The mother post is very good. You should learn a bit more history.
Most of Hitler's victims were never accused of violating any law.
Anything wrong (bad economy supposedly due to fraud and illegal money operations by jews, bad morals due to illegal sexual activities, etc) in the Third Reich was happening because of the jews, gypsies, homosexuals, whatever according to nazi propaganda. That is supposedly why they were put in concentration camps, and that was the excuse for germans not to object.
Stalin was a paranoid, but also a quite clever politician. Anytime he wanted to get ride of someone who he perceived as a threat or enemy, he would make a campaign connecting them to a group who was responsible for a certain crime/social problem, have a court case and send them to Siberia or execute them. It worked very well for him, and it took years before finally people in Kremlin dared discuss Stalin's dirty tactics in public.
No one dared to stop or speak against McCarthy and his helpers, even the presidents or senators or media or courts or other power institutions. That would make them commies. McCarthy did not need to pass laws, since he used the laws that were already written about treason etc to damage people that he did not like (movie industry people, leftist, free thinkers, democrats, you name it). The US is always so proud of its strong democracy, but these years shows how strong it really is.
The inquisition target anyone the catholic church did not like. Especially, it was used against strong women ("witches") or men (intellectuals) who could challenge the power of the priesthood. The jews were another group the church wanted to control. The bathing practises is connected to the muslims, that for a long time controlled what is today Spain and Portugal, anther group that of course threatened the power of the church.
I have to agree up to a point. But I think part of the problem is the way the problem is discussed; one talk of email viruses, internett worms, holes etc. It should be called MS Outlook email viruses, MS worms, MS IE holes, Linux viruses (do they excist yet?), Linux worms, Linux kernel holes, Unix worms, Apple viruses, etc. etc. Then people will realize that it is not so much a web and mail problem, but problems in certain programs' design. Part of the problem is that some programs should not be used to read email or surfe the web or used as webhosts until they become more secure. Which ones should be appearent to people when they get more than just the virus, worm etc description.
Teach the kids Windows, it is the OS used by most people. Linux gives more knowledge needed everyday when working with computers, but lest be blinded by numbers instead.
Teach the kids Chinese, it is the language used by most people. English gives more knowledge needed everyday in an english speaking country, but lets be blinded by numbers instead.
The problem with books like "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism", is that there exists no "Darwinism" as these books wants you to believe. There do exist a very valuable work by Darwin, and there exist many scientists who believe Darwin was mostly right. These scientist engaged and are still engaged in discussions with scientists who do not agree with their view -- both on details and on the more fundamental views (but no real scientist is going to tell you they can prove God's existence or other metaphysical/religious matters). This is what science is all about.
But books like these want you to think there is some sort of conspiracy, or that science have been high-jacked by the (evil) "Darwinist". Creationists attack each evidence for Darwin's theories and end up by saying, "see, again there is reason for doubt -- the Darwinists views are built on an illusion." The problem is, all these methods were not developed to prove Darwin is right. The physics behind carbon dating was not developed with Darwin in mind, but then some smart guy finds out, "these methods can give us answers also in archeology!". Any new method will be compared with estimate from previous methods, and any new method (new radioactive isotopes for instant) will have the potential to invalid older methods (and conclusions built upon them) and make scientist re-evaluate what is the most thrust wordy theory.
When two methods estimates don't compare -- one or both is wrong (or interpreted wrong) -- and scientist in the field will be all fired up to unravel the mystery and to win that Nobel prize. The greatest mistake is to believe scientist in general are disappointed to find out the accept theories are no good -- this only gives them the opportunity for making a new theory that will make them famous (yeah!) and also extend human knowledge (you are a researcher, and this is your goal). A "scientific theory" that God created the Universe in 7 days, is hard to "prove" but more importantly, not very interesting. (An all mighty God could have created the Universe one second ago with me and all my memories with it, but so what?) Metaphysics is best left to the philosophers.
To discuss more details; yes, physicist and geologist do know about experimental errors or experimental limitations. Two orders of magnitude is large, but is sometimes acceptable, but only as long as one are aware of the accuracy of a measurement/method. One can not invalid the usefulness of radioactive dating in a field just because the method is uncertain. The interpretation of the result is also depended on other theories like the Carbon-14 in the atmosphere ages ago. But then, some smart guy drills a hole in the ice of Greenland, and one has a new method to test these theories. And when this method fits with older theories, we believe more in them. But who knows, maybe we will get another way to find out the C14 in the atmosphere millions of year ago, that will show the theories of today are wrong. But it will be a very strange scientist who thinks this is a bad thing.
I do not mind books attacking leading scientific ideas; many of those books are science books. But be aware of books/authors that want to convince you of something, but do not want to tell the whole story. I have not read this book, but any book that builds on the myth of "Darwinism", should be approached at least as critical as those theories we at the moment accept as the most scientific reasonble....
Re:So, do we get a 2.2.20 from this?
on
Linux Kernel Bugs
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I am sure Alan Cox will deliver a 2.2.20 soon, as he is still in charge of maintaining the 2.2.* kernel series. I saw a while ago an 2.2.19-ac*, but Alan has not been in a hurry to reach 2.2.20. But now, he definitely will be.
I think one of the most irritating things about the whole Microsoft monopoly, is that they release a product with huge security holes. Then the consumer has to buy a expensive virus protection program to feel safe when opening emails etc. So, the consumer not only gets the pleasure of getting virus, but even have to pay extra for the favour. I know MS release patches sometimes to try to stop the virus flood, but in a way they also owe the consumer a program to deal with the viruses that too many times get through.
Well, thinking about it, I guess if they included a virus program with their Windows XP, it would be another example of bundling and uncompetitive practice:).
I'd like the switch to Linux to be thought out and executed well.
Good point. My point was that the discussions and planning is happening all over Europe at the moment, and if the German government goes from considering to adopting, a lot of the smaller project will get the push they need to get to the next phase also.
I see these kinds of stories -- "gov't organisation x is considering linux" -- more and more in different european countries these days. And not only on "linux web-sites" like slashdot, but in local papers and national papers, both here in Scandinavia and many other EU countries I visit. In Germany and France there seem to be politicians aware of linux, mostly in local gov't but also on national level, and they are two of the biggest and most influential countries of EU (they are also the "homeland" of SuSe and Mandrake).
Still, there seems to be a lot of inertia to overcome to move away from MS dependency. The articles are usually full of keywords like considering, debating, testing. But I would think that the signal effect of a German government switch to linux could be huge. All these local politicians/activist could win over enough support the day they can point to Germany as a success story of open source. Germany is known as a fairly conservative society that don't jump into changes with out thinking about it, so if "the Germans do it, we can do it".
It feels a bit like the Borg is starting to cave in, when you see all these signs of change in mentality and then on top of it all a friends stop by and ask for help to install Mandrake 8.1. His company is considering to move to linux after hearing about new licenses from Seattle. I think MS can wake up with a bad hang over after introducing XP...
I can not believe that the parent post got the moderation (Score 5: Insightful).
I am sure that he has had some problems with Nautilus bloat (which is a commen problem), but Sawfish bloat is really a stupid comment.
I am also sure that he has grown up on CDE, but to claim that the Gnome interface is clumsy and difficult relative to CDE or Windows for a new user, is just rubbish. Also, one should
give Sun credit for working hard on making the Gnome interface
more user friendly, something all GUI should have even mind all the time.
But the real troll comment is "GNOME is at least five years away from any sort of maturity". Since we just have celebrated KDE's 5 years birthday, that is one of the least : Insightful comments I have seen in this whole slashdot posting. Talk about not paying attention for the last 10 years.
Here
Afghanistan - The Dark Ages contains a RealPlayer video of a 44 min documentary showed yesterday on BBC Panorama. The program gives indepth analysis of what has been happening in Afghanistan the last 20 years and how the Taliban came in power. It describes how life has been in Afghanistan under the Taliban. The video also shows the only known TV tapes of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar and gives the journalist story of meeting Osama bin Laden.
All respect to BBC for their quality programs.
Re:Good news in a unhappy time.
on
Raising the Kursk
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Even though it is nice for the families of the people who died to get to do a proper burial, I do not think this operation is done for the benefit of these unfortunate soldiers. It is a long tradition in marine nation to see the sea as a proper burial place for sailors who lose their life at sea. That is why for instant the ferry Estonia, that went down between Sweden and Finland, has not been raised or tried to be emptied for bodies, even though many relatives have been working hard for it. The argument of the Swedish goverment is that the ship itself is a proper graveyard for the passengers and the extra cost of raising the ship or getting out bodies at the risk of divers life, does not match the .
The real reason to get the Kursk out of the sea, even though it is an extreemly difficult operation, is that you don't want a nuclear reactor in the sea slowly rusting away. This area of the north atlantic is extreemly important for fishing. The sad part is that there is still a lot of retired submarines and radioactive waste that the russian navy don't care about or don't have money to take care of in this area. The norwegian environmental organization Bellona has been working hard to gets funds and understanding that something has to be done to this potential environmental catastrophy. Check out http://www.bellona.no/ for more information.
I'm almost positive that Apple Records was fully owned by Apple Corps, Ltd.
The Beatles used Apple Corp. to help startups who did not have the money to make their visions come true. The original company was founded by Brian Epstein [Beatles manager] as a tax-write off, but became more after Epstein's death.
To make money available for this new idealistic corporation, the last Beatles albumes (from White Album) was sold by the Apple Corp., published under the label Apple Records, making much of the albums profit available directly to Apple Corp.
It all ended in the somewhat naiv Beatles members giving away a lot of their money to scam artist. Today I guess Apple Corp. is a better run company then when four idealistic musicians ran it themselves. Needles to say, Apple Records was the only part of Apple Corp. that actually earned money in the beginning.
AFAIK, Apple Computer is no longer barred from going into the music industry. They certainly breached their original settlement by this point, it's quite easy to use the Macintosh as a low budget recording studio, probably with about as much quality as the Beatles had back in 1981.
I think you confuse the issue here a bit. It is not about Apple computers not being allowed to make music, it is about the Apple computer logo not appearing on records, making music buyers think it is an Apple Record product. Apple don't want to compet against Apple to say it simple.
Anyway, it is hard to get the original sound of Abbey studio that made Beatles and Pink Floyd famous on your Apple computer, even though the sound is now digital and therefore "better" in some meaning of the word.
Of course, had The Federal Trademark Dilution Act been in effect in 1984, Apple probably wouldn't be called Apple any more, since they would have lost the trademark dispute against Apple Records.
Actually, as fare as I know, Apple Corp (that was founded by the Beatles in 1968) sued Apple Computer. The case ended in a settlement where Apple Computer payed something between $25 million - $30 million and had to agree to stay out of the music business. So it basically means that Apple can not become an owner in a record company and that they had to pay a one time fee for keeping their Apple name.
Actually, as fare as I know, Apple Corp (that was founded by the Beatles in 1968) sued Apple Computer. The case ended in a settlement where Apple Computer payed something between $25 million - $30 million and had to agree to stay out of the music business. So it basically means that Apple can not become an owner in a record company and that they had to pay a one time fee for keeping their Apple name.
>Of course, had The Federal Trademark Dilution Act been in effect in 1984, Apple probably wouldn't be called Apple any more, since they would have lost the trademark dispute against Apple Records.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the same story translated to english.
The mother post is very good. You should learn a bit more history.
Anything wrong (bad economy supposedly due to fraud and illegal money operations by jews, bad morals due to illegal sexual activities, etc) in the Third Reich was happening because of the jews, gypsies, homosexuals, whatever according to nazi propaganda. That is supposedly why they were put in concentration camps, and that was the excuse for germans not to object.
Stalin was a paranoid, but also a quite clever politician. Anytime he wanted to get ride of someone who he perceived as a threat or enemy, he would make a campaign connecting them to a group who was responsible for a certain crime/social problem, have a court case and send them to Siberia or execute them. It worked very well for him, and it took years before finally people in Kremlin dared discuss Stalin's dirty tactics in public.
No one dared to stop or speak against McCarthy and his helpers, even the presidents or senators or media or courts or other power institutions. That would make them commies. McCarthy did not need to pass laws, since he used the laws that were already written about treason etc to damage people that he did not like (movie industry people, leftist, free thinkers, democrats, you name it). The US is always so proud of its strong democracy, but these years shows how strong it really is.
The inquisition target anyone the catholic church did not like. Especially, it was used against strong women ("witches") or men (intellectuals) who could challenge the power of the priesthood. The jews were another group the church wanted to control. The bathing practises is connected to the muslims, that for a long time controlled what is today Spain and Portugal, anther group that of course threatened the power of the church.
I have to agree up to a point. But I think part of the problem is the way the problem is discussed; one talk of email viruses, internett worms, holes etc. It should be called MS Outlook email viruses, MS worms, MS IE holes, Linux viruses (do they excist yet?), Linux worms, Linux kernel holes, Unix worms, Apple viruses, etc. etc. Then people will realize that it is not so much a web and mail problem, but problems in certain programs' design. Part of the problem is that some programs should not be used to read email or surfe the web or used as webhosts until they become more secure. Which ones should be appearent to people when they get more than just the virus, worm etc description.
Teach the kids Windows, it is the OS used by most people. Linux gives more knowledge needed everyday when working with computers, but lest be blinded by numbers instead. Teach the kids Chinese, it is the language used by most people. English gives more knowledge needed everyday in an english speaking country, but lets be blinded by numbers instead.
But I would not like to waite a few days after I bought it to find out it freezes up and crashes regularly. Early information and trust is important.
The problem with books like "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism", is that there exists no "Darwinism" as these books wants you to believe. There do exist a very valuable work by Darwin, and there exist many scientists who believe Darwin was mostly right. These scientist engaged and are still engaged in discussions with scientists who do not agree with their view -- both on details and on the more fundamental views (but no real scientist is going to tell you they can prove God's existence or other metaphysical /religious matters). This is what science is all about.
But books like these want you to think there is some sort of conspiracy, or that science have been high-jacked by the (evil) "Darwinist". Creationists attack each evidence for Darwin's theories and end up by saying, "see, again there is reason for doubt -- the Darwinists views are built on an illusion." The problem is, all these methods were not developed to prove Darwin is right. The physics behind carbon dating was not developed with Darwin in mind, but then some smart guy finds out, "these methods can give us answers also in archeology!". Any new method will be compared with estimate from previous methods, and any new method (new radioactive isotopes for instant) will have the potential to invalid older methods (and conclusions built upon them) and make scientist re-evaluate what is the most thrust wordy theory.
When two methods estimates don't compare -- one or both is wrong (or interpreted wrong) -- and scientist in the field will be all fired up to unravel the mystery and to win that Nobel prize. The greatest mistake is to believe scientist in general are disappointed to find out the accept theories are no good -- this only gives them the opportunity for making a new theory that will make them famous (yeah!) and also extend human knowledge (you are a researcher, and this is your goal). A "scientific theory" that God created the Universe in 7 days, is hard to "prove" but more importantly, not very interesting. (An all mighty God could have created the Universe one second ago with me and all my memories with it, but so what?) Metaphysics is best left to the philosophers.
To discuss more details; yes, physicist and geologist do know about experimental errors or experimental limitations. Two orders of magnitude is large, but is sometimes acceptable, but only as long as one are aware of the accuracy of a measurement/method. One can not invalid the usefulness of radioactive dating in a field just because the method is uncertain. The interpretation of the result is also depended on other theories like the Carbon-14 in the atmosphere ages ago. But then, some smart guy drills a hole in the ice of Greenland, and one has a new method to test these theories. And when this method fits with older theories, we believe more in them. But who knows, maybe we will get another way to find out the C14 in the atmosphere millions of year ago, that will show the theories of today are wrong. But it will be a very strange scientist who thinks this is a bad thing.
I do not mind books attacking leading scientific ideas; many of those books are science books. But be aware of books/authors that want to convince you of something, but do not want to tell the whole story. I have not read this book, but any book that builds on the myth of "Darwinism", should be approached at least as critical as those theories we at the moment accept as the most scientific reasonble....
I am sure Alan Cox will deliver a 2.2.20 soon, as he is still in charge of maintaining the 2.2.* kernel series. I saw a while ago an 2.2.19-ac*, but Alan has not been in a hurry to reach 2.2.20. But now, he definitely will be.
I think one of the most irritating things about the whole Microsoft monopoly, is that they release a product with huge security holes. Then the consumer has to buy a expensive virus protection program to feel safe when opening emails etc. So, the consumer not only gets the pleasure of getting virus, but even have to pay extra for the favour. I know MS release patches sometimes to try to stop the virus flood, but in a way they also owe the consumer a program to deal with the viruses that too many times get through.
Well, thinking about it, I guess if they included a virus program with their Windows XP, it would be another example of bundling and uncompetitive practice :).
Good point. But what if XXX don't get enough rebate?
Good point. My point was that the discussions and planning is happening all over Europe at the moment, and if the German government goes from considering to adopting, a lot of the smaller project will get the push they need to get to the next phase also.
I see these kinds of stories -- "gov't organisation x is considering linux" -- more and more in different european countries these days. And not only on "linux web-sites" like slashdot, but in local papers and national papers, both here in Scandinavia and many other EU countries I visit. In Germany and France there seem to be politicians aware of linux, mostly in local gov't but also on national level, and they are two of the biggest and most influential countries of EU (they are also the "homeland" of SuSe and Mandrake).
Still, there seems to be a lot of inertia to overcome to move away from MS dependency. The articles are usually full of keywords like considering, debating, testing. But I would think that the signal effect of a German government switch to linux could be huge. All these local politicians/activist could win over enough support the day they can point to Germany as a success story of open source. Germany is known as a fairly conservative society that don't jump into changes with out thinking about it, so if "the Germans do it, we can do it".
It feels a bit like the Borg is starting to cave in, when you see all these signs of change in mentality and then on top of it all a friends stop by and ask for help to install Mandrake 8.1. His company is considering to move to linux after hearing about new licenses from Seattle. I think MS can wake up with a bad hang over after introducing XP...
I can not believe that the parent post got the moderation (Score 5: Insightful).
I am sure that he has had some problems with Nautilus bloat (which is a commen problem), but Sawfish bloat is really a stupid comment.
I am also sure that he has grown up on CDE, but to claim that the Gnome interface is clumsy and difficult relative to CDE or Windows for a new user, is just rubbish. Also, one should give Sun credit for working hard on making the Gnome interface more user friendly, something all GUI should have even mind all the time.
But the real troll comment is "GNOME is at least five years away from any sort of maturity". Since we just have celebrated KDE's 5 years birthday, that is one of the least : Insightful comments I have seen in this whole slashdot posting. Talk about not paying attention for the last 10 years.
Moderators, wake up!
If one want some background information on the sad history of the Afghanistan wars uptil now, one should check out :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/audiovideo/progra mmes/panorama/default.stm
Here Afghanistan - The Dark Ages contains a RealPlayer video of a 44 min documentary showed yesterday on BBC Panorama. The program gives indepth analysis of what has been happening in Afghanistan the last 20 years and how the Taliban came in power. It describes how life has been in Afghanistan under the Taliban. The video also shows the only known TV tapes of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar and gives the journalist story of meeting Osama bin Laden.
All respect to BBC for their quality programs.
Even though it is nice for the families of the people who died to get to do a proper burial, I do not think this operation is done for the benefit of these unfortunate soldiers. It is a long tradition in marine nation to see the sea as a proper burial place for sailors who lose their life at sea. That is why for instant the ferry Estonia, that went down between Sweden and Finland, has not been raised or tried to be emptied for bodies, even though many relatives have been working hard for it. The argument of the Swedish goverment is that the ship itself is a proper graveyard for the passengers and the extra cost of raising the ship or getting out bodies at the risk of divers life, does not match the . The real reason to get the Kursk out of the sea, even though it is an extreemly difficult operation, is that you don't want a nuclear reactor in the sea slowly rusting away. This area of the north atlantic is extreemly important for fishing. The sad part is that there is still a lot of retired submarines and radioactive waste that the russian navy don't care about or don't have money to take care of in this area. The norwegian environmental organization Bellona has been working hard to gets funds and understanding that something has to be done to this potential environmental catastrophy. Check out http://www.bellona.no/ for more information.
The Beatles used Apple Corp. to help startups who did not have the money to make their visions come true. The original company was founded by Brian Epstein [Beatles manager] as a tax-write off, but became more after Epstein's death.
To make money available for this new idealistic corporation, the last Beatles albumes (from White Album) was sold by the Apple Corp., published under the label Apple Records, making much of the albums profit available directly to Apple Corp.
It all ended in the somewhat naiv Beatles members giving away a lot of their money to scam artist. Today I guess Apple Corp. is a better run company then when four idealistic musicians ran it themselves. Needles to say, Apple Records was the only part of Apple Corp. that actually earned money in the beginning.
I think you confuse the issue here a bit. It is not about Apple computers not being allowed to make music, it is about the Apple computer logo not appearing on records, making music buyers think it is an Apple Record product. Apple don't want to compet against Apple to say it simple.
Anyway, it is hard to get the original sound of Abbey studio that made Beatles and Pink Floyd famous on your Apple computer, even though the sound is now digital and therefore "better" in some meaning of the word.
Actually, as fare as I know, Apple Corp (that was founded by the Beatles in 1968) sued Apple Computer. The case ended in a settlement where Apple Computer payed something between $25 million - $30 million and had to agree to stay out of the music business. So it basically means that Apple can not become an owner in a record company and that they had to pay a one time fee for keeping their Apple name. >Of course, had The Federal Trademark Dilution Act been in effect in 1984, Apple probably wouldn't be called Apple any more, since they would have lost the trademark dispute against Apple Records.