I think you could make an argument that Russia and China were theocracies for much of the Stalinist period. For example I read that Mao apparently gave a speech which was interpreted as him saying that quarks were the fundamental constituent of matter. After that Chinese physicists were careful not to publish papers that might contradict the great man. In Russia Lysenkoism was famously the officially supported theory of agriculture. No.
Government providing support to stupid opinions and doctrines does not make them a religion -- for something to be a religion it has to specifically include belief in a supernatural deity. I remember that in USSR saying that someone believes in god was the ultimate insult to his intelligence.
3d modeling and video editing do belong in classrooms. They belong in an art or trade school, kids have more widely applicable things to study -- like math, sciences, engineering, literature, etc. Also no one should learn 3D modeling and video editing on a computer he can carry -- inexperienced user needs massive amount of resources and very large screen to be able to do anything with it.
. Maybe I should look into running a real OS (like linux or free/openBSD) on it, and running Sugar as a process that talks to X-Windows. I wonder how I'd learn to do that? A lot of people run various "mainstream"distributions of Linux on XO -- I just posted preliminary Ubuntu Hardy installation files and instructions.
On this PB, I have four 90x30 non-overlapping Terminal windows open, with three of them ssh'd to other machines that I'm working on. With the XO, as far as I can tell, I can only get one terminal window at a time, and it's fewer chars than 90x30 (though I don't offhand remember its actual size). It won't give you four non-overlapping oversized terminal windows, but it will comfortably run few overlapping ones, plus Emacs, with multiple desktops.
The state police had a nasty habit of grabbing people and tossing them in prison and torturing them. Other than some EXCEPTIONS from a few rogue assholes, this isn't happening now. Actually this is happening now all the time in Iraq.
Only a complete moron would say things are the same. Then you are welcome to think that I everyone capable of rational thought is a complete moron, because they are the same -- dead and maimed people are dead and maimed people, and so far Americans only succeeded in increasing their numbers. You claiming otherwise does not make it true.
Hospitals, schools, and businesses are being built. Most places are peaceful with some remaining hotspots. The Iraqi army is taking a more active role in dealing with the insurgents and extremists with our armed forces taking on more of a support role. So it's back to how it was under Saddam, except now there are also some foreign terrorists and foreign military there? MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Or did you manage to usefully run X11 on a 486 PC with 8 MB of RAM? With 4M of RAM actually. Graphics adapters were 8-bit then, so everything used less memory.
I think, this has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING with "Liberals" or "Conservatives" on either side of this argument, hierarchical or egalitarian society, etc. -- Social Darwinism is simply invalid and does not properly derive from either evolutionary biology or cultural evolution of modern society. It's primitive survivalist crap that has no place in either science or politics.
All the same, it's not accurate to say that Social Darwinism is an abuse of the theory.
It absolutely definitely is.
It is well known that many species of evolved to form communities of co-operatively behaving individuals. That made their whole communities, or entire species more likely to survive while they competed with other communities and species (remember, in evolution it doesn't matter which individuals, or all of them, survive and produce offspring -- what matters is which genes do they mostly pass to the next generation), and both humans and insects are examples of this very mechanism.
With insects' colonies it's obvious because colonies are composed mostly of clones -- worker bee can never produce an offspring by herself, but a queen (who has the same genes as workers) can if worker bees are successful in supporting the hive, so successful worker bee promotes passing her genes by supporting the survival of queen and offspring, competing with other hives or other species of insects.
With humans the collective nature of all activities involved in survival (hunting, agriculture, building of shelters, development of technology, medicine), and combination of long lifetime and a tradition of having stable families, places a hostile, aggressive individual that is ready to rip throats from everyone he meets including other humans, at a huge disadvantage compared to the rest of society, so humans ended up much less naturally aggressive than most of animals -- even less than animals that perform some activities collectively (hunting, migration) but remain highly competitive against each other within the same species.
Therefore a society that emphasizes co-operation between humans is actually a result of evolution, and "Social Darwinism" goes against the mechanism that humans developed over their evolution -- it promotes development of society that is hurting its own survival by wasting resources and shutting out individuals depriving others from use of their abilities in collective activities.
Compared to religion -- FUCKING HELL NO. Anything that scientists claim as certain, likely or even uncertain is still millions of orders of magnitude above the certainty of religious dogmas.
What is "the point" of religion, does not matter -- I can have a religion that is entirely focused on the claim that longcat is long (oh, and Satan is your master, but it really isn't important).
What matter is making stupid unprovable (or proven false) claims, and Buddhism does that just like any other religion.
It's pretty idiotic to proclaim "waiting for evidence" on a matter that is an equivalent of existence of fairies and unicorns. Would you honestly say that you are "waiting for evidence" of fairies, or would you simply proclaim that they are fictional entities not worth the attention of a non-retarded adult person? So are gods.
The fact that religion has political power and kids who believe in fairies don't have it, is the only difference.
And yes, there is a very remote possibility that something or someone (say, an alien from independently developed advanced civilization with an odd sense of humor) is indeed present on Earth and acts to imitate the exact properties and abilities of a fairy, and succeeds doing so using massive amounts of energy and advanced technology.
It's still an extremely silly thing to expect, or "wait a proof" of -- no one ever seen an evidence of advanced aliens, fairies or gods, and if there may be some (extremely weak) expectations that space aliens of some kind might exist, nothing at all suggests that the other two are anything but figments of imagination.
...of what the current version of "Western", especially American society is built upon -- the assumption that all people can enjoy competitive behavior and environment where they can thrive only at the expense of others' suffering.
Thanks, I will refer to this every time some misanthropic economist or political leader will tell me how great competitive behavior is and how I just HAVE TO be an asshole to match his enlightened view of humanity.
We'd be much better off if that type of application was never invented, and we instead used something like FrameMaker. And it would work, too, if its internal format was as flexible as TeX. And it still can provide a wordprocesor-like user interface at the expense of creating more markup behind the scenes but allowing a "clean" layout/markup mode for those who appreciate it.
Anyway, have you ever read ODF files (after unzipping, of course)? They aren't as ugly as OOXML, but they certainly aren't something you can immediately make sense of without knowing the standard, like nice HTML. If only CSS had worked out to be strong enough that you could do a close to 1 1 conversion of FrameMaker documents, it would probably have replaced a lot of Word documents. Not only I did, once when I had to HTML-ize documentation that I made in OpenOffice, I used semi-manual conversion from ODT XML, and ended up with one of the best-formatted documents I ever produced. Those two representations are made from the same ODT file:
It's also important to take into account that people started using Wiki for documentation, so clean, recognizable markup elements are finally becoming welcome in the horrible mess that is corporate documentation processing.
A wordprocessor that can cut and paste a Wiki-formatted page, and a spreadsheet that can produce separate representation of static text, formulas and combination of two would be infinitely superior to everything Microsoft ever produced, however those products would have to carry a massive baggage of braindead formatting modes if they were to be compatible with OOXML documents, Microsoft Office will continue churning out.
I AM a developer, and most of my problems are caused by convoluted and unclear, or never documented at all outdated specifications.
When a wordprocessor has to imitate some obviously broken legacy behavior, usually it's better to turn it into ridiculously detailed specially-positioned but described in general terms formatting (as long as text flow is preserved) and never ever have to reproduce the bug again in a new format. Microsoft could do that and reduce its own support efforts for future products, but that would make new formats easily usable by new, cleaner and better designed software, and Microsoft can't allow that to happen.
Or, in other words, you should abolish word processors. I'm completely with you on that one. Word processors are all horribly buggy, and users rely on the formatting bugs when they make their documents. If you then FIX the bugs, the documents end up looking like crap (well even more like crap than such documents look even in the best case.) Do you believe that document formats:
1. are formats for files that store word processors' internal state,
or
2. represent information that user intended to store in the document?
If it's the first, you are in Microsoft camp -- formats exist for benefit of the software vendors, and software vendor should forever remain a gatekeeper between user and his data. If it's the second, then there is absolutely no reason for keeping anything in the document that makes initial developer's life easier (does not have to convert every peculiar formatting into generalized form) but does not benefit the user (all software that the user uses from this point has to have re-implementation of every broken logic once used to [mis]-format the text, wasting massive amounts of resources and developers' time).
Slashdot Mirror
Government providing support to stupid opinions and doctrines does not make them a religion -- for something to be a religion it has to specifically include belief in a supernatural deity. I remember that in USSR saying that someone believes in god was the ultimate insult to his intelligence.
I am aware of that.
It should be relatively easy to run Sugar in Xephyr, so both environments can coexist (good for development, bad for UI testing).
BWAHAHAHAHA!
I am writing this response on one of those laptops, running prerelease Ubuntu Hardy that I have just configured for it.
This laptop is not going to do any 3D modeling or video editing any soon, but for everything that belongs in a classroom it's fine.
Stop this.
It's stupid.
No effect? Dollar is falling, isn't it?
...already went wrong, yet US military always finds a way to surprise me.
Then why K3B, an application that is superior to Nero in all imaginable ways, does not have this problem?
Ha-li-bur-ton!
Ha-li-bur-ton!
Ha-li-bur-ton!
Ha-li-bur-ton!
Where the Hell is Haliburton? We have Microsoft and Fox News, but without Haliburton the triumvirate of evil is not complete!
XO laptop with Ubuntu ended up pretty good for a general-purpose mobile use: http://abelits.livejournal.com/37973.html
I think, this has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING with "Liberals" or "Conservatives" on either side of this argument, hierarchical or egalitarian society, etc. -- Social Darwinism is simply invalid and does not properly derive from either evolutionary biology or cultural evolution of modern society. It's primitive survivalist crap that has no place in either science or politics.
All the same, it's not accurate to say that Social Darwinism is an abuse of the theory.
It absolutely definitely is.
It is well known that many species of evolved to form communities of co-operatively behaving individuals. That made their whole communities, or entire species more likely to survive while they competed with other communities and species (remember, in evolution it doesn't matter which individuals, or all of them, survive and produce offspring -- what matters is which genes do they mostly pass to the next generation), and both humans and insects are examples of this very mechanism.
With insects' colonies it's obvious because colonies are composed mostly of clones -- worker bee can never produce an offspring by herself, but a queen (who has the same genes as workers) can if worker bees are successful in supporting the hive, so successful worker bee promotes passing her genes by supporting the survival of queen and offspring, competing with other hives or other species of insects.
With humans the collective nature of all activities involved in survival (hunting, agriculture, building of shelters, development of technology, medicine), and combination of long lifetime and a tradition of having stable families, places a hostile, aggressive individual that is ready to rip throats from everyone he meets including other humans, at a huge disadvantage compared to the rest of society, so humans ended up much less naturally aggressive than most of animals -- even less than animals that perform some activities collectively (hunting, migration) but remain highly competitive against each other within the same species.
Therefore a society that emphasizes co-operation between humans is actually a result of evolution, and "Social Darwinism" goes against the mechanism that humans developed over their evolution -- it promotes development of society that is hurting its own survival by wasting resources and shutting out individuals depriving others from use of their abilities in collective activities.
In the context of science -- yes.
Compared to religion -- FUCKING HELL NO. Anything that scientists claim as certain, likely or even uncertain is still millions of orders of magnitude above the certainty of religious dogmas.
What is "the point" of religion, does not matter -- I can have a religion that is entirely focused on the claim that longcat is long (oh, and Satan is your master, but it really isn't important).
What matter is making stupid unprovable (or proven false) claims, and Buddhism does that just like any other religion.
It's pretty idiotic to proclaim "waiting for evidence" on a matter that is an equivalent of existence of fairies and unicorns. Would you honestly say that you are "waiting for evidence" of fairies, or would you simply proclaim that they are fictional entities not worth the attention of a non-retarded adult person? So are gods.
The fact that religion has political power and kids who believe in fairies don't have it, is the only difference.
And yes, there is a very remote possibility that something or someone (say, an alien from independently developed advanced civilization with an odd sense of humor) is indeed present on Earth and acts to imitate the exact properties and abilities of a fairy, and succeeds doing so using massive amounts of energy and advanced technology.
It's still an extremely silly thing to expect, or "wait a proof" of -- no one ever seen an evidence of advanced aliens, fairies or gods, and if there may be some (extremely weak) expectations that space aliens of some kind might exist, nothing at all suggests that the other two are anything but figments of imagination.
Who cares what Occam thought? It's his problem that his idea invalidates his own belief if applied consistently.
...of what the current version of "Western", especially American society is built upon -- the assumption that all people can enjoy competitive behavior and environment where they can thrive only at the expense of others' suffering.
Thanks, I will refer to this every time some misanthropic economist or political leader will tell me how great competitive behavior is and how I just HAVE TO be an asshole to match his enlightened view of humanity.
PDF
HTML.
It's also important to take into account that people started using Wiki for documentation, so clean, recognizable markup elements are finally becoming welcome in the horrible mess that is corporate documentation processing.
A wordprocessor that can cut and paste a Wiki-formatted page, and a spreadsheet that can produce separate representation of static text, formulas and combination of two would be infinitely superior to everything Microsoft ever produced, however those products would have to carry a massive baggage of braindead formatting modes if they were to be compatible with OOXML documents, Microsoft Office will continue churning out.
I AM a developer, and most of my problems are caused by convoluted and unclear, or never documented at all outdated specifications.
When a wordprocessor has to imitate some obviously broken legacy behavior, usually it's better to turn it into ridiculously detailed specially-positioned but described in general terms formatting (as long as text flow is preserved) and never ever have to reproduce the bug again in a new format. Microsoft could do that and reduce its own support efforts for future products, but that would make new formats easily usable by new, cleaner and better designed software, and Microsoft can't allow that to happen.
1. are formats for files that store word processors' internal state,
or
2. represent information that user intended to store in the document?
If it's the first, you are in Microsoft camp -- formats exist for benefit of the software vendors, and software vendor should forever remain a gatekeeper between user and his data. If it's the second, then there is absolutely no reason for keeping anything in the document that makes initial developer's life easier (does not have to convert every peculiar formatting into generalized form) but does not benefit the user (all software that the user uses from this point has to have re-implementation of every broken logic once used to [mis]-format the text, wasting massive amounts of resources and developers' time).
The author's language (and choice of titles, and sense of humor in most of the entries) is full of fail.