You consider Michael Moore and Kerry to be in the same political strata? Well, whatever. Regardless, if you define the far left as these people then the OP is wrong because they are not interfering with the development of science. The kind of far leftists who would have no power. You can't have it both ways.
ID is a precise example of what I said. Faced with something unknown like the precise mechanics of biogensis (which I know isn't related to evolution, but is brough up a lot in ID), religion teaches that it's the act of an unknown and unknowable creator. Science teaches you to investigate it to determine the cause. Thats one of the reasons *why* ID isn't science. The core facet of ID, the one thats most sympathetic to people, is that when you don't know or you can't see some action, it's God doing it. Faced with incredulity ("irreducible complexity" is a form of argument from incredulity), you accept it as the action of a deity and not something you can further understand.
ID is simply the most recent example, the examples from history are countless. Gallileo is another classic example ("And yet, they move"). And thats without even bringing in the real loonies, like the ones who are convinced that the Earth is 6000 years old, and all the animals that exist today have always existed, and no other animals ever have, and all evidence to the contrary has been *placed by God specifically in an attempt to fool people*.
Then you're wrong
The far left always proves a point by stereotyping the "religious right" into thinking they are a bunch of bible thumping granny's
The "religious right" they are talking about is *by definition* bible thumping. If you aren't a bible thumper, then you aren't included, so quite being offended
The truth is, it has nothing to do with right or left. The far left has "tree-huggers" who want to get rid of industry, dams, power generators, cars, etc.
Thats an objection to *industry*, not to *science*. The two, while often interrelated, are not the same thing at all.
Fact: Religious fundamentalism exists in America, and is growing.
Fact: Religions fundamentalists, because they are (by definition) vocal and passionate, command a very strong political powerbase
Fact: The Bush administration, more than any president in recent memory, caters to and sympathises with religious fundamentalists.
Fact: There is a long-standing and fundamental disconnect between religion and science, and while it can be and has been crossed many times, it is very present. At the core, religion teaches you to venerate the unknown, and treat it as unknowable, while science teaches you to investigate it.
Fact: Religious motivations have already affected public policy in several areas, including science.
The far left (and what you're talking about is the far, far, far left) has practically no political power in the US. Claiming that there is some secret cabal of hippies keeping us from investing in science is ludicrous. It is a simple fact that the religious right has a great deal of political power, and they have an opposition to many forms of science, and that is affecting the quality of scientific education in America. The whole "intelligent design" thing, an exercise in justification and hypocrisy if there ever was one is only one example.
It's not the only thing driving that of course - the current business climate, with it's emphasis on short term profits, definitely affects it. A n adminstration hostile to pure science (as opposed to military or readily commercially exploitable science) is another. But the religious right absolutely is a factor, no matter how much you want to pretend otherwise.
I prefer Ubuntu, but when I used Fedora, I couldn't live without apt4rpm. It really smoothes out the difference between apt/rpm. One advantage was that much software (thats not in repositories) is packaged for Fedora, but.debs for Ubuntu are much rarer. So you kinda get the best of both worlds there.
*Every single* Ask Slashdot either has a slew of people telling the poster that he's stupid and should have just used Google, or a slew of posters telling him that he's stupid and unprofessional and should throw money at the problem. Sometimes both in the same thread, which is always good for a laugh.
Since you're one of the second type of responder, do you care to say what you think an acceptable topic for Ask Slashdot would be? Obviously, asking about highly technical enterprise topics is verbotten, since if you have to ask you're clearly unqualified and instead should just hire the most expensive consultant listed in your directory. And clearly simple questions you can answer by searching Google are a waste of everyones valuable time. So why don't you provide some guidelines for what an acceptable topic is? Maybe this very question would be a good Ask Slashdot!
Unfortunately, it'd also completely destroy the very strong non-professional softare development community. Not just OSS either, but shareware, hobbyists, even personal development. The tools required to do software development, like a compiler, would be enormously more expensive. So the question is whether the cover of professionalism is worth the impact of essentially destroying the amateur community, and whether the economic gain of (maybe) better software is worth the massively increased price of software development, the essential extinction of low-price shareware, and the loss of the freedoms that OSS provides, notably the push to open standards that OSS drives. We would eventually have a "big 3" (or maybe 5 or 6) of software development, just as we do with automobile manufacturers, to the detriment of the consumer.
The fact is that the typical Linux desktop is far more consistent than the typical Windows one. I have here an XP machine. I have, using only Microsoft applications, no fewer than *three* UI sets active. And thats not because I'm running ancient stuff from Windows 3.1 either. Although if you counted the old version of Access I have here (because you can't open Access 97 databases in Access 2000 without corrupting them, even if you don't save anything. Nice.), there'd be 4. And then you can count stuff like WMP and MSN messenger. Ooh, look, I opened a Windows Help document. Theres another one. And this one (still, 10 years after the fact...) breaks the offical UI guidelines by adding crap to the system menu, so when I try to close it by right clicking on the taskbar, I end up hitting "About HTML Help..." instead, because it breaks muscle memory.
Now, theres a variety of widget sets for Linux too, of course. But applications written in those widget sets tend to be highly internally consistent, and thanks to the efforts of distro packagers, all the applications in a distro will also tend to be consistent. The KDE and GNOME guys both do an excellent job of keeping consistency in thier "official" applications as well. Far better than Microsoft does, for example - the biggest Windows app in the world, Office, uses a custom widget library instead of standard ones.
the single best thing i like about Windows is the consistency of it.
No, you like the way that you already know where everything is. Because the simple fact is that Microsoft absolutely does rename and move stuff between versions - the dumbed down (ahem, "simplified") control panel interface in Windows XP is a great example. Especially for managing users and groups. Grr. Theres the ever-loving auto-hiding menu items. There are *vast* UI inconsistencies between Windows versions, beyond the themeing, and major ones even within Windows. But you already know and are familiar with that interface, so you're mentally blind to it and it seems normal.
I bet $5 you can't name 5 objective reasons why a NeXT based theme (as opposed to NeXT UI guidelines) is "more productive" than any other theme, including the GNOME default. You should have just said "because thats what I'm used to".
I also bet you can't name 5 objective reasons why the Windows XP or OS X *themes*, as opposed to interface are less productive than any other theme. If the best you've got is "big title bars take up too much screen space", then you should just go home.
I get pimped through TekSystems, and have (mostly) only good things to say. The only problems I've had with them have been delays in payroll, which was caused by Katrina destroying the office I was paid out of, and seems to be all cleared up now. There is an equivilence to a no-compete, which prevents me from cancelling my contract and going to work for my employer, but I don't mind it too much, it's a reasonable thing on thier part.
You know, thats kinda funny, cause none of that matches my experience with Ikea at all. The Ikea store near my home (in Houston) is very nice, well laid out, chock full of helpfull people, and tremendously family friendly - how many other furnitore stores have complete childrens play centers to drop your kids off at while you shop?
We have some Ikea bookshelves, and the design is a little questionable, but my desk is fantastic. I had a great experience at the store itself.
On a final, slightly flamebait note, my MySQL experience has none of those characteristics:P
The medical supplies may very well be needed (especially US military grade ones), but they're generally not in dire need of food or water. Not enough to expend the kind of resources required to stop a convoy.
Except that we just established that mechanized convoys would be much easier to stop, because they don't have human drivers and don't have armed escorts. And, of course, stopping a convoy not only means more supplies for you, it means less for your enemy. And you're drastically over-estimating the resources required to stop a normal convoy, much less one made up of autonomous trucks.
If cutting supply chains is so ineffective, why do we even still use convoys and trucks? Because it's more dangerous and more expensive to airlift supplies than it is to convoy them. Forcing you to airlift because you can't get supplies through a region on the ground is hardly ineffectual.
There are good reasons to use autonomous convoys. There's good reasons to work on the research. Thinking that one of those reasons is because the enemy won't attack them or that it won't matter if they do is stupid.
the insurgents use AK-47s by and large, which use drastically different ammo from M16s
True, but that is because of the availability of AK47s and the ammo for them, not because nasty terrorist hands are burned by the righteous grips of the M-16. In the very worst case ammo makes a handy ingredient in jury rigged bombs.
And very little of that is desirous to an insurgent, who generally doesn't think in terms of cutting off a supply train.
Yes, those terrorists are so damn stupid they don't realize the value of water, food, and medical supplies. There can't possibly be any need for those when you're a decentralized guerilla army fighting against a better organized and equipped force. And they're so stupid they can't even concieve of tactics a 12 year old playing Risk might come up with, and certainly none of them have ever recieved paramilitary training, because there weren't any US or Russian "advisors" organizing such training all over the middle east in the last 20 years.
Well, it's not like the supply vehicle isn't going to have locks on it. And if it gets stuck in any way, shape, or form when it's not expecting to then it'll probably phone home.
It's a little known fact that none of our existing supply vehicles have locks or radios on them. Because if they did, they'd be invulnerable to those damn stupid terrorists. And if only we stopped filling our all our supply transports with people, and only had a couple drivers in each truck, they wouldn't attack any more, because they only care about causalties.
Way to go mister military mastermind. It sure is a good thing terrorists are too stupid to read English or use the Internet, otherwise they might read your post and realize all the mistakes they're making. Here's a quick hint: action movies and the crap shows on Fox and SpikeTV are not neccesarily accurate depictions of warfare.
theres also the issue of what distribution is, is distributing within a company enough to count?
The traditional GPL response is no, but this is not in line with copyright law. Quick, buy software on a corporate credit card and give copies to everyone in your agency.
The "internal distribution" distinction is in the GPL commentary, but not in the GPL itself. The FSF would be estopped by it from going after people who distribute internally, but as far as I know nobody else who distributes under the GPL would be, as long as they didn't make a similiar statement.
The past week or so I've been learning PHP and SQL (web tutorials of course, why the fuck would I buy a book on it), and working on my site (which is hosted on my PC, using apache).
If this is the extent of your experience, then yes, you are a kiddie. You like MySQL primarily because you had a positive first experience with it and have no experience with alternatives, and secondarily because you've never needed to do professional caliber work with it. That makes you a kiddie.
Being a kiddie is not (neccesarily) a permanent state, and it does not preclude learning something and gaining an appreciation for web developers. However, it does pretty much mean that your opinion of MySQL isn't interesting or important.
The fact that you're profane and whiny in reponse to a perfectly reasonable description of your expertise and experience, that wasn't even personally directed at you, just kinda brings the point home. MySQL is enormously popular in this market.
sqllite serves a totally different need than MySQL would. sqllite is a file-based DB, like Access, and is fantastic for embedding (far, far superior to "embedded MySQL", patooie), but is totally unsuited for a server role. And I hate MySQL and would recommend PostgreSQL anywhere someone is thinking about using MySQL.
This would mean that buying physical CDs and books from other countries via online retailers is also illegal, which I am quite sure it is not. It seems that the train of thought is that a digital delivery is somehow fundamentally different than a physical one. As far as I know, theres no actual law that says that, although perhaps there is case law, I'm not an expert in business law.
It's important to note that fair use is not constitionally protected. It's a result of a combination of court rulings (legislation from the bench, if you will) and legislation. There is absolutely no reason other legislation, like the DMCA, cannot override it. So while the DMCA absoultely does have a chilling effect and it absolutely does violate the social contract of copyright as we understand it, that does not mean that a court would neccesarily over rule it on those grounds. They may very well, and with great justification, decide that it's within Congresses realm to make such legislation and leave it at that. Just as the Supreme Court did with the question of copyright term limits.
Is it legal for you to mail order a Russian CD from an importer? If it is, then allofmp3.com is just as legal. International companies have enjoyed the benefits of the international market for decades, don't let propaganda blind you to the fact that you as a consumer are entitled to do the same thing.
Buying an MP3 from allofmp3.com is *importing*. Its not any more illegal than buying Japanese video games from jlist is. Or buying books from amazon.co.uk. Media companies really, really, really *want* it to be illegal, because then conglomerates are the only ones allowed to take advantage of price differentials in economies, not consumers. What the hell do you think region coded DVDs are all about? Do you actually think those have the force of law?
They included the Tibetan flag on a list of regions used to set your time zone or some such. Chinese occupation of Tibet, though, is slightly more "legit", for whatever passes for legit. Tibet is an occupied, conquered nation (just like the southern states of the US, for example), while Taiwan is objectively independent. The Chinese claim to it is an example of government refutation of reality, not imperialism.
The lawsuit was *10 years* ago and pre-dates any signifigant adoption of Linux. If the GPL is the obstacle to Linux pickup, and the BSD license would resolve that issue, then BSD should be more popular. I submit that the nature of the GPL is such that it attracts more people, developers and users, and thus it is in fact a primary driver behind Linux adoption rather than an impedment.
So I have to ask. Do you compose each jingle as you write the post, or do you have an archive of them you pull from? I suspect the latter as they don't seem to have any clever reference to the discussion topic in them.
Slashdot Mirror
You consider Michael Moore and Kerry to be in the same political strata? Well, whatever. Regardless, if you define the far left as these people then the OP is wrong because they are not interfering with the development of science. The kind of far leftists who would have no power. You can't have it both ways.
ID is simply the most recent example, the examples from history are countless. Gallileo is another classic example ("And yet, they move"). And thats without even bringing in the real loonies, like the ones who are convinced that the Earth is 6000 years old, and all the animals that exist today have always existed, and no other animals ever have, and all evidence to the contrary has been *placed by God specifically in an attempt to fool people*.
Then you're wrong The far left always proves a point by stereotyping the "religious right" into thinking they are a bunch of bible thumping granny's
The "religious right" they are talking about is *by definition* bible thumping. If you aren't a bible thumper, then you aren't included, so quite being offended
The truth is, it has nothing to do with right or left. The far left has "tree-huggers" who want to get rid of industry, dams, power generators, cars, etc.
Thats an objection to *industry*, not to *science*. The two, while often interrelated, are not the same thing at all.
Fact: Religious fundamentalism exists in America, and is growing.
Fact: Religions fundamentalists, because they are (by definition) vocal and passionate, command a very strong political powerbase
Fact: The Bush administration, more than any president in recent memory, caters to and sympathises with religious fundamentalists.
Fact: There is a long-standing and fundamental disconnect between religion and science, and while it can be and has been crossed many times, it is very present. At the core, religion teaches you to venerate the unknown, and treat it as unknowable, while science teaches you to investigate it.
Fact: Religious motivations have already affected public policy in several areas, including science.
The far left (and what you're talking about is the far, far, far left) has practically no political power in the US. Claiming that there is some secret cabal of hippies keeping us from investing in science is ludicrous. It is a simple fact that the religious right has a great deal of political power, and they have an opposition to many forms of science, and that is affecting the quality of scientific education in America. The whole "intelligent design" thing, an exercise in justification and hypocrisy if there ever was one is only one example.
It's not the only thing driving that of course - the current business climate, with it's emphasis on short term profits, definitely affects it. A n adminstration hostile to pure science (as opposed to military or readily commercially exploitable science) is another. But the religious right absolutely is a factor, no matter how much you want to pretend otherwise.
I prefer Ubuntu, but when I used Fedora, I couldn't live without apt4rpm. It really smoothes out the difference between apt/rpm. One advantage was that much software (thats not in repositories) is packaged for Fedora, but .debs for Ubuntu are much rarer. So you kinda get the best of both worlds there.
Since you're one of the second type of responder, do you care to say what you think an acceptable topic for Ask Slashdot would be? Obviously, asking about highly technical enterprise topics is verbotten, since if you have to ask you're clearly unqualified and instead should just hire the most expensive consultant listed in your directory. And clearly simple questions you can answer by searching Google are a waste of everyones valuable time. So why don't you provide some guidelines for what an acceptable topic is? Maybe this very question would be a good Ask Slashdot!
Unfortunately, it'd also completely destroy the very strong non-professional softare development community. Not just OSS either, but shareware, hobbyists, even personal development. The tools required to do software development, like a compiler, would be enormously more expensive. So the question is whether the cover of professionalism is worth the impact of essentially destroying the amateur community, and whether the economic gain of (maybe) better software is worth the massively increased price of software development, the essential extinction of low-price shareware, and the loss of the freedoms that OSS provides, notably the push to open standards that OSS drives. We would eventually have a "big 3" (or maybe 5 or 6) of software development, just as we do with automobile manufacturers, to the detriment of the consumer.
Now, theres a variety of widget sets for Linux too, of course. But applications written in those widget sets tend to be highly internally consistent, and thanks to the efforts of distro packagers, all the applications in a distro will also tend to be consistent. The KDE and GNOME guys both do an excellent job of keeping consistency in thier "official" applications as well. Far better than Microsoft does, for example - the biggest Windows app in the world, Office, uses a custom widget library instead of standard ones.
No, you like the way that you already know where everything is. Because the simple fact is that Microsoft absolutely does rename and move stuff between versions - the dumbed down (ahem, "simplified") control panel interface in Windows XP is a great example. Especially for managing users and groups. Grr. Theres the ever-loving auto-hiding menu items. There are *vast* UI inconsistencies between Windows versions, beyond the themeing, and major ones even within Windows. But you already know and are familiar with that interface, so you're mentally blind to it and it seems normal.
I also bet you can't name 5 objective reasons why the Windows XP or OS X *themes*, as opposed to interface are less productive than any other theme. If the best you've got is "big title bars take up too much screen space", then you should just go home.
I get pimped through TekSystems, and have (mostly) only good things to say. The only problems I've had with them have been delays in payroll, which was caused by Katrina destroying the office I was paid out of, and seems to be all cleared up now. There is an equivilence to a no-compete, which prevents me from cancelling my contract and going to work for my employer, but I don't mind it too much, it's a reasonable thing on thier part.
And that would make any fucking sense if what he was being charged with was lying to police or interering with a police investigation.
We have some Ikea bookshelves, and the design is a little questionable, but my desk is fantastic. I had a great experience at the store itself.
On a final, slightly flamebait note, my MySQL experience has none of those characteristics :P
Except that we just established that mechanized convoys would be much easier to stop, because they don't have human drivers and don't have armed escorts. And, of course, stopping a convoy not only means more supplies for you, it means less for your enemy. And you're drastically over-estimating the resources required to stop a normal convoy, much less one made up of autonomous trucks.
If cutting supply chains is so ineffective, why do we even still use convoys and trucks? Because it's more dangerous and more expensive to airlift supplies than it is to convoy them. Forcing you to airlift because you can't get supplies through a region on the ground is hardly ineffectual.
There are good reasons to use autonomous convoys. There's good reasons to work on the research. Thinking that one of those reasons is because the enemy won't attack them or that it won't matter if they do is stupid.
the insurgents use AK-47s by and large, which use drastically different ammo from M16s
True, but that is because of the availability of AK47s and the ammo for them, not because nasty terrorist hands are burned by the righteous grips of the M-16. In the very worst case ammo makes a handy ingredient in jury rigged bombs.
And very little of that is desirous to an insurgent, who generally doesn't think in terms of cutting off a supply train.
Yes, those terrorists are so damn stupid they don't realize the value of water, food, and medical supplies. There can't possibly be any need for those when you're a decentralized guerilla army fighting against a better organized and equipped force. And they're so stupid they can't even concieve of tactics a 12 year old playing Risk might come up with, and certainly none of them have ever recieved paramilitary training, because there weren't any US or Russian "advisors" organizing such training all over the middle east in the last 20 years.
Well, it's not like the supply vehicle isn't going to have locks on it. And if it gets stuck in any way, shape, or form when it's not expecting to then it'll probably phone home.
It's a little known fact that none of our existing supply vehicles have locks or radios on them. Because if they did, they'd be invulnerable to those damn stupid terrorists. And if only we stopped filling our all our supply transports with people, and only had a couple drivers in each truck, they wouldn't attack any more, because they only care about causalties.
Way to go mister military mastermind. It sure is a good thing terrorists are too stupid to read English or use the Internet, otherwise they might read your post and realize all the mistakes they're making. Here's a quick hint: action movies and the crap shows on Fox and SpikeTV are not neccesarily accurate depictions of warfare.
The traditional GPL response is no, but this is not in line with copyright law. Quick, buy software on a corporate credit card and give copies to everyone in your agency.
The "internal distribution" distinction is in the GPL commentary, but not in the GPL itself. The FSF would be estopped by it from going after people who distribute internally, but as far as I know nobody else who distributes under the GPL would be, as long as they didn't make a similiar statement.
If this is the extent of your experience, then yes, you are a kiddie. You like MySQL primarily because you had a positive first experience with it and have no experience with alternatives, and secondarily because you've never needed to do professional caliber work with it. That makes you a kiddie.
Being a kiddie is not (neccesarily) a permanent state, and it does not preclude learning something and gaining an appreciation for web developers. However, it does pretty much mean that your opinion of MySQL isn't interesting or important.
The fact that you're profane and whiny in reponse to a perfectly reasonable description of your expertise and experience, that wasn't even personally directed at you, just kinda brings the point home. MySQL is enormously popular in this market.
sqllite serves a totally different need than MySQL would. sqllite is a file-based DB, like Access, and is fantastic for embedding (far, far superior to "embedded MySQL", patooie), but is totally unsuited for a server role. And I hate MySQL and would recommend PostgreSQL anywhere someone is thinking about using MySQL.
This would mean that buying physical CDs and books from other countries via online retailers is also illegal, which I am quite sure it is not. It seems that the train of thought is that a digital delivery is somehow fundamentally different than a physical one. As far as I know, theres no actual law that says that, although perhaps there is case law, I'm not an expert in business law.
It's important to note that fair use is not constitionally protected. It's a result of a combination of court rulings (legislation from the bench, if you will) and legislation. There is absolutely no reason other legislation, like the DMCA, cannot override it. So while the DMCA absoultely does have a chilling effect and it absolutely does violate the social contract of copyright as we understand it, that does not mean that a court would neccesarily over rule it on those grounds. They may very well, and with great justification, decide that it's within Congresses realm to make such legislation and leave it at that. Just as the Supreme Court did with the question of copyright term limits.
Is it legal for you to mail order a Russian CD from an importer? If it is, then allofmp3.com is just as legal. International companies have enjoyed the benefits of the international market for decades, don't let propaganda blind you to the fact that you as a consumer are entitled to do the same thing.
Buying an MP3 from allofmp3.com is *importing*. Its not any more illegal than buying Japanese video games from jlist is. Or buying books from amazon.co.uk. Media companies really, really, really *want* it to be illegal, because then conglomerates are the only ones allowed to take advantage of price differentials in economies, not consumers. What the hell do you think region coded DVDs are all about? Do you actually think those have the force of law?
There's a corresponding term for the civil side but I can't be bothered to look it up right now. Enticement rings a bell.
They included the Tibetan flag on a list of regions used to set your time zone or some such. Chinese occupation of Tibet, though, is slightly more "legit", for whatever passes for legit. Tibet is an occupied, conquered nation (just like the southern states of the US, for example), while Taiwan is objectively independent. The Chinese claim to it is an example of government refutation of reality, not imperialism.
The lawsuit was *10 years* ago and pre-dates any signifigant adoption of Linux. If the GPL is the obstacle to Linux pickup, and the BSD license would resolve that issue, then BSD should be more popular. I submit that the nature of the GPL is such that it attracts more people, developers and users, and thus it is in fact a primary driver behind Linux adoption rather than an impedment.
So I have to ask. Do you compose each jingle as you write the post, or do you have an archive of them you pull from? I suspect the latter as they don't seem to have any clever reference to the discussion topic in them.