So why *do* so many people use Gnome? As you said elsewhere, it's not as much as it was 10 years ago but still... I feel like they should be a niche player by now, but they're very much not. Does being Red Hat's default really carry *that* much weight? And why does RHAT support a desktop environment that's overtly hostile towards its users and (if what you say is true) third party devs as well?
I've heard nothing but good things about Qt too (even though I had the same initial assumptions about C++ vs. GTK's C), but GTK, too, seems to have already garnered too much momentum to stop. I just don't quite get how so much momentum can exist in an ecosystem where the alternatives are all free and they're all just single apt-get install (or yum equiv) away. I understand laziness, but surely when Gnome 3 rolled around the lazy option was to go KDE or XFCE and never look back?
I know I've said this like 4 times already in this thread but it's been bugging me for a long time now and I've yet to hear a plausible explanation, or really any explanation not resting entirely on the might of RHAT.
I can't be bothered to stay abreast of all of these latest ham-fisted attempt to be the anti-Windows, but were their workspaces markedly better than KDE's Activities, which I believe predated GNOME 3 by years? Is there anything else that you've found particularly useful? These are genuine questions, but if my tone is scornful I'm sorry... it can't be helped. From what I've seen, the GNOME team just destroys shit, blatantly mocks you if your use case doesn't match their vision (see their response to people who didn't want their laptop to auto-suspend when the lid is closed), and then runs three times slower after their "streamlining" is completed. And then they complain that you aren't sending them more money to fund further destruction (see: gnome-screensaver.) KDE at least has the decency of making most of their "innovations" optional.
It appeared to me that both GNOME 3 and Unity made the bizarre, very Microsoft-like choice of pretending to be a cell phone. Which at least sort of makes sense in Microsoft's case because a few people actually own Windows phones and there is an argument (not one I have much sympathy with, but it does exist) for unifying the UI. But virtually no one is using GNOME or Unity on a phone or daily-driver tablet.
If it helps you swallow my thesis a little better, let me elaborate that this more nuanced, comparative approach I'm advocating is a lot less antitheist than many popular strands of internet atheism. I'm not merely arguing for making this distinction between religious, but also among them.
Your contention that because there are different practices described as religions, different strains or offshoots of religions or practices similar to religions that are described as such, and that they impact people differently does not relate to a general contention that religion may have benefited societies. Its like saying because there are different tools with different uses that tools in general don't benefit society. I'm not sure how I could address it in any other context.
It "related to" (and I would say tends to argue against) a general contention that religion in general may have benefited societies. It's not just "difference practices"; it's vastly different attitudes and different functions. Let's just say for the sake of argument that Christianity is provably good for America. Sure. Fine. But I am not in favor of using this "fact" to argue that Salafi Islam is (or is probably) good for Saudi Arabia. Since they are both Abrahamic monotheisms there are lots of in-principle similarities, but in practice they aren't similar enough to make that assumption. And Christianity has even less in common with the practice of most eastern religions.
If it helps you swallow my thesis a little better, let me elaborate that this more nuanced, comparative approach I'm advocating is a lot less antitheist than many popular strands of internet atheism. I'm not merely arguing for making this distinction between religious, but also among them. I'm usually not in favor of saying a religion is bad (although sometimes it's pretty hard not to, as with Salafi); I'm more in favor of saying that totalitarian or dogmatic beliefs (both morality belief and science/historical belief) are bad. There are many things that are religious and yet not intrinsically dogmatic.
That too. Although I've found they're a little superfluous in recent years... for all of their modifications (discouraging non-Mint updates to the point of modifying Synaptic to remove the "update all" button, removing the apparmor profiles Ubuntu implemented, etc.), I'm not sure if they bring much to the table.
I guess they did come up with Cinnamon, which I guess might be good to look at if you want an eye-candy DE that doesn't hate you *and* you can't stand KDE. I personally discourage this approach, as I think that it merely encourages the GNOME devs who are in need of some good behavior-modifying feedback.
I tend to assume that simple and basic points are defensible, or at least explicable, in a sentence or two.
We can agree to disagree and all, but your smug refusal to provide an explanation, while you simultaneously insist that the explanation is in fact very basic and simple, deserves highlighting.
Fedora is a very upstream distribution, and also does very little modification to the bundled software.
Like Debian, Gentoo or Arch? Maybe I'm misinformed but I thought Ubuntu was the only one well known for that sort of thing.
They also contribute more back upstream then any other distribution does. Finally, The changes that happen in Fedora set the stage for Linux in general - the Fedora team does things first (PulseAudio, Network Manager, GNOME, systemd) and every one else follows.
And that's a positive, is it?
I don't mean to start a religious war here... at least, not on Poettering. I mean with systemd, whatever, there are some valid arguments on both sides there. But GNOME is some kind of bizarre BSDM experiment or something. They've managed to show less respect for their users than Microsoft. Removing as many user choices as possible has long been an explicit goal of theirs. And they've waged a unilateral war against screensavers, inexplicably and for no benefit that I can discern, for something like a decade now. For all their supposed streamlining they still aren't a lightweight or easy to configure DE, and since Gnome 3 they certainly haven't been the 'easy' option or the one you'd install on grandma's computer.
If Red Hat is responsible for that little list of yours, I think the wisest option would be to NOT support them, to be vocal about using XFCE or KDE or OpenRC or whatever, so that they are (eventually) forced to listen to their users and modify the priorities of some of those projects that they contribute so heavily to. And it's not like easy to use alternatives are especially hard to come by. Debian derivatives are a breeze to use and are available in LTS, rapid release or rolling release, with every major (and most minor) desktop environment not only supported but configured right of the box.
As an end user, the only really interesting thing I've seen out of RH in recent years is Docker (but I'm afraid it's nowhere near as interesting as Qubes.)
Fair enough. Momentum is a perfectly valid reason--change shouldn't be undertaken for the sake of change. The human lifespan is, after all, finite.
But that's just *you*. Fedora is still really popular and even recommended to noobs and I can't figure out why. (The continued popularity of GNOME is an even bigger mystery, but it's one that is closely tied to the mystery of Fedora.)
I can't quite square hating Ubuntu for being "dumbed-down" and promoting Red Hat. Their antics at the helm of GNOME alone plainly show the utter contempt in which they hold their users (which, to be fair, must be deserved to some degree--I mean, for whatever reason, people kept using GNOME.)
Ubuntu has a very handy five year LTS snapshot release style that RH has refused to match for their desktop product, which is only support for something like 18 months. They also have extended the dpkg system with PPAs which (last time I checked) Debian did not support out of the box.
Appreciating all of that and being a fan of Mir or the Unity desktop are two entirely different things. Just use a derivative like Xubuntu or Kubuntu instead. Problem solved. All of the advantages of Ubuntu (and by extension Debian) with few of the disadvantages.
That there are great differences doesn't negate my original point at all. Your interpretation of what those difference means are your own.
That original point being:
Virtually all societies have independently birthed religions. That doesn't happen by chance, or by virtue of a scheme. That happens because there is a real social benefit.
And you're shamelessly tap-dancing around my response to this point, which was that just because we have a fancy umbrella word that encompasses extremely different phenomena does not mean one can make hand-waving appeals to universality and nebulous "social benefit".
Some people carry sticks. Virtually all cultures have some sort of stick-carrying tradition. That didn't happen by chance, or by virtue of a scheme. That happened because there's a real social benefit to stick-carrying.
Do you think a statement like that is saying anything profound? Do you think it would be a compelling argument in a discussion about the merits of baseball, orthopedic support canes, warring (spear-wielding) tribes in the Amazon, violin bows, and/or selfie sticks ?
I hear they're tossing in a ballgag if you're into that sort of thing.
Seriously though, what exactly is the appeal of Fedora? Familiarity via using RH Enterprise at work? I'm not saying I'm in love with Ubuntu in particular, but Fedora has long puzzled me in this regard. Beyond the (perhaps familiar to many) rpm ecosystem, what does it offer? It's not topping the list on life cycle, stability, user-friendliness, tweak-ability, respect for users or pragmatism (see their "not our problem; go yell at Adobe " response to breaking 64 bit flash a few years back), etc.
There has to be some niche I'm overlooking here. I just couldn't ever find a compelling reason to join this massive all-volunteer Red Hat beta testing team. Maybe it's just an easy way to get more up-to-date apps if you're too impatient for something like Gentoo or Arch? (Even then, I'm not certain it has much over the non-stable and non-LTS Debian-based options.)
The appeal to art (or music) is pretty weak, too. We'll never know the artwork Michaelangelo might have made if he wasn't forced to disguise his enthusiasm of naked men under a religious veneer. Also: not a lot of non-religious institutions had a budget on the scale of the Catholic church in those days.
As for music specifically, well, If today's music is any indication then the large majority of those people who are inspired to write music primarily because of their religion (as opposed to the ones who merely happened to be writing music in the days when popular music was frowned on or low class) are not... particularly... gifted.
Care to explain how you look at it? Or whom you're looking at? Japanese morality and attitudes towards life or the afterlife, specifically as influenced by Buddhism, are markedly different from the Christian outlook. I'm going by poll results here in addition to the general vibe one gets from their culture, as well as the formal roles religion plays. For example, the vast majority of Japanese do not attend Buddhist temples on a weekly basis of the ones that do, the resulting in experience is extremely different from your average evangelical church. The Buddhist political lobby is not much like the Christian lobby. Buddhist day care services, if indeed such things exist, are probably markedly different from Christian daycares. A devout Buddhist Japanese person probably has more in common with a Japanese atheist than a devout American Christian. Etc.
I think the differences clearly outweigh the similarities, and the few similarities they do share can be found in many beliefs and institutions not normally considered "religious". The attempt to draw strong parallels and appeals to universalism are naive ethnocentrism at best, and at worst it's a cynical religious apologism that is widely practiced by theists and fawning non-theists alike (witness the ridiculous translations, usually without footnote, of words like "heaven" and "God" that one usually finds in translations of holy texts from Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc.)
I haven't seen much of that. However, it is true that the phrase "dogmatic religion" is tragically underused, since it's usually only the dogmatic elements that we take issue with.
But you should realize that this issue isn't limited to the myths: Dogmatically asserted moral principles are usually more problematic than the myths. Whether or not you believe that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by Yahweh/Jehovah is of lesser importance than the question of whether you believe that homosexuality is a moral problem .
To quote Sam Harris: "religion" is a word like "sports." Just because we happen to have a word that encompasses shuffleboard and Mixed Martial Arts doesn't mean the two things are closely related. The affect Christianity has on your average American has very little in common with the affect Buddhism or Shinto has on your average Japanese person.
The line between religion and non-religion is also pretty arbitrary: it's quite possible to be a practicing Jew who doesn't believe in the supernatural (there are millions of them), yet we don't consider people who practice astrology or homeopathy to be members of a religion. The same goes to belong who dogmatic political parties, even when a party requires that all members profess a belief in mythical or irrational things.
Appealing to all of the other religions in the world to say that any particular religion must be doing good or arising from some kind of universal need should be treated with the same amount of skepticism as the phrase "ping pong is a safe sport; therefore, American football is a safe sport."
Explain what? That people are freaking out over a relatively harmless disease?
Gotcha. You're a conspiracy theorist who does not believe the data supporting a strong casual link between Zika and severe birth defects. Or maybe you're just so bad at math that you think that any news story including the figure "1%" is by definition minor and not worthy of any attention whatsoever. Or maybe you don't understand how this is the first new birth defect causing disease we've seen in a long time that is both highly virulent and difficult to detect. Some combination of those points. Regardless, it seems the debate has been concluded.
I very briefly skimmed the rest of the post but it looks like the same boring ADHD ramblings. If you're going to troll, at least be entertaining about it.
Actually, you're *so* bad at this that I think you're probably not intentionally trolling, which makes it all the sadder, but it's just too darn hard to keep you on-topic so... au revoir.
I'm not reading all that self-indulgent twaddle. I read the first 20% and then very lightly skimmed the rest. You're doing it again: making vague, unclassified insinuations about whether you question the math or the WHO reports or the link between the virus and the birth defects or the likelihood of the virus spreading or whatever. Or possibly you're a much bigger misanthrope than me, and you think fewer human beings in the world would be a good thing. Is that it? Or are you just a harmless conspiracy nut who thinks the WHO is lying? Or are you a Christian scientist who thinks that all diseases are merely tests by God and this can be prayed away?
The numbers and the reports indicate suffering and the extent of future suffering. You are implicitly either denying the numbers, denying the reports or denying that the suffering would a bad thing. Whichever it is, you have a lot of explaining to do.
Is it a matter of "won't" or "can't" ? Is English your first or second language? I'm actually a little serious here; some of your constructions and errors are a bit strange.
To summarize: any sane person who understands the facts and numbers and values human life *at all* would not come out so strongly against the current rate of insecticide spraying, as you implicitly did at the start of all this. Calling me hysterical is not explaining yourself. And by the way, you really need to learn the difference between a misanthropic curmudgeon and someone who is hysterical. This is an important life lesson here.
Again, you should really back down from this approach, it's not helping you.
On the contrary, that gave me significant joy, and the fact that you are refusing to admit that you strung together a long series of misunderstandings and non-sequitur with that curious line about going to the doctor gives me even more joy. I am a curmudgeon, not a hand-wringing "think of the chlidren" middle-aged housewife, you silly twit. A hysterical person would probably get very mad or very hurt by your attitude thus far, whereas I'm rather enjoying myself. It's not enough enjoyment to actually read your post in its entirety, but still...
On that note, I will not be reading any reply that begins with any more of your delusional attempts at grandiose puffery or laughable retorts. Explain your bizarre statements, or you can go play with yourself alone in the dark you sad, cowardly little person.
The key point here, which maybe some people just aren't realizing, is that across the southeast there are hundreds of towns where the mosquito truck with flashing yellow lights, belching a fog of pesticide, is a regular occurrence. It came by like twice a month or something during mosquito season in the city where I spent part of my childhood. And my parents indicated that these trucks had been there doing the same thing long before I was born.
So if you're worried about these chemicals, whatever they are, fucking up the environment near major population centers... that ship has sailed. And it's unalloyed idiocy to claim that NOW is the proper moment for those trucks to be mothballed. If you want to abolish or tone down the use of pesticides, the proper way to do it is 1. Not in the early stages of an epidemic and 2. By campaigning for safe and species-targeted genetic technology to replace them.
Very few people around here seems to be getting either of these points, and as geeks I expect better of them.
I don't have an agenda. I'm against people who have agendas, at least in the sinister pro-delusion sense that you're using the word.
The environment is important and babies' brains not being fucked up is important. But in this case, the tradeoff between the two things is laughably lopsided. There is no current or probable insect holocaust. Any severe damage that it might do has already been done decades ago. Everything I can see indicates this would represent a very small blip on the radar. I'd be more worried about endangered amphibians than insects. The bugs will bounce right back if they're even harmed to begin with (i.e. much of the spraying can or could be larvicides, which the vast majority of insects are immune to)... but if you show me a highly endangered amphibian in the target area and I'll concede we should try to avoid mass spraying in that particular area. Sure. That's fine. But anything beyond that is idiocy. And I don't consider anti-idiocy to be an "agenda" any more than my breathing is an "agenda".
That said, I did manage to miss the pro-DDT post when I wrote that. That old chestnut is very, very dumb... but still only a tenth as stupid as claiming that we need to stop killing agricultural honeybees because if we don't, North American ecology will collapse and we'll all starve to death. A sentiment that at least half a dozen people have echoed around here. And there are three, count them THREE horribly incorrect assumptions built into that assertion.
I do appreciate the interest but I'm not sure I'm up for wading into the details right now. Suffice it to say I've had a toe in a few different industries and while there are a sizable number of good people and comfortable-seeming niches to be found, the ecosystems they've been embedded in (both the people and the niches) have been invariably unstable and hostile. During my last job search, I intentionally sought out the least stressful and most stable-sounding job I could find (even though it was low paying) and it turned out to be the worst of all. I may just have had a long run of bad luck, but as the years tick by it gets harder and harder to assume that theory. At this point, the most obvious answer seems to be that every career demands some level of dogmatism or delusion (to keep up one's self esteem, for starters) and politicking, not just occasionally but actually constantly. And it just so happens that my two worst skills are lying to people and self-delusion so... bummer. There are some other issues like health problems but, meh, I kinda don't want to get into the whole spiel right now. But I do appreciate the interest.
I'm not pitching a no-hitter. I mean, my baseball terminology is a little fuzzy but I don't think that 1/4 or 2/3 (depending on the metric) is a no-hitter. I will say that of the times I've realized that I'm wrong, I usually have to point it out myself. Most of the time the person I'm arguing with will miss the point entirely and yammer on about something irrelevant or even some other sub-point that I was entirely correct on. Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of success in going out of my way to point out my own flaws. It catches people off their guard, yes, but so far it doesn't seem to make them any more reasonable. Just a tad smug.
I don't actually think I'm an expert in anything. Jack of all trades, master of none... but usually better than a master of one. I briefly double-checked Wikipedia today just to confirm it but in all honesty the honeybee thing was entirely based on a couple hazy memories and a spur of the moment realization. I had read about European vs. African honeybees long ago (specifically, how so-called "killer bees" were simply crossbreeds between the two) and I had also read the same hand-wringing stuff about the plight of the honeybees and CCD and how important they were as pollinators, but I never put those two bits of information together until today. 'Wait a second... I never heard the phrase "American honeybee" or "American-African crossbreed" before.'
I can see how it might be astonishing to you, but it was very natural for me--"oh wait, I bet this whole grand story about honeybee ecosystem destruction is just an urban myth drummed up by journalists and concerned citizens, isn't it?" The fact that I'd heard people talk about it dozens of times and seen articles on it in major news outlets didn't seem relevant. Click click, read three sentences on Wikipedia that confirmed what I already knew about honeybees being non-native to the Americas and poof, I'm done. (The Europeans and/or the Africans may still have a serious problem, but I wouldn't take it for granted.) If that sounds like I'm bragging, I'm really not. I just have a default assumption that people are full of shit. I hope you don't take that too personally. I am too, I'm sure, although I like to think I'm at least somewhere down in the lower quartile of bullshit-affinity.
Here's an experiment everyone can try at home: at Thanksgiving, when someone brings up that "did you know turkey has a chemical in it that makes you sleepy" thing, explain in detail how that is a myth. The levels are far too low to have any noticeable effect and the real reason for post-meal sleepiness probably has more to do with the fact that most of the people at the table got up early and spent all day cooking, or got up early and spent all day driving, or spent the night at some crappy motel after spending the previous day driving, and then sat down and ate a really big meal and
5. The dead bees are trivial. 2.5M is a very tiny amount. And they aren't native to America. And the Southeast is not the breadbasket of America. And famine will not occur even if someone manages to kill every single honeybee on Earth--they're important to certain farmers, but they've never been that important. The most widely grown crops are the ones that don't require finding beekeepers to haul their hives out to your farm every year.
This hysteria is completely misplaced. The real ire needs to be directed at the Luddite jackoffs campaigning against the safer and more effective replacements for pesticides, I guess because messing with genes is something only the bad guys do in the movies.
I think Slashdot is officially dead. This is ridiculous. Every single comment +4 or +5 under this article is unadulterated stupidity. In no particular order:
1. You're not a epidemiologist or a doctor. So please shut up. You don't know anything.
2. Voluntarily introduce a brain-damaging disease to our children before we understand how, when and to what extent it damages their growing brains? I have a better idea: why don't you jump into the nearest wood chipper?
I usually frown on recommending self-harm to strangers on the internet, but this is one of the most hatefully stupid and sadistic things I've ever read. I really, really hope you don't have any children.
3. Inocculation?! Holy shit, you actually used the word inoculation. Ok, so, we don't DO that any more. The sane and compassionate parents don't, any way. Those parents who purposefully exposed their children to chickenpox 30 years ago? Morons. Dolts who needlessly tortured and even endangered their childrens' lives, imbeciles who never bothered to crunch the numbers to properly weigh the risks. Today, their spiritual descendants refuse to vaccinate their children because they'd prefer to believe the lies of a proven fraudster instead of decades of repeated clinical research.
4. Vaccination. What we do now, in the modern age, is vaccination. And in order to buy time for vaccines to be prepared, we spray. And while we spray, we should work on more environmentally friendly techniques like genetic splicing and sterilizing male mosquitoes with radiation and releasing them, both extremely safe and (at least in the case of the latter) proven methods of selectively eliminating non-native mosquitoes that ignorant assholes (who've apparently read one too many comic book involving radioactive spiders) are protesting against RIGHT NOW.
Argh. I'm done with this thread. This is obscene. Not a single reasonable voice has been modded up. I think Dice is doing this on purpose to drive clicks. I hope to god Dice is doing this on purpose. I dearly hope this isn't simply the current state of affairs among the technical- and scientifically-minded on the internet.
Can we possibly delay calling up Captain Planet with our rings for a little while? Can we please see if Zika can possibly be contained using limited spraying only in human-occupied areas? Can we please just wait a year or two until vaccines are developed? Can we please focus some of this righteous indignation towards the assholes who are RIGHT NOW waving signs and calling politicians to complain about the plans to use radiation-sterilized and genetically modified aedes egypti mosquitoes to selectively wipe out only that species of non-native and dangerous mosquito?
There are better tools than pesticides, but we're not going to suddenly stop all pesticide use in the early stages of one of the most alarming mosquito-vector disease outbreaks that the USA has ever seen. And using them for a few more years isn't going to magically do a ton of damage that we haven't already done in the past 50+ years of spraying.
This form of environmental hysteria is just SO DUMB. If you want to save the goddamn bugs then try supporting the techniques that can replace pesticides. This stands a much better chance of working vs. trying to argue with people that they should just lie back and accept that a certain portion of our kids are going to grow up brain-damaged from now on. Or peddling stupid myths about a famine occurring due to a few accidental incidents when a very small number (yes, 2.5M is pretty small) of non-native honeybees died.
Glad to see there's bullshit coming from both sides in this debate. DDT was never banned worldwide and from my understanding is still being used in parts of Africa where malaria is prevalent. I've no idea why this DDT myth is so popular with the ultra-libertarian crowd. It's actually a very poor example of environmentalism (supposedly) running amok.
So do we go back to ddt? Or just suffer the effects of Zika?
I suspect that may be just a teensy bit of a false dichotomy there. We have other pesticides at our disposal, vaccines are in the works, and gene splicing and sterile insect techniques have the potential (if properly funded) to wipe out specific species of mosquito like aedes egypti (not all species!) for good.
We desperately need more people arguing for a strong response to Zika, but not this kind of ignorant, tunnel-vision argument. The people in Key West, for example, are actively trying to block a realistic plan to kill off the non-native and dangerous aedes egypti using extremely safe species-specific techniques. Blathering about DDT is the last thing we need right now.
There may be harmful Zika hysteria somewhere in this country that's doing real damage but here, in this little discussion on slashdot, the only hysteria in sight is among people who do not understand the first thing about the environment, agriculture, epidemiology, or the wisdom of taking very small and very sensible temporary precautions (using chemicals that have already been widely used and studied for decades) while more data is collected and longer term plans forged.
I'm not going to go out and read that book just yet, so maybe you can send a few spoilers my way: was the problem that they were using too few condoms? Was that it? Was the problem they were testing blood too thoroughly before it was transfused?
Or, you know, was the hysteria just a problem of ignorant laypeople not understanding how it was transmitted, when in this case we already know for a fact that Zika has been transmitted both sexually and via mosquitoes?
Slashdot Mirror
So why *do* so many people use Gnome? As you said elsewhere, it's not as much as it was 10 years ago but still... I feel like they should be a niche player by now, but they're very much not. Does being Red Hat's default really carry *that* much weight? And why does RHAT support a desktop environment that's overtly hostile towards its users and (if what you say is true) third party devs as well?
I've heard nothing but good things about Qt too (even though I had the same initial assumptions about C++ vs. GTK's C), but GTK, too, seems to have already garnered too much momentum to stop. I just don't quite get how so much momentum can exist in an ecosystem where the alternatives are all free and they're all just single apt-get install (or yum equiv) away. I understand laziness, but surely when Gnome 3 rolled around the lazy option was to go KDE or XFCE and never look back?
I know I've said this like 4 times already in this thread but it's been bugging me for a long time now and I've yet to hear a plausible explanation, or really any explanation not resting entirely on the might of RHAT.
I can't be bothered to stay abreast of all of these latest ham-fisted attempt to be the anti-Windows, but were their workspaces markedly better than KDE's Activities, which I believe predated GNOME 3 by years? Is there anything else that you've found particularly useful? These are genuine questions, but if my tone is scornful I'm sorry... it can't be helped. From what I've seen, the GNOME team just destroys shit, blatantly mocks you if your use case doesn't match their vision (see their response to people who didn't want their laptop to auto-suspend when the lid is closed), and then runs three times slower after their "streamlining" is completed. And then they complain that you aren't sending them more money to fund further destruction (see: gnome-screensaver.) KDE at least has the decency of making most of their "innovations" optional.
It appeared to me that both GNOME 3 and Unity made the bizarre, very Microsoft-like choice of pretending to be a cell phone. Which at least sort of makes sense in Microsoft's case because a few people actually own Windows phones and there is an argument (not one I have much sympathy with, but it does exist) for unifying the UI. But virtually no one is using GNOME or Unity on a phone or daily-driver tablet.
If it helps you swallow my thesis a little better, let me elaborate that this more nuanced, comparative approach I'm advocating is a lot less antitheist than many popular strands of internet atheism. I'm not merely arguing for making this distinction between religious, but also among them.
* "within them", not among them.
Your contention that because there are different practices described as religions, different strains or offshoots of religions or practices similar to religions that are described as such, and that they impact people differently does not relate to a general contention that religion may have benefited societies. Its like saying because there are different tools with different uses that tools in general don't benefit society. I'm not sure how I could address it in any other context.
It "related to" (and I would say tends to argue against) a general contention that religion in general may have benefited societies. It's not just "difference practices"; it's vastly different attitudes and different functions. Let's just say for the sake of argument that Christianity is provably good for America. Sure. Fine. But I am not in favor of using this "fact" to argue that Salafi Islam is (or is probably) good for Saudi Arabia. Since they are both Abrahamic monotheisms there are lots of in-principle similarities, but in practice they aren't similar enough to make that assumption. And Christianity has even less in common with the practice of most eastern religions.
If it helps you swallow my thesis a little better, let me elaborate that this more nuanced, comparative approach I'm advocating is a lot less antitheist than many popular strands of internet atheism. I'm not merely arguing for making this distinction between religious, but also among them. I'm usually not in favor of saying a religion is bad (although sometimes it's pretty hard not to, as with Salafi); I'm more in favor of saying that totalitarian or dogmatic beliefs (both morality belief and science/historical belief) are bad. There are many things that are religious and yet not intrinsically dogmatic.
That too. Although I've found they're a little superfluous in recent years... for all of their modifications (discouraging non-Mint updates to the point of modifying Synaptic to remove the "update all" button, removing the apparmor profiles Ubuntu implemented, etc.), I'm not sure if they bring much to the table.
I guess they did come up with Cinnamon, which I guess might be good to look at if you want an eye-candy DE that doesn't hate you *and* you can't stand KDE. I personally discourage this approach, as I think that it merely encourages the GNOME devs who are in need of some good behavior-modifying feedback.
I tend to assume that simple and basic points are defensible, or at least explicable, in a sentence or two.
We can agree to disagree and all, but your smug refusal to provide an explanation, while you simultaneously insist that the explanation is in fact very basic and simple, deserves highlighting.
Fedora is a very upstream distribution, and also does very little modification to the bundled software.
Like Debian, Gentoo or Arch? Maybe I'm misinformed but I thought Ubuntu was the only one well known for that sort of thing.
They also contribute more back upstream then any other distribution does. Finally, The changes that happen in Fedora set the stage for Linux in general - the Fedora team does things first (PulseAudio, Network Manager, GNOME, systemd) and every one else follows.
And that's a positive, is it?
I don't mean to start a religious war here... at least, not on Poettering. I mean with systemd, whatever, there are some valid arguments on both sides there. But GNOME is some kind of bizarre BSDM experiment or something. They've managed to show less respect for their users than Microsoft. Removing as many user choices as possible has long been an explicit goal of theirs. And they've waged a unilateral war against screensavers, inexplicably and for no benefit that I can discern, for something like a decade now. For all their supposed streamlining they still aren't a lightweight or easy to configure DE, and since Gnome 3 they certainly haven't been the 'easy' option or the one you'd install on grandma's computer.
If Red Hat is responsible for that little list of yours, I think the wisest option would be to NOT support them, to be vocal about using XFCE or KDE or OpenRC or whatever, so that they are (eventually) forced to listen to their users and modify the priorities of some of those projects that they contribute so heavily to. And it's not like easy to use alternatives are especially hard to come by. Debian derivatives are a breeze to use and are available in LTS, rapid release or rolling release, with every major (and most minor) desktop environment not only supported but configured right of the box.
As an end user, the only really interesting thing I've seen out of RH in recent years is Docker (but I'm afraid it's nowhere near as interesting as Qubes.)
Fair enough. Momentum is a perfectly valid reason--change shouldn't be undertaken for the sake of change. The human lifespan is, after all, finite.
But that's just *you*. Fedora is still really popular and even recommended to noobs and I can't figure out why. (The continued popularity of GNOME is an even bigger mystery, but it's one that is closely tied to the mystery of Fedora.)
I can't quite square hating Ubuntu for being "dumbed-down" and promoting Red Hat. Their antics at the helm of GNOME alone plainly show the utter contempt in which they hold their users (which, to be fair, must be deserved to some degree--I mean, for whatever reason, people kept using GNOME.)
Ubuntu has a very handy five year LTS snapshot release style that RH has refused to match for their desktop product, which is only support for something like 18 months. They also have extended the dpkg system with PPAs which (last time I checked) Debian did not support out of the box.
Appreciating all of that and being a fan of Mir or the Unity desktop are two entirely different things. Just use a derivative like Xubuntu or Kubuntu instead. Problem solved. All of the advantages of Ubuntu (and by extension Debian) with few of the disadvantages.
That there are great differences doesn't negate my original point at all. Your interpretation of what those difference means are your own.
That original point being:
Virtually all societies have independently birthed religions. That doesn't happen by chance, or by virtue of a scheme. That happens because there is a real social benefit.
And you're shamelessly tap-dancing around my response to this point, which was that just because we have a fancy umbrella word that encompasses extremely different phenomena does not mean one can make hand-waving appeals to universality and nebulous "social benefit".
Some people carry sticks. Virtually all cultures have some sort of stick-carrying tradition. That didn't happen by chance, or by virtue of a scheme. That happened because there's a real social benefit to stick-carrying.
Do you think a statement like that is saying anything profound? Do you think it would be a compelling argument in a discussion about the merits of baseball, orthopedic support canes, warring (spear-wielding) tribes in the Amazon, violin bows, and/or selfie sticks ?
I hear they're tossing in a ballgag if you're into that sort of thing. Seriously though, what exactly is the appeal of Fedora? Familiarity via using RH Enterprise at work? I'm not saying I'm in love with Ubuntu in particular, but Fedora has long puzzled me in this regard. Beyond the (perhaps familiar to many) rpm ecosystem, what does it offer? It's not topping the list on life cycle, stability, user-friendliness, tweak-ability, respect for users or pragmatism (see their "not our problem; go yell at Adobe " response to breaking 64 bit flash a few years back), etc.
There has to be some niche I'm overlooking here. I just couldn't ever find a compelling reason to join this massive all-volunteer Red Hat beta testing team. Maybe it's just an easy way to get more up-to-date apps if you're too impatient for something like Gentoo or Arch? (Even then, I'm not certain it has much over the non-stable and non-LTS Debian-based options.)
The appeal to art (or music) is pretty weak, too. We'll never know the artwork Michaelangelo might have made if he wasn't forced to disguise his enthusiasm of naked men under a religious veneer. Also: not a lot of non-religious institutions had a budget on the scale of the Catholic church in those days.
As for music specifically, well, If today's music is any indication then the large majority of those people who are inspired to write music primarily because of their religion (as opposed to the ones who merely happened to be writing music in the days when popular music was frowned on or low class) are not... particularly... gifted.
Care to explain how you look at it? Or whom you're looking at? Japanese morality and attitudes towards life or the afterlife, specifically as influenced by Buddhism, are markedly different from the Christian outlook. I'm going by poll results here in addition to the general vibe one gets from their culture, as well as the formal roles religion plays. For example, the vast majority of Japanese do not attend Buddhist temples on a weekly basis of the ones that do, the resulting in experience is extremely different from your average evangelical church. The Buddhist political lobby is not much like the Christian lobby. Buddhist day care services, if indeed such things exist, are probably markedly different from Christian daycares. A devout Buddhist Japanese person probably has more in common with a Japanese atheist than a devout American Christian. Etc.
I think the differences clearly outweigh the similarities, and the few similarities they do share can be found in many beliefs and institutions not normally considered "religious". The attempt to draw strong parallels and appeals to universalism are naive ethnocentrism at best, and at worst it's a cynical religious apologism that is widely practiced by theists and fawning non-theists alike (witness the ridiculous translations, usually without footnote, of words like "heaven" and "God" that one usually finds in translations of holy texts from Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc.)
I haven't seen much of that. However, it is true that the phrase "dogmatic religion" is tragically underused, since it's usually only the dogmatic elements that we take issue with.
But you should realize that this issue isn't limited to the myths: Dogmatically asserted moral principles are usually more problematic than the myths. Whether or not you believe that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by Yahweh/Jehovah is of lesser importance than the question of whether you believe that homosexuality is a moral problem .
To quote Sam Harris: "religion" is a word like "sports." Just because we happen to have a word that encompasses shuffleboard and Mixed Martial Arts doesn't mean the two things are closely related. The affect Christianity has on your average American has very little in common with the affect Buddhism or Shinto has on your average Japanese person.
The line between religion and non-religion is also pretty arbitrary: it's quite possible to be a practicing Jew who doesn't believe in the supernatural (there are millions of them), yet we don't consider people who practice astrology or homeopathy to be members of a religion. The same goes to belong who dogmatic political parties, even when a party requires that all members profess a belief in mythical or irrational things.
Appealing to all of the other religions in the world to say that any particular religion must be doing good or arising from some kind of universal need should be treated with the same amount of skepticism as the phrase "ping pong is a safe sport; therefore, American football is a safe sport."
Explain what? That people are freaking out over a relatively harmless disease?
Gotcha. You're a conspiracy theorist who does not believe the data supporting a strong casual link between Zika and severe birth defects. Or maybe you're just so bad at math that you think that any news story including the figure "1%" is by definition minor and not worthy of any attention whatsoever. Or maybe you don't understand how this is the first new birth defect causing disease we've seen in a long time that is both highly virulent and difficult to detect. Some combination of those points. Regardless, it seems the debate has been concluded.
I very briefly skimmed the rest of the post but it looks like the same boring ADHD ramblings. If you're going to troll, at least be entertaining about it.
Actually, you're *so* bad at this that I think you're probably not intentionally trolling, which makes it all the sadder, but it's just too darn hard to keep you on-topic so... au revoir.
The numbers and the reports indicate suffering and the extent of future suffering. You are implicitly either denying the numbers, denying the reports or denying that the suffering would a bad thing. Whichever it is, you have a lot of explaining to do.
Is it a matter of "won't" or "can't" ? Is English your first or second language? I'm actually a little serious here; some of your constructions and errors are a bit strange.
To summarize: any sane person who understands the facts and numbers and values human life *at all* would not come out so strongly against the current rate of insecticide spraying, as you implicitly did at the start of all this. Calling me hysterical is not explaining yourself. And by the way, you really need to learn the difference between a misanthropic curmudgeon and someone who is hysterical. This is an important life lesson here.
Again, you should really back down from this approach, it's not helping you.
On the contrary, that gave me significant joy, and the fact that you are refusing to admit that you strung together a long series of misunderstandings and non-sequitur with that curious line about going to the doctor gives me even more joy. I am a curmudgeon, not a hand-wringing "think of the chlidren" middle-aged housewife, you silly twit. A hysterical person would probably get very mad or very hurt by your attitude thus far, whereas I'm rather enjoying myself. It's not enough enjoyment to actually read your post in its entirety, but still...
On that note, I will not be reading any reply that begins with any more of your delusional attempts at grandiose puffery or laughable retorts. Explain your bizarre statements, or you can go play with yourself alone in the dark you sad, cowardly little person.
The key point here, which maybe some people just aren't realizing, is that across the southeast there are hundreds of towns where the mosquito truck with flashing yellow lights, belching a fog of pesticide, is a regular occurrence. It came by like twice a month or something during mosquito season in the city where I spent part of my childhood. And my parents indicated that these trucks had been there doing the same thing long before I was born.
So if you're worried about these chemicals, whatever they are, fucking up the environment near major population centers... that ship has sailed. And it's unalloyed idiocy to claim that NOW is the proper moment for those trucks to be mothballed. If you want to abolish or tone down the use of pesticides, the proper way to do it is 1. Not in the early stages of an epidemic and 2. By campaigning for safe and species-targeted genetic technology to replace them.
Very few people around here seems to be getting either of these points, and as geeks I expect better of them.
I don't have an agenda. I'm against people who have agendas, at least in the sinister pro-delusion sense that you're using the word.
The environment is important and babies' brains not being fucked up is important. But in this case, the tradeoff between the two things is laughably lopsided. There is no current or probable insect holocaust. Any severe damage that it might do has already been done decades ago. Everything I can see indicates this would represent a very small blip on the radar. I'd be more worried about endangered amphibians than insects. The bugs will bounce right back if they're even harmed to begin with (i.e. much of the spraying can or could be larvicides, which the vast majority of insects are immune to)... but if you show me a highly endangered amphibian in the target area and I'll concede we should try to avoid mass spraying in that particular area. Sure. That's fine. But anything beyond that is idiocy. And I don't consider anti-idiocy to be an "agenda" any more than my breathing is an "agenda".
That said, I did manage to miss the pro-DDT post when I wrote that. That old chestnut is very, very dumb... but still only a tenth as stupid as claiming that we need to stop killing agricultural honeybees because if we don't, North American ecology will collapse and we'll all starve to death. A sentiment that at least half a dozen people have echoed around here. And there are three, count them THREE horribly incorrect assumptions built into that assertion.
I do appreciate the interest but I'm not sure I'm up for wading into the details right now. Suffice it to say I've had a toe in a few different industries and while there are a sizable number of good people and comfortable-seeming niches to be found, the ecosystems they've been embedded in (both the people and the niches) have been invariably unstable and hostile. During my last job search, I intentionally sought out the least stressful and most stable-sounding job I could find (even though it was low paying) and it turned out to be the worst of all. I may just have had a long run of bad luck, but as the years tick by it gets harder and harder to assume that theory. At this point, the most obvious answer seems to be that every career demands some level of dogmatism or delusion (to keep up one's self esteem, for starters) and politicking, not just occasionally but actually constantly. And it just so happens that my two worst skills are lying to people and self-delusion so... bummer. There are some other issues like health problems but, meh, I kinda don't want to get into the whole spiel right now. But I do appreciate the interest.
I'm not pitching a no-hitter. I mean, my baseball terminology is a little fuzzy but I don't think that 1/4 or 2/3 (depending on the metric) is a no-hitter. I will say that of the times I've realized that I'm wrong, I usually have to point it out myself. Most of the time the person I'm arguing with will miss the point entirely and yammer on about something irrelevant or even some other sub-point that I was entirely correct on. Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of success in going out of my way to point out my own flaws. It catches people off their guard, yes, but so far it doesn't seem to make them any more reasonable. Just a tad smug.
I don't actually think I'm an expert in anything. Jack of all trades, master of none... but usually better than a master of one. I briefly double-checked Wikipedia today just to confirm it but in all honesty the honeybee thing was entirely based on a couple hazy memories and a spur of the moment realization. I had read about European vs. African honeybees long ago (specifically, how so-called "killer bees" were simply crossbreeds between the two) and I had also read the same hand-wringing stuff about the plight of the honeybees and CCD and how important they were as pollinators, but I never put those two bits of information together until today. 'Wait a second... I never heard the phrase "American honeybee" or "American-African crossbreed" before.'
I can see how it might be astonishing to you, but it was very natural for me--"oh wait, I bet this whole grand story about honeybee ecosystem destruction is just an urban myth drummed up by journalists and concerned citizens, isn't it?" The fact that I'd heard people talk about it dozens of times and seen articles on it in major news outlets didn't seem relevant. Click click, read three sentences on Wikipedia that confirmed what I already knew about honeybees being non-native to the Americas and poof, I'm done. (The Europeans and/or the Africans may still have a serious problem, but I wouldn't take it for granted.) If that sounds like I'm bragging, I'm really not. I just have a default assumption that people are full of shit. I hope you don't take that too personally. I am too, I'm sure, although I like to think I'm at least somewhere down in the lower quartile of bullshit-affinity.
Here's an experiment everyone can try at home: at Thanksgiving, when someone brings up that "did you know turkey has a chemical in it that makes you sleepy" thing, explain in detail how that is a myth. The levels are far too low to have any noticeable effect and the real reason for post-meal sleepiness probably has more to do with the fact that most of the people at the table got up early and spent all day cooking, or got up early and spent all day driving, or spent the night at some crappy motel after spending the previous day driving, and then sat down and ate a really big meal and
oh, and:
5. The dead bees are trivial. 2.5M is a very tiny amount. And they aren't native to America. And the Southeast is not the breadbasket of America. And famine will not occur even if someone manages to kill every single honeybee on Earth--they're important to certain farmers, but they've never been that important. The most widely grown crops are the ones that don't require finding beekeepers to haul their hives out to your farm every year.
This hysteria is completely misplaced. The real ire needs to be directed at the Luddite jackoffs campaigning against the safer and more effective replacements for pesticides, I guess because messing with genes is something only the bad guys do in the movies.
I think Slashdot is officially dead. This is ridiculous. Every single comment +4 or +5 under this article is unadulterated stupidity. In no particular order:
1. You're not a epidemiologist or a doctor. So please shut up. You don't know anything.
2. Voluntarily introduce a brain-damaging disease to our children before we understand how, when and to what extent it damages their growing brains? I have a better idea: why don't you jump into the nearest wood chipper?
I usually frown on recommending self-harm to strangers on the internet, but this is one of the most hatefully stupid and sadistic things I've ever read. I really, really hope you don't have any children.
3. Inocculation?! Holy shit, you actually used the word inoculation. Ok, so, we don't DO that any more. The sane and compassionate parents don't, any way. Those parents who purposefully exposed their children to chickenpox 30 years ago? Morons. Dolts who needlessly tortured and even endangered their childrens' lives, imbeciles who never bothered to crunch the numbers to properly weigh the risks. Today, their spiritual descendants refuse to vaccinate their children because they'd prefer to believe the lies of a proven fraudster instead of decades of repeated clinical research.
4. Vaccination. What we do now, in the modern age, is vaccination. And in order to buy time for vaccines to be prepared, we spray. And while we spray, we should work on more environmentally friendly techniques like genetic splicing and sterilizing male mosquitoes with radiation and releasing them, both extremely safe and (at least in the case of the latter) proven methods of selectively eliminating non-native mosquitoes that ignorant assholes (who've apparently read one too many comic book involving radioactive spiders) are protesting against RIGHT NOW.
Argh. I'm done with this thread. This is obscene. Not a single reasonable voice has been modded up. I think Dice is doing this on purpose to drive clicks. I hope to god Dice is doing this on purpose. I dearly hope this isn't simply the current state of affairs among the technical- and scientifically-minded on the internet.
Can we possibly delay calling up Captain Planet with our rings for a little while? Can we please see if Zika can possibly be contained using limited spraying only in human-occupied areas? Can we please just wait a year or two until vaccines are developed? Can we please focus some of this righteous indignation towards the assholes who are RIGHT NOW waving signs and calling politicians to complain about the plans to use radiation-sterilized and genetically modified aedes egypti mosquitoes to selectively wipe out only that species of non-native and dangerous mosquito?
There are better tools than pesticides, but we're not going to suddenly stop all pesticide use in the early stages of one of the most alarming mosquito-vector disease outbreaks that the USA has ever seen. And using them for a few more years isn't going to magically do a ton of damage that we haven't already done in the past 50+ years of spraying.
This form of environmental hysteria is just SO DUMB. If you want to save the goddamn bugs then try supporting the techniques that can replace pesticides. This stands a much better chance of working vs. trying to argue with people that they should just lie back and accept that a certain portion of our kids are going to grow up brain-damaged from now on. Or peddling stupid myths about a famine occurring due to a few accidental incidents when a very small number (yes, 2.5M is pretty small) of non-native honeybees died.
So do we go back to ddt? Or just suffer the effects of Zika?
I suspect that may be just a teensy bit of a false dichotomy there. We have other pesticides at our disposal, vaccines are in the works, and gene splicing and sterile insect techniques have the potential (if properly funded) to wipe out specific species of mosquito like aedes egypti (not all species!) for good.
We desperately need more people arguing for a strong response to Zika, but not this kind of ignorant, tunnel-vision argument. The people in Key West, for example, are actively trying to block a realistic plan to kill off the non-native and dangerous aedes egypti using extremely safe species-specific techniques. Blathering about DDT is the last thing we need right now.
There may be harmful Zika hysteria somewhere in this country that's doing real damage but here, in this little discussion on slashdot, the only hysteria in sight is among people who do not understand the first thing about the environment, agriculture, epidemiology, or the wisdom of taking very small and very sensible temporary precautions (using chemicals that have already been widely used and studied for decades) while more data is collected and longer term plans forged.
I'm not going to go out and read that book just yet, so maybe you can send a few spoilers my way: was the problem that they were using too few condoms? Was that it? Was the problem they were testing blood too thoroughly before it was transfused?
Or, you know, was the hysteria just a problem of ignorant laypeople not understanding how it was transmitted, when in this case we already know for a fact that Zika has been transmitted both sexually and via mosquitoes?