Just like the present Gregorian Calendar,
the C&T Calendar Fully Respects the Fourth Commandment of the Bible.
You mean it fully respects, "Let the earth put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit-trees bearing fruit after their kind, wherein is the seed thereof, upon the earth." (Genesis 1:11) Or did you perhaps mean the fourth commandment of the ten commandments?
I know, I know, geekery, pedantry, and religious knowledge can be a dangerous mix.:)
Just to be really pedantic, the fourth commandment of the ten commandments isn't given to calendars at all, but to people (and people of a different ethnicity than myself, at that).
As evidenced by the title of the article. Is this about the success of Linux-based operating systems, or is it about the success of Free Software/Open Source Software (FOSS)?
At the moment my preferred operating system is GNU/Linux. But I personally could care less about the ultimate success or failure of Linux and GNU per se. What I desire is the victory of FOSS over proprietary software. In fact I see this victory as inevitable. I support it with minor efforts when I can, although seeing the triumph of FOSS as inevitable means I do not feel the need to completely abandon or wage war on proprietary software at present.
The question of FOSS vs. proprietary software makes sense. The question of Windows vs. Linux makes sense. To me, the question of Windows vs. FOSS, posed by the article in the text, does not make that much sense. I desire FOSS to take over not because of anything specific I have against Windows, but because of what I have against proprietary software. If GNU/Linux died but FOSS prevailed through ReactOS (Open Source Windows NT/2000/XP clone, for those who haven't read the news lately), I would be content. (Although only because ReactOS will surely support a POSIX layer and/or Cygwin so I can get the UNIXy goodness I love as a geek.)
The apps I want can run pretty much on any operating system. From/bin/ls to Firefox to perl, I can pretty much make anything run on any hardware under any OS. (At least, as long as I have access to Cygwin. And Cygwin is proof-of-concept to show how these apps could be made to run on an OS that was neither UNIX nor Windows, if such a beast still existed any more.) Thus, the issue of which operating system will win out is not that big a deal to me any more as long as the OS is a free one! Yes, Windows has some design and security issues. But if the winning operating system were a free Windows (either through ReactOS or Microsoft actually releasing Windows as FOSS), it could be fixed by virtue of the fact that it would be free. (Yeah, I know; you and I would prefer to stick with UNIX for many reasons. After all, why reinvent the wheel? But that's a secondary concern to me.)
So, let's look at history for a minute. When Richard Stallman launched the GNU movement, there were no free operating systems for him to build on. (Barring ITS, which I'm not entirely sure was free, and which he recognized would never be acceptable to the general software using public.) So he chose a proprietary operating system that he thought would stand the greatest success and begin to replace it with free software, piece by piece. In the end he replaced almost every component with GNU utilities and, as we know, when development stalled on the GNU kernel somebody else who was interested stepped in and donated a Free UNIX kernel... and the rest was history. Suddenly the world finally had a Free Operating system (and with three BSDs, AtheOS, FreeDOS, and a handful of other alternatives, the world now has many, many Free Operating systems in various states of viability).
Until such time as a completely Free operating system was available, the GNU project built, tested, and ran each GNU component on proprietary operating systems. In fact it was the attempt to keep such software portable to the vast incompatible variety of proprietary UNIX implementations that led to the development of GNU autoconfig, the program that writes those handy configure scripts some of us use every day.
The general philosophy was that the author or maintainer of a component would make a decent level of effort toward keeping a Free component running on reasonably recent proprietary operating systems, assisted by those who had a vested interest in doing so. If a particular developer thought AIX 3.2 was just too wonky to support, he'd leave it out of the supported systems list and make no effort on it. Anybody else could pick it up and run with it. If their changes to port said component to AIX 3.2 fit in well with the rest
Thank you. I just purchased the game and the 5-6 player expansion for $48 on ebay (including shipping). This game looks very interesting and I know my family and my in-laws (all of whom love a good board game) are going to enjoy it this holiday season.
Thanks for introducing me to this very interesting game. I've been looking for something like this for years, actually.
Your list excludes one important item on the checklist of going to war against Iraq:
(X) Has indicated a desire to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States.
In the opinion of some, this is not true about China.
That is the first reason why war was made with Iraq and not China, for those who want to actually analyze how the hawks are thinking rather than tell the hawks how they are thinking and make fun of strawmen.
The second item missing from the list is:
(X) The U.S. is in a military position to actually be able to win a confrontation with them.
Hopefully everyone is agreed that that is not true about China.
One final reason is:
(X) Has violated UN resolutions that carried an explicit threat of force to respond to noncompliance.
To be honest, I don't know if that is true about China or not.
So, to summarize, despite the resemblance between China (and any number of other regimes) to Iraq, the U.S. has not gone to war with China because in the opinion of some there has been no indication of desire to wreak mass destruction on the United States and because there would be no hope of effecting change militarily since the United States could not win such a conflict.
Donating is a great idea, and not Communist, at least in the traditional sense. Donations are voluntary. Communism as usually practiced is mandatory. I support people's right to voluntarily form a communistic society as long as participation is not compulsory.
Er, giving embryos created by one couple to another. Not sure if "transplant" is the technical term for that or not.
took special measures not to create any more embryos than were actually necessary
You mean, they're not reproducing?
I know how you feel; I'm a pedant, too. Actually necessary for purpose X, where purpose X was unspecified in my sentence. You might have taken purpose X to be "survival," in which case, of course, no embryo creation is necessary. In this case, purpose X is reproduction, where at least one embryo is going to be necessary.
Angling for private funding is all well and good, but there's a severe lack of funding for pure science; corporate sponsors are far more interested in applied science. Applied science is important, but pure science is equally important and would suffer badly if it weren't for federal funding.
Perhaps the problem is caused by the government unfairly intervening in the market by funding pure science research in the first place? If industry could not build off of public-tax-dollar-funded pure science research, then they would have to do SOME of it on their own.
To ban these stem cells from research is hypocritical, at root--if the issue at hand is the destruction of a human life, they should be fighting just as hard to outlaw the practice of freezing embryos in the first place
You're right. But since freezing is more like hitting the pause button, it's the destruction of embryos that is the issue, rather than the freezing.
something that'd otherwise be flushed down the drain without so much as a second thought.
Yahoo had a story on or about September 17, 2004 that indicated that practice on this is far more varied than you or I would have expected. Clinics don't all just throw them down the tubes. Some actually require that the parents of the embryos be present, some actually hold a quasi-religious funeral service upon their destruction, some require that the embryos be donated to people who want children. There was even one clinic that said they took special measures not to create any more embryos than were actually necessary, and that they had people crossing state lines to use their services because of their beliefs. I wish the article was still around; it was very surprising.
Why should the government do this? Because the results of fundamental research must be completely open and available to all scientists and entrepeneurs who would do something useful with it. Industry will *never* do that.
Of course, my solution to this problem is to eliminate copyright and patents...:)
Seems like a government solution to a government caused problem.
And I don't deny homeless people exist. But come on. There are 300 million people in N American and nearly all have a place to live, despite bad ol' private propery.
If nobody owns property, then everyone is, by definition, homeless. If privately-owned property is a bad thing, then the problem is NOT that there are some number of homeless/propertyless people; the problem would be that there is anyone who DOES own property/have a home. Apparently the solution such people want to foist on us is that noone should have a home.
My recommendation is buy a $100 Tivo. All Tivos come with "basic service" which gives something like three days of programming information. You don't even want that... you wouldn't even have to hook it up (to the phone line). My understanding is that any Tivo can accept a request of the form you describe: "Record Channel X beginning at time Y and ending at time Z." Ours certainly did before it finished downloading programming information for the first time (of course ours was the fancy $700 version that would record DVDs).
I think you can get exactly what you want now, for $100. I'm considering getting exactly that for our bedroom TV, in addition to the Tivo we already have in the living room.
Concession has absolutely no legal implications. It just means you'll quit putting any resources into contesting the election. (i.e., you won't ask for recounts, you'll tell your supporters it's over and you fought a good fight, etc.). If you remember, Al Gore actually conceded and then took his concession back.:)
The election still is not final. Each state will certify its election results through its own legal process which may differ from state to state. I don't think that's complete in most (any?) states, yet. The popular vote counts are only final when that certification process happens, so if recounts started showing up for Kerry, the election could still change.
Even after that, the electoral college doesn't meet for awhile, and it's not over until they vote.
It's a race condition, meaning it depends on timing. It's not always the case that the timing falls out the same way on each load, which means that some users never see the bug, some see it only intermittently (that's how it started for me), and some see it almost every time (that's how it is for me now). It may very well depend on variables we could never hope to control such as where exactly you are on the net. I hear many users report that the workaround is to reload, but that does not at all work from my set of circumstances.
The fact that this is a race condition made it hard to debug, I understand, but they do in fact have a fix ready in the trunk. It was delayed because the fix was not ready in time to get it into 1.0 with the appropriate amount of testing time (in order to do that it probably should have been incorporated into the 1.0PR). If I understand correctly, the HTML that causes the problem is not invalid, and the problem does affect some sites besides slashdot, at least for people who read sites besides slashdot.
I do not have Flash installed, and there are still a small number of popups getting through. Not enough to be annoying, yet, but I figure it will irritate enough Firefox developers it won't last long.:)
I don't want a better popup blocker (AFAIK - It is absolutely perfect as is!).
Actually at least one news site I know of has discovered a hole in Firefox's popup blocking (as of 1.0PR, and I doubt the official 1.0 incorporated a fix, even if there might be one on the trunk). I'm sure both you and I would like to see one "better" in the sense that that hole is plugged.
Also, some sites do Javascript "ad-overs," and I'd like to see a block for those. Not quite sure how that can be done yet without crippling Javascript, but I have confidence the Firefox people will find a way.
My list of reasons to like Firefox is full of features I didn't initially think were valuable, or at least wouldn't have initially thought of as something to add:
Find as you type
Tabbed browsing (admittedly available elsewhere)
Live bookmarks
Ability to detect and offer to kill slow-running Javascript that is crippling load times
Real programmers install Cygwin on their computer and search it with find piped to xargs grep.
(Actually, real programmers don't use Windows at all except when forced to... I suppose REAL real programmers mount their FAT32 or NTFS systems over on UNIX and use find piped to xargs grep.)
It boils down to, I put an X next to who I want on a piece of paper.
How much harder does it have to be.
Sorry; given that some people couldn't handle, "It boils down to I punch out a hole next to who I want on a piece of paper," I'm not sure that's simple enough...
Can you help with my complaint? A few versions back, I became overjoyed at the fact that I could simply start typing, and Firefox (Firebird back then) would find any link that matched what I was typing. If I wanted to find non-hyperlinked text, I could hit slash first and it would search all text, not just links. This distinction was important to me and became an ingrained habit.
When I upgraded to 1.0PR, suddenly I couldn't find links. I found the menu option you refer to and turned it on, but now when I begin typing, it searches all text, not just links. How can I get back the old behavior? Why was this feature removed?
I admit that's an ancient version of Perl, but unfortunately that's what I'm stuck with here. At home it might say perl5.8.5 or so.
I realized a long time ago that I'd better have every program I wrote tied to specific installation of a specific version of Perl, to avoid problems in installing future versions or new modules. Has nothing to do with Perl 6; it's just good configuration management. I can at any time install another perl without interfering with the one installed or with any programs that are using it (and I intend to play this card at work at some point).
While that's pure horror to the average American, I think that's pretty swell.
I think that about sums it up. The first time I heard the idea, I thought it was madness. The next forty-nine times, I still thought it was madness. But sometime between then (six years ago?) and now, I realized it was the only correct and the only ethical way for things to be.
Thanks for the pointer to anarcho-syndicalism. My thinking is still in development. Four years ago, I was a "laissez-faire capitalist." Then I finally become a "libertarian." This year I accepted the "anarchist" label. (Through all this I still consider myself conservative and vote in the Republican party... but that is changing. There are anarcho-libs who came at it from the left side, and those who came at it from the right side. It takes us all awhile to come to grips with all the implications of the beliefs, but in the end we come out remarkably the same, and firm allies.)
Slashdot Mirror
Just like the present Gregorian Calendar, the C&T Calendar Fully Respects the Fourth Commandment of the Bible.
You mean it fully respects, "Let the earth put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit-trees bearing fruit after their kind, wherein is the seed thereof, upon the earth." (Genesis 1:11) Or did you perhaps mean the fourth commandment of the ten commandments?
I know, I know, geekery, pedantry, and religious knowledge can be a dangerous mix. :)
Just to be really pedantic, the fourth commandment of the ten commandments isn't given to calendars at all, but to people (and people of a different ethnicity than myself, at that).
Despite the fact that his site said slashdot rules the other day, Sollog has now declared slashdot guilty of religious hate crimes. :)
As evidenced by the title of the article. Is this about the success of Linux-based operating systems, or is it about the success of Free Software/Open Source Software (FOSS)?
At the moment my preferred operating system is GNU/Linux. But I personally could care less about the ultimate success or failure of Linux and GNU per se. What I desire is the victory of FOSS over proprietary software. In fact I see this victory as inevitable. I support it with minor efforts when I can, although seeing the triumph of FOSS as inevitable means I do not feel the need to completely abandon or wage war on proprietary software at present.
The question of FOSS vs. proprietary software makes sense. The question of Windows vs. Linux makes sense. To me, the question of Windows vs. FOSS, posed by the article in the text, does not make that much sense. I desire FOSS to take over not because of anything specific I have against Windows, but because of what I have against proprietary software. If GNU/Linux died but FOSS prevailed through ReactOS (Open Source Windows NT/2000/XP clone, for those who haven't read the news lately), I would be content. (Although only because ReactOS will surely support a POSIX layer and/or Cygwin so I can get the UNIXy goodness I love as a geek.)
The apps I want can run pretty much on any operating system. From /bin/ls to Firefox to perl, I can pretty much make anything run on any hardware under any OS. (At least, as long as I have access to Cygwin. And Cygwin is proof-of-concept to show how these apps could be made to run on an OS that was neither UNIX nor Windows, if such a beast still existed any more.) Thus, the issue of which operating system will win out is not that big a deal to me any more as long as the OS is a free one! Yes, Windows has some design and security issues. But if the winning operating system were a free Windows (either through ReactOS or Microsoft actually releasing Windows as FOSS), it could be fixed by virtue of the fact that it would be free. (Yeah, I know; you and I would prefer to stick with UNIX for many reasons. After all, why reinvent the wheel? But that's a secondary concern to me.)
So, let's look at history for a minute. When Richard Stallman launched the GNU movement, there were no free operating systems for him to build on. (Barring ITS, which I'm not entirely sure was free, and which he recognized would never be acceptable to the general software using public.) So he chose a proprietary operating system that he thought would stand the greatest success and begin to replace it with free software, piece by piece. In the end he replaced almost every component with GNU utilities and, as we know, when development stalled on the GNU kernel somebody else who was interested stepped in and donated a Free UNIX kernel ... and the rest was history. Suddenly the world finally had a Free Operating system (and with three BSDs, AtheOS, FreeDOS, and a handful of other alternatives, the world now has many, many Free Operating systems in various states of viability).
Until such time as a completely Free operating system was available, the GNU project built, tested, and ran each GNU component on proprietary operating systems. In fact it was the attempt to keep such software portable to the vast incompatible variety of proprietary UNIX implementations that led to the development of GNU autoconfig, the program that writes those handy configure scripts some of us use every day.
The general philosophy was that the author or maintainer of a component would make a decent level of effort toward keeping a Free component running on reasonably recent proprietary operating systems, assisted by those who had a vested interest in doing so. If a particular developer thought AIX 3.2 was just too wonky to support, he'd leave it out of the supported systems list and make no effort on it. Anybody else could pick it up and run with it. If their changes to port said component to AIX 3.2 fit in well with the rest
Thank you. I just purchased the game and the 5-6 player expansion for $48 on ebay (including shipping). This game looks very interesting and I know my family and my in-laws (all of whom love a good board game) are going to enjoy it this holiday season.
Thanks for introducing me to this very interesting game. I've been looking for something like this for years, actually.
Your list excludes one important item on the checklist of going to war against Iraq:
(X) Has indicated a desire to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States.
In the opinion of some, this is not true about China.
That is the first reason why war was made with Iraq and not China, for those who want to actually analyze how the hawks are thinking rather than tell the hawks how they are thinking and make fun of strawmen.
The second item missing from the list is:
(X) The U.S. is in a military position to actually be able to win a confrontation with them.
Hopefully everyone is agreed that that is not true about China.
One final reason is:
(X) Has violated UN resolutions that carried an explicit threat of force to respond to noncompliance.
To be honest, I don't know if that is true about China or not.
So, to summarize, despite the resemblance between China (and any number of other regimes) to Iraq, the U.S. has not gone to war with China because in the opinion of some there has been no indication of desire to wreak mass destruction on the United States and because there would be no hope of effecting change militarily since the United States could not win such a conflict.
Donating is a great idea, and not Communist, at least in the traditional sense. Donations are voluntary. Communism as usually practiced is mandatory. I support people's right to voluntarily form a communistic society as long as participation is not compulsory.
Are you telling me they're transplanting embryos?
Er, giving embryos created by one couple to another. Not sure if "transplant" is the technical term for that or not.
took special measures not to create any more embryos than were actually necessary
You mean, they're not reproducing?
I know how you feel; I'm a pedant, too. Actually necessary for purpose X, where purpose X was unspecified in my sentence. You might have taken purpose X to be "survival," in which case, of course, no embryo creation is necessary. In this case, purpose X is reproduction, where at least one embryo is going to be necessary.
Angling for private funding is all well and good, but there's a severe lack of funding for pure science; corporate sponsors are far more interested in applied science. Applied science is important, but pure science is equally important and would suffer badly if it weren't for federal funding.
Perhaps the problem is caused by the government unfairly intervening in the market by funding pure science research in the first place? If industry could not build off of public-tax-dollar-funded pure science research, then they would have to do SOME of it on their own.
To ban these stem cells from research is hypocritical, at root--if the issue at hand is the destruction of a human life, they should be fighting just as hard to outlaw the practice of freezing embryos in the first place
You're right. But since freezing is more like hitting the pause button, it's the destruction of embryos that is the issue, rather than the freezing.
something that'd otherwise be flushed down the drain without so much as a second thought.
Yahoo had a story on or about September 17, 2004 that indicated that practice on this is far more varied than you or I would have expected. Clinics don't all just throw them down the tubes. Some actually require that the parents of the embryos be present, some actually hold a quasi-religious funeral service upon their destruction, some require that the embryos be donated to people who want children. There was even one clinic that said they took special measures not to create any more embryos than were actually necessary, and that they had people crossing state lines to use their services because of their beliefs. I wish the article was still around; it was very surprising.
Why should the government do this? Because the results of fundamental research must be completely open and available to all scientists and entrepeneurs who would do something useful with it. Industry will *never* do that.
Of course, my solution to this problem is to eliminate copyright and patents... :)
Seems like a government solution to a government caused problem.
And I don't deny homeless people exist. But come on. There are 300 million people in N American and nearly all have a place to live, despite bad ol' private propery.
If nobody owns property, then everyone is, by definition, homeless. If privately-owned property is a bad thing, then the problem is NOT that there are some number of homeless/propertyless people; the problem would be that there is anyone who DOES own property/have a home. Apparently the solution such people want to foist on us is that noone should have a home.
My recommendation is buy a $100 Tivo. All Tivos come with "basic service" which gives something like three days of programming information. You don't even want that ... you wouldn't even have to hook it up (to the phone line). My understanding is that any Tivo can accept a request of the form you describe: "Record Channel X beginning at time Y and ending at time Z." Ours certainly did before it finished downloading programming information for the first time (of course ours was the fancy $700 version that would record DVDs).
I think you can get exactly what you want now, for $100. I'm considering getting exactly that for our bedroom TV, in addition to the Tivo we already have in the living room.
Concession has absolutely no legal implications. It just means you'll quit putting any resources into contesting the election. (i.e., you won't ask for recounts, you'll tell your supporters it's over and you fought a good fight, etc.). If you remember, Al Gore actually conceded and then took his concession back. :)
The election still is not final. Each state will certify its election results through its own legal process which may differ from state to state. I don't think that's complete in most (any?) states, yet. The popular vote counts are only final when that certification process happens, so if recounts started showing up for Kerry, the election could still change.
Even after that, the electoral college doesn't meet for awhile, and it's not over until they vote.
Awesome! Congratulations; my compliments, respect, and gratitude for the work you are doing.
An easier fix if you have a scrollwheel mouse is control+wheelup followed by control+wheeldown.
It's a race condition, meaning it depends on timing. It's not always the case that the timing falls out the same way on each load, which means that some users never see the bug, some see it only intermittently (that's how it started for me), and some see it almost every time (that's how it is for me now). It may very well depend on variables we could never hope to control such as where exactly you are on the net. I hear many users report that the workaround is to reload, but that does not at all work from my set of circumstances.
The fact that this is a race condition made it hard to debug, I understand, but they do in fact have a fix ready in the trunk. It was delayed because the fix was not ready in time to get it into 1.0 with the appropriate amount of testing time (in order to do that it probably should have been incorporated into the 1.0PR). If I understand correctly, the HTML that causes the problem is not invalid, and the problem does affect some sites besides slashdot, at least for people who read sites besides slashdot.
I do not have Flash installed, and there are still a small number of popups getting through. Not enough to be annoying, yet, but I figure it will irritate enough Firefox developers it won't last long. :)
I don't want a better popup blocker (AFAIK - It is absolutely perfect as is!).
Actually at least one news site I know of has discovered a hole in Firefox's popup blocking (as of 1.0PR, and I doubt the official 1.0 incorporated a fix, even if there might be one on the trunk). I'm sure both you and I would like to see one "better" in the sense that that hole is plugged.
Also, some sites do Javascript "ad-overs," and I'd like to see a block for those. Not quite sure how that can be done yet without crippling Javascript, but I have confidence the Firefox people will find a way.
My list of reasons to like Firefox is full of features I didn't initially think were valuable, or at least wouldn't have initially thought of as something to add:
Real programmers install Cygwin on their computer and search it with find piped to xargs grep.
(Actually, real programmers don't use Windows at all except when forced to... I suppose REAL real programmers mount their FAT32 or NTFS systems over on UNIX and use find piped to xargs grep.)
It boils down to, I put an X next to who I want on a piece of paper. How much harder does it have to be.
Sorry; given that some people couldn't handle, "It boils down to I punch out a hole next to who I want on a piece of paper," I'm not sure that's simple enough...
Thank you!
Can you help with my complaint? A few versions back, I became overjoyed at the fact that I could simply start typing, and Firefox (Firebird back then) would find any link that matched what I was typing. If I wanted to find non-hyperlinked text, I could hit slash first and it would search all text, not just links. This distinction was important to me and became an ingrained habit.
When I upgraded to 1.0PR, suddenly I couldn't find links. I found the menu option you refer to and turned it on, but now when I begin typing, it searches all text, not just links. How can I get back the old behavior? Why was this feature removed?
The first line of most of my Perl programs is
I admit that's an ancient version of Perl, but unfortunately that's what I'm stuck with here. At home it might say perl5.8.5 or so.
I realized a long time ago that I'd better have every program I wrote tied to specific installation of a specific version of Perl, to avoid problems in installing future versions or new modules. Has nothing to do with Perl 6; it's just good configuration management. I can at any time install another perl without interfering with the one installed or with any programs that are using it (and I intend to play this card at work at some point).
That's surprising because most people here really liked Episodes I and II. You must be the only exception.
ROTFL!!!!
Thank you for bringing a big grin to my face.
While that's pure horror to the average American, I think that's pretty swell.
I think that about sums it up. The first time I heard the idea, I thought it was madness. The next forty-nine times, I still thought it was madness. But sometime between then (six years ago?) and now, I realized it was the only correct and the only ethical way for things to be.
Thanks for the pointer to anarcho-syndicalism. My thinking is still in development. Four years ago, I was a "laissez-faire capitalist." Then I finally become a "libertarian." This year I accepted the "anarchist" label. (Through all this I still consider myself conservative and vote in the Republican party ... but that is changing. There are anarcho-libs who came at it from the left side, and those who came at it from the right side. It takes us all awhile to come to grips with all the implications of the beliefs, but in the end we come out remarkably the same, and firm allies.)