it shouldn't require 40MB of binaries [...] to make GNOME or KDE run.
It doesn't. There are implementations of X that are much smaller. You're free to produce your own distribution of X without the fat, if you want.
The fact is, though, few really care. My/usr is 3 GB in size, about equal in size to 10 MST3K episodes I have laying around my hard drive./usr/X11R6 is 14th on the list of big directories under/usr, after several kernel-source directories, documentation, locales and texmf(!!!). Tossing away some of the basic, if extraneous, X utilities that may be of use for less than 100MB is pointless; I have much more stuff that couldn't possibly be of use to delete first.
The fact that open source software can be sold freely does not mean free beer. There's some software that just isn't distributed freely; ACT has made wavefront and prereleases of GNU Ada available only to paying users for a long time. Another solution is exactly what Ned was talking about; you get people to pay for the creation or modification of the software. If nobody pays, the software doesn't get made; even if it does get made, the non-payers are the last to get their hands on a copy.
George Bernard Shaw clearly stated why he believed true Christianity to be Socialist in his introduction to Androcles and the Lion. It's an interesting read, and available from Project Gutenberg.
The reason why there are more people writing code for a living than novels is two fold. First, the market demands more man-hours worth of software than it does novels, and pays better for software than novels. Whether it's simpler is a complex question; almost everyone who can code can write a novel, and many novel authors could code after a few lessons. The question is whether they could do a decent job at it. I would guess there's a lot more crap code than crap writing on the market, because of the above mentioned marketplaces, and the fact writing gets checked better than code.
This is a side point, but there actually is a copyright on any new translations of the Bible, and it is often enforced. If you buy a computer Bible program you'll note that the NIV almost always comes seperately for an additional charge. That's because the company has to pay the translators to include it.
I suppose that one of the dangers of trying to find an objective measure of something is that you risk placing things you hold to be of value in a less positive light.
I seriously doubt the author of this list found that a problem. It seems fairly clear that he considered Protestantism good, Catholism bad, and wrote his list to describe those which he considered bad. Trying to use his list to determine anything isn't of interest to me; all it is an encoding of his biases.
Offshore subsidiaries of the company he worked for made the sales, not the US company directly.
The remaining 12 counts [of 20] involve shipments from Bro-Tech offices in Canada, Mexico, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom
So most of the counts were related to an American corporation directly. American corporations, American citizens and those living in America are subject to American law. Same as any other nation. Americans who put Nazi webpages have been arrested the instant they set foot in Germany. If you don't want to be subject to those laws, don't enter the country.
His conviction is a symptom of the injustice of the embargo.
Non-violent means of persuation are to be discouraged, then? If you really care, convince Canada to embargo the US until we release the embargo on Cuba.
Short story: Canadian citizen living in the US was convicted of the horrible crime of selling water filters to Cuba.
Gee, a citizen from one nation comes to another and does something that's against the law in that nation and sent to jail for it. What a horrendous, vile act.
Well, seeing as I'm at work and lack the time to list everything I was told while in college, I think this link here [jubilee.org.nz] pretty much sums it up.
That's the exact problem with the government going after cults. That page is a fine example of a "do you disagree with us? Then you're a cult" page. If they "deny the unconditional acceptance of all Scripture", they're a cult? The other way around might be a minor warning sign (it's demanding unquestioning belief in authority.)
Cults have all the rights of other religions. The problems with labeling something as a cult and taking legal action against is two-fold.
One, cult is very poorly defined. Most definitions I can think of, however, would include most major world religions in their early years. There are many people who would label pretty much anything besides protestant Christianity as a cult; there are others who would label the churches of the prior group cults, not without reason.
Second, people have a fundamental right to choose how they believe and worship. If someone wants to follow Scientology, or Reverend Moon, or Jim Jones, it's not your right to force them to stop. It is their life, and ultimately thier choice, no matter how much someone else might disagree.
Re:Its Not Challenged Because Nobody Uses It
on
GPL's Strength
·
· Score: 2
Because, gee, the world's most portable multi-frontend optimizing compiler is not a commericially viable application. Neither is the world's most popular Un*x like operating system. Heck, the proof is in the pudding; Cygnus and ACT are two commericially successful companies build around GCC.
Linux will be ready for the Desktop when the majority of *neophyte computer users* don't need tech support and hand-holding to use it, or when the tech support which is available is as freely and ubiquitously available as it is for the Windows platform.
Viable - Capable of living; born alive and with such form and development of organs as to be capable of living; -- said of a newborn, or a prematurely born, infant.
Viable doesn't mean that it conquers all. It means that there is something there that works.
In Linux, the customer has to understand debs, and rpms, and tarballs, minimum.
Why? Minimum, you have to understand debs or rpms, whichever is native on your system. For most major distributions, that will let you install pretty much everything you could possibly want. I have at most two or three packages installed from source hanging around, and none from RPM. You may as well claim that any Windows user must understand zips and rars and isos, minimum.
UIs that are good for the beginning user may not be good for the power-user...
That's a common point I have yet to see proven.
One example is some of Eudora's message boxes. The UI Hall of Shame has an example of Eudora displaying the direct communication between the mail server and client, instead of whiteswashing it. Well, I remember that as a nice features, even before I even knew where to look up the RFC. The SMTP tags are menomic, and the client-server communication is usually clear about what exactly went wrong, unlike the stuff that tries to summarize everything and gives back a "Um, _something_ went wrong" error for anything even slightly unusual. But, yes, for someone with no tolerance for computese, and who really doesn't care what exactly went wrong, it's probably bad.
Are you willing to rewrite your entire code base to take advantage of Itanium's architecture?
Ever heard of a high-level language that isn't architecture bound? How about an optimizing compiler? I don't have to rewrite code for any architecture. Even the performance geeks usually have C code that does the same thing as the optimized assembly.
I recall reading about a double-blind study whereby people would put wounded arms through a hole in a screen.
It's a million dollars if you can do that in front of James Randi. But somehow, whenever any one who can do that gets near a skeptic, the ability goes away. Funny how that happens . ..
The bad guys own the media.
Good or bad is relative to your perspective. What makes the media owners "bad"? Why should we waste our time fighting them? They're clearly beyond us - Israelis and Arabs, liberals and democrats, facists and communists, all working together? Not only can we not stop them, maybe we shouldn't. They may have a way to bring peace to world, since they have the power and the obvious ability to escape all the things that divide us.
Every single one of your 5 points could easily hold true for an inventor with a valid new idea, up to and including the last point.
Could be. But no one wants to deal with someone like that, someone who considers himself superior to the people around him and who can't communicate his ideas in a way that someone else can understand. It's not worth the frustration of dealing with such a person, especially considering the fact that they're usually wrong.
What is going on here? If you want to be a scientist, you must at least make an effort to find current papers on the subject you talk about.
If I speak as a scientist, yes. I feel no such obligation when BSing here at slashdot.
You seem to be totally unaware that the experiments have been replicated, that the predicted amounts of helium are produced etc.
Any experiment can be reproduced, given enough time and laxness in controls, and beating a dead horse long enough doesn't make it live. The paper by Solalmon on Pons and Fleischmann's cold fusion cells clearly shows that there was no evidence that the cells underwent cold fusion. If there never was any evidence of cold fusion, why will more research make it show up?
In 1993, the University of Utah licensed its patent rights to cold fusion to ENECO, which latter returned the rights. In 1998 the University of Utah Research Foundation gave up its search for patent rights. That's very unusual behavior for an invention that could be worth billions, if there was any hope. Japan spent $20 million dollars on it, and gave up. Again, if there was fusion going on, why didn't they see it and continue?
I'd love to see cold fusion work. But if there are results to be found, I'm very surprised that they haven't been found yet. They've wasted enough of people's time; we'll care when there's solid incontroverable results.
It is most certainly NOT an efficacy threshold for drug concentration, as you implied above.
It was poorly stated, but Avogadro's number is a key elment in the efficacy threshold for drug concentration. If there's none there, then it has no effect, and Avogadro's number is key in figuring how many times you have to dilute it before you have none left.
The scientific dogma when the Wright brothers made their historic flight was that heavier than air flight is impossible. The news of their success was "exposed" as a fraud by some scientists for some time afterward.
So they flew the plane around, and made it clear that there actually was a flying machine. All we're asking from homeopathy is the same thing. There is a standard for drugs that shows that they work, yet in over 80 years of homeopathy, no one has shown that homeopathy passes it. Homeopathy is almost as older (older than?) the airplane; why is that airplane enthusists managed to convince everyone that the airplane was a great tool, and homeopathy hasn't?
After some workers found themselves unable to reproduce the results initially claimed by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989
Where all workers failed to reproduce an experiment that any lab should have been able to...
He fails to mention here, as the video does, that the small amount of such products anticipated, given the amount of energy generated, was eventually observed, and in just the right quantity.
From what I've read, the amount of radiation that should have been emitted along with the claimed energy release should have easily detected - the physicists would have taken lethal doses of radiation.
Therefore, before simply dismissing yet another claim of a perpetual motion machine based on the laws of thermodynamics, it is worth while to look over the scientific analysis of the device and then find the caveat the 'discoverer' missed.
Even if it's possible it works, that doesn't mean it's worth the physicist's time to check it out. There has been thousands of "perpetual motion machines", and even one working would mean almost everything we know in physics, stuff that has been shown over and over again, was wrong. If you want to spend your days trying to teach basic physics to people who don't want to learn and who will complain you're oppressing them, go ahead; but some people feel they have more productive things to do.
If physics says it's impossible, then that's a pretty strong argument that it doesn't work. As someone else said, if there's all this evidence for it, why don't these companies selling this stuff have FDA approval? All they would have to do is run the same tests ordinary drugs do.
If homeopathic medicine doesnt work, and its just the placebo effect, then how come vets use it successfully to treat animals?
Because many diseases go away on their own? If you want sceptics to find it interesting, then put it through a scienetific, double-blind test. There are too many cases where something looked good and bombed the double-blind test. If we should throughly test a new medical technology that makes sense, then we should demand at least as much testing on a new medical technology that breaks the laws of physics.
Slashdot Mirror
it shouldn't require 40MB of binaries [...] to make GNOME or KDE run.
/usr is 3 GB in size, about equal in size to 10 MST3K episodes I have laying around my hard drive. /usr/X11R6 is 14th on the list of big directories under /usr, after several kernel-source directories, documentation, locales and texmf(!!!). Tossing away some of the basic, if extraneous, X utilities that may be of use for less than 100MB is pointless; I have much more stuff that couldn't possibly be of use to delete first.
It doesn't. There are implementations of X that are much smaller. You're free to produce your own distribution of X without the fat, if you want.
The fact is, though, few really care. My
The fact that open source software can be sold
freely does not mean free beer. There's some
software that just isn't distributed freely; ACT
has made wavefront and prereleases of GNU Ada
available only to paying users for a long time.
Another solution is exactly what Ned was talking
about; you get people to pay for the creation or
modification of the software. If nobody pays, the
software doesn't get made; even if it does get
made, the non-payers are the last to get their
hands on a copy.
George Bernard Shaw clearly stated why he believed true Christianity to be Socialist in his introduction to Androcles and the Lion. It's an interesting read, and available from Project Gutenberg.
The reason why there are more people writing code for a living than novels is two fold. First, the market demands more man-hours worth of software than it does novels, and pays better for software than novels.
Whether it's simpler is a complex question; almost everyone who can code can write a novel, and many novel authors could code after a few lessons. The question is whether they could do a decent job at it. I would guess there's a lot more crap code than crap writing on the market, because of the above mentioned marketplaces, and the fact writing gets checked better than code.
There is no copywrite on the Bible or the Koran.
This is a side point, but there actually is a copyright on any new translations of the Bible, and it is often enforced. If you buy a computer Bible program you'll note that the NIV almost always comes seperately for an additional charge. That's because the company has to pay the translators to include it.
I suppose that one of the dangers of trying to find an objective measure of something is that you risk placing things you hold to be of value in a less positive light.
I seriously doubt the author of this list found that a problem. It seems fairly clear that he considered Protestantism good, Catholism bad, and wrote his list to describe those which he considered bad. Trying to use his list to determine anything isn't of interest to me; all it is an encoding of his biases.
You didn't read the article.
Actually, I did.
Offshore subsidiaries of the company he worked for made the sales, not the US company directly.
The remaining 12 counts [of 20] involve shipments from Bro-Tech offices in Canada, Mexico, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom
So most of the counts were related to an American corporation directly. American corporations, American citizens and those living in America are subject to American law. Same as any other nation. Americans who put Nazi webpages have been arrested the instant they set foot in Germany. If you don't want to be subject to those laws, don't enter the country.
His conviction is a symptom of the injustice of the embargo.
Non-violent means of persuation are to be discouraged, then? If you really care, convince Canada to embargo the US until we release the embargo on Cuba.
Short story: Canadian citizen living in the US was convicted of the horrible crime of selling water filters to Cuba.
Gee, a citizen from one nation comes to another and does something that's against the law in that nation and sent to jail for it. What a horrendous, vile act.
Well, seeing as I'm at work and lack the time to list everything I was told while in college, I think this link here [jubilee.org.nz] pretty much sums it up.
That's the exact problem with the government going after cults. That page is a fine example of a "do you disagree with us? Then you're a cult" page. If they "deny the unconditional acceptance of all Scripture", they're a cult? The other way around might be a minor warning sign (it's demanding unquestioning belief in authority.)
If you want take action against illegal actions by a church, that's entirely different from taking action against a "cult".
Cults have all the rights of other religions. The problems with labeling something as a cult and taking legal action against is two-fold.
One, cult is very poorly defined. Most definitions I can think of, however, would include most major world religions in their early years. There are many people who would label pretty much anything besides protestant Christianity as a cult; there are others who would label the churches of the prior group cults, not without reason.
Second, people have a fundamental right to choose how they believe and worship. If someone wants to follow Scientology, or Reverend Moon, or Jim Jones, it's not your right to force them to stop. It is their life, and ultimately thier choice, no matter how much someone else might disagree.
Because, gee, the world's most portable multi-frontend optimizing compiler is not a commericially viable application. Neither is the world's most popular Un*x like operating system. Heck, the proof is in the pudding; Cygnus and ACT are two commericially successful companies build around GCC.
Linux will be ready for the Desktop when the majority of *neophyte computer users* don't need tech support and hand-holding to use it, or when the tech support which is available is as freely and ubiquitously available as it is for the Windows platform.
Viable - Capable of living; born alive and with such form and development of organs as to be capable of living; -- said of a newborn, or a prematurely born, infant.
Viable doesn't mean that it conquers all. It means that there is something there that works.
In Linux, the customer has to understand debs, and rpms, and tarballs, minimum.
Why? Minimum, you have to understand debs or rpms, whichever is native on your system. For most major distributions, that will let you install pretty much everything you could possibly want. I have at most two or three packages installed from source hanging around, and none from RPM. You may as well claim that any Windows user must understand zips and rars and isos, minimum.
UIs that are good for the beginning user may not be good for the power-user...
That's a common point I have yet to see proven.
One example is some of Eudora's message boxes. The UI Hall of Shame has an example of Eudora displaying the direct communication between the mail server and client, instead of whiteswashing it. Well, I remember that as a nice features, even before I even knew where to look up the RFC. The SMTP tags are menomic, and the client-server communication is usually clear about what exactly went wrong, unlike the stuff that tries to summarize everything and gives back a "Um, _something_ went wrong" error for anything even slightly unusual. But, yes, for someone with no tolerance for computese, and who really doesn't care what exactly went wrong, it's probably bad.
Are you willing to rewrite your entire code base to take advantage of Itanium's architecture?
Ever heard of a high-level language that isn't architecture bound? How about an optimizing compiler? I don't have to rewrite code for any architecture. Even the performance geeks usually have C code that does the same thing as the optimized assembly.
I recall reading about a double-blind study whereby people would put wounded arms through a hole in a screen.
.
It's a million dollars if you can do that in front of James Randi. But somehow, whenever any one who can do that gets near a skeptic, the ability goes away. Funny how that happens . .
The bad guys own the media.
Good or bad is relative to your perspective. What makes the media owners "bad"? Why should we waste our time fighting them? They're clearly beyond us - Israelis and Arabs, liberals and democrats, facists and communists, all working together? Not only can we not stop them, maybe we shouldn't. They may have a way to bring peace to world, since they have the power and the obvious ability to escape all the things that divide us.
Every single one of your 5 points could easily hold true for an inventor with a valid new idea, up to and including the last point.
Could be. But no one wants to deal with someone like that, someone who considers himself superior to the people around him and who can't communicate his ideas in a way that someone else can understand. It's not worth the frustration of dealing with such a person, especially considering the fact that they're usually wrong.
What is going on here? If you want to be a scientist, you must at least make an effort to find current papers on the subject you talk about.
If I speak as a scientist, yes. I feel no such obligation when BSing here at slashdot.
You seem to be totally unaware that the experiments have been replicated, that the predicted amounts of helium are produced etc.
Any experiment can be reproduced, given enough time and laxness in controls, and beating a dead horse long enough doesn't make it live. The paper by Solalmon on Pons and Fleischmann's cold fusion cells clearly shows that there was no evidence that the cells underwent cold fusion. If there never was any evidence of cold fusion, why will more research make it show up?
In 1993, the University of Utah licensed its patent rights to cold fusion to ENECO, which latter returned the rights. In 1998 the University of Utah Research Foundation gave up its search for patent rights. That's very unusual behavior for an invention that could be worth billions, if there was any hope. Japan spent $20 million dollars on it, and gave up. Again, if there was fusion going on, why didn't they see it and continue?
I'd love to see cold fusion work. But if there are results to be found, I'm very surprised that they haven't been found yet. They've wasted enough of people's time; we'll care when there's solid incontroverable results.
It is most certainly NOT an efficacy threshold for drug concentration, as you implied above.
It was poorly stated, but Avogadro's number is a key elment in the efficacy threshold for drug concentration. If there's none there, then it has no effect, and Avogadro's number is key in figuring how many times you have to dilute it before you have none left.
The scientific dogma when the Wright brothers made their historic flight was that heavier than air flight is impossible. The news of their success was "exposed" as a fraud by some scientists for some time afterward.
So they flew the plane around, and made it clear that there actually was a flying machine. All we're asking from homeopathy is the same thing. There is a standard for drugs that shows that they work, yet in over 80 years of homeopathy, no one has shown that homeopathy passes it. Homeopathy is almost as older (older than?) the airplane; why is that airplane enthusists managed to convince everyone that the airplane was a great tool, and homeopathy hasn't?
After some workers found themselves unable to reproduce the results initially claimed by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989
...
Where all workers failed to reproduce an experiment that any lab should have been able to
He fails to mention here, as the video does, that the small amount of such products anticipated, given the amount of energy generated, was eventually observed, and in just the right quantity.
From what I've read, the amount of radiation that should have been emitted along with the claimed energy release should have easily detected - the physicists would have taken lethal doses of radiation.
Therefore, before simply dismissing yet another claim of a perpetual motion machine based on the laws of thermodynamics, it is worth while to look over the scientific analysis of the device and then find the caveat the 'discoverer' missed.
Even if it's possible it works, that doesn't mean it's worth the physicist's time to check it out. There has been thousands of "perpetual motion machines", and even one working would mean almost everything we know in physics, stuff that has been shown over and over again, was wrong. If you want to spend your days trying to teach basic physics to people who don't want to learn and who will complain you're oppressing them, go ahead; but some people feel they have more productive things to do.
Quinine is a homeopathic.
No. It comes in pill form.
It is, in fact, the only effective treatment for malaria that exists.
There's also chloroquine and mefloquine.
See this page, or hey, search google yourself.
Don't dismiss what you can't explain.
If physics says it's impossible, then that's a pretty strong argument that it doesn't work. As someone else said, if there's all this evidence for it, why don't these companies selling this stuff have FDA approval? All they would have to do is run the same tests ordinary drugs do.
If homeopathic medicine doesnt work, and its just the placebo effect, then how come vets use it successfully to treat animals?
Because many diseases go away on their own? If you want sceptics to find it interesting, then put it through a scienetific, double-blind test. There are too many cases where something looked good and bombed the double-blind test. If we should throughly test a new medical technology that makes sense, then we should demand at least as much testing on a new medical technology that breaks the laws of physics.