I think Janis has a lot of legitimate points to make; it is a revelation to me that the RIAA basically will not allow an artist say anyting in public which supports file sharing.
That said, my concern about file sharing is that the people who are sharing files are far more likely to share Britney Spears' or No Doubt's latest CD than they are to share innovative, talented artists. If people wish to find innovative, talented artists on the internet, they can find them at mp3.com; these artists freely share their music with the world.
Technology like this is one step in the right direction.
Another step would be for consumers who buy laptops to consider battery life more important than raw megahertz. Right now, Intel (or AMD, or someone else) could create a Pentium or Pentium II clone using modern.013 micron technology which would consume very little power and generate very little heat.
For anything besides video game playing, the equivalent of a PIII 500 is more than adequate.
Another area where battery usage in a portable can be decreased is by using solid-state memory instead of a hard disk. It should be feasable to have a gigabyte of solid state memory in the near future; this should be more than enough for OS + Web browser + basic office suite (I remember complaining ten years ago that Microsoft Word was all of 15 megabytes big).
The display looks to be the biggest power-hog which current technology has no really good solution for. It may be possible the electronic paper displays will use less power than a current TFT display (which needs a strong backlight to go through 3 layers of LCD display).
With all of these technologies combined, one may be able to make a laptop which lasts over two or three days of continous usage; for example, over a trans-pacific flight or on a long bus trip. Another example: This would allow one to use their laptop for basic email checking over a two-week vacation without needing to charge the beast.
As a student of linguists myself, I find it interesting that the Slashdot idiots who replied to you don't know the difference between prescriptive grammer and descriptive grammer.
I guess they are too busy flaming every poster who gets (rightly so, in your case) modded up to 5 to actually learn something useful about the science of linguistics.
- Sam (My goal: To teach English in foreign countries while making a best effort to learn the language of the country in question)
Do you feel that piracy is wrong? If not, is your justification for pirating software one which respects the wishes of the companies which invest large quantities of time and money in to making software available?
The reason why the kinds of attacks which convert Rijndael in to a complex system of equations look risky for Rijndael is because Rijndael has an S-box which is very easy to describe algebraciaclly. The solution is to replace Rijndael's S-box with another S-box.
In fact, the Rijndael designers were considering changing Rijndael's S-box during the AES process. NIST, however, for not entirely known reasons, did not allow the Rijndael designers to do this.
Now, as it turns out, the Rijndael designers have designed some other ciphers after Rijndael. These ciphers have different S-Boxes. In fact, the Rijndael designers revised ("tweaked" as they call it) each cipher to have a representation which is easy to implement in hardware; most of the die space used when implementing Rijndael on an ASIC is implementing the S-box.
The ciphers in question are Whirlpool and Anubis (Anubis uses an involutional S-box which might possibly make it weaker). In fact, my software project does not use Rijndael proper as a psudo-random-number-generator; it uses a Rijndael variant with the "tweaked" Whirlpool S-box.
- Sam
P.S. I should also mention Khazad, named after the bridge Gandalf fights balrog at, which uses Anubis' S-box.
God is a God of surprises, obviously. When Jesus returns, I know it will surprise a lot of peoeple, including most Christians.
As I just posted in another article, I think it is kinda sad that the internet causes Christians to get in to these nasty flame wars with each other on places like Slashdot.
One place where I have seen some really mature discussions about God and Jesus is on the Orson Scott Card mailing list. I don't know what got in to me to get so passionate about the (relatively minor) points on which we disagree; I think we have a lot more in common with our faiths than what we disagree on.
My main objection when I was an atheist was the creationists. I am a Christian who belives in Evolution and an old universe still; I don't have to be like an ostrich when it comes to modern science to accept Christ in to my life.
A saying comes to mind here: Minds are like parachutes. They only function when open. I can't deal with nutcases like superyooser until I meet someone like this face-to-face and find out what it is going on in this person's life that makes them have such hatred in their worldview.
Until then, I will have to satisfy myself with putting superyooser on my list of foes.
For people who are not Christians: You don't have to be a nutcase like superyooser to accept Christ in to your life.
You've basically taken to the Bible with a big, black marker and a pair of scissors
As have you. (Pot calling the kettle black indeed)
Does your church forbid women to speak in it (1 Cor 14:34)?
Do you really think that genocide is acceptable? (Deuteronomy 7:2-3)
Does your church mandate that women wear veils? (1 Cor 11:6)
Do you really think a man should marry a woman who he rapes, instead of going to jail? (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)
What is your opinion of seeing prostitutes? (Genesis 38:15-16; Joshua 2:1; Judges 16:1) Of having a harem (1 Kings 11:3)?
How do you explain that Jesus has not returned for 2000 years, even though the early Christians thought he would appear in his generation? (For exmaple, 1 Cor 15:51 is stated in the first person plural, which means that St. Paul thought that miracle will happen to the people he was writing to, not some group of Christians in the distant future. All other predictions of the Parousia have the same problem.)
People like you need to read the Bible instead of regurgitating what your Fundamentalist pastor shoves down your throat.
Arrogant, closed-minded Fundamentalists (read: Jerks who don't do anything to make the world better, but instead sit around, thinking they have some monopoly on God, and judge and condemn anyone who doesn't have their particular narrow world-view) annoy me. This person probably also thinks the earth was created in seven days and is 6000 years old.
As a non-Mormon, I have a lot of respect for Mormons and for the Mormon church. Obviously, it is not for everyone--the church demands a lot from their believers.
The only thing which I disagree with which matters is the idea that "The church will not be led astray". I will be impressed if the Mormon church survives for 2000 years and does not do anything which can not be viewed as "being led astray". If the Mormon church becomes very powerful, and does not abuse that power, that will be a miracle.
This particular heresy was invented by Martin Luther; and developed by American fundamentalists. It was, in many ways, a step up from the belif system we had at the time (as I explain in another post in this thread).
I know that you believe in solo scripture. Even so, the Bible does not support your argument:
Matthew 25:31-46
James 2:19, 26
Christianity is a relgigion that believes in the importance of good works.
A lot of fundamentalists based their beliefs on a flawed translation of John 3:16, which really should be translated as:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who belives in him might not perish but might have eternal life.
Christianity is not a clique, and it annoys me that the agnostics/atheists here are receiving a gospel that becoming a Christian makes one an arrogant prick.
Well, I guess Matthew 7:13-14,21 come in to play here.
Thank you for the article link. The thing which I found the most interesting with the article was the three references in Isaiah; the other references still support my assertion that the first-century Christians got their notions of eternal torment from the Greek ideas about Hades. All of the references in Isaiah are essentially identical, they simply refer to an "everlasting" fire. My translation says that it is the corpses of the people that are burning, and notes that "Just as in the past, corpses, filth, and refuse lay in the Valley of Hinnom just outside of the city, where huge fires were constantly burning", and then refers to Jos 15:8, 2 Chr 28:3, and Mark 9:45-48.
I also wonder how scripture literalists handle the "vaporware" problem of Christianity; people have been believing since the days when Jesus walked on this earth that their generation was the one that would see Jesus come back in glory. 2000 years (approximately 100 generations) has passed and it still hasn't happened yet.
Not that there has been a lack of faith among belivers; 1844 comes to mind.
I know I handle the problem by saying "It does not matter when He comes or how he comes or what happens when he returns again; what matters is is I am ready for him coming again". What will really happen will be a profound surprise; the first century Jewish people were not expecting Jesus to be the messiah.
- Sam
Mancala variant which has not been solved
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 2
For prople who enjoy mancala-type games, and want to play something with more complexity which has not been solved yet, game inventer Christian Freeling has an excellent game called the glass bead game.
When we die we are judged and that is it. If we believed and trusted in him we will live with him forever, and if we don't, we go to hell.
As a Christian, this is the part of Fundamentalism that I find most objectionable. This idea of eternal damnation comes from the Greek mythos (the ancient Isreleis did not belive in an afterlife per se). This can be seen in the gospel of Luke, where the only time the Greek word hades is used is in the parable of the rich man and Lazardus (5 cent summary: Selfish rich man is tortured by fire in Hades, poor suffering man is in heaven).
Over the years, this idea developed in to a place to punish the sinners. Of course, we are all sinners. In the dark ages, people belived that everyone was going to go to hell, except for a few saints. In fact, Fundamentalism was a step up from this, because it revised the theolgy from "Jesus forgives all sins, but any sin done after accepting Jesus is a black mark on your record" to "Jesus forgives all sins you do for the rest of your life". It is still a flawed theology, because it still has the baggage that we are so sinful that we all deserve to be tortured in the most horrible way for ever and ever.
People like to feel that they are somehow special, that they are part of the inside clique. Fundamentalism, which tells the people that they are very special with God, and that everyone else is not, meets this human desire very nicely. And, it goes with the writings of Saint John, who was trying to strengthen Christianity in a time when the church was undergoing some very difficult struggles, right after the Christians were expelled from the synagogues, which made them lose the right to not worship the emperor as a god under Roman law. And so they started feeding Christians to the lions.
This is why a number of Christians, such as the Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, and 7th Day Adventists, do not belive in eternal punishment for all non-believers (they still belive only they are going to heaven, but it is still a step upward).
To say "you are going to hell because you belive differently than me" is the ultimate arrogance; I belive in a God which brings out the good things in myself, not the bad things like my arrogance.
I think the point ICANN is making here is not that Verisign has to make each and every single WHOIS contact info accurate. The point is that Verisign does not even care that their WHOIS contact informaiton is bogus more often than not.
People would complain to Network Solutions about spammers having obviously bogus WHOIS information (such as phone numbers of --- --- ----), and their reply was that "WHOIS information is ot guaranteed to be accurate".
I think the response is that, if a given set of WHOIS contact information is bogus, and people complain about the bogus information, Verisign should pull the domain in question until they update the information to have legitimate contact info.
A spam-friendly domain without real WHOIS contact information should be pulled until the information is updated. People should be held more accountable for what they put up on the internet; non-bogus WHOIS contact info is a start.
- Sam (Pot. Kettle. Black. I've moved since signing up for mydomains, and have not updated the WHOIS contact info)
For furture reference, unles your audience is a bunch of bigoted yahoos, random xenophobic statemnents tends to make an argument less effective.
Interesting that you perceived the statement as being bigoted. I did not see the statement as being bigoted; I saw the statement as being an observation which I have been making, based on a friend with an Japanese wife and a love for animae and some Japanese ex-coworkers.
My general observation is that when a company has a patent claim of dubious merit, such as Rambus, it is very common for the Japenese companies (Hitaci, etc.) to cave in. On the other hand, US comapnies usually have a courtroom battle (Prodigy vs. British Telecom; Amazon vs. Barns and Noble; etc.). I think it is perfect reasonable to conclude that Japenese companies are more likely to give the patent holder the money they ask for without a courtroom fight than an American company, even if the patent in question is of dubious merit.
I also have observed that Japan is still recovering, in many ways, from the extensive damage that the US did to Japan in World War II. A lot of the animae has scenes of widespread distruction and doomsday senerios; there are cartoons in Japan which show what US's extensive bombing campaign did to their cities. One reason the US had such a vicious bombing campaign was because Japan had a sense of pride which made them fight to the last man in many WWII battles. The children of WWII saw how this pride resulted in their country being led to the brink of destruction; I feel it is reasonable to conclude that they do not have the desire to engage in conflict the way people in the US do any more (Observe: George Bush's desire to battle Iraq even though almost every other country does not want a battle there).
In addition, I have read Pearl S Buck's The Good Earth (I had to read it in high school; its amazing how reading that stuff actually helps in the real world). The book has one plot point where the hero has an (IIRC: If I recall correctly) uncle which demands some money from him; he starts to argue until the uncle in question shows him a symbol indicating that he is part of a Chinese mafia-type organization. At this point, he submits and gives the uncle the money he asks for. While this book takes place in China, not Japan, it shows a long-standing tradition of people of shady nature bilking money out of honest workers in an Asian culture.
Making an observation about how a Japanese company responds to a questionable patent claim differently than an American company is one that respects Japan's culture. I hope that political correctness is not gotten to the point that trying to make observations about different cultures is somehow xenophobic.
There is a key difference between the forgent patent (which they wish covered JPEG) and the MP3 patents: The MP3 patents are patents owned by the people who invented MP3, and, as it turns out, invested a good deal of money in making MP3 a reality. The Forgent patent, on the other hand, is not a patent made by anyone who invented JPEG. It is a patent which has some similarities to JPEG, but the similarities are based on prior knowledge in the field concerning DCTs and run-length encoding.
MP3 has a right to do anything they want with their patent; we have Ogg so if Thompson gets to be too nasty about enforcing MP3, we can simply switch over (as RedHat is doing). Remember: Thompson has never hid the fact that they had a patent on MP3; the people who made MP3 a popular format for pirating music in fact broke Thompson license agreements and copyrights. I seriously doubt that they will go after the XMMS developers (free MP3 decoder for Linux); they aren't even going after the Lame developers (Free MP3 encoder for Linux). They make a good deal from money from MP3 hardware players and from commercial MP3 encoders/decoders for Windows (money they deserve to earn); they won't go after anything free for Linux because that will just make for less MP3 users and more OGG users.
Forgent, on the other hand, has no right to JPEG. This is simply a case of some greedy corporate types who saw that their company was going down the tubes--this happens to companies which do not provide goods and services of value for people any more. Instead of providing something of value, they went through their patent profile and found something that looked like a patent on JPEG. In their greed, they blackmailed some large Japanese corporations, some of whom gave in easily--I guess giving money to shady organizations is an accepted norm in their culture.
Naturally, once their actions became public, the reaction was outrage. And well it should have been--Forgent did nothing to help invent JPEG or make the JPEG image format a reality. All they did was make a different motion video format which had some similarities to JPEG--simply because the cutting edge of image compression at the time was based on DCTs and run-length encoding. Any similarities their format has to JPEG is because both JPEG and Forgent's thingy used the same previously invented principles. If Forgent did, in fact, invent JPEG, and never hid the fact it was patented, we would be in a different situtation. Since Forgent did neither, they do not have a chance of winning a court case.
If I were Sony, I would sue Forgent for making false patnet claims or some such.
The only reasonable way to write code is to document it at the same time as you're implementing it
I find that I write better code when I first put out a basic sketch of the design. Basically, the data structures used, the names and arguments for the functions, and what the functions do. Once this is sketched out, I go about actually writing the code in question. I will generally actually making up more functions than what I sketeched out, and will change some of the arguments that the functions receive.
I find that the code I write while designing the strucutre is more bug-prone and difficult to maintain; "play it by ear" is not a good way of working for projects of any significant complexity.
Since Slashdot has zapped signatures (in the defulat config), I will referer people to my main software project. This project is my most ambitous project to date; it currently has over 24,000 lines of code (including comments).
My experience with looking at the source code for projects is that the main problem is not how people comment the code, but that people generally do not comment their code at all.
what about all the people with multiple gb's of mp3's
Just get out your CD collection (which must be about 200 CDs or more to have 10 gigs worth of mp3s) and re-rip all of the files as OGGs. Set it up to be automatically done with a shell script; should take too long, since you can start off with all of the MP3s that you listen to the most.
As for mp3-com downloads, those need to be converted to ogg. Which will affect the sound in a bad way, alas.
As for all of the music which you, errr, got off of a file sharing network (Why do I get this feeling that that is about 90% of your 10 gigs of mp3), just delete all of the mp3s. Or don't. And, if you don't deleted all of those mp3s, I don't think you need to worry about your mp3 players violating any patents; when you're violating copyright, you may as violate some patents also.
- Sam (Why do I get the feeling that Lame will live on and that XMMS will continue to have an easily downloaded mp3 decoder?)
As a photographer I would like to say that this photo is a most excellent photo. I particularily like the vibrant green that the Gecko's skin has; and the way the background is completely out of focus so that it does not distract from the image of the gecko.
My only comment is that the face of the gecko is not quite in the plane of focus. I know that, with a really long lens (which can very well be on a medium format camera, which further squashes the plane of focus), the plain of focus is really thin. And, with Autofocus cameras, one can not readily choose what is in focus. However, it would have been better if the face would have been in focus and less of the tail of the gecko was in focus.
Then again, I know that getting the perfect focus is just about impossible in situtations where you need to collapse the depth of field; I hate flashes so have the same problems when taking pictures at night.
As an aside, I shudder every time I see source code held captive in an.RPM, because the source should be in a tarball, not someone's idea of 'one package system to rule them all.'
I will not disagree with your "should", since subjective impression are, of course, always completely valid.
I actually prefer putting up source in RPM format because RPMs can have the following things that a tarball can not conveniently have:
GPG signatures
Patches
A.spec file which tells RPM-based program how to compile the thing.
Any other file I want to add
RPMs can be "broken open" easily enough:
rpm2cpio whatever-8.1.69.src.rpm | cpio -i
In the case of a source code RPM, this will give you the source code tarball, and any patches the packager wanted to include. With the RPMs I make, this will also give a stand-along GPG signature for the tarball.
RPM has supported bz2 tarballs for over two years, which makes my.src.rpm files smaller than my.gz tarballs. And, yes, I know that the UNIX world is not comfortable with RPMs the way they are with tarballs, so I make my code available in.gz tarballs,.bz2 tarballs,.src.rpm files, and in.i386.rpm files.
I don't much to say besides what the articles already went over. Basically, RedHat, unlike SuSE and Caldera (and some other distributions) is 100% free. There is no difference between the RedHat ISO images that anyone can download off of various FTP sites and the CDs for the core distribution which come from official RedHat. Unlike Mandrake, RedHat also makes official ISOs of the source. Mandrake only offers binary ISOs; people have to make their own ISO cd images from their source directory.
Unlike Debian, the stable release has recent libaries and binaries; they also have a much more formal SQA methodology than what Debian has (Debian testing works, of course, but it just takes longer for Debian to declare something stable). Unlike gentoo/sorcerer/etc., no one has to wait while all of the programs compile. While this is an excellent learning experience, a.k.a. Slackware (another great platform for learning the internals of Linux on a very intimate level), it is, in my opinion, not necessary for daily production usage.
I like knowing that I can buy (or download; the two are 100% identical) RedHat and not have to upgrade my system for a year or two; RedHat will "freeze" on a given release and release only critical bug fixes (mainly security updates) for a period of two years for a given release. This is very useful; it allows people to use systems without having to be on the constant upgrade treadmill.
I am very pleased to see RedHat merging KDE and Gnome; having different applications on the desktop having different user interfaces looks, IMHO, unprofessional and I am glad to see RedHat resolving this.
RedHat has always strongly belived in free software. They took a stand aginst the old Free/Qt licensing by strongly supporting Gnome; their actions undoubtably contributed to QT's decision to allow the free versions of their libraies be GPL'd.
If you don't like RedHat, you are free to make your own fork of RedHat which fixes the things you don't like. Mandrake did this because they wanted a RedHat with KDE five years ago; they are a RedHat fork which still exists today (knock on wood; I hope they get past their financial problems). I think the person at tummy.com is still selling RedHat-derived distributions (RedHat + whatever updates he feels are needed).
I have been using RedHat for over five years, since RedHat 4.2, and have been very happy with RedHat. I feel that they have made an excellent compromise between making the settings configurable with a GUI or with a text editor--I happyily use a text editor to configure my RedHat box (currently only one: A laptop with 7.2). Some old Sun greybeards (too lazy to learn a new tool) complain about Xinetd; I think RedHat is remarkably conservative about intorducing new things which force users to relearn; I think replacing the old, crufty inetd.conf with Xinetd is perfectly reasonable. Now, if only Microsoft were so reasonable about keeping the UI so consistant between releases.
Speaking of Microsoft, RedHat, as the articles pointed out, can not be the next Microsoft. The GPL protects us from that.
In the spirit of Slashdot, people are giving Lilo a hard time because he dares to ask for money. That in mind, I would like to say that I appreciate all of the effort Lilo has made to make OPN an excellent IRC netowrk. Back in 1996, there was Linpeople (what OPN was called ot the time) and Linuxnet. As anyone knows, Karl Asha's Linuxnet is an extremely snobby IRC network; anyone who goes there to IRC is a bloody fool. Linpeople, on the other hand, has always been a warm and friendly IRC network.
The work that Lilo does has always been of the most professional calibar (I can not say the same about Karl's IRC network). I do not think it is unreasonable for him to ask for donations. There is a lot more to a good IRC netowrk than servers and bandwidth; an IRC network can quick degenerate to childish kick-and-ban games unless someone of Lilo's caliber maintains the network.
I would certainly grin holding a floppy with 32 megs of stuff on it.
In 1992 (when Computer shopper was this huge monstrsity before the 'net killed it), there were a lot of ideas bouncing around about making floppys have about 20 megs of capacity. Unfortunatly, no one was willing to come up with a standard to agree on. Each company had their own idea on how to make a 20 meg floppy.
Iomega finally came up with their zip drive, and the clever parallel port connection. Too bad Iomega made it illegal for anyone besides themselves to make Zip disks; Zip was eventually replaced by CDR (and all of the headaches for any use besides long-term data archival) because of Iomega's greed.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, my concern about file sharing is that the people who are sharing files are far more likely to share Britney Spears' or No Doubt's latest CD than they are to share innovative, talented artists. If people wish to find innovative, talented artists on the internet, they can find them at mp3.com; these artists freely share their music with the world.
- Sam
Another step would be for consumers who buy laptops to consider battery life more important than raw megahertz. Right now, Intel (or AMD, or someone else) could create a Pentium or Pentium II clone using modern .013 micron technology which would consume very little power and generate very little heat.
For anything besides video game playing, the equivalent of a PIII 500 is more than adequate.
Another area where battery usage in a portable can be decreased is by using solid-state memory instead of a hard disk. It should be feasable to have a gigabyte of solid state memory in the near future; this should be more than enough for OS + Web browser + basic office suite (I remember complaining ten years ago that Microsoft Word was all of 15 megabytes big).
The display looks to be the biggest power-hog which current technology has no really good solution for. It may be possible the electronic paper displays will use less power than a current TFT display (which needs a strong backlight to go through 3 layers of LCD display).
With all of these technologies combined, one may be able to make a laptop which lasts over two or three days of continous usage; for example, over a trans-pacific flight or on a long bus trip. Another example: This would allow one to use their laptop for basic email checking over a two-week vacation without needing to charge the beast.
- Sam
I guess they are too busy flaming every poster who gets (rightly so, in your case) modded up to 5 to actually learn something useful about the science of linguistics.
- Sam (My goal: To teach English in foreign countries while making a best effort to learn the language of the country in question)
- Sam
There is also the rumoured Motorola PowerPC G5, which is supposed to be 64-bit.
- Sam
In fact, the Rijndael designers were considering changing Rijndael's S-box during the AES process. NIST, however, for not entirely known reasons, did not allow the Rijndael designers to do this.
Now, as it turns out, the Rijndael designers have designed some other ciphers after Rijndael. These ciphers have different S-Boxes. In fact, the Rijndael designers revised ("tweaked" as they call it) each cipher to have a representation which is easy to implement in hardware; most of the die space used when implementing Rijndael on an ASIC is implementing the S-box.
The ciphers in question are Whirlpool and Anubis (Anubis uses an involutional S-box which might possibly make it weaker). In fact, my software project does not use Rijndael proper as a psudo-random-number-generator; it uses a Rijndael variant with the "tweaked" Whirlpool S-box.
- Sam
P.S. I should also mention Khazad, named after the bridge Gandalf fights balrog at, which uses Anubis' S-box.
As I just posted in another article, I think it is kinda sad that the internet causes Christians to get in to these nasty flame wars with each other on places like Slashdot.
One place where I have seen some really mature discussions about God and Jesus is on the Orson Scott Card mailing list. I don't know what got in to me to get so passionate about the (relatively minor) points on which we disagree; I think we have a lot more in common with our faiths than what we disagree on.
My main objection when I was an atheist was the creationists. I am a Christian who belives in Evolution and an old universe still; I don't have to be like an ostrich when it comes to modern science to accept Christ in to my life.
- Sam
Yep
A saying comes to mind here: Minds are like parachutes. They only function when open. I can't deal with nutcases like superyooser until I meet someone like this face-to-face and find out what it is going on in this person's life that makes them have such hatred in their worldview.
Until then, I will have to satisfy myself with putting superyooser on my list of foes.
For people who are not Christians: You don't have to be a nutcase like superyooser to accept Christ in to your life.
- Sam (Talking to myself here, yes)
As have you. (Pot calling the kettle black indeed)
- Does your church forbid women to speak in it (1 Cor 14:34)?
- Do you really think that genocide is acceptable? (Deuteronomy 7:2-3)
- Does your church mandate that women wear veils? (1 Cor 11:6)
- Do you really think a man should marry a woman who he rapes, instead of going to jail? (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)
- What is your opinion of seeing prostitutes? (Genesis 38:15-16; Joshua 2:1; Judges 16:1) Of having a harem (1 Kings 11:3)?
- How do you explain that Jesus has not returned for 2000 years, even though the early Christians thought he would appear in his generation? (For exmaple, 1 Cor 15:51 is stated in the first person plural, which means that St. Paul thought that miracle will happen to the people he was writing to, not some group of Christians in the distant future. All other predictions of the Parousia have the same problem.)
People like you need to read the Bible instead of regurgitating what your Fundamentalist pastor shoves down your throat.Arrogant, closed-minded Fundamentalists (read: Jerks who don't do anything to make the world better, but instead sit around, thinking they have some monopoly on God, and judge and condemn anyone who doesn't have their particular narrow world-view) annoy me. This person probably also thinks the earth was created in seven days and is 6000 years old.
- Sam
As a non-Mormon, I have a lot of respect for Mormons and for the Mormon church. Obviously, it is not for everyone--the church demands a lot from their believers.
The only thing which I disagree with which matters is the idea that "The church will not be led astray". I will be impressed if the Mormon church survives for 2000 years and does not do anything which can not be viewed as "being led astray". If the Mormon church becomes very powerful, and does not abuse that power, that will be a miracle.
- Sam
Mlong,
This particular heresy was invented by Martin Luther; and developed by American fundamentalists. It was, in many ways, a step up from the belif system we had at the time (as I explain in another post in this thread).
I know that you believe in solo scripture. Even so, the Bible does not support your argument:
- Matthew 25:31-46
- James 2:19, 26
Christianity is a relgigion that believes in the importance of good works.A lot of fundamentalists based their beliefs on a flawed translation of John 3:16, which really should be translated as:
Christianity is not a clique, and it annoys me that the agnostics/atheists here are receiving a gospel that becoming a Christian makes one an arrogant prick.Well, I guess Matthew 7:13-14,21 come in to play here.
- Sam
I also wonder how scripture literalists handle the "vaporware" problem of Christianity; people have been believing since the days when Jesus walked on this earth that their generation was the one that would see Jesus come back in glory. 2000 years (approximately 100 generations) has passed and it still hasn't happened yet. Not that there has been a lack of faith among belivers; 1844 comes to mind.
I know I handle the problem by saying "It does not matter when He comes or how he comes or what happens when he returns again; what matters is is I am ready for him coming again". What will really happen will be a profound surprise; the first century Jewish people were not expecting Jesus to be the messiah.
- Sam
- Sam
As a Christian, this is the part of Fundamentalism that I find most objectionable. This idea of eternal damnation comes from the Greek mythos (the ancient Isreleis did not belive in an afterlife per se). This can be seen in the gospel of Luke, where the only time the Greek word hades is used is in the parable of the rich man and Lazardus (5 cent summary: Selfish rich man is tortured by fire in Hades, poor suffering man is in heaven).
Over the years, this idea developed in to a place to punish the sinners. Of course, we are all sinners. In the dark ages, people belived that everyone was going to go to hell, except for a few saints. In fact, Fundamentalism was a step up from this, because it revised the theolgy from "Jesus forgives all sins, but any sin done after accepting Jesus is a black mark on your record" to "Jesus forgives all sins you do for the rest of your life". It is still a flawed theology, because it still has the baggage that we are so sinful that we all deserve to be tortured in the most horrible way for ever and ever.
People like to feel that they are somehow special, that they are part of the inside clique. Fundamentalism, which tells the people that they are very special with God, and that everyone else is not, meets this human desire very nicely. And, it goes with the writings of Saint John, who was trying to strengthen Christianity in a time when the church was undergoing some very difficult struggles, right after the Christians were expelled from the synagogues, which made them lose the right to not worship the emperor as a god under Roman law. And so they started feeding Christians to the lions.
This is why a number of Christians, such as the Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, and 7th Day Adventists, do not belive in eternal punishment for all non-believers (they still belive only they are going to heaven, but it is still a step upward).
To say "you are going to hell because you belive differently than me" is the ultimate arrogance; I belive in a God which brings out the good things in myself, not the bad things like my arrogance.
- Sam
People would complain to Network Solutions about spammers having obviously bogus WHOIS information (such as phone numbers of --- --- ----), and their reply was that "WHOIS information is ot guaranteed to be accurate".
I think the response is that, if a given set of WHOIS contact information is bogus, and people complain about the bogus information, Verisign should pull the domain in question until they update the information to have legitimate contact info.
A spam-friendly domain without real WHOIS contact information should be pulled until the information is updated. People should be held more accountable for what they put up on the internet; non-bogus WHOIS contact info is a start.
- Sam (Pot. Kettle. Black. I've moved since signing up for my domains, and have not updated the WHOIS contact info)
Interesting that you perceived the statement as being bigoted. I did not see the statement as being bigoted; I saw the statement as being an observation which I have been making, based on a friend with an Japanese wife and a love for animae and some Japanese ex-coworkers.
My general observation is that when a company has a patent claim of dubious merit, such as Rambus, it is very common for the Japenese companies (Hitaci, etc.) to cave in. On the other hand, US comapnies usually have a courtroom battle (Prodigy vs. British Telecom; Amazon vs. Barns and Noble; etc.). I think it is perfect reasonable to conclude that Japenese companies are more likely to give the patent holder the money they ask for without a courtroom fight than an American company, even if the patent in question is of dubious merit.
I also have observed that Japan is still recovering, in many ways, from the extensive damage that the US did to Japan in World War II. A lot of the animae has scenes of widespread distruction and doomsday senerios; there are cartoons in Japan which show what US's extensive bombing campaign did to their cities. One reason the US had such a vicious bombing campaign was because Japan had a sense of pride which made them fight to the last man in many WWII battles. The children of WWII saw how this pride resulted in their country being led to the brink of destruction; I feel it is reasonable to conclude that they do not have the desire to engage in conflict the way people in the US do any more (Observe: George Bush's desire to battle Iraq even though almost every other country does not want a battle there).
In addition, I have read Pearl S Buck's The Good Earth (I had to read it in high school; its amazing how reading that stuff actually helps in the real world). The book has one plot point where the hero has an (IIRC: If I recall correctly) uncle which demands some money from him; he starts to argue until the uncle in question shows him a symbol indicating that he is part of a Chinese mafia-type organization. At this point, he submits and gives the uncle the money he asks for. While this book takes place in China, not Japan, it shows a long-standing tradition of people of shady nature bilking money out of honest workers in an Asian culture.
Making an observation about how a Japanese company responds to a questionable patent claim differently than an American company is one that respects Japan's culture. I hope that political correctness is not gotten to the point that trying to make observations about different cultures is somehow xenophobic.
- Sam
MP3 has a right to do anything they want with their patent; we have Ogg so if Thompson gets to be too nasty about enforcing MP3, we can simply switch over (as RedHat is doing). Remember: Thompson has never hid the fact that they had a patent on MP3; the people who made MP3 a popular format for pirating music in fact broke Thompson license agreements and copyrights. I seriously doubt that they will go after the XMMS developers (free MP3 decoder for Linux); they aren't even going after the Lame developers (Free MP3 encoder for Linux). They make a good deal from money from MP3 hardware players and from commercial MP3 encoders/decoders for Windows (money they deserve to earn); they won't go after anything free for Linux because that will just make for less MP3 users and more OGG users.
Forgent, on the other hand, has no right to JPEG. This is simply a case of some greedy corporate types who saw that their company was going down the tubes--this happens to companies which do not provide goods and services of value for people any more. Instead of providing something of value, they went through their patent profile and found something that looked like a patent on JPEG. In their greed, they blackmailed some large Japanese corporations, some of whom gave in easily--I guess giving money to shady organizations is an accepted norm in their culture.
Naturally, once their actions became public, the reaction was outrage. And well it should have been--Forgent did nothing to help invent JPEG or make the JPEG image format a reality. All they did was make a different motion video format which had some similarities to JPEG--simply because the cutting edge of image compression at the time was based on DCTs and run-length encoding. Any similarities their format has to JPEG is because both JPEG and Forgent's thingy used the same previously invented principles. If Forgent did, in fact, invent JPEG, and never hid the fact it was patented, we would be in a different situtation. Since Forgent did neither, they do not have a chance of winning a court case.
If I were Sony, I would sue Forgent for making false patnet claims or some such.
- Sam
I find that I write better code when I first put out a basic sketch of the design. Basically, the data structures used, the names and arguments for the functions, and what the functions do. Once this is sketched out, I go about actually writing the code in question. I will generally actually making up more functions than what I sketeched out, and will change some of the arguments that the functions receive.
I find that the code I write while designing the strucutre is more bug-prone and difficult to maintain; "play it by ear" is not a good way of working for projects of any significant complexity.
Since Slashdot has zapped signatures (in the defulat config), I will referer people to my main software project. This project is my most ambitous project to date; it currently has over 24,000 lines of code (including comments).
My experience with looking at the source code for projects is that the main problem is not how people comment the code, but that people generally do not comment their code at all.
- Sam
Just get out your CD collection (which must be about 200 CDs or more to have 10 gigs worth of mp3s) and re-rip all of the files as OGGs. Set it up to be automatically done with a shell script; should take too long, since you can start off with all of the MP3s that you listen to the most.
As for mp3-com downloads, those need to be converted to ogg. Which will affect the sound in a bad way, alas.
As for all of the music which you, errr, got off of a file sharing network (Why do I get this feeling that that is about 90% of your 10 gigs of mp3), just delete all of the mp3s. Or don't. And, if you don't deleted all of those mp3s, I don't think you need to worry about your mp3 players violating any patents; when you're violating copyright, you may as violate some patents also.
- Sam (Why do I get the feeling that Lame will live on and that XMMS will continue to have an easily downloaded mp3 decoder?)
My only comment is that the face of the gecko is not quite in the plane of focus. I know that, with a really long lens (which can very well be on a medium format camera, which further squashes the plane of focus), the plain of focus is really thin. And, with Autofocus cameras, one can not readily choose what is in focus. However, it would have been better if the face would have been in focus and less of the tail of the gecko was in focus.
Then again, I know that getting the perfect focus is just about impossible in situtations where you need to collapse the depth of field; I hate flashes so have the same problems when taking pictures at night.
- Sam
I will not disagree with your "should", since subjective impression are, of course, always completely valid.
I actually prefer putting up source in RPM format because RPMs can have the following things that a tarball can not conveniently have:
- GPG signatures
- Patches
- A
.spec file which tells RPM-based program how to compile the thing.
- Any other file I want to add
RPMs can be "broken open" easily enough: In the case of a source code RPM, this will give you the source code tarball, and any patches the packager wanted to include. With the RPMs I make, this will also give a stand-along GPG signature for the tarball.RPM has supported bz2 tarballs for over two years, which makes my .src.rpm files smaller than my .gz tarballs. And, yes, I know that the UNIX world is not comfortable with RPMs the way they are with tarballs, so I make my code available in .gz tarballs, .bz2 tarballs, .src.rpm files, and in .i386.rpm files.
OK, time to get off the soap box.
- Sam
Unlike Debian, the stable release has recent libaries and binaries; they also have a much more formal SQA methodology than what Debian has (Debian testing works, of course, but it just takes longer for Debian to declare something stable). Unlike gentoo/sorcerer/etc., no one has to wait while all of the programs compile. While this is an excellent learning experience, a.k.a. Slackware (another great platform for learning the internals of Linux on a very intimate level), it is, in my opinion, not necessary for daily production usage.
I like knowing that I can buy (or download; the two are 100% identical) RedHat and not have to upgrade my system for a year or two; RedHat will "freeze" on a given release and release only critical bug fixes (mainly security updates) for a period of two years for a given release. This is very useful; it allows people to use systems without having to be on the constant upgrade treadmill.
I am very pleased to see RedHat merging KDE and Gnome; having different applications on the desktop having different user interfaces looks, IMHO, unprofessional and I am glad to see RedHat resolving this.
RedHat has always strongly belived in free software. They took a stand aginst the old Free/Qt licensing by strongly supporting Gnome; their actions undoubtably contributed to QT's decision to allow the free versions of their libraies be GPL'd.
If you don't like RedHat, you are free to make your own fork of RedHat which fixes the things you don't like. Mandrake did this because they wanted a RedHat with KDE five years ago; they are a RedHat fork which still exists today (knock on wood; I hope they get past their financial problems). I think the person at tummy.com is still selling RedHat-derived distributions (RedHat + whatever updates he feels are needed).
I have been using RedHat for over five years, since RedHat 4.2, and have been very happy with RedHat. I feel that they have made an excellent compromise between making the settings configurable with a GUI or with a text editor--I happyily use a text editor to configure my RedHat box (currently only one: A laptop with 7.2). Some old Sun greybeards (too lazy to learn a new tool) complain about Xinetd; I think RedHat is remarkably conservative about intorducing new things which force users to relearn; I think replacing the old, crufty inetd.conf with Xinetd is perfectly reasonable. Now, if only Microsoft were so reasonable about keeping the UI so consistant between releases.
Speaking of Microsoft, RedHat, as the articles pointed out, can not be the next Microsoft. The GPL protects us from that.
- Sam
The work that Lilo does has always been of the most professional calibar (I can not say the same about Karl's IRC network). I do not think it is unreasonable for him to ask for donations. There is a lot more to a good IRC netowrk than servers and bandwidth; an IRC network can quick degenerate to childish kick-and-ban games unless someone of Lilo's caliber maintains the network.
- Sam
In 1992 (when Computer shopper was this huge monstrsity before the 'net killed it), there were a lot of ideas bouncing around about making floppys have about 20 megs of capacity. Unfortunatly, no one was willing to come up with a standard to agree on. Each company had their own idea on how to make a 20 meg floppy.
Iomega finally came up with their zip drive, and the clever parallel port connection. Too bad Iomega made it illegal for anyone besides themselves to make Zip disks; Zip was eventually replaced by CDR (and all of the headaches for any use besides long-term data archival) because of Iomega's greed.
- Sam
Strange; I have never had a problem booting RedHat from CD-ROM; did you burn the CDs yourself or use some official RedHat CDs?
- Sam