example, Program X is released under GPLv2 "or any subsequent license". Evil company, M gains control of FSF and releasess GPLv99 which says "Company M can do whatever it wishes with the code", and proceeds to re-distribute the code in proprietary terms. When owners of X tries to sue M, M points out that they chose to accept GPLv99, and under the above clause they theoretically could do so.
Btw, if this really happens, then Evil Company M will basically have the right to do anything with the code of GPL'd software as it pleases. That's the problem the grandparent is talking about.
By definition the so called "strong experimental evidence" would be useless on those with blind faith.
The Basic Law (something akin to a constitution) of Hong Kong provides in Article 8 that:
The laws previously in force in Hong Kong, that is, the common law, rules of equity, ordinances, subordinate legislation and customary law shall be maintained, except for any that contravene this Law, and subject to any amendment by the legislature of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
So basically Hong Kong has the same laws and legal system as it did before 1997.
Yes, the laws of Hong Kong and mainland China are radically different, and will probably stay that way.
If you're really interested, you might want to check out the Basic Law of Hong Kong.
Bragging rights to be the first to arrest a Bittorrent PIRATE!!
Or perhaps the *AA just realized that they could use Hong Kong as a testing ground before they do it back in the U.S. Seriously, nobody here in Hong Kong really cares about the legal consequences and the only thing they're interested in is how we are going to elect the new Chief Executive in '08.
No, he'll probably be prosecuted under criminal charges.
I mean, getting into prison even for one day because you decided to seed a frigg'n movie is just so uncool.
Not really, it probably "happened" about 100K years ago. ;-p
last I checked, the perchild-MPM is still highly experimental.
t ml
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/perchild.h
This module is not functional. Development of this module is not complete and is not currently active. Do not use perchild unless you are a programmer willing to help fix it.
Just curious, but how is PHP better in code gluing?
;-p Or worse, perhaps I'm the one coding a guestbook using autoglobals ;-p
I thought Java's inherit OOP design would make it easier to integrate code, whereas PHP only recently supported "real" OOP in PHP5.
And about type-casting, I find the exact opposite. After coding Java for a few months, I got uneasy at the loose types in PHP. Perhaps it's my fault of not scrutinizing the interpretter
I've done programming in PHP and in Java.
PHP is straightforward and easy, and most distributions have their own packages for it. Whereas with Java, the initial set up is overwhelming for beginners.
I learnt PHP years ago by myself, and it wasn't really that hard. Yet a few months ago when I was finally required to learn Java, the complexity of the Java frameworks (Hibernate, Spring, etc) tortured me for days before I actually knew what was going on. And it doesn't help when all the frameworks gives such a "bulky" feeling.
The learning curve of Java is definitely much higher than PHP.
Of course, I do agree that Java is much better suited for large scale web programming than PHP. It's much easier to do things cleanly in Java, and although PHP's loose typing is great for a simple 1 page script, I'd rather have the strict typing of Java when it comes to large scale projects.
How come people cannot simply accept that there is no morally "right" and "wrong" when it comes to things like war? You may put a glamorous name on top of it, but war is still war, people are still killed, homes and families are still destroyed, and it still fucks up people's lives, both for the invaders and the invaded.
It's just sick when people discuss how war "should" be engaged, and who "should" invade who, as if it were casual things like where to have lunch.
There is never, ever a right to invade. Does anybody have the right to kill? And the right to kill hundreds of thousands of people?
And what do you get from having such a kingdom?
It takes so much work to put restrictions on people, to me it's just not worth it. And besides, I don't even get any satisfaction from enslaving people.
To get satisfaction from making people obey your orders is a sign of weakness and insecurity.