"The truely ideal situation would be if every american citezen was armed, and every american criminal was in prison. Unfortunately we don't play that way."
How the hell is that the ideal situation?? The ideal situation is that nobody commits heinous crimes and very few are in jail. What twisted world do you live in?
"If one kid in the library had a gun, and the balls to use it, many lives may have been saved. We're too afraid of guns to trust 'children' with them, but not all children are messed up like 'we' were."
Hmm...I knew two kids in the library with guns...Isn't this whole "guns save people" a bit old...Do nuclear arms save people?? Hey, lookie, Russia has a big ass bomb which could kill us all, but so do we, so let's just be friends. Great logic. You're civil because if you aren't your enemy will blow you to friggen pieces? Great worldview.
"With muggers it may be a better choice to give up your money than to fight. For other crimes, such as kidnapping, it is never a better choice to give in to your attacker's demands. An armed female who is the object of an abduction is much better off than an unarmed one."
Well, if you consider being killed immediately in retribution after pulling her gun an attempting an attack, instead of being gagged for a while or raped "better off" then I guess so.
"You also ignore the peripheral benefits of an armed populace. It doesn't have to be YOU who has a gun to thwart crime, just someone around you, or the populace at large that can dissuade a potential criminal."
Does this peripheral benifit also extend to me being shot dead because I'm mistaken for a criminal? Or maybe a child being shot in the crossfire? No thank you...I will take an armed and trained specialized police force over an armed, stupid, and deadly populace.
"Had they been more skilled with their bombmaking they would have done much more damage."
Yeah, they could've chucked their bombs at people. Much worse than guns. You can never tell when somebody is carrying a concealed propane bomb.
"Had they placed the bombs in a car and driven into the cafeteria and manually exploded them, how many would have died? 169? In any event, more."
Um, and how many armed students would it take to avoid this???
Um yes...well we cannot make any law which will radically take our society back to 1950's mores can we? Nor did people in the 1950s have access to assault rifles (did they?).
The availability of guns WAS a factor. It is undeniable that if they did not have guns, that this probably wouldn't have happened (ok sure sure, bombs, but still...). It so happens that the guns they attained were attained illegally, so we already have in place a restriction on being able to attain guns. We know that is broken all the time. We simply CANNOT stop it. Now I consider myself liberal, I'm all for the ACLU, and if the Constitution says so (if it should is another argument), then people SHOULD be able to have "arms" (even though this is actually an anachronism because nobody is going to be able to overthrow a government with firearms). BUT, I also believe that there is no sound reason for anybody to have a gun which was made with the intent of killing other PEOPLE, and breaking the law. YES, I know, guns DON'T kill people, people do...BUT I think it is ok to make a small exception and say, "ok, you can have all the guns you want - as long as they have not be manufactured for the express purpose of killing other human beings which is obviously strictly against the law here".
If these two boys came in with revolvers they would have been subdued in NO time.
What? The media has it all wrong/again/? They've merely been pushed the self-created exaggerated, sensationalized conclusion? NO!?
What? These kids where really PEOPLE? Couldn't be! They must have been evil satanic GOTHS. Or immoral godless GAYS. Never real PEOPLE! If they were real people, we'd have to acknowledge that there were real reasons, perhaps caused by other people around, that they may actually have done these things. You mean they're not racists? Not anti-Christian? You mean that stupid so-called martyr I've been hearing so damn much about from every news magazine and foaming preacher is really NOT a martyr, but just another random death? No way!
You mean that everything the media has piped into my soggy little brain is false...that these were just two very frustrated, screwed up teens, outcasts of outcasts, that did a/botched/ job!? And that immediately afterwards, every uptight principal in the US decided it was cause to violate the civil rights of American citizens by denying them public services because they wore a certain type of clothing that in actuality had nothing to do with the perpetrators anyway? Couldn't be!
--
This was just an occasion for every selfish stupid special interest to displace the "fault" on to their favorite evil, and push their cause...nobody gave a damn about the real PEOPLE involved. They were too damn busy licking their wounds and feeling sorry for themselves by making out as if their enemy was some big evil unaviodable thing. Well wake up! Black clothing and satan don't cause people to do this! It's everybody's responsibility to see that no human gets in a state that they want to do something like this.
Re: A little perspective - *nix culture
on
WinLinux 2000
·
· Score: 2
I think a lot of the resistence you cite is present, but stems from another, perhaps subconscious reason. Humans have always had "rites of passage", whereby people/earn/ their entry into a particular group. In the hacker/geek circle, this "rite of passage" was RTFMing, spending hours in the dark behind a glowing monitor, tweaking code, and intellectually grasping the system so that at the time you are considered "passed", you are in truth already a/part/ of the system. As the bar lowers more and more people can flood in, risking the original group from losing its identity.
While I actually/_LIKE_/ the idea of pervasive, "thin"/dumb clients, if you look at the figures it doesn't make/all/ that much sense in the home user arena. Computer prices are dropping so fast that a "dumb" client is only marginally cheaper than an acceptibly "smart" client. I know *I* don't want a whole bunch of dumb terminals (although they are the perfect solution in many cases). What, am I going to rely on the server's graphics card to accelerate my Quake3 match??? Pshaw.
Their patents are broad and ambiguous. As noted in another thread, almost anybody in modern computer could be charged for infringing on these concepts. And, um, don't you have to PROVE that you/use/ your marvelous magical technology to actually enforce the patent?
Next time you get a page with the drop down, copy the HTML form and create your own page (could even be locally on your HD). Then use this page. Google doesn't care where its requests are coming from, and in fact they give instructions on how to put a google search form on your site. Just copy the drop-down code...or create the input field with your favorite value...
Man, I had Car Wars...nobody would ever play with me (pout)...but I spent tons of time designing the coolest cars...I loved it...I would just use their system to design up all sorts of cars...it was great...
Um.../WHY/ do we want to go to the moon and all?? Is there any practical reason? I don't understand this. Why would anyone want to pay to live in a bubble in the middle of a freezing desert (on one side, and the other a boiling desert) with no atmosphere and a life span of a few seconds after exposure???
I also found that peculiar. While there are certainly religious and rational people, the great majority of religious people I encounter are actually NOT rational about it. As if among everything else in the world, that was one thing that could not be questioned. Perhaps he was just brought up religious and likes to stay that way for social reasons. Maybe he doesn't care to think about it...time is not something he has to waste. There are plenty of intelligent and religious people who have never had a reason to question their belief, were never challenged about it.
I agree that the user NOT knowing about root is patently BAD. At least tell the user that they must now enter a root password, AND WRITE IT DOWN, and DON'T FORGET.
Couldn't this be fixed with RunLevels? Couldn't you just set up the box to boot into X under a certain user?
Re: Package **Nightmares**
on
Linux Lite?
·
· Score: 2
About a year ago I decided I was sick of being a windows luser. I am a programmer, and had had previous generic *nix experience so I was far from being inept. I, like many others, decided to take the easy approach and go with Red Hat (I was aware of the other distributions, but had it on good word from a Linux guru that I should start out with Red Hat).
Most of the installation was pretty straightfoward...I knew my hardware specs and wasn't really phased by all the partitioning. However, the package installer was a **nightmare**. There was an absolutely humongous list of packages with undecipherable names that all had intricate dependencies on each other. "What is prl3.405.1? And why do I need it for tk103.4? What the hell is asdf4.21...and why does qwerty1.2.3 want it?" Since no clue was really given as to WHAT these things were, I was forced (after several attempts at a minimalistic install) to install a humongous amount of crap @350 MB.
Now I used to be a DOS dork with a stupid 386. I knew every in and out of my system, and spent a lot of time tweaking. I liked to be able to understand and control everything. But the sheer amount of stuff I was required to install under Linux made this a bit daunting, and less than enjoyable. Sometimes there is such a thing as TOO much choice;). Anyway, I kept Linux around for a while, until the real world problem of disk space came around.
I would really, *really* like to switch to SOMETHING other than Windows. BeOS looks pretty nice too...I sort of like the idea of a clean start. If I do permanently switch to Linux it will probably be Debian, because I've heard their package handling is rather stringent. I'd also like GNOME and KDE to mature a bit, and see XFree86 get some of the performance enhancements in.
I thought this article would be typical clueless bs...but actually this article is quite on target.
I used to know a kid like this (roommate). Annoying to the extreme unfortunately. He used to rock constantly in his chair, and had the weirdest "galloping" style of locomotion, both of which are referred to in the article. He claimed he could never understand lyrics or music. He also, with no offense, was pretty slovenly and understatedly less than mannered in his dining behavoir. Very smart kid. But when his sleep cycle started to become the exact opposite of mine that was the last straw.
To make an analogy to operating systems, it seems people with this mild autism have a larger timeslice...they can get more of any one thing done at a time, but their consistency and responsiveness is at a disadvantage...their IO is also terrible because of a higher timeslice;).
Dolly IS a true clone. Mitochondrial DNA (AFAIK) has nothing to do with the traits of an organism. It just happened that the egg somehow mashed the mitochondrial DNA incidentally introduced during the procedure.
I have this on good word from a biology geek who knows her stuff. That the mitochondrial DNA isn't the same does not make Dolly NOT a genetic clone, or somehow flawed.
----
On a different topic, I was quite annoyed at this article. I thought someone HAD actually CREATED life in some breakthrough, and here all they were talking about were the ethics of the situation. I was waiting to find out HOW it was done, where it was done, when it was done. I hope when somebody actually DOES create life the it gets a little more attention than some arm-chair ethics speculation.
Newton: I have created Calculus World : Hmm...Calculus...that's new and strange...is it ethical? It doesn't sound too nice...what do you think peanut gallery?
If they change all their 75,000 machines over to Linux, Microsoft will be losing @$2,000,000 in sales. And that's only using NT Workstation figures, not NT server (NT workstation = @$250, right?).
Yes, standard native compilation would be VERY nice:). The problem, I think, would occur in serialization, where there is a reliance on platform-independence for the sharing of objects and their code. The next best thing would byedynamic optimization and compilation which is now entering JDKs and is very nice, in fact in some cases better than static compilation. For example, if you have a windows application, you can optimize it for the 486, or Pentium, or Pentium Pro, or Pentium II, or Pentium III, on and on. So what most people do is optimize it for the least common denomitor (486), or a mix of optimizations, which, end up not to be optimal. A dynamic optimizer/compiler, can introspect and realize that it is running on the latest whizbang chip and optimize/compile on the fly.
The main thing microkernels facilitated was componentization, the flexibility and ease of use of which I believe outweighs in most cases the traditional, big, inlined monolithic kernel, and the accompanying finer omptimizations available. Microkernels basically facilitate/design/ optimization over code optimization I guess. Warning: IANAKH (I Am Not A Kernel Hacker)
I worked at an Air Force lab in the Human Resources department where they were doing cognitive and experimental psychological testing (in order to develop better ways of training pilots, or whatever). I would sometimes have discussions with my "mentor" (I was an intern - programming though), about human visual processing. One stream of thought was that one had to first/mentally construct/ an object before it could be recognized/identified/percieved. The other stream of thought said it was at a much lower level, just past the point of stimulation in eye cones and rods, where the image was constructed before the brain ever "thought" about it. I forget the names of the two streams of thought. Anyway, it seems to me that this article is at a much higher cognitive level. If you are/asking/ the subject to do something, you have given them a goal, and a reason to premeditate a process to solve the goal. All humans (in this case), chose to move their attention serially from cube to cube. This is far from saying that they could only "percieve" or "recognize" the cubes on a serial basis. They probably sat down and saw a whole bunch of cubes (parallel), and then/decided/ to examine them serially. It seems very fishy to me to conclude that the brain therefore processes the images serially. What if the test material wasn't graphical? What if it was just a multiple choice problem? Of course you'd examine the possible solutions/serially/...you wouldn't be able to examine them/all/ at once, and if you did, you'd do a pretty bad job of evaluating them.
That stupid annoying two-headed pod-race commentator ruined the movie for me more than Jar Jar. I can buy the Force (despite the mass appeal to peoples' grand ignorance with that "midichlorian bull), I can buy that some 6 yr old is a mechanical genious...but that stupid commentator broke all semblence of reality for me.
"The truely ideal situation would be if every american citezen was armed, and every american criminal was in prison. Unfortunately we don't play that way."
How the hell is that the ideal situation?? The ideal situation is that nobody commits heinous crimes and very few are in jail. What twisted world do you live in?
"If one kid in the library had a gun, and the balls to use it, many lives may have been saved. We're too afraid of guns to trust 'children' with them, but not all children are messed up like 'we' were."
Hmm...I knew two kids in the library with guns...Isn't this whole "guns save people" a bit old...Do nuclear arms save people?? Hey, lookie, Russia has a big ass bomb which could kill us all, but so do we, so let's just be friends. Great logic. You're civil because if you aren't your enemy will blow you to friggen pieces? Great worldview.
"With muggers it may be a better choice to give up your money than to fight. For other crimes, such as kidnapping, it is never a better choice to give in to your attacker's demands. An armed female who is the object of an abduction is much better off than an unarmed one."
Well, if you consider being killed immediately in retribution after pulling her gun an attempting an attack, instead of being gagged for a while or raped "better off" then I guess so.
"You also ignore the peripheral benefits of an armed populace. It doesn't have to be YOU who has a gun to thwart crime, just someone around you, or the populace at large that can dissuade a potential criminal."
Does this peripheral benifit also extend to me being shot dead because I'm mistaken for a criminal? Or maybe a child being shot in the crossfire? No thank you...I will take an armed and trained specialized police force over an armed, stupid, and deadly populace.
"Had they been more skilled with their bombmaking they would have done much more damage."
Yeah, they could've chucked their bombs at people. Much worse than guns. You can never tell when somebody is carrying a concealed propane bomb.
"Had they placed the bombs in a car and driven into the cafeteria and manually exploded them, how many would have died? 169? In any event, more."
Um, and how many armed students would it take to avoid this???
"How does one defend one's self against a bomb?"
Well, ya got a gun right? It's plain as day.
Right, and you won't be firing off 30 rounds of hot arrows a second with your composite bow.
"Guns equalize people" to the base state of aggressive animals.
Um yes...well we cannot make any law which will radically take our society back to 1950's mores can we? Nor did people in the 1950s have access to assault rifles (did they?).
The availability of guns WAS a factor. It is undeniable that if they did not have guns, that this probably wouldn't have happened (ok sure sure, bombs, but still...). It so happens that the guns they attained were attained illegally, so we already have in place a restriction on being able to attain guns. We know that is broken all the time. We simply CANNOT stop it. Now I consider myself liberal, I'm all for the ACLU, and if the Constitution says so (if it should is another argument), then people SHOULD be able to have "arms" (even though this is actually an anachronism because nobody is going to be able to overthrow a government with firearms). BUT, I also believe that there is no sound reason for anybody to have a gun which was made with the intent of killing other PEOPLE, and breaking the law. YES, I know, guns DON'T kill people, people do...BUT I think it is ok to make a small exception and say, "ok, you can have all the guns you want - as long as they have not be manufactured for the express purpose of killing other human beings which is obviously strictly against the law here".
If these two boys came in with revolvers they would have been subdued in NO time.
Oh, well, then if /GOD/ says it's ok it MUST be. Let's not think for ourselves.
"...here is a random Bible quote which will support any side of any argument..."
What? The media has it all wrong /again/? They've merely been pushed the self-created exaggerated, sensationalized conclusion? NO!?
/botched/ job!? And that immediately afterwards, every uptight principal in the US decided it was cause to violate the civil rights of American citizens by denying them public services because they wore a certain type of clothing that in actuality had nothing to do with the perpetrators anyway? Couldn't be!
What? These kids where really PEOPLE? Couldn't be! They must have been evil satanic GOTHS. Or immoral godless GAYS. Never real PEOPLE! If they were real people, we'd have to acknowledge that there were real reasons, perhaps caused by other people around, that they may actually have done these things. You mean they're not racists? Not anti-Christian? You mean that stupid so-called martyr I've been hearing so damn much about from every news magazine and foaming preacher is really NOT a martyr, but just another random death? No way!
You mean that everything the media has piped into my soggy little brain is false...that these were just two very frustrated, screwed up teens, outcasts of outcasts, that did a
--
This was just an occasion for every selfish stupid special interest to displace the "fault" on to their favorite evil, and push their cause...nobody gave a damn about the real PEOPLE involved. They were too damn busy licking their wounds and feeling sorry for themselves by making out as if their enemy was some big evil unaviodable thing. Well wake up! Black clothing and satan don't cause people to do this! It's everybody's responsibility to see that no human gets in a state that they want to do something like this.
I think a lot of the resistence you cite is present, but stems from another, perhaps subconscious reason. Humans have always had "rites of passage", whereby people /earn/ their entry into a particular group. In the hacker/geek circle, this "rite of passage" was RTFMing, spending hours in the dark behind a glowing monitor, tweaking code, and intellectually grasping the system so that at the time you are considered "passed", you are in truth already a /part/ of the system. As the bar lowers more and more people can flood in, risking the original group from losing its identity.
While I actually /_LIKE_/ the idea of pervasive, "thin"/dumb clients, if you look at the figures it doesn't make /all/ that much sense in the home user arena. Computer prices are dropping so fast that a "dumb" client is only marginally cheaper than an acceptibly "smart" client. I know *I* don't want a whole bunch of dumb terminals (although they are the perfect solution in many cases). What, am I going to rely on the server's graphics card to accelerate my Quake3 match??? Pshaw.
Their patents are broad and ambiguous. As noted in another thread, almost anybody in modern computer could be charged for infringing on these concepts. And, um, don't you have to PROVE that you /use/ your marvelous magical technology to actually enforce the patent?
Next time you get a page with the drop down, copy the HTML form and create your own page (could even be locally on your HD). Then use this page. Google doesn't care where its requests are coming from, and in fact they give instructions on how to put a google search form on your site. Just copy the drop-down code...or create the input field with your favorite value...
Man, I had Car Wars...nobody would ever play with me (pout)...but I spent tons of time designing the coolest cars...I loved it...I would just use their system to design up all sorts of cars...it was great...
Um.../WHY/ do we want to go to the moon and all?? Is there any practical reason? I don't understand this. Why would anyone want to pay to live in a bubble in the middle of a freezing desert (on one side, and the other a boiling desert) with no atmosphere and a life span of a few seconds after exposure???
-stumped
I also found that peculiar. While there are certainly religious and rational people, the great majority of religious people I encounter are actually NOT rational about it. As if among everything else in the world, that was one thing that could not be questioned. Perhaps he was just brought up religious and likes to stay that way for social reasons. Maybe he doesn't care to think about it...time is not something he has to waste. There are plenty of intelligent and religious people who have never had a reason to question their belief, were never challenged about it.
I agree that the user NOT knowing about root is patently BAD. At least tell the user that they must now enter a root password, AND WRITE IT DOWN, and DON'T FORGET.
Couldn't this be fixed with RunLevels? Couldn't you just set up the box to boot into X under a certain user?
About a year ago I decided I was sick of being a windows luser. I am a programmer, and had had previous generic *nix experience so I was far from being inept. I, like many others, decided to take the easy approach and go with Red Hat (I was aware of the other distributions, but had it on good word from a Linux guru that I should start out with Red Hat).
;). Anyway, I kept Linux around for a while, until the real world problem of disk space came around.
Most of the installation was pretty straightfoward...I knew my hardware specs and wasn't really phased by all the partitioning. However, the package installer was a **nightmare**. There was an absolutely humongous list of packages with undecipherable names that all had intricate dependencies on each other. "What is prl3.405.1? And why do I need it for tk103.4? What the hell is asdf4.21...and why does qwerty1.2.3 want it?" Since no clue was really given as to WHAT these things were, I was forced (after several attempts at a minimalistic install) to install a humongous amount of crap @350 MB.
Now I used to be a DOS dork with a stupid 386. I knew every in and out of my system, and spent a lot of time tweaking. I liked to be able to understand and control everything. But the sheer amount of stuff I was required to install under Linux made this a bit daunting, and less than enjoyable. Sometimes there is such a thing as TOO much choice
I would really, *really* like to switch to SOMETHING other than Windows. BeOS looks pretty nice too...I sort of like the idea of a clean start. If I do permanently switch to Linux it will probably be Debian, because I've heard their package handling is rather stringent. I'd also like GNOME and KDE to mature a bit, and see XFree86 get some of the performance enhancements in.
I thought this article would be typical clueless bs...but actually this article is quite on target.
;).
I used to know a kid like this (roommate). Annoying to the extreme unfortunately. He used to rock constantly in his chair, and had the weirdest "galloping" style of locomotion, both of which are referred to in the article. He claimed he could never understand lyrics or music. He also, with no offense, was pretty slovenly and understatedly less than mannered in his dining behavoir. Very smart kid. But when his sleep cycle started to become the exact opposite of mine that was the last straw.
To make an analogy to operating systems, it seems people with this mild autism have a larger timeslice...they can get more of any one thing done at a time, but their consistency and responsiveness is at a disadvantage...their IO is also terrible because of a higher timeslice
Dolly IS a true clone. Mitochondrial DNA (AFAIK) has nothing to do with the traits of an organism. It just happened that the egg somehow mashed the mitochondrial DNA incidentally introduced during the procedure.
I have this on good word from a biology geek who knows her stuff. That the mitochondrial DNA isn't the same does not make Dolly NOT a genetic clone, or somehow flawed.
----
On a different topic, I was quite annoyed at this article. I thought someone HAD actually CREATED life in some breakthrough, and here all they were talking about were the ethics of the situation. I was waiting to find out HOW it was done, where it was done, when it was done. I hope when somebody actually DOES create life the it gets a little more attention than some arm-chair ethics speculation.
Newton: I have created Calculus
World : Hmm...Calculus...that's new and strange...is it ethical? It doesn't sound too nice...what do you think peanut gallery?
If they change all their 75,000 machines over to Linux, Microsoft will be losing @$2,000,000 in sales. And that's only using NT Workstation figures, not NT server (NT workstation = @$250, right?).
I must be way too young..._/Bill Gates/_ had a column?!
ha! These youngsters refer to "open-source software"! Is this a new term for "open-system software?
;)
Knuth was around long before open-source...I think I'll trust him
Yes, standard native compilation would be VERY nice :). The problem, I think, would occur in serialization, where there is a reliance on platform-independence for the sharing of objects and their code. The next best thing would byedynamic optimization and compilation which is now entering JDKs and is very nice, in fact in some cases better than static compilation. For example, if you have a windows application, you can optimize it for the 486, or Pentium, or Pentium Pro, or Pentium II, or Pentium III, on and on. So what most people do is optimize it for the least common denomitor (486), or a mix of optimizations, which, end up not to be optimal. A dynamic optimizer/compiler, can introspect and realize that it is running on the latest whizbang chip and optimize/compile on the fly.
/design/ optimization over code optimization I guess.
The main thing microkernels facilitated was componentization, the flexibility and ease of use of which I believe outweighs in most cases the traditional, big, inlined monolithic kernel, and the accompanying finer omptimizations available. Microkernels basically facilitate
Warning: IANAKH (I Am Not A Kernel Hacker)
"I think that we might end up in an era where, just as people today have their own e-mail addresses, people will have their own Web sites," he said.
Every llama has their own website...what are you talking about??
I worked at an Air Force lab in the Human Resources department where they were doing cognitive and experimental psychological testing (in order to develop better ways of training pilots, or whatever). I would sometimes have discussions with my "mentor" (I was an intern - programming though), about human visual processing. One stream of thought was that one had to first /mentally construct/ an object before it could be recognized/identified/percieved. The other stream of thought said it was at a much lower level, just past the point of stimulation in eye cones and rods, where the image was constructed before the brain ever "thought" about it. I forget the names of the two streams of thought. Anyway, it seems to me that this article is at a much higher cognitive level. If you are /asking/ the subject to do something, you have given them a goal, and a reason to premeditate a process to solve the goal. All humans (in this case), chose to move their attention serially from cube to cube. This is far from saying that they could only "percieve" or "recognize" the cubes on a serial basis. They probably sat down and saw a whole bunch of cubes (parallel), and then /decided/ to examine them serially. It seems very fishy to me to conclude that the brain therefore processes the images serially. What if the test material wasn't graphical? What if it was just a multiple choice problem? Of course you'd examine the possible solutions /serially/...you wouldn't be able to examine them /all/ at once, and if you did, you'd do a pretty bad job of evaluating them.
That stupid annoying two-headed pod-race commentator ruined the movie for me more than Jar Jar. I can buy the Force (despite the mass appeal to peoples' grand ignorance with that "midichlorian bull), I can buy that some 6 yr old is a mechanical genious...but that stupid commentator broke all semblence of reality for me.
TPM bit...
1 232&mode=nested 8 232&mode=nested
The original movies, although a bit corny, still had some zen in them...TPM is just pure pop-culture trash...
See David Brin's articles:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/06/15/141
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/07/04/204