As for Apache vs. IIS showing that Windows is gaining anything, it doesn't necessarily do that. Apache, as I mentioned, runs just fine on Windows. It's quite possible a good chunk of those Apache vs. IIS numbers would be Windows either way. If some of those are conversions and not just growth patterns, some could be Apache on Windows to IIS on Windows.
Also, there are methodology questions besides those you already raised.
When you're looking at sites served by a particular web server, are they counting bunches of subdomains for each site that are needed because the main server doesn't scale as well?
Do they count by IP address of the web server and the domain for every server in DNS, or just by one hit to each domain? Again, servers that scale better need fewer servers for the same traffic.
Are they considering sites with more than one domain name pointing to the same site (same virtualhost, etc) as separate sites served by the platform?
Are they considering the network layout of companies that use reverse proxy configurations so that they have fewer public-facing web servers than servers actually generating pages?
I'm sure someone can come along and add to our combined list even more.
The State of Illinois case study is bullshit. I worked as a contractor for the Department of Human Services in Springfield for a year just a few years back. My wife's stepdad worked for Department of Public Aid as a contractor for years. He's now DPA staff because the AFSCME union strongarmed the state into getting rid of knowledgeable contractors and giving the work to state employees. They couldn't do it with state employees, so he became one to continue doing his old job for additional pay plus benefits. There's a budget solution for you...
The company I worked for also had contracts with Corrections, Courts, State Police, Public Aid, and some other state agencies, so I sometimes went to locations for those as well.
Anyway, Novell wasn't the source of the "desktop productivity solution" when I did desktop support for them. They ran Groupwise (which does email and calendars) at DHS. They also ran Office and in some cases also WordPerfect Suite. They ran Crystal Reports when needed. There is, or was anyway, an entire subdepartment of DHS that handles creating, modifying, warehousing, and distributing paper forms. Those people had additional software for that. There were mainframes in the Harris building (the main DHS office center on South Main St. East) and many users had terminal emulation packages to access that. In no way did they switch everything from Novell to Microsoft on the desktop.
The servers were NT 4, Novell 4 and 5, some NT 3.5, some commercial Unix on Alpha (although that was mostly being replaced with Win2k), and the IBM mainframe stuff. There were contractors running the actual servers in every case. Most of them worked for the same company I did.
CMS is an agency that's supposed to consolidate resources across the state for the other agencies to improve security, decrease waste, and "improve" accountability (although that has never seemed an appropriate goal for the convicted Republican George Ryan nor the current governor Democrat Rod Blagojevich either one). We had to have our badges for DHS buildings issued through CMS, for example. When there was a network outage, DHS had to bother CMS to bother the phone companies. Real efficient and cost effective, that.
The State Police had Avid equipment and such for reconstructing accidents. I'm sure Microsoft Windows Movie Maker hasn't entirely displaced that. They might have replaced some of the serial dumb terminals in the maximum security prisons with Windows PCs, but I'm not sure you'd want something with lots of little voids and such in with the inmates. The schools for the visually impaired and for the deaf already ran Windows PCs for students and teachers, as did the developmental and mental health centers (all part of DHS). The department of the courts had Windows PCs. The local Office of Rehabilitative Services (part of DHS) offices had Windows and OS/2 PCs, and sometimes were not even on the statewide Novell networks for DHS. DCFS (part of DHS) had Windows PCs.
Other than replacing Groupwise server and client with Exchange and Outlook and upgrading the desktops to newer versions of Windows (which was always being done anyway, as any PC more than 3 or 4 years old goes to CMS auction to the public), I'm not sure what they've really done for DHS. They've traded Novell's superior print server, client management (ZenWorks/snapshots anyone?), firewall (Bordermanager worked well), years of employee training, and working with certified consultants familiar with the old network all for Windows printer sharing, Windows remote client management (if they're doing that at all), probably going to Cisco's firewall solutions as Microsoft's suck, having to retrain their workforce, and having to find new contractors (or hire more unionized employees away from consulting companies).
All this is from a state that can't pay Medicaid on time and has run pharmacies out of business. It's a state that uses taxpayer money to pay government employees to campaign for their elected bosses. The federal government is very concer
No. That's what makes it interesting, is that there's no way to shine a light on such a big area.;-)
I don't think they're saying it's necessarily like this now or that it will continue to be like this. What they're saying is that right now, as observed, this region of space shows these odd properties. That means that at the time the light and other radiation being observed around it would have passed by it or through it, that it was huge and as far as our scientists know very odd. I don't think any long-term study of it is required to find out that much.
I think you mean cold fusion, don't you? Fusion of hydrogen is pretty well established. Well, for that matter, usable terrestrial power plants using fusion seem to be in this file for now, too. But in stars, we're pretty sure it works.
Copyright can be enforced as criminal (breaking the statutory law that it is and all that) and as civil (for the damages caused by the copying).
IANAL, but that's basically how it goes. And no, being convicted and sued is not double jeopardy. Only being tried more than once for the criminal proceeding is.
Those are very good points. One doesn't necessarily have to beat AMD or Intel at desktop and server lines to be successful, though. Intel, Zilog, Freescale, TI, AMD, Via, Sun, IBM, Fujitsu, and more have programmable processors that sit nowhere near the desktop CPU market. Even those companies at or near the top of that market make chips for motherboards, disk drives, Ethernet adapters, cars, coffee makers, industrial control, etc.
The great thing about a new concept from outside established players is that it can be integrated with the best of the technology through buyouts, mergers, or licensing deals if the concept is worthwhile. It's much harder for the established leaders to come up with a wholly new idea than for the people with the new idea to get some manufacturing tech. A collaboration could be a big win for everyone involved in it.
I'm sure c.l.f is not a lot different in many ways from c.l.lisp, c.l.haskell, c.l.perl.misc, or any other language newsgroup where there is a lot of personality and promotion within the language community. There are Lisp machines, there are Java processors, the BASIC stamp, and Perl replacements for most of the Unix / GNU command line utilities (partly to have a Unixish system with little more than a C library and a Perl interpreter and partly to bring these tools to non-Unix environments easily). The fact that Forth is closer to the level of normal hardware than most dialects of Lisp or Basic and much closer than Java is means it may actually be a lot more flexible than systems designed with those other languages in mind. However, there are always those zealots who take anything good too far.
It's super easy to get from most modern languages into Forth via translation. Forth is very similar to postfix assembly for most architectures. Compiler texts sometimes show how to get from high-level languages to machine code via building a syntax tree followed by traversing the tree and producing postfix pseudo-assembly. Outputting Forth would be no more difficult.
Some Forth implementations are actually implemented so that words in the Forth dictionary are directly executable machine code even on standard multi-purpose CPUs.
Registration, tracking, seizure, possibly trade-ins for cash or shoes, rewards, undercover officers, and well-paid informants, just like they are doing with guns, drugs, syringes, and like the US once tried for nearly a decade with alcohol will be the tools of choice if this comes to pass.
First you register new ones, then you make people have a license to handle them, then you make it so that old, pre-registration ones have to be registered or destroyed. Then you take away licenses for everyone but government cronies and a few well-connected big businesses. You enforce horrible anti-freedom laws like "complicity", so that people are afraid not to turn their neighbors in. You pay rewards to people who turn people in for owning or using one. You place officers into circles of people suspected of using one or more of them.
Notice it doesn't matter what the word "one" in the above paragraph represents. The effect of the actions is the same: the government curtails freedom by slowly enumerating the things it allows rather than allowing anything it does not forbid explicitly. Then, it stops enumerating the freedoms the people in power really rather wish you didn't have. True freedom means if it's not illegal and doesn't harm the neighbors, an adult doesn't have to consult nor inform anyone about doing it.
I never said you couldn't make smart-ass comments about whether or not you believe in a creator.:-)
The answer, of course, scientifically, is that we have no proof of a creator, and we have no proof of a lack of a creator. We just don't know, can't know, and couldn't know the nature or origins of a creator. It is therefore scientifically irrelevant, no matter how important or unimportant anyone feels the matter is on a more personal, philosophical, or spiritual level.
Now, belief, faith, trust in the supernatural and in stories we've been told, in personal experiences that seem subjectively outside the laws of physics for some reason, and whatever else mean people can believe in a creator. Indeed, there are a number of creation "myths" from around the world. Most "people of faith" call everyone's creation stories "myths" but their own, which of course they call the "Truth" (yes, often with a capital "T", as in the single, objective Truth).
I've known many a religious person who is open-minded enough to say, "I believe this, but I could be wrong and someone else could be right. I'll go on believing what I believe." That takes real faith and conviction, yet at the same time an open mind. I asked a Catholic priest once what it would mean if it turned out there was no God, and he said he'd feel pretty silly passing up a family and a normal shirt, and just laughed. I asked a Protestant minister the same question, and his response was that it didn't mean a thing if there was no God he was praying to, but it meant a great deal if there was a benevolent God that he didn't pray to (philosophy students might recognize Pascal's wager here). The minister went on to say that what we do here on Earth for each other would mean a great deal more if there was no God, because there'd be noone else to do it. He said that's the problem with people of faith who shutter themselves from the world to avoid temptation or for whatever reason, that there's work to be done here that doesn't get done without hands to do it.
I can see perfectly if many religious types are too closed-minded to accept science or even to be around people outside their own church why many scientists don't want to hear anything about religion. What I don't understand is why scientists, who are supposed to be the open-minded ones, would discount the possibility of some being or beings more powerful than humans who take some interest in what we do. Occam's razor demands that gods and demons are not considered as a cause for phenomena since any supposed inputs cannot be studied empirically.
There's really no more scientific evidence to disprove any supernatural religion than there is to prove any of them. (The supposed physical effects of certain supernatural hopes and wishes, like magical spells and telekinesis, can be tested of course, but the religion itself still, strictly speaking, cannot). The only plausible scientific answer is, "We don't know." If a scientist feels like adding, "..,And I don't care", well then that's fine too. Dismissing religion's _relevance_ to science is easy. Any person should be allowed to declare religion irrelevant to his or her own life, too. To dismiss that there's any possible truth to a belief in the supernatural is a religious decision as much as to accept that there is truth in that belief, and neither has any bearing on science.
It's easy enough to say that things believed to be miracles _could_ be happy circumstance. It's easy to say that prayer has a placebo effect or that the relaxation and calmness it can lead to are what helps patients who pray. But to dismiss the possibility of something it's impossible to test for, measure, or observe is unscientific. To dismiss a God, many gods, angels, demons, devils, sprites, fairies, gremlins, or whatever and that it's possible they might observe or effect things is frankly as unscientific as to say that they do observe and effect things.
Of course, adults should be able to say that science is irrelevant to their lives, too.
It is good to note that even if we could create our own pocket universes which were left to chance but measured for complexity after that fact that we could not prove that intelligent design is necessary. If complex life proved extremely statistically unlikely to arise on its own, that would only prove we were an anomaly and not the nature of the anomaly. Even if we created life intelligently, that would only prove it's possible, and not that we arrived via the same route.
We likewise cannot disprove that we were created by an intelligent creator. Even if we found it was easy in our pocket universes for complex life to thrive, that would not be proof that our specific origins were not special.
We could only offer absence of proof, and never proof of absence. This puts the definition of "fact" quite contrary to anything to do with intelligent design, unless we all one day in some afterlife meet the creator and are shown how we were created. We can neither prove nor disprove intelligent design, so it is outside the scope of science.
I rather like what my high-school biology teacher said about evolution. This is not verbatim by any means, as it was erm... a while ago that I was in high school;-) . You don't have to believe in it. You don't have to believe it was unguided if you do believe in it. You do have to learn it and you do have to learn to apply it and reason about it. No matter what you believe, science is based on evidence, and despite the beliefs, hopes, and dreams of many people, evolutionary theory is a good model for understanding things. Even though Newtonian physics have been overtaken by Einstein, and Einstein's physics might be overtaken by QM or string theory, Newtonian physics is still a good framework for lots of things. That's why people need to learn about evolution: for all the doubts one might personally have about it, there's lots of evidence for it and it explains lots of things. Those students who don't want to believe in evolution emotionally are free to feel that way, but intellectually the class will act based on evidence and not emotion. The test is the same no matter how you feel about it.
In case anyone's wondering, the teacher was Southern Baptist and didn't believe in evolution as truth about the past at all. She did, however, believe what she said about it being necessary to understand it because scientific progress was being made based on it. I never asked whether she thought intelligent design should be taught in public schools, but another student tells me her opinion is that it should be mentioned in passing that some people believe in it if a student asks, and the class should get right back to evolution.
A buddy of mine once was given a box of electronics junk. Some other buddy of his bought an auction lot of the boxes for $20. he took what he wanted and split the rest among a few people.
In the box was a four-gig DEC drive. The initial buyer had been told it was bad, and he tried to fdisk it under DOS (this was back before 1995). DOS's fdisk didn't make much sense of it. So, in the box with my buddy' stuff it went. Being a little more clueful and having a much wider array of machines to try it in, we determined in about 15 minutes that not only was it a DEC drive, but it had been in DEC machine and was partitioned and formatted accordingly.
One SCSI low-level, an FDISK, and a format later, and my friend had a 4 GB drive for his NT 3.51 file server. At the time I was running a whopping 520 MB IDE drive in my system, so consider what a find that was.
Maybe the universe is just a Beowulf cluster of these.
I mean, hell, we use light to transmit information. We use magnets to store and transmit information. We _are_ information stored in DNA. We're could be part of a big genetic algorithm that's been running for millions of years. Maybe Agent Smith was right. Maybe we _are_ a virus, but not in the sense written into the script for the movie The Matrix. Maybe us figuring out how to store and transmit information ever more efficiently by using ever-more basic building blocks of the universe is just like a virus figuring out the system it's inside and using that information for its own purposes.
Then again, fuck it. I just wanna know if it'll run Supreme Commander at a decent speed.
You make some valid points, but court is usually the place that one brings up supporting case law. The people at the FSF are likely smart enough to know they should not try to give legal advice on a web site, as every case has different facts.
Thanks for the concern. Yeah, I know a mattress makes a lot of difference. We had a nice after-market pad on top of the old one while we tried to figure out what to replace the thing with.
We looked at Select Comfort, and they're nice, but the warranty prorates. We looked and the Tempurpedic foam beds, but my wife didn't like the feel of it.
So, we started looking at conventional mattresses, and there's always a sale somewhere on some brand. We found a store that was changing from multiple suppliers to just one to cut costs, and we got a good one for dirt cheap. This thing's got a fifteen year non-prorated warranty, has a nice thick pillow-top on both sides, and is extra firm beneath the pillow-top. We like it about as well as any hotel or guest room bed we've ever been on.
Actually, I've never worked for IBM, and I keep pricing eComStation. I'd kind of like to use that on a system or two. Warp 3 is getting a bit paunchy. I don't want to drop it, though, because then I'd be down to Linux, BSD, Windows, OS X, DOS, and AmigaOS.
Visopsys, ReactOS, OpenSolaris, plan9, Minix, QNX, MMURTL, OpenVMS, Haiku, and some others could serve for utility and novelty in varying degrees, but I already have plenty of software for OS/2.
Yes, I'm an avid system collector. If you have hardware or software that's old, obsolete, and quirky, I probably want it.
Carrying excess weight primarily around the midsection is a strong indicator of risk for type 2 diabetes. My doctor keeps telling me that focusing on losing weight there in particular will help keep me from ever becoming insulin dependent like my dad.
You make a good point. The trend in modern society is towards more "necessities". I think it has to do with two things, mainly. One is that people feel better if they're buying something they can call a necessity rather than a luxury. The other is that marketers know that people will buy something more surely if it can be made to appear necessary.
In my line of work, Internet access faster than dial-up is a necessity. I still don't need streaming high-def video type bandwidth even at my office.
At home it's a luxury to have anything faster than dial-up. My wife and I have two TV channels that actually come in clearly. We both drive older, lower mid-range cars. Our newest video game console is the Super Nintendo. When my 61 disc CD changer went bad, I reverted to using the single-disc DVD player to play CDs in the living room. We slept on an old, beat-up mattress until we found a good sale on King-size replacements. So we're not too upset over having 6Mbps DSL be considered a luxury. That, air conditioning, restaurant meals, and long drives to see family are about the only luxuries we use regularly. If we could get cheap (and I don't just mean affordable, I mean cheap enough that we wouldn't have to sacrifice lots of other things in order to get it) higher-speed access, especially with a higher outbound speed, then we'd get that. I'm not spending another $45 a month on top of the $45I'm spending now to get it, though, unless it's something crazy fast like FTTH and has a tight SLA.
Is that MIT X11r5, X11r6, XFree86, X.org, MetroX? Do you use just Gnome libraries, or do you have Qt and some KDE libs for certain applications? What window manager do you use: Evolution, WindowMaker, AfterStep, BlueCurve, GNUStep? Is your X framebuffer with a card-specific driver in the kernel, or is your card driver in the X server?
That still leaves out browser, email client, news reader, office applications, text editor, file manager, cd/dvd burning software, printing system, firewall management software, shell, video player, audio player, Postscript viewer, PDF reader, PIM, and a bunch of other end-user options that could be named if one was particular enough.
I guess you could also specify the package manager you use, the compiler your stuff is compiled with if you compile packages yourself, which system init option you use, firewall kernel option, hardening options, and which audio driver platform. Whether you use a distro kernel, a stock kernel.org kernel, an Alan Cox kernel, or a locally customized kernel might be worth noting, too.
One of my systems is a Firefox+Opera+Seamonkey/mutt/tin/OpenOffice/vim/mc /k3b/CUPS+hplip/vim/bash/VLC/VLC/Kghostview/Kghost view/KOrganizer+Karm/urpmi/gcc3/startitup/iptables /Basille+SELinux+custom/ALSA/kernel.org/AfterStep/ KDE/X.org/Apache/Postfix/MySQL/Postgres/Samba/gpm/ GNU+BSD+Mozlla+Apache+Postfix+CCL-SA+Commercial/Li nux.
Now let's see you get a magazine to put that much detail in an article every time a system is mentioned.
On the other hand, there's been no word of criminal action, so after this Darl might have a lot of free time on his hands. He sold a lot of shares when the stock was inflated, so he'll be cash-heavy. He's hard-headed, arrogant, and combative. Hardly anyone would have him as an executive after this. Think "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back". Darl and Kevin, flying around, kicking some/. ass.
Slashdot Mirror
As for Apache vs. IIS showing that Windows is gaining anything, it doesn't necessarily do that. Apache, as I mentioned, runs just fine on Windows. It's quite possible a good chunk of those Apache vs. IIS numbers would be Windows either way. If some of those are conversions and not just growth patterns, some could be Apache on Windows to IIS on Windows.
Also, there are methodology questions besides those you already raised.
I'm sure someone can come along and add to our combined list even more.
The State of Illinois case study is bullshit. I worked as a contractor for the Department of Human Services in Springfield for a year just a few years back. My wife's stepdad worked for Department of Public Aid as a contractor for years. He's now DPA staff because the AFSCME union strongarmed the state into getting rid of knowledgeable contractors and giving the work to state employees. They couldn't do it with state employees, so he became one to continue doing his old job for additional pay plus benefits. There's a budget solution for you...
The company I worked for also had contracts with Corrections, Courts, State Police, Public Aid, and some other state agencies, so I sometimes went to locations for those as well.
Anyway, Novell wasn't the source of the "desktop productivity solution" when I did desktop support for them. They ran Groupwise (which does email and calendars) at DHS. They also ran Office and in some cases also WordPerfect Suite. They ran Crystal Reports when needed. There is, or was anyway, an entire subdepartment of DHS that handles creating, modifying, warehousing, and distributing paper forms. Those people had additional software for that. There were mainframes in the Harris building (the main DHS office center on South Main St. East) and many users had terminal emulation packages to access that. In no way did they switch everything from Novell to Microsoft on the desktop.
The servers were NT 4, Novell 4 and 5, some NT 3.5, some commercial Unix on Alpha (although that was mostly being replaced with Win2k), and the IBM mainframe stuff. There were contractors running the actual servers in every case. Most of them worked for the same company I did.
CMS is an agency that's supposed to consolidate resources across the state for the other agencies to improve security, decrease waste, and "improve" accountability (although that has never seemed an appropriate goal for the convicted Republican George Ryan nor the current governor Democrat Rod Blagojevich either one). We had to have our badges for DHS buildings issued through CMS, for example. When there was a network outage, DHS had to bother CMS to bother the phone companies. Real efficient and cost effective, that.
The State Police had Avid equipment and such for reconstructing accidents. I'm sure Microsoft Windows Movie Maker hasn't entirely displaced that. They might have replaced some of the serial dumb terminals in the maximum security prisons with Windows PCs, but I'm not sure you'd want something with lots of little voids and such in with the inmates. The schools for the visually impaired and for the deaf already ran Windows PCs for students and teachers, as did the developmental and mental health centers (all part of DHS). The department of the courts had Windows PCs. The local Office of Rehabilitative Services (part of DHS) offices had Windows and OS/2 PCs, and sometimes were not even on the statewide Novell networks for DHS. DCFS (part of DHS) had Windows PCs.
Other than replacing Groupwise server and client with Exchange and Outlook and upgrading the desktops to newer versions of Windows (which was always being done anyway, as any PC more than 3 or 4 years old goes to CMS auction to the public), I'm not sure what they've really done for DHS. They've traded Novell's superior print server, client management (ZenWorks/snapshots anyone?), firewall (Bordermanager worked well), years of employee training, and working with certified consultants familiar with the old network all for Windows printer sharing, Windows remote client management (if they're doing that at all), probably going to Cisco's firewall solutions as Microsoft's suck, having to retrain their workforce, and having to find new contractors (or hire more unionized employees away from consulting companies).
All this is from a state that can't pay Medicaid on time and has run pharmacies out of business. It's a state that uses taxpayer money to pay government employees to campaign for their elected bosses. The federal government is very concer
Apache runs on Windows, too. NCSA runs on multiple platforms, too. Web server statistics don't say much about operating systems.
No. That's what makes it interesting, is that there's no way to shine a light on such a big area. ;-)
I don't think they're saying it's necessarily like this now or that it will continue to be like this. What they're saying is that right now, as observed, this region of space shows these odd properties. That means that at the time the light and other radiation being observed around it would have passed by it or through it, that it was huge and as far as our scientists know very odd. I don't think any long-term study of it is required to find out that much.
I don't think it's a dupe of that one. That might be where they get their study participants, though.
You may have just made the funniest /. post of all time.
I think you mean cold fusion, don't you? Fusion of hydrogen is pretty well established. Well, for that matter, usable terrestrial power plants using fusion seem to be in this file for now, too. But in stars, we're pretty sure it works.
Copyright can be enforced as criminal (breaking the statutory law that it is and all that) and as civil (for the damages caused by the copying).
IANAL, but that's basically how it goes. And no, being convicted and sued is not double jeopardy. Only being tried more than once for the criminal proceeding is.
I think they'd just put it on your arm.
Those are very good points. One doesn't necessarily have to beat AMD or Intel at desktop and server lines to be successful, though. Intel, Zilog, Freescale, TI, AMD, Via, Sun, IBM, Fujitsu, and more have programmable processors that sit nowhere near the desktop CPU market. Even those companies at or near the top of that market make chips for motherboards, disk drives, Ethernet adapters, cars, coffee makers, industrial control, etc.
The great thing about a new concept from outside established players is that it can be integrated with the best of the technology through buyouts, mergers, or licensing deals if the concept is worthwhile. It's much harder for the established leaders to come up with a wholly new idea than for the people with the new idea to get some manufacturing tech. A collaboration could be a big win for everyone involved in it.
I'm sure c.l.f is not a lot different in many ways from c.l.lisp, c.l.haskell, c.l.perl.misc, or any other language newsgroup where there is a lot of personality and promotion within the language community. There are Lisp machines, there are Java processors, the BASIC stamp, and Perl replacements for most of the Unix / GNU command line utilities (partly to have a Unixish system with little more than a C library and a Perl interpreter and partly to bring these tools to non-Unix environments easily). The fact that Forth is closer to the level of normal hardware than most dialects of Lisp or Basic and much closer than Java is means it may actually be a lot more flexible than systems designed with those other languages in mind. However, there are always those zealots who take anything good too far.
It's super easy to get from most modern languages into Forth via translation. Forth is very similar to postfix assembly for most architectures. Compiler texts sometimes show how to get from high-level languages to machine code via building a syntax tree followed by traversing the tree and producing postfix pseudo-assembly. Outputting Forth would be no more difficult.
Some Forth implementations are actually implemented so that words in the Forth dictionary are directly executable machine code even on standard multi-purpose CPUs.
Registration, tracking, seizure, possibly trade-ins for cash or shoes, rewards, undercover officers, and well-paid informants, just like they are doing with guns, drugs, syringes, and like the US once tried for nearly a decade with alcohol will be the tools of choice if this comes to pass.
First you register new ones, then you make people have a license to handle them, then you make it so that old, pre-registration ones have to be registered or destroyed. Then you take away licenses for everyone but government cronies and a few well-connected big businesses. You enforce horrible anti-freedom laws like "complicity", so that people are afraid not to turn their neighbors in. You pay rewards to people who turn people in for owning or using one. You place officers into circles of people suspected of using one or more of them.
Notice it doesn't matter what the word "one" in the above paragraph represents. The effect of the actions is the same: the government curtails freedom by slowly enumerating the things it allows rather than allowing anything it does not forbid explicitly. Then, it stops enumerating the freedoms the people in power really rather wish you didn't have. True freedom means if it's not illegal and doesn't harm the neighbors, an adult doesn't have to consult nor inform anyone about doing it.
I never said you couldn't make smart-ass comments about whether or not you believe in a creator. :-)
The answer, of course, scientifically, is that we have no proof of a creator, and we have no proof of a lack of a creator. We just don't know, can't know, and couldn't know the nature or origins of a creator. It is therefore scientifically irrelevant, no matter how important or unimportant anyone feels the matter is on a more personal, philosophical, or spiritual level.
Now, belief, faith, trust in the supernatural and in stories we've been told, in personal experiences that seem subjectively outside the laws of physics for some reason, and whatever else mean people can believe in a creator. Indeed, there are a number of creation "myths" from around the world. Most "people of faith" call everyone's creation stories "myths" but their own, which of course they call the "Truth" (yes, often with a capital "T", as in the single, objective Truth).
I've known many a religious person who is open-minded enough to say, "I believe this, but I could be wrong and someone else could be right. I'll go on believing what I believe." That takes real faith and conviction, yet at the same time an open mind. I asked a Catholic priest once what it would mean if it turned out there was no God, and he said he'd feel pretty silly passing up a family and a normal shirt, and just laughed. I asked a Protestant minister the same question, and his response was that it didn't mean a thing if there was no God he was praying to, but it meant a great deal if there was a benevolent God that he didn't pray to (philosophy students might recognize Pascal's wager here). The minister went on to say that what we do here on Earth for each other would mean a great deal more if there was no God, because there'd be noone else to do it. He said that's the problem with people of faith who shutter themselves from the world to avoid temptation or for whatever reason, that there's work to be done here that doesn't get done without hands to do it.
I can see perfectly if many religious types are too closed-minded to accept science or even to be around people outside their own church why many scientists don't want to hear anything about religion. What I don't understand is why scientists, who are supposed to be the open-minded ones, would discount the possibility of some being or beings more powerful than humans who take some interest in what we do. Occam's razor demands that gods and demons are not considered as a cause for phenomena since any supposed inputs cannot be studied empirically.
There's really no more scientific evidence to disprove any supernatural religion than there is to prove any of them. (The supposed physical effects of certain supernatural hopes and wishes, like magical spells and telekinesis, can be tested of course, but the religion itself still, strictly speaking, cannot). The only plausible scientific answer is, "We don't know." If a scientist feels like adding, "..,And I don't care", well then that's fine too. Dismissing religion's _relevance_ to science is easy. Any person should be allowed to declare religion irrelevant to his or her own life, too. To dismiss that there's any possible truth to a belief in the supernatural is a religious decision as much as to accept that there is truth in that belief, and neither has any bearing on science.
It's easy enough to say that things believed to be miracles _could_ be happy circumstance. It's easy to say that prayer has a placebo effect or that the relaxation and calmness it can lead to are what helps patients who pray. But to dismiss the possibility of something it's impossible to test for, measure, or observe is unscientific. To dismiss a God, many gods, angels, demons, devils, sprites, fairies, gremlins, or whatever and that it's possible they might observe or effect things is frankly as unscientific as to say that they do observe and effect things.
Of course, adults should be able to say that science is irrelevant to their lives, too.
It is good to note that even if we could create our own pocket universes which were left to chance but measured for complexity after that fact that we could not prove that intelligent design is necessary. If complex life proved extremely statistically unlikely to arise on its own, that would only prove we were an anomaly and not the nature of the anomaly. Even if we created life intelligently, that would only prove it's possible, and not that we arrived via the same route.
;-) . You don't have to believe in it. You don't have to believe it was unguided if you do believe in it. You do have to learn it and you do have to learn to apply it and reason about it. No matter what you believe, science is based on evidence, and despite the beliefs, hopes, and dreams of many people, evolutionary theory is a good model for understanding things. Even though Newtonian physics have been overtaken by Einstein, and Einstein's physics might be overtaken by QM or string theory, Newtonian physics is still a good framework for lots of things. That's why people need to learn about evolution: for all the doubts one might personally have about it, there's lots of evidence for it and it explains lots of things. Those students who don't want to believe in evolution emotionally are free to feel that way, but intellectually the class will act based on evidence and not emotion. The test is the same no matter how you feel about it.
We likewise cannot disprove that we were created by an intelligent creator. Even if we found it was easy in our pocket universes for complex life to thrive, that would not be proof that our specific origins were not special.
We could only offer absence of proof, and never proof of absence. This puts the definition of "fact" quite contrary to anything to do with intelligent design, unless we all one day in some afterlife meet the creator and are shown how we were created. We can neither prove nor disprove intelligent design, so it is outside the scope of science.
I rather like what my high-school biology teacher said about evolution. This is not verbatim by any means, as it was erm... a while ago that I was in high school
In case anyone's wondering, the teacher was Southern Baptist and didn't believe in evolution as truth about the past at all. She did, however, believe what she said about it being necessary to understand it because scientific progress was being made based on it. I never asked whether she thought intelligent design should be taught in public schools, but another student tells me her opinion is that it should be mentioned in passing that some people believe in it if a student asks, and the class should get right back to evolution.
I hope you either rotate your logs often or don't log 404 errors.
A buddy of mine once was given a box of electronics junk. Some other buddy of his bought an auction lot of the boxes for $20. he took what he wanted and split the rest among a few people.
In the box was a four-gig DEC drive. The initial buyer had been told it was bad, and he tried to fdisk it under DOS (this was back before 1995). DOS's fdisk didn't make much sense of it. So, in the box with my buddy' stuff it went. Being a little more clueful and having a much wider array of machines to try it in, we determined in about 15 minutes that not only was it a DEC drive, but it had been in DEC machine and was partitioned and formatted accordingly.
One SCSI low-level, an FDISK, and a format later, and my friend had a 4 GB drive for his NT 3.51 file server. At the time I was running a whopping 520 MB IDE drive in my system, so consider what a find that was.
Actually, I like to think of matter as energy that's mellowed for a while and decided to hang out together.
Maybe the universe is just a Beowulf cluster of these.
I mean, hell, we use light to transmit information. We use magnets to store and transmit information. We _are_ information stored in DNA. We're could be part of a big genetic algorithm that's been running for millions of years. Maybe Agent Smith was right. Maybe we _are_ a virus, but not in the sense written into the script for the movie The Matrix. Maybe us figuring out how to store and transmit information ever more efficiently by using ever-more basic building blocks of the universe is just like a virus figuring out the system it's inside and using that information for its own purposes.
Then again, fuck it. I just wanna know if it'll run Supreme Commander at a decent speed.
You make some valid points, but court is usually the place that one brings up supporting case law. The people at the FSF are likely smart enough to know they should not try to give legal advice on a web site, as every case has different facts.
Thanks for the concern. Yeah, I know a mattress makes a lot of difference. We had a nice after-market pad on top of the old one while we tried to figure out what to replace the thing with.
We looked at Select Comfort, and they're nice, but the warranty prorates. We looked and the Tempurpedic foam beds, but my wife didn't like the feel of it.
So, we started looking at conventional mattresses, and there's always a sale somewhere on some brand. We found a store that was changing from multiple suppliers to just one to cut costs, and we got a good one for dirt cheap. This thing's got a fifteen year non-prorated warranty, has a nice thick pillow-top on both sides, and is extra firm beneath the pillow-top. We like it about as well as any hotel or guest room bed we've ever been on.
Actually, I've never worked for IBM, and I keep pricing eComStation. I'd kind of like to use that on a system or two. Warp 3 is getting a bit paunchy. I don't want to drop it, though, because then I'd be down to Linux, BSD, Windows, OS X, DOS, and AmigaOS.
Visopsys, ReactOS, OpenSolaris, plan9, Minix, QNX, MMURTL, OpenVMS, Haiku, and some others could serve for utility and novelty in varying degrees, but I already have plenty of software for OS/2.
Yes, I'm an avid system collector. If you have hardware or software that's old, obsolete, and quirky, I probably want it.
Carrying excess weight primarily around the midsection is a strong indicator of risk for type 2 diabetes. My doctor keeps telling me that focusing on losing weight there in particular will help keep me from ever becoming insulin dependent like my dad.
You make a good point. The trend in modern society is towards more "necessities". I think it has to do with two things, mainly. One is that people feel better if they're buying something they can call a necessity rather than a luxury. The other is that marketers know that people will buy something more surely if it can be made to appear necessary.
In my line of work, Internet access faster than dial-up is a necessity. I still don't need streaming high-def video type bandwidth even at my office.
At home it's a luxury to have anything faster than dial-up. My wife and I have two TV channels that actually come in clearly. We both drive older, lower mid-range cars. Our newest video game console is the Super Nintendo. When my 61 disc CD changer went bad, I reverted to using the single-disc DVD player to play CDs in the living room. We slept on an old, beat-up mattress until we found a good sale on King-size replacements. So we're not too upset over having 6Mbps DSL be considered a luxury. That, air conditioning, restaurant meals, and long drives to see family are about the only luxuries we use regularly. If we could get cheap (and I don't just mean affordable, I mean cheap enough that we wouldn't have to sacrifice lots of other things in order to get it) higher-speed access, especially with a higher outbound speed, then we'd get that. I'm not spending another $45 a month on top of the $45I'm spending now to get it, though, unless it's something crazy fast like FTTH and has a tight SLA.
Is that MIT X11r5, X11r6, XFree86, X.org, MetroX? Do you use just Gnome libraries, or do you have Qt and some KDE libs for certain applications? What window manager do you use: Evolution, WindowMaker, AfterStep, BlueCurve, GNUStep? Is your X framebuffer with a card-specific driver in the kernel, or is your card driver in the X server?
c /k3b/CUPS+hplip/vim/bash/VLC/VLC/Kghostview/Kghost view/KOrganizer+Karm/urpmi/gcc3/startitup/iptables /Basille+SELinux+custom/ALSA/kernel.org/AfterStep/ KDE/X.org/Apache/Postfix/MySQL/Postgres/Samba/gpm/ GNU+BSD+Mozlla+Apache+Postfix+CCL-SA+Commercial/Li nux.
That still leaves out browser, email client, news reader, office applications, text editor, file manager, cd/dvd burning software, printing system, firewall management software, shell, video player, audio player, Postscript viewer, PDF reader, PIM, and a bunch of other end-user options that could be named if one was particular enough.
I guess you could also specify the package manager you use, the compiler your stuff is compiled with if you compile packages yourself, which system init option you use, firewall kernel option, hardening options, and which audio driver platform. Whether you use a distro kernel, a stock kernel.org kernel, an Alan Cox kernel, or a locally customized kernel might be worth noting, too.
One of my systems is a Firefox+Opera+Seamonkey/mutt/tin/OpenOffice/vim/m
Now let's see you get a magazine to put that much detail in an article every time a system is mentioned.
On the other hand, there's been no word of criminal action, so after this Darl might have a lot of free time on his hands. He sold a lot of shares when the stock was inflated, so he'll be cash-heavy. He's hard-headed, arrogant, and combative. Hardly anyone would have him as an executive after this. Think "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back". Darl and Kevin, flying around, kicking some /. ass.