I strongly disagree that video hardware is better in the kernel. In fact, it actually can make the system much more unstable. Adding code to the kernel can actually expose the system even more severely to bugs in that code. Adding code to the kernel does not make the code safer but actually more dangerous. Drivers can also exist in userspace and there are definite benefits of this, including the system is better protected from code in the drivers. The only benefit from having a driver in the kernel is it may improve performance a little, but that is debatable i am sure. There are big downsides, in that it would further fragment the video driver community. With video drivers in userspace and connected to X as they have been, it has not been necessary to maintain a seperate set of drivers for each OS. This has allowed FreeBSD and Linux to benefit from using the same base of drivers. Putting drivers into the kernel would likely mean the drivers would use some OS specific kernel interface and would need major porting to be used on other OS.
AFAIK the modesetting is minimalist to restore the console after X has crashed and so on, not a full blown graphics system. You are also wrong about putting things in the kernel. Putting something in the kernel does not automatically make it responsible or safe, but in fact, it can mean the opposite, making code even more destructive. It is true that applications should not contain driver code, but drivers can exist outside of the kernel, and applications, and provide a safe API to applications. Being in the kernel does not make code safer, being well written and well designed does, and its also possible to make well designed userspace code, and the system is even more protected from userspace code.
Well, these are myths about X. First X does not have "Legacy" code. Code is not like milk where it goes sour after a certain amount of time. Code that is decades can still be perfectly good and in fact newer attempts to implement the same things implementing by older code can actually result in buggier code of poorer quality. X is actually pretty efficient and does not use a lot of memory compared to other GUIs. The core X engines probably use somewhere in the area of a few megabytes.
X also has an extension mechanism where the protocol can be extended to keep up with new features and developments. X is a pretty capable system, and keeps up with all of the most recent needs of GUIs. It also has assured backwards compatability and has become sort of an API standard, so you could always count on an X application running on any X server without having to worry about compatability issues. The network transparent design allows for things that are unthinkable on windows, like running programs on one computer and displaying to another, and displaying programs from several user to one X server, etc.
An OS cannot claim to support standards when it does not support the X Window System standard which assures that all GUI apps can run on an OS without needing to port the app. Why Google did not simply use X is beyond me, we dont need yet another proprietary OS. I wouldn't touch Chrome, sounds like hype and violates its own claims of standards conformance. The POSIX support is probably shoddy too.,
I definitely agree. Compiling programs is not user friendly for regular users who just want to get things working right away and have them run out of the box. Linux really does need to work on this, and also on better backwards compatability. There is definitely a situation where kernel developers system developers, etc, just cant understand the fact that normal users dont want to have to wonder about if their hardware will work, have to figure out of software will work on one of twenty linux distro and kernel version combinations, deal with 20 different compilations of a driver or software program for different linux versions. they just want to download the software, click install, and use it. Users should be able to use one version of a driver supplied by their hardware vendor on any installation of Linux with complete backwards compatability, and any packaged software with complete backwards compatability without having to deal with compilation and configuration marathons and shaninagans. Most users arent interested in messing around with compilers and so on. They dont want to mess around with configuration files. Either Linux developers are arrogant bout regular users or they just dont care and want Linux to remain a fringe OS.
Providing a stable driver ABI, this does not have to be in the main kernel but can be an ABI provided by a module, would not preclude you from using an open source driver. In fact, it may speed up the development of open source driver since we could watch the communications between the driver and hardware and backengineer the protocol, leading to faster arrival of open source drivers. Open source drivers are preferable, but wer also have to be pragmatic, and its better to have your hardware work with a proprietary driver, when no open source is avialable, than not work at all. Its this either/or mentality which is to be avoided. We can have a choice between open source and proprietary drivers and users can decide to use which works best for them. I am not sayng that the proprietary drivers are better, but sometimes the only choice.
Also this idea that people will go out of their way to purchase special hardware just to use linux, is very naive. People wont bother, They just want something that works. If they have to worry every time about whether it works on Linux, they will just ditch Linux and go back to Windows, which is what most people who try Linux do. I know all about common granny users and they are not going to use Linux just because its Linux. If it cant run the same hardware that Windows does, they are just going to use Windows, which comes preinstalled most of the time anyway, and then they dont have to worry about it. its just not worth it to most people to waste their time messing around with Linux's shitty hardware support.
Problems with vendor drivers on Windows are very rare. Vendors do immense testing on their drivers before they release them. I have never had a problem with vendor provided drivers on Windos, and they usually work better than the open source Linux drivers, which some times do not work at all or do not support some hardware feature. I had a scanner once that it was 5 minutes to run the driver installer on Windows and it was working. No hassles. It took a week of manipulations to get it to work with Linux, and then, still, I couldnt access some of the scanner features regarding resolution control.
As for the proprietary package systems, yes they do often contain proprietary software. But, there may also be software programs out there that do not come in a proprietary package, so these have to be dealt with. Many users buy new software that was released well after they installed their OS, and others use very old software. Its unreasonable to reinstall the OS completely to install a new program, or to, not be able to install a program because the OS is a year old. Furthermore, its unreasomable to ask people to wait for package maintainers to make a native package. Most people just want to put in the software disk or download a "Windows" or "Linux" package and install it. Yes, companies do not want to deal with 20 different packages and users are bewildered by this. So a Linux system, needs to be able to cope with foreign installers, be able to run a program that was made years ago, and run a program that came out after the system was installed. Windows can do this to a good degree, which is why users go back to Windows and it just works for them. Most people, are not going to put up with an OS where they can't run a disk that they had acquired a few years ago. Linux can support such backward and forward compatability, if we cannot its because we are too retarded to realise how important this is for most users.
As sith the binary drivers, providing forward and backward compatability for app installers does not prevent you from using the native packages and I am not saying that using a foreign installer is better than the native package system, usually the native system is better.
As far as the self protecting idea, it is nifty, and would also perhaps even protect the system from rootkits, since the program would not be able to attempt to overwrite the system files. I have often thought that Linux systems by default should come with an 'installer' user that only has access to/usr/local/bin to protect the root system.
While there may be a credible argument that internet via craigslist, et al, have been eating away at newspaper revenue, this claim that deep linking is a big problem I think is really absurd. If anything, deep linking, improves advertiser exposure as users click on a link to be transported to a newspapers website. The benefit and ad exposure to the newspaper is quite the same as if the user had entered the article from the newspapers own main index page. This just seems to be an Orwellian attempt to censor the internet and expand tyranical powers. If a newspaper were really concerned about the financial issues, maybe they should provide some premium online subscription option and password protect their content. THe idea of banning linking is totally unnecessary, since the newspapers if they wished could password protect, and in fact, unconstitutional violation of free speech, similar to banning citations in written material.
I would also suggest that, a solution best for all users is allow for an alliance or cooperative of newspapers nationally, a recipricol agreement between them that when one purchases a subscription to the local newspaper, they also get access to other newspapers around the country as well. This preserves the benefits of the internet to be able to access information easily coming from everywhere, and makes it affordable, given the thousands of news sources, its impossible to subscribe to each one. There can be 'low income' and 'consumer' plans which are targeted at the affordability in the consumer market.
The useability problems with Linux comes from several areas. One is the lack of hardware support which results from the lack of a stable binary driver ABI between versions. This is basically a great disincentive for hardware manufacturers to not support linux and providing a driver. The open source drivers are often late, becoming avialable months of years after the hardware was released, buggy and does not support many hardware features. Vendors tend to carry out a lot of testing on the drivers which they produce and are better able to write driver to fully exploit the features. All hardware vendors will never release driver source, thats not realistic and a pipe dream, and shows the arrogance and niave nature of some Linux developers. The only people that refusing to provide a stable ABI ends up hurting is users who cant use their hardware. Users dont want to wait months for the release of some crappy open source driver, they just want the hardware to work.
This support for backwards compatability does not necessarily need to go into the main kernel but could be provided by a compatability layer or module.
For any platform, backwards compatability is essential for useability and to get support for software and hardware companies. These companies are not going to want to support 15 different versions of software for each od the kernel/distro combinations that exist.
On linux, the package systems and program installation is also a mess. Linux developers make an arrogant and naive assumption that all programs that a user wants to run will be open source, and that they will be installed with the native package system. An effective OS realises that the program installers will vary and will not always be in the form of a native package, and makes sure that these can work, and also protects itself.
One solution to these problems is to utilise a filesystem overlay. If an installation program attempts to overwrite an existing library, for instance, instead of being overwritten, the old version of the library will remain visible to other programs that use it but from the perspective of new program, it will see the new version of the library. This prevents the DLL hell nightmare. Each version of a file and program would be tagged to environment overlays. This would also allow, every file in the system to be traced back to the program which installed it and all files the installer put in the system to be completely removed without even affecting other programs.
This would be secondary and used mainly with foreign installers, programs of the native package system instead linking to a shared version of the library that they need and with different versions of the library being stored with the version number in the file name.
Linux can and should be both user and expert friendly. There does have to be a focus on both providing a high level user interface and as well transparency of the underlying systems so that they can be better understood and services. Everything should be able to be done both at the command line, programming and GUI level.
THe key to designing useable software is not making software dumbed down or removing features. Doing this makes the software so inflexible that only an idiot can use it. Instead, the software needs to be configurable and flexible as possible, but useability is in the layout, more commonly used features are placed up front and less commonly ones placed in expert screens and so on.
Sometimes, people who know little or nothing about Linux or software development make badly informed opinions on software development. I have heard people both advocate actions that would cripple linux software by damaging backwards compatability or remove essential features and functionality making the software too rigid and inflexible. These badly informed decisions cause a significant degree of the useability headaches with Linux. One example of people who dont know what they are talking about is people who think X needs a built in widget set, or who complain
I certainly do agree with this. I am circumcised and with a condom there is little or no sensation. Without a condom there is barely any at all. This leads to a great sense of lack of fulfillment and a sense of betrayal as if a part of ones life has been stolen. It could be possible that circumcision discourages condom use.
Circumcision has been proven in emperical studies to reduce pleasure sensitivity by as much as 80%. Monofilement pressure tests in the 2007 Sorrels sensitivity study published in the British Journal of Urology showed that the most sensitive parts of the penis are located on the foreskin, which is removed in circumcision. Circumcision removes up to 50% of the foreskin. Removing any skin from the penis destroys and removes nerve endings. Since nerve endings generate pleasure sensations, it is inescapable and inevitable that removing skin from the penis is going to reduce sensitivity due to the simple fact that nerve endings are removed.
In fact, the original reason circumcision was promoted in the USA was to desensitise boys during the anti-masturbation hysteria of the 1800s. John Harvey Kellogg among others recommended circumcising boys without anesthetic as a punishment for masturbation. Circumcision does not prevent masturbation and masturbation is harmless, but this originally was how circumcision was promoted in the USA. When masturbation as a disease was discredited, the doctors who had benefiting from the lucrative practice of circumcision had to find new lies to continue to dupe parents into handing over their little boys to be chopped up.
It was also recommended to do similar to girls and female circumcision was also done for the same reason. The male foreskin is about equivalent to a womens clitoris, on the male penis, the nerve endings are more concentrated on the foreskin rather than the glans, while on the clitoris its more on the clitoris rather than the female foreskin. Thus removal of the foreskin from a man actually can caused greater loss than removal of a foreskin from a womens clitoris. Male circumcision is at least more destructive than the circumcision removal of a womens clitoral foreskin, and perhaps approaches or equals that of a removal of a womens entire clitoris.
In any case, removal of medically normal body parts of children cannot be justified. Amputation is a last resort option to treat present, current, severe, diseases which are actually present, when there is an urgent, compelling need to do so to treat a present and current disease and there is no lesser invasive options, not to remove normal, undiseased body parts that have no medical abnormality. Circumcision violates Primum Non Nocere since it causes a damage and an injury to a medically normal body part. Prophylaxis never has been and never will be an ethically valid reason to amputate normal body parts from childrens bodies. We would not justify removing a childs breasts to prevent breast cancer, neither should we attempt to justify amputation of normal parts of boys penises that all boys are born with. Everyone has a right to a whole body.
You haven't read the old testament have you? Scientology is mild compared to the atrocities which are demanded by 'god' in the old testament, who heartily recommended stoning children to death, massive bloodbaths of ritual animal sacrifices, and human sacrifices of the human flesh of, well, i wont go there. It is just filled with violence. And the bible is supposed to be some wonderful moral guide and authority for thousands of years. My god, no wonder we are so screwed up!
Personally, i have an interest in understanding cosmological theories. But I tend to avoid belief systems that demand that people do things. Its just too easy to claim to be a prophet, to say you talk to god, and then use that to manipulate and control other people. I think, people have to make up their own minds, we shouldnt force people to believe or not to believe any religion but they should have freedom of information so they can make up their own minds.
For the wikipedia page, instead of just a complete ban on all scientology edits, why not just give them their own pro-scientology section in the article on wikipedia to espouse their views and confine them to that area? That way they dont try to erase anti-scientology views but still get to express their own view.
I actually think the idea of newspapers having a single national registration and payment system that would allow news subscribers to pay once, which would go to their local newspaper, to access news all over the country, would be good for consumers since it allows for them to continue to access news from all over the country from anywhere, without having to make seperate payments to each newspaper, and allows newspapers to continue to survive in this economy. For those who oppose this, how do you expect for newspapers to survive when advertising revenue does not make ends meet? Furthermore, blogs and part time journalists dont really have the resources to do some of the things that larger news organisations do, such as going into foreign countries which can require a lot of resources and security, and other investigations that require resources. This would bode poorly for american society which already is woefully ignorant about the world and international news. The smaller newspapers are often the ones most endangered and failing to act to prevent dissappearance of them would mean fewer independant voices and more media consolidation.
Lets stop demonising all of the newspapers here. We are talking about our ability of our society to have full time, paid reporters who act as independant watchdogs which play a critical role in our society as a check and balance against corruption. Making sure the newspapers can survive is in the best interests of consumers who rely upon and benefit from the research, investigation and reporting of news investigators and journalists.
This is correct. Nuclear is safe under normal operations. Its accidents we are worried about. We know accidents happen. People can be corrupt, negligent and so on, etc. Corporations try to cut costs to improve the profit margin. Another thing i forgot tp mention is terrorism and an intentional spill of radioactivity as well. Container technology is supposedly safe, the nuclear waste supposedly kept in tight facilities, yet, we've learned from the past not to take the reliability of technologies for granted. Long term storage cannot be done safely so it would be nice to have reprocessing. The waste is dangerous, in very small amounts, and it would not take much getting into the environment, either on a worker, or whatever, maybe a corrupt corporations who ignores contamination, etc. With the human element, nuclear becomes more dangerous.
Perhaps with a massive regulatory framework and a very competent government and plant operator, and reprocessing, extensive checks, safeguards, and procedures, you can have safe nuclear and the chance of leaks or mishandling is nil. But the cost of an accident can be very high.
Actually, there is a risk of an accidental leak or spill of radioactive materials which is always present. The amount of radioactivity by coal is minor compared to this, and in fact USA coal technologies are using filters to reduce emissions. But I will not say coal is safe. Your argument is fallacious because you are trying to distract the argument away from the risks of nuclear, by saying coal is dirty. Coal is in fact very dirty of a fuel. This does NOT mean that nuclear is not dirty and does not present grave threats. With a nuke plant we are dealing with high concentrations of radioactive waste, that even in a small quantities is lethal. If you have a leaking container a significant amount of radioactivity could leak, enough to cause major health problems, birth defects, cancer, etc. This idea that Nuclear is safe is propoganda fed to you by the nuclear industry. In fact, it is a dangerous technology and there is just too many places something could go wrong. Even a small accident can kill thousands of people and make a place unliveable for millions of years. You dont need a meltdown for this, just an accidental spill of radioactive waste.
If modern mainstream religions do not attempt to turn followers against non followers, this is a recent development. In fact christians are still very powerful and influential and have been able to manipulate the government in the USA into passing laws which blatantly discriminate against and attack those who are its enemies and live their lives in a way that contradict their religious beliefs. The most noticeable here is the ban on gay marriage that exists within many state, inspired by christianity and an attempt to render illegal the life of gay people, who truly have done no harm to anyone else. This also shows what these religions promote as being "good" and "bad" are actually quite different from what we would say is from an objective analysis. Gay people marrying would not hurt christians or straight people who marry in any way. Does gay marraige in any way take away the right of a straight person to marry and endanger that? The framing of the gay marraige ban as "protection of marriage" is the worst delusion i have seen in a while.
But back to my main point. Christians still do today attempt to harrass and injure, attack, deprive and discriminate against those it has marked as undesirable. But, not only that., but islam is a full blown tyranny that is probably 100x worse than scientology. You dont need auditing sessions to brainwash people. Christianity and islam is very effective at it and enforcing conformance through theocracy and violence. In islamic country you can arrested, killed, executed for simply questioning islam, or being gay. Most of these people are so brainwashed that their entire view of reality is determined by the Quran and become extremely violent to anyone who questions the Quran or the wisdom of Mohammad. I dont think its a minority either. Many of them, while not support an overt unsanctioned terrorist act by small groups, they support a full blown theocracy that through violence, intimidation and police force forces religious theocracy sharia law on all people and basically forces people to follow the strict, rigid religious codes and observations of the religion. It becomes accepted when the government commits the very same acts of violence and death that lone extremist groups do. It happens all the time in Saudi Arabia, who commits violent crimes against civilians much the same as Osama Bin Laden does. I guess since government does it its not a "crime" because the government made it legal. In islam, the church does not just try to influence the law, it IS the law, which makes it even more pernicious than CoS. These are people who dress up their women in long robes, because god forbid a women should be seen in public or the sky would fall, and mutilate their own childrens genitals (which is a tragedy when done to boys or girls, since boys have an equal right to a whole body that girls do. Neither are all forms of female circumcision more harmful or invasive than common male circumcision) The insanities that religion, or really just a general disregard for the self determination, dignity, human rights, and phyical integrity, of the person can lead to. ANd indeed, science without ethics can lead to the same atrocities.
the big problem however with nuclear is not that there are safety concerns with normal operations. There is little doubt reactors are fairly safe now. But the big concern is an accident in the handling of the waste. Murphys law, indicates that if something can happen, it will. In nuclear power there are too many things that can go wrong, too many mistakes and places accidents can be made. Nuclear power really approaches anything near a level of safety in the presence of a very strong independant regulatory regime, not present in all countries and constantly in tenous in the USA due to conservativism. even then an accident cant be devastating. Its just like accidently dropping some coal in a coal plant. If you see the birth defects and diseases caused by just a minuscule amount of radioactivity, you think twice. There are a million things that could go wrong that this could end up in surface water and ground water, etc. Plus there is storage which there is NO vaible solution for safely storing waste for a few billion years. Any storage container can be eroded down just like entire mountain ranges dissappear in that time frame.
The summary imples that the US has given scientology religious status. The US does not recognise or give religions status. This is prohibited by the Constitution. Furthermore, being a religion does not exempt one from laws, so the law would apply the same no matter if it was a religion or not. Being a religion does not allow an organisation to do things that would be illegal for another religion to do. Furthermore, an organisation being a religion should not single it out for more intense persecution.
As far as the charges against scientology, scientology does use sleazy methods to extract methods from the followers of this cult. However, these persons handed over this money willingly, in cases this is not illegal as long as Scientology did not attempt to coerce them or prohibit them from leaving.
This idiot seems to be a Nazi with his calls for censorship and so on. He acts like there is some terrible danger, yet copyright infringement is already illegal under present laws and nothing more needs to be done. I think what he is rally concerned about is that people can now publish their own music, art, literature etc, independantly, without having to go through large corporations who have to approve their work and control it. The idea that people can express themselves independantly scares them and they want the internet to be like every other medium, they control, that is filled with the same corporate controlled crap that fills the other mediums, basically an online version of MTV, the crappy noise that passes for music today and so on cooked up by recording company marketing departments and computer processed and synthesized that could make any bad singer sound like Elvis.
However, monopolies can happen without government intervention. Thats what your free market ayn randish argument seems to forget. In fact, the government is essential in making sure that there is competition by preventing monopolies. If we had a completely unregulated economy with no government like some Rush Limbaugh fantasy, we would end up with a situation where one company could easily seize control of a market and using its size and anti-competitive practices to destroy anyone else who would try to compete. Government is the only thing that can step into stop that.
Also, just a note, but conservatives at least by their behaviour show a contempt to democracy and the peoples ability to solve their problems, through their democratic system. To make the democratic institutions inept and powerless, basically allows corporations to do whatever they want, and these corporations are not accountable to the people. Its not unreasonable to ask for an economic system that serves the common good of the people and which is democratically controlled by us, rther than controlled by large corporations which exploit the people to hoard massive amounts of wealth for themselves. Your ideology is leading directly to a corporate totalitarian police state where a few massive corporations have consolidated control over everything, jobs, money, the economy, markets, and operate completely above the law and any democratic institution.
Rather than this corporate fascism, id rather see a mix of socialism, democratic corporations, and small mom and pop businesses.
Pulling funding from JavaFX would probably be a bad idea since JavaFX is meant to keep Java competitive with.Net and Flash platforms which are rapidly taking over web and application markets. There is a big market in content design so it seems ridiculous to cut funding to those projects and they would shoot themselves in the foot. I see it more likely that MySQl is in danger, since this is heavily overlapped with oracles own database applications.
It was never a rubbish service. The ads were a reasonable trade off for a free service. People really should not complain about ads on a free service because its what allows the service to be provided for free. I still think that web page hosting is still important and there are things that can be done with it that cant be done with facebook. Shutting down Geocities is a really dumb decision. There is a lot of important content on Geocities that really should be archived somewhere. This is an example of what many have expressed concern about, that the cultural records and legacy of an entire era is dissappearing as a result of computer data being deleted.
I always thought that the ads were a reasonable trade off for the service being free. I mean, people shouldnt complain about ads on a free service, since they help keep the service going to it can be free. I am really quite angered by the move Yahoo has made and hope that maybe they consider to keep existing material online.
This is another example of how a socialist system run by the peoples representatives can do better than some private dictatorship run for the benefit of wealthy elite interests. This is because the city government is controlled by the people and is operated with consent of the people to provide services in the common interest and in the common good, at the highest quality and lowest cost. The purpose of corporations instead is to provide the worst service at the highest cost to enrich wealthy plutocrats that run them. Thats why the corporations adn wealthy elites through their Republican conservative ayn rand and rush limbaugh elitist pro-corporate totalitarian plantation slave labour admirer puppets will fight tooth and nail against anything that will benefit and improve the conditoons of the common people and give them control over their lives and make systems that benefit everyone, rather than exploit us for the mansions and yachts of a wealthy elite. This totalitarainists are clearly in control of North Carolina, being the neofascist Republican totalitarian state it is, and want to assure that the people are rupe to be raped by massive corporations and to destroy anything that gets in the way of exploitation of the people for benefit of elite yachts.
Their goal is to impoverish common people, starve people to death with slave wages and deny health care to the people so they can continue to expand their own wealth. since the 1980s this is whats been happening, with waes of common people falling, unemployment growing, and quality life falling, the only people who have gotten wealthier are the elite fat cats who control our economic system. When are we going to stop putting up with slave wages, high prices and lousy service so some arrogant CEO can sit on a yacht all day, and who considers that his birth right. A major cause of our present economic recession and as well the fact americans are dying because of lack of healthcare when every other country has universal health care coverage for less per capita cost, is that we have greed and an economic system rigged up by the wealthy and greedy elite to make themselves richer at the expense of everyone else. They own so much opf the economy that they control everything, people are under their control at their wal mart job, how much money adn what life they have is controlled, their health care is controlled, how much things cost is controlled. There is a hidden tax in everything we buy that goes not to help the poor but to pay for some greedy corporate elites yacht, this is the corporate overhead adn profit margins corporations put ine verything we buy which is made for cents in china and sold for hun dreds here, both impoverishing chinese and destroying american jobs, the only winners are corporate elitist fascists. ALL of this is done WITH NO CONTROL over it by the people. Unlike our government, the people have no voice in this corporations which have more power over peoples lives than government, and who actually buy the government through campaign contributions, dismantle all pro-consumer and pro-working class government regulations so corporations become defacto governments above the law. THus law becomes something ratheer than to protect peoples freedom, something to protect masive corporations like we see with RIAA and MPAA, at the same time government ignores the basic needs of people to food shelter, medical care and housing. The corporate system is one who only see people has having a value to expand and enrich corporations, they see people as things to be exploited, used and thrown away again and left to die when no longer useful to them. It needs to be replaced with an economic system for and by the common people, a democratic socialist system where we elect who runs the corporations who control the economy.
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I strongly disagree that video hardware is better in the kernel. In fact, it actually can make the system much more unstable. Adding code to the kernel can actually expose the system even more severely to bugs in that code. Adding code to the kernel does not make the code safer but actually more dangerous. Drivers can also exist in userspace and there are definite benefits of this, including the system is better protected from code in the drivers. The only benefit from having a driver in the kernel is it may improve performance a little, but that is debatable i am sure. There are big downsides, in that it would further fragment the video driver community. With video drivers in userspace and connected to X as they have been, it has not been necessary to maintain a seperate set of drivers for each OS. This has allowed FreeBSD and Linux to benefit from using the same base of drivers. Putting drivers into the kernel would likely mean the drivers would use some OS specific kernel interface and would need major porting to be used on other OS.
AFAIK the modesetting is minimalist to restore the console after X has crashed and so on, not a full blown graphics system. You are also wrong about putting things in the kernel. Putting something in the kernel does not automatically make it responsible or safe, but in fact, it can mean the opposite, making code even more destructive. It is true that applications should not contain driver code, but drivers can exist outside of the kernel, and applications, and provide a safe API to applications. Being in the kernel does not make code safer, being well written and well designed does, and its also possible to make well designed userspace code, and the system is even more protected from userspace code.
What the hell are you talking about? have you ever used Compiz? Its more attractive than any Windows desktop Ive ever used.
Well, these are myths about X. First X does not have "Legacy" code. Code is not like milk where it goes sour after a certain amount of time. Code that is decades can still be perfectly good and in fact newer attempts to implement the same things implementing by older code can actually result in buggier code of poorer quality. X is actually pretty efficient and does not use a lot of memory compared to other GUIs. The core X engines probably use somewhere in the area of a few megabytes.
X also has an extension mechanism where the protocol can be extended to keep up with new features and developments. X is a pretty capable system, and keeps up with all of the most recent needs of GUIs. It also has assured backwards compatability and has become sort of an API standard, so you could always count on an X application running on any X server without having to worry about compatability issues. The network transparent design allows for things that are unthinkable on windows, like running programs on one computer and displaying to another, and displaying programs from several user to one X server, etc.
An OS cannot claim to support standards when it does not support the X Window System standard which assures that all GUI apps can run on an OS without needing to port the app. Why Google did not simply use X is beyond me, we dont need yet another proprietary OS. I wouldn't touch Chrome, sounds like hype and violates its own claims of standards conformance. The POSIX support is probably shoddy too.,
I definitely agree. Compiling programs is not user friendly for regular users who just want to get things working right away and have them run out of the box. Linux really does need to work on this, and also on better backwards compatability. There is definitely a situation where kernel developers system developers, etc, just cant understand the fact that normal users dont want to have to wonder about if their hardware will work, have to figure out of software will work on one of twenty linux distro and kernel version combinations, deal with 20 different compilations of a driver or software program for different linux versions. they just want to download the software, click install, and use it. Users should be able to use one version of a driver supplied by their hardware vendor on any installation of Linux with complete backwards compatability, and any packaged software with complete backwards compatability without having to deal with compilation and configuration marathons and shaninagans. Most users arent interested in messing around with compilers and so on. They dont want to mess around with configuration files. Either Linux developers are arrogant bout regular users or they just dont care and want Linux to remain a fringe OS.
Providing a stable driver ABI, this does not have to be in the main kernel but can be an ABI provided by a module, would not preclude you from using an open source driver. In fact, it may speed up the development of open source driver since we could watch the communications between the driver and hardware and backengineer the protocol, leading to faster arrival of open source drivers. Open source drivers are preferable, but wer also have to be pragmatic, and its better to have your hardware work with a proprietary driver, when no open source is avialable, than not work at all. Its this either/or mentality which is to be avoided. We can have a choice between open source and proprietary drivers and users can decide to use which works best for them. I am not sayng that the proprietary drivers are better, but sometimes the only choice.
Also this idea that people will go out of their way to purchase special hardware just to use linux, is very naive. People wont bother, They just want something that works. If they have to worry every time about whether it works on Linux, they will just ditch Linux and go back to Windows, which is what most people who try Linux do. I know all about common granny users and they are not going to use Linux just because its Linux. If it cant run the same hardware that Windows does, they are just going to use Windows, which comes preinstalled most of the time anyway, and then they dont have to worry about it. its just not worth it to most people to waste their time messing around with Linux's shitty hardware support.
Problems with vendor drivers on Windows are very rare. Vendors do immense testing on their drivers before they release them. I have never had a problem with vendor provided drivers on Windos, and they usually work better than the open source Linux drivers, which some times do not work at all or do not support some hardware feature. I had a scanner once that it was 5 minutes to run the driver installer on Windows and it was working. No hassles. It took a week of manipulations to get it to work with Linux, and then, still, I couldnt access some of the scanner features regarding resolution control.
As for the proprietary package systems, yes they do often contain proprietary software. But, there may also be software programs out there that do not come in a proprietary package, so these have to be dealt with. Many users buy new software that was released well after they installed their OS, and others use very old software. Its unreasonable to reinstall the OS completely to install a new program, or to, not be able to install a program because the OS is a year old. Furthermore, its unreasomable to ask people to wait for package maintainers to make a native package. Most people just want to put in the software disk or download a "Windows" or "Linux" package and install it. Yes, companies do not want to deal with 20 different packages and users are bewildered by this. So a Linux system, needs to be able to cope with foreign installers, be able to run a program that was made years ago, and run a program that came out after the system was installed. Windows can do this to a good degree, which is why users go back to Windows and it just works for them. Most people, are not going to put up with an OS where they can't run a disk that they had acquired a few years ago. Linux can support such backward and forward compatability, if we cannot its because we are too retarded to realise how important this is for most users.
As sith the binary drivers, providing forward and backward compatability for app installers does not prevent you from using the native packages and I am not saying that using a foreign installer is better than the native package system, usually the native system is better.
As far as the self protecting idea, it is nifty, and would also perhaps even protect the system from rootkits, since the program would not be able to attempt to overwrite the system files. I have often thought that Linux systems by default should come with an 'installer' user that only has access to /usr/local/bin to protect the root system.
While there may be a credible argument that internet via craigslist, et al, have been eating away at newspaper revenue, this claim that deep linking is a big problem I think is really absurd. If anything, deep linking, improves advertiser exposure as users click on a link to be transported to a newspapers website. The benefit and ad exposure to the newspaper is quite the same as if the user had entered the article from the newspapers own main index page. This just seems to be an Orwellian attempt to censor the internet and expand tyranical powers. If a newspaper were really concerned about the financial issues, maybe they should provide some premium online subscription option and password protect their content. THe idea of banning linking is totally unnecessary, since the newspapers if they wished could password protect, and in fact, unconstitutional violation of free speech, similar to banning citations in written material.
I would also suggest that, a solution best for all users is allow for an alliance or cooperative of newspapers nationally, a recipricol agreement between them that when one purchases a subscription to the local newspaper, they also get access to other newspapers around the country as well. This preserves the benefits of the internet to be able to access information easily coming from everywhere, and makes it affordable, given the thousands of news sources, its impossible to subscribe to each one. There can be 'low income' and 'consumer' plans which are targeted at the affordability in the consumer market.
The useability problems with Linux comes from several areas. One is the lack of hardware support which results from the lack of a stable binary driver ABI between versions. This is basically a great disincentive for hardware manufacturers to not support linux and providing a driver. The open source drivers are often late, becoming avialable months of years after the hardware was released, buggy and does not support many hardware features. Vendors tend to carry out a lot of testing on the drivers which they produce and are better able to write driver to fully exploit the features. All hardware vendors will never release driver source, thats not realistic and a pipe dream, and shows the arrogance and niave nature of some Linux developers. The only people that refusing to provide a stable ABI ends up hurting is users who cant use their hardware. Users dont want to wait months for the release of some crappy open source driver, they just want the hardware to work.
This support for backwards compatability does not necessarily need to go into the main kernel but could be provided by a compatability layer or module.
For any platform, backwards compatability is essential for useability and to get support for software and hardware companies. These companies are not going to want to support 15 different versions of software for each od the kernel/distro combinations that exist.
On linux, the package systems and program installation is also a mess. Linux developers make an arrogant and naive assumption that all programs that a user wants to run will be open source, and that they will be installed with the native package system. An effective OS realises that the program installers will vary and will not always be in the form of a native package, and makes sure that these can work, and also protects itself.
One solution to these problems is to utilise a filesystem overlay. If an installation program attempts to overwrite an existing library, for instance, instead of being overwritten, the old version of the library will remain visible to other programs that use it but from the perspective of new program, it will see the new version of the library. This prevents the DLL hell nightmare. Each version of a file and program would be tagged to environment overlays. This would also allow, every file in the system to be traced back to the program which installed it and all files the installer put in the system to be completely removed without even affecting other programs.
This would be secondary and used mainly with foreign installers, programs of the native package system instead linking to a shared version of the library that they need and with different versions of the library being stored with the version number in the file name.
Linux can and should be both user and expert friendly. There does have to be a focus on both providing a high level user interface and as well transparency of the underlying systems so that they can be better understood and services. Everything should be able to be done both at the command line, programming and GUI level.
THe key to designing useable software is not making software dumbed down or removing features. Doing this makes the software so inflexible that only an idiot can use it. Instead, the software needs to be configurable and flexible as possible, but useability is in the layout, more commonly used features are placed up front and less commonly ones placed in expert screens and so on .
Sometimes, people who know little or nothing about Linux or software development make badly informed opinions on software development. I have heard people both advocate actions that would cripple linux software by damaging backwards compatability or remove essential features and functionality making the software too rigid and inflexible. These badly informed decisions cause a significant degree of the useability headaches with Linux. One example of people who dont know what they are talking about is people who think X needs a built in widget set, or who complain
Correction: Circumcision removes 50% of the skin from the penis.
I certainly do agree with this. I am circumcised and with a condom there is little or no sensation. Without a condom there is barely any at all. This leads to a great sense of lack of fulfillment and a sense of betrayal as if a part of ones life has been stolen. It could be possible that circumcision discourages condom use.
Circumcision has been proven in emperical studies to reduce pleasure sensitivity by as much as 80%. Monofilement pressure tests in the 2007 Sorrels sensitivity study published in the British Journal of Urology showed that the most sensitive parts of the penis are located on the foreskin, which is removed in circumcision. Circumcision removes up to 50% of the foreskin. Removing any skin from the penis destroys and removes nerve endings. Since nerve endings generate pleasure sensations, it is inescapable and inevitable that removing skin from the penis is going to reduce sensitivity due to the simple fact that nerve endings are removed.
In fact, the original reason circumcision was promoted in the USA was to desensitise boys during the anti-masturbation hysteria of the 1800s. John Harvey Kellogg among others recommended circumcising boys without anesthetic as a punishment for masturbation. Circumcision does not prevent masturbation and masturbation is harmless, but this originally was how circumcision was promoted in the USA. When masturbation as a disease was discredited, the doctors who had benefiting from the lucrative practice of circumcision had to find new lies to continue to dupe parents into handing over their little boys to be chopped up.
It was also recommended to do similar to girls and female circumcision was also done for the same reason. The male foreskin is about equivalent to a womens clitoris, on the male penis, the nerve endings are more concentrated on the foreskin rather than the glans, while on the clitoris its more on the clitoris rather than the female foreskin. Thus removal of the foreskin from a man actually can caused greater loss than removal of a foreskin from a womens clitoris. Male circumcision is at least more destructive than the circumcision removal of a womens clitoral foreskin, and perhaps approaches or equals that of a removal of a womens entire clitoris.
In any case, removal of medically normal body parts of children cannot be justified. Amputation is a last resort option to treat present, current, severe, diseases which are actually present, when there is an urgent, compelling need to do so to treat a present and current disease and there is no lesser invasive options, not to remove normal, undiseased body parts that have no medical abnormality. Circumcision violates Primum Non Nocere since it causes a damage and an injury to a medically normal body part. Prophylaxis never has been and never will be an ethically valid reason to amputate normal body parts from childrens bodies. We would not justify removing a childs breasts to prevent breast cancer, neither should we attempt to justify amputation of normal parts of boys penises that all boys are born with. Everyone has a right to a whole body.
You haven't read the old testament have you? Scientology is mild compared to the atrocities which are demanded by 'god' in the old testament, who heartily recommended stoning children to death, massive bloodbaths of ritual animal sacrifices, and human sacrifices of the human flesh of, well, i wont go there. It is just filled with violence. And the bible is supposed to be some wonderful moral guide and authority for thousands of years. My god, no wonder we are so screwed up!
Personally, i have an interest in understanding cosmological theories. But I tend to avoid belief systems that demand that people do things. Its just too easy to claim to be a prophet, to say you talk to god, and then use that to manipulate and control other people. I think, people have to make up their own minds, we shouldnt force people to believe or not to believe any religion but they should have freedom of information so they can make up their own minds.
For the wikipedia page, instead of just a complete ban on all scientology edits, why not just give them their own pro-scientology section in the article on wikipedia to espouse their views and confine them to that area? That way they dont try to erase anti-scientology views but still get to express their own view.
I actually think the idea of newspapers having a single national registration and payment system that would allow news subscribers to pay once, which would go to their local newspaper, to access news all over the country, would be good for consumers since it allows for them to continue to access news from all over the country from anywhere, without having to make seperate payments to each newspaper, and allows newspapers to continue to survive in this economy. For those who oppose this, how do you expect for newspapers to survive when advertising revenue does not make ends meet? Furthermore, blogs and part time journalists dont really have the resources to do some of the things that larger news organisations do, such as going into foreign countries which can require a lot of resources and security, and other investigations that require resources. This would bode poorly for american society which already is woefully ignorant about the world and international news. The smaller newspapers are often the ones most endangered and failing to act to prevent dissappearance of them would mean fewer independant voices and more media consolidation.
Lets stop demonising all of the newspapers here. We are talking about our ability of our society to have full time, paid reporters who act as independant watchdogs which play a critical role in our society as a check and balance against corruption. Making sure the newspapers can survive is in the best interests of consumers who rely upon and benefit from the research, investigation and reporting of news investigators and journalists.
This is correct. Nuclear is safe under normal operations. Its accidents we are worried about. We know accidents happen. People can be corrupt, negligent and so on, etc. Corporations try to cut costs to improve the profit margin. Another thing i forgot tp mention is terrorism and an intentional spill of radioactivity as well. Container technology is supposedly safe, the nuclear waste supposedly kept in tight facilities, yet, we've learned from the past not to take the reliability of technologies for granted. Long term storage cannot be done safely so it would be nice to have reprocessing. The waste is dangerous, in very small amounts, and it would not take much getting into the environment, either on a worker, or whatever, maybe a corrupt corporations who ignores contamination, etc. With the human element, nuclear becomes more dangerous.
Perhaps with a massive regulatory framework and a very competent government and plant operator, and reprocessing, extensive checks, safeguards, and procedures, you can have safe nuclear and the chance of leaks or mishandling is nil. But the cost of an accident can be very high.
Actually, there is a risk of an accidental leak or spill of radioactive materials which is always present. The amount of radioactivity by coal is minor compared to this, and in fact USA coal technologies are using filters to reduce emissions. But I will not say coal is safe. Your argument is fallacious because you are trying to distract the argument away from the risks of nuclear, by saying coal is dirty. Coal is in fact very dirty of a fuel. This does NOT mean that nuclear is not dirty and does not present grave threats. With a nuke plant we are dealing with high concentrations of radioactive waste, that even in a small quantities is lethal. If you have a leaking container a significant amount of radioactivity could leak, enough to cause major health problems, birth defects, cancer, etc. This idea that Nuclear is safe is propoganda fed to you by the nuclear industry. In fact, it is a dangerous technology and there is just too many places something could go wrong. Even a small accident can kill thousands of people and make a place unliveable for millions of years. You dont need a meltdown for this, just an accidental spill of radioactive waste.
If modern mainstream religions do not attempt to turn followers against non followers, this is a recent development. In fact christians are still very powerful and influential and have been able to manipulate the government in the USA into passing laws which blatantly discriminate against and attack those who are its enemies and live their lives in a way that contradict their religious beliefs. The most noticeable here is the ban on gay marriage that exists within many state, inspired by christianity and an attempt to render illegal the life of gay people, who truly have done no harm to anyone else. This also shows what these religions promote as being "good" and "bad" are actually quite different from what we would say is from an objective analysis. Gay people marrying would not hurt christians or straight people who marry in any way. Does gay marraige in any way take away the right of a straight person to marry and endanger that? The framing of the gay marraige ban as "protection of marriage" is the worst delusion i have seen in a while.
But back to my main point. Christians still do today attempt to harrass and injure, attack, deprive and discriminate against those it has marked as undesirable. But, not only that., but islam is a full blown tyranny that is probably 100x worse than scientology. You dont need auditing sessions to brainwash people. Christianity and islam is very effective at it and enforcing conformance through theocracy and violence. In islamic country you can arrested, killed, executed for simply questioning islam, or being gay. Most of these people are so brainwashed that their entire view of reality is determined by the Quran and become extremely violent to anyone who questions the Quran or the wisdom of Mohammad. I dont think its a minority either. Many of them, while not support an overt unsanctioned terrorist act by small groups, they support a full blown theocracy that through violence, intimidation and police force forces religious theocracy sharia law on all people and basically forces people to follow the strict, rigid religious codes and observations of the religion. It becomes accepted when the government commits the very same acts of violence and death that lone extremist groups do. It happens all the time in Saudi Arabia, who commits violent crimes against civilians much the same as Osama Bin Laden does. I guess since government does it its not a "crime" because the government made it legal. In islam, the church does not just try to influence the law, it IS the law, which makes it even more pernicious than CoS. These are people who dress up their women in long robes, because god forbid a women should be seen in public or the sky would fall, and mutilate their own childrens genitals (which is a tragedy when done to boys or girls, since boys have an equal right to a whole body that girls do. Neither are all forms of female circumcision more harmful or invasive than common male circumcision) The insanities that religion, or really just a general disregard for the self determination, dignity, human rights, and phyical integrity, of the person can lead to. ANd indeed, science without ethics can lead to the same atrocities.
the big problem however with nuclear is not that there are safety concerns with normal operations. There is little doubt reactors are fairly safe now. But the big concern is an accident in the handling of the waste. Murphys law, indicates that if something can happen, it will. In nuclear power there are too many things that can go wrong, too many mistakes and places accidents can be made. Nuclear power really approaches anything near a level of safety in the presence of a very strong independant regulatory regime, not present in all countries and constantly in tenous in the USA due to conservativism. even then an accident cant be devastating. Its just like accidently dropping some coal in a coal plant. If you see the birth defects and diseases caused by just a minuscule amount of radioactivity, you think twice. There are a million things that could go wrong that this could end up in surface water and ground water, etc. Plus there is storage which there is NO vaible solution for safely storing waste for a few billion years. Any storage container can be eroded down just like entire mountain ranges dissappear in that time frame.
The summary imples that the US has given scientology religious status. The US does not recognise or give religions status. This is prohibited by the Constitution. Furthermore, being a religion does not exempt one from laws, so the law would apply the same no matter if it was a religion or not. Being a religion does not allow an organisation to do things that would be illegal for another religion to do. Furthermore, an organisation being a religion should not single it out for more intense persecution.
As far as the charges against scientology, scientology does use sleazy methods to extract methods from the followers of this cult. However, these persons handed over this money willingly, in cases this is not illegal as long as Scientology did not attempt to coerce them or prohibit them from leaving.
This idiot seems to be a Nazi with his calls for censorship and so on. He acts like there is some terrible danger, yet copyright infringement is already illegal under present laws and nothing more needs to be done. I think what he is rally concerned about is that people can now publish their own music, art, literature etc, independantly, without having to go through large corporations who have to approve their work and control it. The idea that people can express themselves independantly scares them and they want the internet to be like every other medium, they control, that is filled with the same corporate controlled crap that fills the other mediums, basically an online version of MTV, the crappy noise that passes for music today and so on cooked up by recording company marketing departments and computer processed and synthesized that could make any bad singer sound like Elvis.
However, monopolies can happen without government intervention. Thats what your free market ayn randish argument seems to forget. In fact, the government is essential in making sure that there is competition by preventing monopolies. If we had a completely unregulated economy with no government like some Rush Limbaugh fantasy, we would end up with a situation where one company could easily seize control of a market and using its size and anti-competitive practices to destroy anyone else who would try to compete. Government is the only thing that can step into stop that.
Also, just a note, but conservatives at least by their behaviour show a contempt to democracy and the peoples ability to solve their problems, through their democratic system. To make the democratic institutions inept and powerless, basically allows corporations to do whatever they want, and these corporations are not accountable to the people. Its not unreasonable to ask for an economic system that serves the common good of the people and which is democratically controlled by us, rther than controlled by large corporations which exploit the people to hoard massive amounts of wealth for themselves. Your ideology is leading directly to a corporate totalitarian police state where a few massive corporations have consolidated control over everything, jobs, money, the economy, markets, and operate completely above the law and any democratic institution.
Rather than this corporate fascism, id rather see a mix of socialism, democratic corporations, and small mom and pop businesses.
Pulling funding from JavaFX would probably be a bad idea since JavaFX is meant to keep Java competitive with .Net and Flash platforms which are rapidly taking over web and application markets. There is a big market in content design so it seems ridiculous to cut funding to those projects and they would shoot themselves in the foot. I see it more likely that MySQl is in danger, since this is heavily overlapped with oracles own database applications.
It was never a rubbish service. The ads were a reasonable trade off for a free service. People really should not complain about ads on a free service because its what allows the service to be provided for free. I still think that web page hosting is still important and there are things that can be done with it that cant be done with facebook. Shutting down Geocities is a really dumb decision. There is a lot of important content on Geocities that really should be archived somewhere. This is an example of what many have expressed concern about, that the cultural records and legacy of an entire era is dissappearing as a result of computer data being deleted.
I always thought that the ads were a reasonable trade off for the service being free. I mean, people shouldnt complain about ads on a free service, since they help keep the service going to it can be free. I am really quite angered by the move Yahoo has made and hope that maybe they consider to keep existing material online.
This is another example of how a socialist system run by the peoples representatives can do better than some private dictatorship run for the benefit of wealthy elite interests. This is because the city government is controlled by the people and is operated with consent of the people to provide services in the common interest and in the common good, at the highest quality and lowest cost. The purpose of corporations instead is to provide the worst service at the highest cost to enrich wealthy plutocrats that run them. Thats why the corporations adn wealthy elites through their Republican conservative ayn rand and rush limbaugh elitist pro-corporate totalitarian plantation slave labour admirer puppets will fight tooth and nail against anything that will benefit and improve the conditoons of the common people and give them control over their lives and make systems that benefit everyone, rather than exploit us for the mansions and yachts of a wealthy elite. This totalitarainists are clearly in control of North Carolina, being the neofascist Republican totalitarian state it is, and want to assure that the people are rupe to be raped by massive corporations and to destroy anything that gets in the way of exploitation of the people for benefit of elite yachts.
Their goal is to impoverish common people, starve people to death with slave wages and deny health care to the people so they can continue to expand their own wealth. since the 1980s this is whats been happening, with waes of common people falling, unemployment growing, and quality life falling, the only people who have gotten wealthier are the elite fat cats who control our economic system. When are we going to stop putting up with slave wages, high prices and lousy service so some arrogant CEO can sit on a yacht all day, and who considers that his birth right. A major cause of our present economic recession and as well the fact americans are dying because of lack of healthcare when every other country has universal health care coverage for less per capita cost, is that we have greed and an economic system rigged up by the wealthy and greedy elite to make themselves richer at the expense of everyone else. They own so much opf the economy that they control everything, people are under their control at their wal mart job, how much money adn what life they have is controlled, their health care is controlled, how much things cost is controlled. There is a hidden tax in everything we buy that goes not to help the poor but to pay for some greedy corporate elites yacht, this is the corporate overhead adn profit margins corporations put ine verything we buy which is made for cents in china and sold for hun dreds here, both impoverishing chinese and destroying american jobs, the only winners are corporate elitist fascists. ALL of this is done WITH NO CONTROL over it by the people. Unlike our government, the people have no voice in this corporations which have more power over peoples lives than government, and who actually buy the government through campaign contributions, dismantle all pro-consumer and pro-working class government regulations so corporations become defacto governments above the law. THus law becomes something ratheer than to protect peoples freedom, something to protect masive corporations like we see with RIAA and MPAA, at the same time government ignores the basic needs of people to food shelter, medical care and housing. The corporate system is one who only see people has having a value to expand and enrich corporations, they see people as things to be exploited, used and thrown away again and left to die when no longer useful to them. It needs to be replaced with an economic system for and by the common people, a democratic socialist system where we elect who runs the corporations who control the economy.
The number of Hindu and Buddhist texts is vast, and some of the oldest on the planet. I wonder if they will get around to digitising these.