All sorts of stuff actually. Their mission is twofold; in addition to breaking the bad guys codes or elsewise compromising their communications, they are also tasked with protecting the good guys communications from being compromised. Now it's important to remember that "good guys" and "bad guys" here is as defined by the US Government, but I for one agree with them at least ocasionally. In any case, if they have thought up some super secret tricky way to get around your security, I wouldn't expect them to help defeat it. But when it comes to the myriad run-of-the-mill security flaws that all sorts of people know how to exploit, the NSA has great expertise in how to deal with them, and can be expected to share it.
Re:Palm's Mistakes or Microsoft's Tactics?
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Palm's Mistakes
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Palm failed because of Microsofts secret protocols and formats? Sorry, but that's nuts. You even quoted the part about how RIM suceeded. They didn't have acess to "secret" protocols either. Palms problem wasn't talking to Exchange; they did that great with the device sitting in a synch cradle. Their problem was that they had issues with their support for synching from the other side of the office building via a wifi network. Nevermind synching from anywhere with cell service, which entirely changes the usefulness of the device. These issues have squat to do with Microsoft. They have everything to do with Palm making a product that was an organizer and not a communications device when customers were considering organizer functions only in choosing between communication devices. So they croaked vs. Blackberries and (particularly) cell phones.
Open formats are great; we sould demand them; MS sucks. All true, but none of that has much to do with Palms difficulties.
"We should fund it because it is the search for truth, and that's *always* important."
But is the ISS the most cost effective way to search for fund research? How many dollars are spent on each shuttle launch to do things we already know how to do and have done many times? Almost all of them. Medical Ultrasound was invented in Sweden and Scotland in the 50s, not as part of the space program. I've no idea what advancement to it they may be working on in relation to IIS, but I'm pretty confident ultrasound would be advanced more if we just spent the IIS budget on it directly.
Every time someone says the IIS is a stupid waste of money, people come out of the woodwork saying we need to fund research, because it is important to search for truth. Well, IIS is a stupid waste of money that I'd rather spend searching for truth. Lifting vast amounts of food, water and fuel into LEO is bloddy expensive, and we learn absolutely nothing by doing it.
Actually, currently the Earth is closest to the sun in Northern Hemisphere winter. For the effect you describe, it would have to get much more eliptical, and in the opposite direction. But that's nitpicking. I'll happily agree that actually pulling the earth out of orbit around the sun (which is just stupendously unlikely) wouldn't be necessary to cause a problem; any significant disturbance to the orbit would do it. I was just pointing out that to cause a significant disturbance in the earths orbit would require a combination of mass and closeness of aproach such that the odds very heavily favor passing all the way through the Andromeda galaxy without it happening.
Apparently both you and whoever modded me Flamebait took me more seriously than I intended. I apologize for not being clearer; I just found it slightly amusing that you say you are not particularly religious, but are sufficiently so so as to not write "God", which I associate with people who are pretty seriously religious. I also took "not particularly religous" to be much closer to "not religous" than you would apparently intend. I don't generally knock on wood or have good luck charms, but I do have a small plastic astronaut figurine which I have intentionally convinced myself will drive me crazy if it is not kept surrounded by a circle of tiny blue stones. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone who does not expect me to take their religious beliefs any more seriously than I expect them to take my belief about the astronaut. And I expect them to find that belief utterly laughable (but I'd apreciate it if they did not move the stones).
Having been to the midwest, suicide would definitely be on the table if no other method of leaving were available.
You're "not a particularly religious person"? You apparently think there's a supreme being, maker and master of all creation, who for reasons we mortals cannot begin to fathom, gets really pissy if we write down a word that refers to him. But he thinks it's fine as long as you leave out one of the letters. Would I be going out on a limb in thinking you also beleive god has no problem with either roast beef sandwiches or cheese sandwiches, but that roast beef and cheese together is right out?
Sorry, it just kind of depresses me that I live in a society where "not particularly religous" can include people who not only beleive in god, but have such specific beleifs about him as to not only establish that that god is batshit crazy, but allow discussion of exactly what mental disorders this god might suffer from.
Just doing some quick and dirty estimations, the messing with orbits issue seems pretty unlikely. The earths orbit, for example, would only be disturbed by something pulling different amounts on the earth vs. the sun, because the earth was closer to it or further from it. It would have to be awfully close for the distance from the earth to the sun to be very significant. Even at 1 light year, we're talking something like 1 part in 100,000. You'd need something very massive, passing quite close, and very quickly. The quickly part is there, but the other two are a pretty tiny probability. The galactic collision will no doubt wreck all sorts of re-arangement on the massive scale of galaxies. Any observers concerned only with the relatively minute scale of a single solar system will presumably not even notice.
Not, as noted, that there is much chance those observers will be human.
The sun won't go nova in any case; it's too small.
Andromeda is the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way, a mere ~2 million light years away. It's moving toward us rather rapidly though, and the two galaxies should collide in about 3 billion years; if one of these stars was "thrown free" (how exactly?) it might get here well before that, but your basic point is right on: By the time it got here, there is basically no chance that the earth will still be a habitable planet.
Of course, the chance of an object randomly thrown from that far away hitting the earth is like... Let's see, if I randomly threw a dart (really hard), the chances of hitting the bullseye of a dartboard on the planet neptune... are much much better.
I will call this new product "a second dishwasher". I used to live in a group house that had two dishwashers. When one got full, you'd start it up, and take the last couple clean dishes out of the other one, stacking them on the counter. Dishes never went in cabinets. There was a drawer for silverware, but it just got dumped in loose. If you don't care whether the dishes you're using match, or whether there are a small number of clean dishes sitting on the counter, it's fantastically efficient in terms of time. Highly recomended for houses containing a group of lazy 20-somethings who aren't going to put all the dishes away in any case.
But all of those laws are agreements between nations, which vessels are subject to because they are subject to the laws of the country whose flag they sail under, and that coutry has agreed to those treaties. If a vessel violates those rules, you could complain to the country in question, and expect them to enforce the rules, because that ship is effectively part of their territory (though the treaty in question may give signatories the right to just go ahead and enforce it forthwith, even in international waters)
If a ship is not associated with any country, it has not agreed to any of those treaties, and is theoretically not legally bound by them. When the whaling ban went into effect, some vessels tried out this theory, renouncing their flag, and managing to get by without ever sailing into port. Before long they learned the "theoretical" part: Certain countries explained that if they were their own independant nations, war could be declared on them, and would be if they didn't sail into territorial waters where they could be safely arrested.
Well, you are not the knee-jerk open-source-only advocate I knee-jerkingly assumed.:)
Certainly the companies you mention hire developers, but the vast majority of the open source devlopers whose work their business is based on do not see a dime. (Not that they expected to or that there is anything wrong with this.)
As far as FundingUtah, I understand that they are using open source software. The quote implied that had they not, the only alternative would have been to spend hundreds of thousands writing it from scratch. Which is silly. There are five zillion proprietary web content management systems out there in addition to the fifty zillion open ones. None of them are terribly expensive, if only because several are both good and free.
They appear to be an investment group of some sort, so I wonder why are they messing with custom coding at all. Taking the quickest of looks at their site, they certainly paid some designer more than $2000, and will need to be paying a sysadmin more on an ongoing basis.
It is frequently a great answer, but Open source is not ALWAYS the ONLY answer; and nothing in your post refutes that.
But you make a good point; if I release all my code as open source, some people can indeed make a living. Just not necessarily me.
The companies you mention sell support and expertise. None of them have as their chief selling point the actuial open source code, as it would not then be a selling point. You do not pay RedHat for the Linux kernel, unless you're an idiot.
"you are only fooling yourself when you suggest that you cannot making a living unless you keep the source code to yourself"
Oh certainly, but in many cases it makes it a hell of a lot easier to make a living if I just charge for the thing I produce, which is high quality software. This even provides my customers with a neat mechanism for sharing the devlopment costs between them, rather than having to spend hundreds of thousands to write their web server from scratch; which was apparently the only alternative to open source FundingUtah could find. (guess I'll avoid investing with them, eh?)
Well, sea-going vessels don't actually have to be registered anywhere. Because there aren't really any "international" laws. There are agreements between nations (even sometimes basically all of them) that get codified within the laws of those countries. But a sea going vessel can renounce whatever national affiliation it had, and not register anywhere new. Of course, at that point few countries will allow you into their territrorial watters, much less harbors, so it makes it difficult to stop "sea going". None the less, some vessels, notably whalers, have done so. At that point, there's no country you're part of to come harras you for violating their laws, regulations, or what have you. Of course, there's nobody to come help you out if any country or private party decides to harrass you for any reason they like.
So vessels tenfd to be registered somewhere, because it's nice to have some country backing you, and it's nice to be able to come into harbor ocasionally. In the case of aircraft, it probably is effectively compulsory if you consider it's nice if people will let you land ocasionally.
"look only at the numbers and geopolitics. You can hardly call it a 'disaster.'"
Iraqi civilians are dying at a vastly higher rate than under Saddam. Millions of people have been moved from a brutal dictatorship to a nasty civil war that shows every sign of leading quickly to a brutal theocracy. Saddams regime was quite terrible, yet at great expense in lives and money we have made things worse for pretty much everyone. How could one possibly not call it a disaster?
In the case of a "Meltdown", sinking may well not cool it down fine. Cooling does not control the rate of fission, it simply keeps your mechanisms for doing so from melting; if they've already done so, cooling it down is unlikely to make them operable again.
You are quite right that a normaly operating coal plant produces more radiation than a properly operating nuclear plant. This red herring is frequently thrown up by nuclear power proponents. No one (with sense) is worried about properly operating nuclear plants; please see your own subject line for what they are worried about. That, and the need to store the waste safely for 100000 years.
Total income at the federal level is up, yes. Total spending at the federal level is up much much more, and this is what I would credit with the increase in tax revenues.
If we simply paid the additional spending to someone, and taxed them, we would realize a bigger increase in net income than we have. Of course, we'd still have this completely unsustainable, crushing debt that we're running up just stupidly fast, but hey, net income is up! Want to increase your net income? I'll pay you five bucks if you let me borrow 500 in your name. Your net income will be up.
It is not remotely clear whether the Bush tax cuts would increase revenues without the spending. It is abundantly clear that the Bush spending is not sustainable. Let's assume that the tax cuts cause the economy to start growing at the fastest yearly rate it ever has (not exactly what we've seen by a long shot), and it continues to do so forever (a prediction hopefully even a Bushite would consider overly-optimistic). It still wouldn't increase revenue fast enough to support Bush's spending.
Bush's policies are completely trashing the economic future of this country, over the increasingly near term. Your defense of them tells me you can not, or at least have not, done the math.
Based on having interacted with him over the course of a weekend 12 years ago, ESR, no question. It's not that I do or don't think Gates is an ass; it's that I don't think it is possible to be a bigger more pompous ass than ESR. You'd, like, collapse into a black hole of pomposity or something.
"So you say that for anyone to have a discussion of evolution they must use your conventions of naming? I say bullshit"
Cool. Because I define the word "bullshit" as simple shorthand for mean "You are absolutely correct, all creationists are idiots, me doubly so." Glad we agree.
To have a discussion of anything you must use commonly accepted conventions of naming. It's called language.
I hate focus stealing too. But it's not as easy for MS to fix as you make out. I beleive in 2000, and certainly in XP, the only way an app can steal the focus is to open a new window and specify that it should get the focus. Of course, there are various things I can do in an app where opening a new window and giving it the focus is exactly what I want to have happen. I can think of various schemes for deciding whether a new window should be allowed to get the focus, but none that allow every legitimate instance and ban every illegitamite one. At some point you just need to blame the developers who write focus stealing code.
Gaim is the biggest culprit on my system. Anyone know a way to fix this (short of hacking the code)? The whole advantage of IM is people can contact me in a way less intrusive than the phone.
"In the natural language processing business they call this 'the same level of understanding as a two-year-old child'"
Not if they know what they are talking about. That would be very impressive.
At my daughters 2 year old checkup, she was feeling shy. The doctor wanted her to say something, so he could confirm she was capable of putting two words together meaningfully. After some coaxing she said, "Dad, I don't want to be at the doctor! I want to go home. This is poopy!"
It is worrisome if a child cannot combine multiple words together in meaningful combinations on their second birthday. Your gibberish generator does not appear to be anywhere close. Heck, my 11 month old can understand and answer questions like "Do you want to eat more or go nigh-nigh?"
"I for one conjecture there just aren't enough good programmers in the world, otherwise we would see more games as revolutionary as Doom and Quake popping up on the interent."
You really think of Doom and Quake as revolutionary? Hey, it's some tight code that made good use of the latest and greatest video card tech. But they were just better graphics than previous FPS games.
In any case, there are plenty of good programmers, particularly since a totally 733t coder is not what you need to make a great game. A fast 3D engine perhaps; but how many of them does the world need?
There are few good game designers, and they are hard to identify because almost everyone thinks they are one. A good friend of mine is an excellent game designer, but has never programmed a thing. I'd much rather play a game he designed that was implemented by a mediocre coder, than a game designed by some one else and coded by a fabulous coder.
Certainly someone can cook up a great game on their own; I've played a few and enjoyed them. But every game in a nice box on the shelf in that store in the mall represents many man-years of programmers, game designers, artists, etc. time. You certainly canb't write a winner every 6 months, because most game shops have multi-year development cycles. And most games don't ever make it to that shelf, or they don't last long there because no one buys them. Most of them lose big piles of money.
Right, so start selling tissues that say "Kleenex" on the side of the box, and see what happens; you'll get sued and lose. Sell "Biily-Bobs nifto dispenser full of Kleenex", and no problem, as long as the tissues inside are actual Kleenex.
People will go right on calling it Linux, and Linus will let them, and he couldn't necessarily stop them if he wanted to. If he defends the trademark, he can, and presumably will, stop companies from calling something Linux which is not.
No significant number are going to call it GNU anything. Not for any good technical reason, but because Gnu is a stupid word. Stallman ensured it would be "Linux" when he went for a stupid recursive-acronym hacker joke. Sorry, but names aren't about giving credit where due, they are about having people know what you're talking about. 99% of the time anyone says "Linux", they are not talking about just the kernel. Therefore "Linux" is not just the kernel, no matter how much that may have been anyones intent.
"until our hyphothesis, theorys, faith, and et all are PROVEN LAW or PROVEN FALSE, they are just as plausible as any other belief scientific or religious"
Scientific theories are never proven, yet some are more plausible; they are better supported than others because they fit the evidence better; they explain things we observe about the world in ways that would not explain things if the observations were different.
"...without accepting Newton's laws - a Law that has been agreed upon."
Newtons laws are not assumed to be true, they are not agreed on. They are observed to be true (or in certain cases false.) There is no need to ask for consensus; I can go throw a ball and observe that Newtons laws accurately predict the course it will follow. If someone thinks Newton is wrong, there is no need to discuss it, they just need to figure out what their theory predicts differently from Newtons. Then they, or anyone, can go check it out.
If the star appears to be out of position, Einstein is right and Newtons "Law" is wrong. Oh, sure, there will be some disbeleiving shock, Newton has seemed right for centuries, but what you going to do? There are pictures; the star is out of position. Whether you have an open mind, whether you are biased, irrelevant. There's no agreeing or not agreeing; science is not a democracy.
"If you are unwilling to accept that God may exist (or does exist, for the point of discussion of Christianity),"
"may exist" and "does exist" are rather different assertions. Rejecting "may exist" would be obvious folly, as clearly no possible evidence could show that god does not exist. So, I'll happily accept that god may exist, all sorts of things may exist. But I don't see any point in discussing it beyond that, unless there is some actual evidence to examine, which there isn't.
"So there is no proof for something to be unproofable, perhaps the proof isn't found jet."
I do not agree. I do not think it will ever be possible to prove, or disprove, the existence of God. I beleive it is fairly trivial to prove that this is impossible. If I am correct, it will not be seen differently in a couple years time, any more than 2+2=4 might be. This is the point of proving things.
"Well wouldn't you call that a god? I don't know but if it acts like a god, has power like a god, it probably is one. Or do you think someone will go through all that trouble just to make you believe the being is a god?"
Why someone would or wouldn't go to the trouble is irrelevant; I was merely trying to come up with a blanket possible explanation for any apparent proof of God. The real point is, I cannot imagine any possible observation I could make who's only possible explantaion was God. The super-powered non-god trickster is a philosophy class classic, but "I could just be halucinating" works equally well. Really, you're pretty much doomed any time you want to prove anything of a non-mathematical nature. Sometimes you can dis-prove non-mathematical things, if they are subject to counter-examples, but God isn't. God explains anything, and thus, to my mind, nothing.
"The law of conservation of energy is a something a lot of people refer to as being a law"
Yes, this is modern use of "law" in science - an observed fact that appears to hold in all cases, but for which the motivating reason is unknown. We have observed that energy is conserved. Why? No idea. But it holds so absolutely consistently, that if we found a case where it wasn't, we would reasonably spend a very long time trying to figure out why our observations were wrong.
I called Newton "arrogant" above for calling it the Law of gravity; but perhaps "clever" is also appropriate. He figured out the inverse square rule, but was well aware he had no idea why it should be that way. Or rather he was sure he did know - God made it that way. He didn't think science should be in the business of asking why. "Law" puts a nice finality on the discussion.
The law of conservation of energy, like Newtons law of gravity, is really just an observation. It is distinct from a theory in that it doesn't offer any explanation; it doesn't add anything to the observation. I still think "Law" is arrogant. Ideally we ought to call it "the extremely widely observed, and so far universally consistent phenomenon of conservation of energy". Calling anything a "fundamental underlying principle" sure sounds to me like a fancy way of saying "I'm really not comfortable continuing to ask why beyond this point, because I, and all of modern science, have no idea"
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All sorts of stuff actually. Their mission is twofold; in addition to breaking the bad guys codes or elsewise compromising their communications, they are also tasked with protecting the good guys communications from being compromised. Now it's important to remember that "good guys" and "bad guys" here is as defined by the US Government, but I for one agree with them at least ocasionally. In any case, if they have thought up some super secret tricky way to get around your security, I wouldn't expect them to help defeat it. But when it comes to the myriad run-of-the-mill security flaws that all sorts of people know how to exploit, the NSA has great expertise in how to deal with them, and can be expected to share it.
Palm failed because of Microsofts secret protocols and formats? Sorry, but that's nuts. You even quoted the part about how RIM suceeded. They didn't have acess to "secret" protocols either. Palms problem wasn't talking to Exchange; they did that great with the device sitting in a synch cradle. Their problem was that they had issues with their support for synching from the other side of the office building via a wifi network. Nevermind synching from anywhere with cell service, which entirely changes the usefulness of the device. These issues have squat to do with Microsoft. They have everything to do with Palm making a product that was an organizer and not a communications device when customers were considering organizer functions only in choosing between communication devices. So they croaked vs. Blackberries and (particularly) cell phones.
Open formats are great; we sould demand them; MS sucks. All true, but none of that has much to do with Palms difficulties.
"We should fund it because it is the search for truth, and that's *always* important."
But is the ISS the most cost effective way to search for fund research? How many dollars are spent on each shuttle launch to do things we already know how to do and have done many times? Almost all of them. Medical Ultrasound was invented in Sweden and Scotland in the 50s, not as part of the space program. I've no idea what advancement to it they may be working on in relation to IIS, but I'm pretty confident ultrasound would be advanced more if we just spent the IIS budget on it directly.
Every time someone says the IIS is a stupid waste of money, people come out of the woodwork saying we need to fund research, because it is important to search for truth. Well, IIS is a stupid waste of money that I'd rather spend searching for truth. Lifting vast amounts of food, water and fuel into LEO is bloddy expensive, and we learn absolutely nothing by doing it.
Actually, currently the Earth is closest to the sun in Northern Hemisphere winter. For the effect you describe, it would have to get much more eliptical, and in the opposite direction. But that's nitpicking. I'll happily agree that actually pulling the earth out of orbit around the sun (which is just stupendously unlikely) wouldn't be necessary to cause a problem; any significant disturbance to the orbit would do it. I was just pointing out that to cause a significant disturbance in the earths orbit would require a combination of mass and closeness of aproach such that the odds very heavily favor passing all the way through the Andromeda galaxy without it happening.
Apparently both you and whoever modded me Flamebait took me more seriously than I intended. I apologize for not being clearer; I just found it slightly amusing that you say you are not particularly religious, but are sufficiently so so as to not write "God", which I associate with people who are pretty seriously religious. I also took "not particularly religous" to be much closer to "not religous" than you would apparently intend.
I don't generally knock on wood or have good luck charms, but I do have a small plastic astronaut figurine which I have intentionally convinced myself will drive me crazy if it is not kept surrounded by a circle of tiny blue stones. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone who does not expect me to take their religious beliefs any more seriously than I expect them to take my belief about the astronaut. And I expect them to find that belief utterly laughable (but I'd apreciate it if they did not move the stones).
Having been to the midwest, suicide would definitely be on the table if no other method of leaving were available.
You're "not a particularly religious person"? You apparently think there's a supreme being, maker and master of all creation, who for reasons we mortals cannot begin to fathom, gets really pissy if we write down a word that refers to him. But he thinks it's fine as long as you leave out one of the letters. Would I be going out on a limb in thinking you also beleive god has no problem with either roast beef sandwiches or cheese sandwiches, but that roast beef and cheese together is right out?
Sorry, it just kind of depresses me that I live in a society where "not particularly religous" can include people who not only beleive in god, but have such specific beleifs about him as to not only establish that that god is batshit crazy, but allow discussion of exactly what mental disorders this god might suffer from.
Just doing some quick and dirty estimations, the messing with orbits issue seems pretty unlikely. The earths orbit, for example, would only be disturbed by something pulling different amounts on the earth vs. the sun, because the earth was closer to it or further from it. It would have to be awfully close for the distance from the earth to the sun to be very significant. Even at 1 light year, we're talking something like 1 part in 100,000. You'd need something very massive, passing quite close, and very quickly. The quickly part is there, but the other two are a pretty tiny probability.
The galactic collision will no doubt wreck all sorts of re-arangement on the massive scale of galaxies. Any observers concerned only with the relatively minute scale of a single solar system will presumably not even notice.
Not, as noted, that there is much chance those observers will be human.
The sun won't go nova in any case; it's too small.
Andromeda is the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way, a mere ~2 million light years away. It's moving toward us rather rapidly though, and the two galaxies should collide in about 3 billion years; if one of these stars was "thrown free" (how exactly?) it might get here well before that, but your basic point is right on: By the time it got here, there is basically no chance that the earth will still be a habitable planet.
Of course, the chance of an object randomly thrown from that far away hitting the earth is like... Let's see, if I randomly threw a dart (really hard), the chances of hitting the bullseye of a dartboard on the planet neptune... are much much better.
I will call this new product "a second dishwasher". I used to live in a group house that had two dishwashers. When one got full, you'd start it up, and take the last couple clean dishes out of the other one, stacking them on the counter. Dishes never went in cabinets. There was a drawer for silverware, but it just got dumped in loose. If you don't care whether the dishes you're using match, or whether there are a small number of clean dishes sitting on the counter, it's fantastically efficient in terms of time. Highly recomended for houses containing a group of lazy 20-somethings who aren't going to put all the dishes away in any case.
But all of those laws are agreements between nations, which vessels are subject to because they are subject to the laws of the country whose flag they sail under, and that coutry has agreed to those treaties. If a vessel violates those rules, you could complain to the country in question, and expect them to enforce the rules, because that ship is effectively part of their territory (though the treaty in question may give signatories the right to just go ahead and enforce it forthwith, even in international waters)
If a ship is not associated with any country, it has not agreed to any of those treaties, and is theoretically not legally bound by them. When the whaling ban went into effect, some vessels tried out this theory, renouncing their flag, and managing to get by without ever sailing into port. Before long they learned the "theoretical" part: Certain countries explained that if they were their own independant nations, war could be declared on them, and would be if they didn't sail into territorial waters where they could be safely arrested.
Well, you are not the knee-jerk open-source-only advocate I knee-jerkingly assumed.
Certainly the companies you mention hire developers, but the vast majority of the open source devlopers whose work their business is based on do not see a dime. (Not that they expected to or that there is anything wrong with this.)
As far as FundingUtah, I understand that they are using open source software. The quote implied that had they not, the only alternative would have been to spend hundreds of thousands writing it from scratch. Which is silly. There are five zillion proprietary web content management systems out there in addition to the fifty zillion open ones. None of them are terribly expensive, if only because several are both good and free.
They appear to be an investment group of some sort, so I wonder why are they messing with custom coding at all. Taking the quickest of looks at their site, they certainly paid some designer more than $2000, and will need to be paying a sysadmin more on an ongoing basis.
It is frequently a great answer, but Open source is not ALWAYS the ONLY answer; and nothing in your post refutes that.
But you make a good point; if I release all my code as open source, some people can indeed make a living. Just not necessarily me.
The companies you mention sell support and expertise. None of them have as their chief selling point the actuial open source code, as it would not then be a selling point. You do not pay RedHat for the Linux kernel, unless you're an idiot.
"you are only fooling yourself when you suggest that you cannot making a living unless you keep the source code to yourself"
Oh certainly, but in many cases it makes it a hell of a lot easier to make a living if I just charge for the thing I produce, which is high quality software. This even provides my customers with a neat mechanism for sharing the devlopment costs between them, rather than having to spend hundreds of thousands to write their web server from scratch; which was apparently the only alternative to open source FundingUtah could find. (guess I'll avoid investing with them, eh?)
Well, sea-going vessels don't actually have to be registered anywhere. Because there aren't really any "international" laws. There are agreements between nations (even sometimes basically all of them) that get codified within the laws of those countries. But a sea going vessel can renounce whatever national affiliation it had, and not register anywhere new. Of course, at that point few countries will allow you into their territrorial watters, much less harbors, so it makes it difficult to stop "sea going". None the less, some vessels, notably whalers, have done so. At that point, there's no country you're part of to come harras you for violating their laws, regulations, or what have you. Of course, there's nobody to come help you out if any country or private party decides to harrass you for any reason they like.
So vessels tenfd to be registered somewhere, because it's nice to have some country backing you, and it's nice to be able to come into harbor ocasionally. In the case of aircraft, it probably is effectively compulsory if you consider it's nice if people will let you land ocasionally.
"look only at the numbers and geopolitics. You can hardly call it a 'disaster.'"
Iraqi civilians are dying at a vastly higher rate than under Saddam. Millions of people have been moved from a brutal dictatorship to a nasty civil war that shows every sign of leading quickly to a brutal theocracy. Saddams regime was quite terrible, yet at great expense in lives and money we have made things worse for pretty much everyone. How could one possibly not call it a disaster?
In the case of a "Meltdown", sinking may well not cool it down fine. Cooling does not control the rate of fission, it simply keeps your mechanisms for doing so from melting; if they've already done so, cooling it down is unlikely to make them operable again.
You are quite right that a normaly operating coal plant produces more radiation than a properly operating nuclear plant. This red herring is frequently thrown up by nuclear power proponents. No one (with sense) is worried about properly operating nuclear plants; please see your own subject line for what they are worried about. That, and the need to store the waste safely for 100000 years.
Total income at the federal level is up, yes. Total spending at the federal level is up much much more, and this is what I would credit with the increase in tax revenues.
If we simply paid the additional spending to someone, and taxed them, we would realize a bigger increase in net income than we have. Of course, we'd still have this completely unsustainable, crushing debt that we're running up just stupidly fast, but hey, net income is up! Want to increase your net income? I'll pay you five bucks if you let me borrow 500 in your name. Your net income will be up.
It is not remotely clear whether the Bush tax cuts would increase revenues without the spending. It is abundantly clear that the Bush spending is not sustainable. Let's assume that the tax cuts cause the economy to start growing at the fastest yearly rate it ever has (not exactly what we've seen by a long shot), and it continues to do so forever (a prediction hopefully even a Bushite would consider overly-optimistic). It still wouldn't increase revenue fast enough to support Bush's spending.
Bush's policies are completely trashing the economic future of this country, over the increasingly near term. Your defense of them tells me you can not, or at least have not, done the math.
Based on having interacted with him over the course of a weekend 12 years ago, ESR, no question. It's not that I do or don't think Gates is an ass; it's that I don't think it is possible to be a bigger more pompous ass than ESR. You'd, like, collapse into a black hole of pomposity or something.
"So you say that for anyone to have a discussion of evolution they must use your conventions of naming? I say bullshit"
Cool. Because I define the word "bullshit" as simple shorthand for mean "You are absolutely correct, all creationists are idiots, me doubly so." Glad we agree.
To have a discussion of anything you must use commonly accepted conventions of naming. It's called language.
I hate focus stealing too. But it's not as easy for MS to fix as you make out.
I beleive in 2000, and certainly in XP, the only way an app can steal the focus is to open a new window and specify that it should get the focus. Of course, there are various things I can do in an app where opening a new window and giving it the focus is exactly what I want to have happen. I can think of various schemes for deciding whether a new window should be allowed to get the focus, but none that allow every legitimate instance and ban every illegitamite one. At some point you just need to blame the developers who write focus stealing code.
Gaim is the biggest culprit on my system. Anyone know a way to fix this (short of hacking the code)? The whole advantage of IM is people can contact me in a way less intrusive than the phone.
"In the natural language processing business they call this 'the same level of understanding as a two-year-old child'"
Not if they know what they are talking about. That would be very impressive.
At my daughters 2 year old checkup, she was feeling shy. The doctor wanted her to say something, so he could confirm she was capable of putting two words together meaningfully. After some coaxing she said, "Dad, I don't want to be at the doctor! I want to go home. This is poopy!"
It is worrisome if a child cannot combine multiple words together in meaningful combinations on their second birthday. Your gibberish generator does not appear to be anywhere close. Heck, my 11 month old can understand and answer questions like "Do you want to eat more or go nigh-nigh?"
"I for one conjecture there just aren't enough good programmers in the world, otherwise we would see more games as revolutionary as Doom and Quake popping up on the interent."
You really think of Doom and Quake as revolutionary? Hey, it's some tight code that made good use of the latest and greatest video card tech. But they were just better graphics than previous FPS games.
In any case, there are plenty of good programmers, particularly since a totally 733t coder is not what you need to make a great game. A fast 3D engine perhaps; but how many of them does the world need?
There are few good game designers, and they are hard to identify because almost everyone thinks they are one. A good friend of mine is an excellent game designer, but has never programmed a thing. I'd much rather play a game he designed that was implemented by a mediocre coder, than a game designed by some one else and coded by a fabulous coder.
Certainly someone can cook up a great game on their own; I've played a few and enjoyed them. But every game in a nice box on the shelf in that store in the mall represents many man-years of programmers, game designers, artists, etc. time. You certainly canb't write a winner every 6 months, because most game shops have multi-year development cycles. And most games don't ever make it to that shelf, or they don't last long there because no one buys them. Most of them lose big piles of money.
Right, so start selling tissues that say "Kleenex" on the side of the box, and see what happens; you'll get sued and lose. Sell "Biily-Bobs nifto dispenser full of Kleenex", and no problem, as long as the tissues inside are actual Kleenex.
People will go right on calling it Linux, and Linus will let them, and he couldn't necessarily stop them if he wanted to. If he defends the trademark, he can, and presumably will, stop companies from calling something Linux which is not.
No significant number are going to call it GNU anything. Not for any good technical reason, but because Gnu is a stupid word. Stallman ensured it would be "Linux" when he went for a stupid recursive-acronym hacker joke. Sorry, but names aren't about giving credit where due, they are about having people know what you're talking about. 99% of the time anyone says "Linux", they are not talking about just the kernel. Therefore "Linux" is not just the kernel, no matter how much that may have been anyones intent.
"until our hyphothesis, theorys, faith, and et all are PROVEN LAW or PROVEN FALSE, they are just as plausible as any other belief scientific or religious"
Scientific theories are never proven, yet some are more plausible; they are better supported than others because they fit the evidence better; they explain things we observe about the world in ways that would not explain things if the observations were different.
"...without accepting Newton's laws - a Law that has been agreed upon."
Newtons laws are not assumed to be true, they are not agreed on. They are observed to be true (or in certain cases false.) There is no need to ask for consensus; I can go throw a ball and observe that Newtons laws accurately predict the course it will follow. If someone thinks Newton is wrong, there is no need to discuss it, they just need to figure out what their theory predicts differently from Newtons. Then they, or anyone, can go check it out.
If the star appears to be out of position, Einstein is right and Newtons "Law" is wrong. Oh, sure, there will be some disbeleiving shock, Newton has seemed right for centuries, but what you going to do? There are pictures; the star is out of position. Whether you have an open mind, whether you are biased, irrelevant. There's no agreeing or not agreeing; science is not a democracy.
"If you are unwilling to accept that God may exist (or does exist, for the point of discussion of Christianity),"
"may exist" and "does exist" are rather different assertions. Rejecting "may exist" would be obvious folly, as clearly no possible evidence could show that god does not exist. So, I'll happily accept that god may exist, all sorts of things may exist. But I don't see any point in discussing it beyond that, unless there is some actual evidence to examine, which there isn't.
"So there is no proof for something to be unproofable, perhaps the proof isn't found jet."
I do not agree. I do not think it will ever be possible to prove, or disprove, the existence of God. I beleive it is fairly trivial to prove that this is impossible. If I am correct, it will not be seen differently in a couple years time, any more than 2+2=4 might be. This is the point of proving things.
"Well wouldn't you call that a god? I don't know but if it acts like a god, has power like a god, it probably is one. Or do you think someone will go through all that trouble just to make you believe the being is a god?"
Why someone would or wouldn't go to the trouble is irrelevant; I was merely trying to come up with a blanket possible explanation for any apparent proof of God. The real point is, I cannot imagine any possible observation I could make who's only possible explantaion was God. The super-powered non-god trickster is a philosophy class classic, but "I could just be halucinating" works equally well. Really, you're pretty much doomed any time you want to prove anything of a non-mathematical nature. Sometimes you can dis-prove non-mathematical things, if they are subject to counter-examples, but God isn't. God explains anything, and thus, to my mind, nothing.
"The law of conservation of energy is a something a lot of people refer to as being a law"
Yes, this is modern use of "law" in science - an observed fact that appears to hold in all cases, but for which the motivating reason is unknown. We have observed that energy is conserved. Why? No idea. But it holds so absolutely consistently, that if we found a case where it wasn't, we would reasonably spend a very long time trying to figure out why our observations were wrong.
I called Newton "arrogant" above for calling it the Law of gravity; but perhaps "clever" is also appropriate. He figured out the inverse square rule, but was well aware he had no idea why it should be that way. Or rather he was sure he did know - God made it that way. He didn't think science should be in the business of asking why. "Law" puts a nice finality on the discussion.
The law of conservation of energy, like Newtons law of gravity, is really just an observation. It is distinct from a theory in that it doesn't offer any explanation; it doesn't add anything to the observation. I still think "Law" is arrogant. Ideally we ought to call it "the extremely widely observed, and so far universally consistent phenomenon of conservation of energy". Calling anything a "fundamental underlying principle" sure sounds to me like a fancy way of saying "I'm really not comfortable continuing to ask why beyond this point, because I, and all of modern science, have no idea"