It takes an over-educated human to think that monkeys are not inferior to humans.
It also says something about the OP that reproductive prowess is the first measuring stick pulled out. How about using mobility, communications or creativity as a yard stick? How about we pull out wallets and compare those? Well, monkeys don't have wallets, do they.
I'm sure there's some really deep academic argument for this. It probably has been peer reviewed, the mark of good science is consensus.
Most people see a fat person and assume that it is a problem with their self-control. It's not always the case. Many are on diets and exercise regularly. Many can trace their weight problem to a real medical condition.
I had problems with my weight thru out my life. It wasn't until a few years ago that I found out why. I have an intolerance to wheat. If I cut wheat out of my diet, I lose weight. If I add it back in, I gain weight. It's that simple.*
The idea of charging people more for health insurance because of some phony metrics is sad. One of the major problems with health care in the USA is that the health industry doesn't promote preventative medicine. They wait until something becomes catastrophic before they do anything.
"In the United States roughly three times as many people are killed in gun accidents per year than at Pearl Harbor."
There, fixed it for you. The attack at Pearl Harbor has a lot of similarities to the 9/11 attack including the fact that there were other greater causes of death at the time it occurred.
I agree that there is no comparison between the Nazis and the current threat. What are a few million Nazis compared to the 100s of millions of Muslim extremists that either participate in terrorism or condone its use. At least a majority the German people were ashamed to find out what their former leaders were capable of and then renounced that behavior.
Name one right or liberty you had in the past that you no longer have. You can't, because your liberty has not been diminished one bit. It is all just rumor and hearsay and a claim on something that was never yours in the first place. Try to find annonymity or privacy in the constitution or bill of rights. Try to find a right to sedition.
It's a shame that you have to wait in line at the airport. Get over it.
This is probably the dream situation. First, the GPL developers actually recognize that id and steam using their stuff is a good thing. Second, id and steam didn't integrate any of the GPL stuff into their own base.
Take either of those two things away and this situation can quickly approach nightmare levels from a corporate perspective. Eventually, there is going to be a very high profile case where some developer at some company gets caught stealing gpl code after integrating it into their companies product line. It's happening already, just no one has got caught yet.
I'm sure the company will blame the developer. That may be their main line of defence. I wonder if removing the offending code will work, after all, that's what everyone says they'll do if MS ever tries to enforce a patent. I don't think that would work in either case (seriously, if you remove code then you are admitting infringement, maybe not a good strategy).
So far, most of these GPL violations have been minor, not that you'd know it on slashdot.
It boils down to basic property rights. Property crossing a border is subject to unlimited search and seizure. Every country on earth recognizes this fact.
If one end of a conversation is outside of the US, then the property is crossing the US border and is subject to search and seizure. End of story.
It is one thing to not get credit, however, that's something that is easily remedied. Violating copyrights is a whole other matter. The DosBox guys are getting credit right now. Good job guys, haven't personally used you, but still kudos. Id and Valve should start complying with the terms of the GPLv3 or whatever. And it should end there.
The DosBox guys should realize that the DosBox is a utility to run old dos software (guessing, not a user, see above). They should be going out and celebrating that Id and Valve are pushing their software. After all, the GPL is a service model, right?
It's almost like the hostility between the driver writers and the hardware manufacturers. The driver writers don't want the hardware guys to steal their code and the hardware guys don't want to reveal too much about their hardware. With 95% of the market closed source, it's hard for them to justify releasing an open source driver just to satisfy a beligerent minority. 99% of that remaining 5% just want their video cards to work right.
Not really all that basic when you consider how much of the world doesn't really have it.
Americans cry because they can't call Pakistan without the NSA listening. Somehow listening to a conversation is an illegal act of property seizure by the government in violation of the 5th ammendment. Except the government has the right to search and seize property at the border, which your conversation -er- property is most certainly crossing.
Somehow on slashdot ripping music and movies is not theft, but the government doing the same thing when someone calls Iran, why that's illegal search and seizure. Logic be damned, full speed ahead.
Hard and doesn't suck are two different things. Unless you are talking about basic math, it generally is hard. The only class I ever dropped at Uni was a math class.* I thought I was failing but the teacher was actually grading on a curve. She said I was one of the top students. Key word being 'She'. In fact almost all of my math teachers have been women.
It's almost degrading to women that people keep bringing this stuff up. Condescending might be the right word. Like when someone feels the need to comment about how well Colin Powell speaks. There's an unspoken 'and he's black' that is left hanging for the listener to fill in by themselves.
I get the same feeling everytime I see a story about how some person is the first X to do Y. I get an image of them being patted on the head and someone saying, 'Gee, you're a hero to X people every where, it only took all of recorded history for you Xers to get off your fat lazy assess and do Y, but golly, you finally did, great job. Now go find some other dubious achievement you Xers haven't got around too yet and be the first in that too.'.
Still, Winnie was hot and I always knew she had brains.
--- *I didn't need the credit and wanted to keep my grade point at the honors level. CS was put in with the Natural Sciences like interior decorating, who all seemed to graduate Summa Cum Laude, which blew out the GPA for everyone else.
Latex and Word Perfect... I'm guessing head trauma followed by a long nap.
WP and Latex were never easy to use. Maybe easy for you to use. My Mom used WP, knew all the shortcuts, thought it was the best. Then they changed all the shortcuts. Took up Word instead. A year later, she couldn't remember any of the shortcuts. Nothing to do with a coercive monopoly. Just a bad decision by the makers of WP.
I have a similar story with OS/2, when IBM screwed me out of a free upgrade. Anybody seen OS/2 lately?
Anywhile, whatever happens will be preferable to PDF.
I would consider that your own intelligence is a part of the universe. We can argue whether you or any person is actually intelligent, but can we argue that you are not a part of the universe? Seems fairly odd to even consider.
My theory is that the Universe is getting more complex and thus more intelligent over time. Exhibit number one is all of human history. Graphing human intelligence over time, there is a steady rise through most of recorded history.* Lately the trend has accelerated due to improved methods of intelligence sharing. Exhibit number two is the periodic table. Back in the day, the periodic table had only 1 entry. A graph of the elements that have appeared in the Universe over time shows a steady rise. Exhibit number three is the iPhone. Clearly no phone has ever been more intelligently designed. Once again, consulting the graphs shows a progressive rise over time for the intelligence of cell phone designers.
This guy just said he did it. Did you try to do it? Did it not work?
I ran into this same thing dealing with farsi and arabic. Which, IIRC, could easily be cut and pasted into excel or word. What I don't understand is how to build support around languages that allow for the same character to be written in multiple ways? It is not ethno-centric to point out that the english alphabet is finite. Maybe there should be some standards in those languages or at least in their UTF-whatever implementation.
This is a can of worms that is being opened and I don't know if there is a big enough can available to clean this mess up. Blaming MS is just silly. Spreading FUD about MS products is even sillier.
Sorry, but the American market is dominated by good and fast. In fact, most people around the globe want good and fast. We might settle for cheap, good and slow, but really we want the good and fast.
You should avoid a career in marketing. The slogan "cheap-but-good", while an improvement over "almost as good and getting better", wouldn't be my first choice as a replacement. How about, "we run the internets" or "they trust us on servers and we have a desktop".
Seriously folks, there are a lot of positive arguments to be made for linux but here on slashdot, most of the advocacy is from a negative viewpoint, mostly dealing with MS, Bill Gates and Balmer. The focus should be on making linux better.
The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. The OSS/Free movements need to move beyond this blind hatred and knee-jerk rejections of everything MS. It gives them too much power.
I almost feel sorry for someone who makes a choice based on the actions of a single corporation. I suppose you missed the story about the MS open source license. Don't read it, or you'll end up in a cave wearing ash cloth.
Everytime the Mac gets to be about the same price as it's competition, I keep looking for the next OS upgrade from Jobs. OSXI is going to be the bomb and the macites will happily line up to pay for the priveledge. Besides, the new mac is going to have 50% less buttons.
Games maybe cpu hogs, but the person playing the game probably thinks that whatever is causing the lag is the pig. I think that is the whole point.
The computer should spend cycles on the things the user is interested in, it should not be optimized primarily for the big service companies. The linux camp in 2007 just seems like some alternate dinosaur-computing reality: IBM, Sun, Novell, Oracle. I don't think of free or open when I see any of those names and I'm sure that none of those companies want to take computing in the direction I favor.
In the computing world, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
"I here tell there's this crowd on the intertubes that likes to shutdown sites that have interesting articles. Why it is un-American to have one group of people reading interesting things on the intertubes while denying others the same with their so-called slashdot effect. Think of the children."
-The Bipartisan Investigation To Close Hrmm Examine Slashdot (BITCHES)
"Most of us have paid the MS tax on numerous times unjustly - I won't bother boring you with my experience on that. Needless to say in my opinion they have plenty of money for bandwidth and have, through "the system" obtained some of my money without my really wanting or needing their stuff. I have no interest in subsidizing their bandwidth bills, given that."
You are an admitted accomplice to an illegal monopoly. You could have chosen to NOT pay the M$ tax and yet you have sided with a known illegal monopoly, numerous times. Do not blame "the system" for giving your money away. You had alternatives. You could have spent more and bought an apple or taken the time to build your own system. There were plenty of good choices for an OS, like BeOS (still have a copy at home), NeXT, OS/2*.
It's people with your kind of attitude that enabled Adolf Hitler to rise to power.
---
* Technically, I think OS/2 was part M$ so you can maybe ignore that one.
No it's not. Sending humans to Mars is a waste of time. A child's fantasy wrapped up in scientific hubris. I'm not saying we shouldn't study Mars, just why bother sending people.
Unless and until we can turn back the desertification of our own planet, why bother. If we can't do it here, we won't be able to do it there.
I'm not a Global Warming alarmist, far from it, but I am the founder of the Terraform Terra First Foundation (T2F2(c)).
A trillion dollars (I'm just making up a number) to send a person(s) to Mars could pay for the Pacific - Death Valley siphon. Drop a pipe in the Pacific and snake it out to Death Valley. Use pumps to prime the pipe and then let gravity take over. The primer pumps can probably start generating electricity. Fill Death Valley up to 'sea level' and start pumping water east. Tidal forces can keep both the generators and the salt water flowing. Maybe put some glass pipes on the Death Valley side to purify the salt water or use solar stills.
It's not a zero-sum game, but there does obviously have to be priorities.
Literally they will suck the US dry. The worst generation of Americans ever. The BB politicians are a prime example. A generation of ego driven, self-serving, money grubbing thieves, who will sell this country and their mothers out to make a dime.
No one in my immediate family are baby boomers. Both my parents were born before the boom. My aunts and uncles who are baby boomers are all ego driven, self-serving, money grubbing thieves. One of them is retired from government service with a 100% pension. He makes the same money retired as he does working. Is it any wonder he retired? Another stole money from my family to finance their house.
All of the generations that have followed these losers are going to have to stand up to them. They are not super geniuses and they do not deserve our adoration. They are ego driven, self-serving, money grubbing thieves, and they will piss on your back and tell you it's raining, just because they can.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes an over-educated human to think that monkeys are not inferior to humans.
It also says something about the OP that reproductive prowess is the first measuring stick pulled out. How about using mobility, communications or creativity as a yard stick? How about we pull out wallets and compare those? Well, monkeys don't have wallets, do they.
I'm sure there's some really deep academic argument for this. It probably has been peer reviewed, the mark of good science is consensus.
Most people see a fat person and assume that it is a problem with their self-control. It's not always the case. Many are on diets and exercise regularly. Many can trace their weight problem to a real medical condition.
I had problems with my weight thru out my life. It wasn't until a few years ago that I found out why. I have an intolerance to wheat. If I cut wheat out of my diet, I lose weight. If I add it back in, I gain weight. It's that simple.*
The idea of charging people more for health insurance because of some phony metrics is sad. One of the major problems with health care in the USA is that the health industry doesn't promote preventative medicine. They wait until something becomes catastrophic before they do anything.
----
*for me.
"In the United States roughly three times as many people are killed in gun accidents per year than at Pearl Harbor."
There, fixed it for you. The attack at Pearl Harbor has a lot of similarities to the 9/11 attack including the fact that there were other greater causes of death at the time it occurred.
I agree that there is no comparison between the Nazis and the current threat. What are a few million Nazis compared to the 100s of millions of Muslim extremists that either participate in terrorism or condone its use. At least a majority the German people were ashamed to find out what their former leaders were capable of and then renounced that behavior.
Name one right or liberty you had in the past that you no longer have. You can't, because your liberty has not been diminished one bit. It is all just rumor and hearsay and a claim on something that was never yours in the first place. Try to find annonymity or privacy in the constitution or bill of rights. Try to find a right to sedition.
It's a shame that you have to wait in line at the airport. Get over it.
This is probably the dream situation. First, the GPL developers actually recognize that id and steam using their stuff is a good thing. Second, id and steam didn't integrate any of the GPL stuff into their own base.
Take either of those two things away and this situation can quickly approach nightmare levels from a corporate perspective. Eventually, there is going to be a very high profile case where some developer at some company gets caught stealing gpl code after integrating it into their companies product line. It's happening already, just no one has got caught yet.
I'm sure the company will blame the developer. That may be their main line of defence. I wonder if removing the offending code will work, after all, that's what everyone says they'll do if MS ever tries to enforce a patent. I don't think that would work in either case (seriously, if you remove code then you are admitting infringement, maybe not a good strategy).
So far, most of these GPL violations have been minor, not that you'd know it on slashdot.
It boils down to basic property rights. Property crossing a border is subject to unlimited search and seizure. Every country on earth recognizes this fact.
If one end of a conversation is outside of the US, then the property is crossing the US border and is subject to search and seizure. End of story.
It is one thing to not get credit, however, that's something that is easily remedied. Violating copyrights is a whole other matter. The DosBox guys are getting credit right now. Good job guys, haven't personally used you, but still kudos. Id and Valve should start complying with the terms of the GPLv3 or whatever. And it should end there.
The DosBox guys should realize that the DosBox is a utility to run old dos software (guessing, not a user, see above). They should be going out and celebrating that Id and Valve are pushing their software. After all, the GPL is a service model, right?
It's almost like the hostility between the driver writers and the hardware manufacturers. The driver writers don't want the hardware guys to steal their code and the hardware guys don't want to reveal too much about their hardware. With 95% of the market closed source, it's hard for them to justify releasing an open source driver just to satisfy a beligerent minority. 99% of that remaining 5% just want their video cards to work right.
That is going to be one busy developer. They are going to have to keep him stocked with snickers bars and jolt cola.
Not really all that basic when you consider how much of the world doesn't really have it.
Americans cry because they can't call Pakistan without the NSA listening. Somehow listening to a conversation is an illegal act of property seizure by the government in violation of the 5th ammendment. Except the government has the right to search and seize property at the border, which your conversation -er- property is most certainly crossing.
Somehow on slashdot ripping music and movies is not theft, but the government doing the same thing when someone calls Iran, why that's illegal search and seizure. Logic be damned, full speed ahead.
Hard and doesn't suck are two different things. Unless you are talking about basic math, it generally is hard. The only class I ever dropped at Uni was a math class.* I thought I was failing but the teacher was actually grading on a curve. She said I was one of the top students. Key word being 'She'. In fact almost all of my math teachers have been women.
It's almost degrading to women that people keep bringing this stuff up. Condescending might be the right word. Like when someone feels the need to comment about how well Colin Powell speaks. There's an unspoken 'and he's black' that is left hanging for the listener to fill in by themselves.
I get the same feeling everytime I see a story about how some person is the first X to do Y. I get an image of them being patted on the head and someone saying, 'Gee, you're a hero to X people every where, it only took all of recorded history for you Xers to get off your fat lazy assess and do Y, but golly, you finally did, great job. Now go find some other dubious achievement you Xers haven't got around too yet and be the first in that too.'.
Still, Winnie was hot and I always knew she had brains.
---
*I didn't need the credit and wanted to keep my grade point at the honors level. CS was put in with the Natural Sciences like interior decorating, who all seemed to graduate Summa Cum Laude, which blew out the GPA for everyone else.
Latex and Word Perfect... I'm guessing head trauma followed by a long nap.
WP and Latex were never easy to use. Maybe easy for you to use. My Mom used WP, knew all the shortcuts, thought it was the best. Then they changed all the shortcuts. Took up Word instead. A year later, she couldn't remember any of the shortcuts. Nothing to do with a coercive monopoly. Just a bad decision by the makers of WP.
I have a similar story with OS/2, when IBM screwed me out of a free upgrade. Anybody seen OS/2 lately?
Anywhile, whatever happens will be preferable to PDF.
I would consider that your own intelligence is a part of the universe. We can argue whether you or any person is actually intelligent, but can we argue that you are not a part of the universe? Seems fairly odd to even consider.
My theory is that the Universe is getting more complex and thus more intelligent over time. Exhibit number one is all of human history. Graphing human intelligence over time, there is a steady rise through most of recorded history.* Lately the trend has accelerated due to improved methods of intelligence sharing. Exhibit number two is the periodic table. Back in the day, the periodic table had only 1 entry. A graph of the elements that have appeared in the Universe over time shows a steady rise. Exhibit number three is the iPhone. Clearly no phone has ever been more intelligently designed. Once again, consulting the graphs shows a progressive rise over time for the intelligence of cell phone designers.
---
* the Dark Ages were only thus in Europe.
Do you work for Eee? I honestly had no idea what that was but I will google it like a good pavlovian slashdotter. Nice turf, Eee.
Someone would just release a non-ad-encumbered version of the same software. After all, it's within their rights, right?
This guy just said he did it. Did you try to do it? Did it not work?
I ran into this same thing dealing with farsi and arabic. Which, IIRC, could easily be cut and pasted into excel or word. What I don't understand is how to build support around languages that allow for the same character to be written in multiple ways? It is not ethno-centric to point out that the english alphabet is finite. Maybe there should be some standards in those languages or at least in their UTF-whatever implementation.
This is a can of worms that is being opened and I don't know if there is a big enough can available to clean this mess up. Blaming MS is just silly. Spreading FUD about MS products is even sillier.
Sorry, but the American market is dominated by good and fast. In fact, most people around the globe want good and fast. We might settle for cheap, good and slow, but really we want the good and fast.
You should avoid a career in marketing. The slogan "cheap-but-good", while an improvement over "almost as good and getting better", wouldn't be my first choice as a replacement. How about, "we run the internets" or "they trust us on servers and we have a desktop".
Seriously folks, there are a lot of positive arguments to be made for linux but here on slashdot, most of the advocacy is from a negative viewpoint, mostly dealing with MS, Bill Gates and Balmer. The focus should be on making linux better.
I'm with you, but I think we should have clear goals and not just a budget line.
The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. The OSS/Free movements need to move beyond this blind hatred and knee-jerk rejections of everything MS. It gives them too much power.
I almost feel sorry for someone who makes a choice based on the actions of a single corporation. I suppose you missed the story about the MS open source license. Don't read it, or you'll end up in a cave wearing ash cloth.
Everytime the Mac gets to be about the same price as it's competition, I keep looking for the next OS upgrade from Jobs. OSXI is going to be the bomb and the macites will happily line up to pay for the priveledge. Besides, the new mac is going to have 50% less buttons.
Just wait, it's coming...
Games maybe cpu hogs, but the person playing the game probably thinks that whatever is causing the lag is the pig. I think that is the whole point.
The computer should spend cycles on the things the user is interested in, it should not be optimized primarily for the big service companies. The linux camp in 2007 just seems like some alternate dinosaur-computing reality: IBM, Sun, Novell, Oracle. I don't think of free or open when I see any of those names and I'm sure that none of those companies want to take computing in the direction I favor.
In the computing world, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
"I here tell there's this crowd on the intertubes that likes to shutdown sites that have interesting articles. Why it is un-American to have one group of people reading interesting things on the intertubes while denying others the same with their so-called slashdot effect. Think of the children."
-The Bipartisan Investigation To Close Hrmm Examine Slashdot (BITCHES)
"Most of us have paid the MS tax on numerous times unjustly - I won't bother boring you with my experience on that. Needless to say in my opinion they have plenty of money for bandwidth and have, through "the system" obtained some of my money without my really wanting or needing their stuff. I have no interest in subsidizing their bandwidth bills, given that."
You are an admitted accomplice to an illegal monopoly. You could have chosen to NOT pay the M$ tax and yet you have sided with a known illegal monopoly, numerous times. Do not blame "the system" for giving your money away. You had alternatives. You could have spent more and bought an apple or taken the time to build your own system. There were plenty of good choices for an OS, like BeOS (still have a copy at home), NeXT, OS/2*.
It's people with your kind of attitude that enabled Adolf Hitler to rise to power.
---
* Technically, I think OS/2 was part M$ so you can maybe ignore that one.
It is California, after all. Maybe they can raid Tommy Chong's house, again.
All of this drama over a note some blogger got about a NASA subcontractor's employee being an ass-hat.
Now it's the evil neo-cons and six degrees of GWB. There should be a tag for cryingwolf!
No it's not. Sending humans to Mars is a waste of time. A child's fantasy wrapped up in scientific hubris. I'm not saying we shouldn't study Mars, just why bother sending people.
Unless and until we can turn back the desertification of our own planet, why bother. If we can't do it here, we won't be able to do it there.
I'm not a Global Warming alarmist, far from it, but I am the founder of the Terraform Terra First Foundation (T2F2(c)).
A trillion dollars (I'm just making up a number) to send a person(s) to Mars could pay for the Pacific - Death Valley siphon. Drop a pipe in the Pacific and snake it out to Death Valley. Use pumps to prime the pipe and then let gravity take over. The primer pumps can probably start generating electricity. Fill Death Valley up to 'sea level' and start pumping water east. Tidal forces can keep both the generators and the salt water flowing. Maybe put some glass pipes on the Death Valley side to purify the salt water or use solar stills.
It's not a zero-sum game, but there does obviously have to be priorities.
Literally they will suck the US dry. The worst generation of Americans ever. The BB politicians are a prime example. A generation of ego driven, self-serving, money grubbing thieves, who will sell this country and their mothers out to make a dime.
No one in my immediate family are baby boomers. Both my parents were born before the boom. My aunts and uncles who are baby boomers are all ego driven, self-serving, money grubbing thieves. One of them is retired from government service with a 100% pension. He makes the same money retired as he does working. Is it any wonder he retired? Another stole money from my family to finance their house.
All of the generations that have followed these losers are going to have to stand up to them. They are not super geniuses and they do not deserve our adoration. They are ego driven, self-serving, money grubbing thieves, and they will piss on your back and tell you it's raining, just because they can.