> Happiness does arise from living up to standards of right, and engaging with family, neighbor and stranger. That might be true, but what is right is not what is in the bible or what the dogma of old men who call themselves "priests" says. On the contrary: this is often wrong, because it sets some silly tradition or what can be interpreted from a stone-old book over what compassion and human feeling would dictate.
> True religion True religion? What is that supposed to be? I just see religion as it happens, as it exists in reality. And everything about true religion is incompatible with reason and enlightenment based on what is instead of what one wants to be.
Regarding your "God is the computer the universe is running on" argument: in the very basic sense this would just mean that what you call "God" is just another word for "laws of nature". This notion of God has nothing to do whatsoever with a God who created, who designed, who listens to prayers or whatever other things make the Gods of religions Gods. This God is so abstract that it is irrelevant. And that brings us to the second point: if God cannot be seen and does not in any way interfere, if everything observable can be explained without god or be equally unexplainable, what then is the point of inventing the concept of some God in the first place? Sounds like a desperate attempt to not abandon something your grandparents told you about and that you are emotionally attached to. There is an infinite number of things that can be imagined but would be unprovable. None of these things can be disproved, but what is the point of insisting on their existance? The great invisible Hubu in the center of the Mars is equally likely as the God of Christians. I could invent a whole story about her and you wouldn't be able to disprove it. Does it mean that the great invisible Hubu exists? Of course not you would say. It just doesnt make sense to assume that everything that cannot be disproven exists. And that applies to the Christian God as well as to all the thousands of other Gods and fairy-tale beings humankind invented.
> If you say that you have some right to make that choice for another person,.. I never said that, on the contrary. Read again: "Unlike atheists like me, the so-called christians and also the muslims, jews etc. have strong opinions not only about what they should or should not do, but what I should or should not be allowed to do. I have no problem about Christians believing they will rot in hell if they have sex before marriage or sex with a condom, but I do not see why they should mess with what others do in that respect."
Its usually religious people who care strongly about the choices of other persons and it is religious fanatics who care about what others should be allowed to do or not fanatically. It is usually religious people who care in a way that ignores the pure compassion with other people and establishes some "higher principle" like the "will of god" or the "principles of islam". Where it is ok to stone a woman who has been raped or make the life of somebody miserable who loves another man.
I was trying to keep my quick post free of references to any specific religion. Of course the fact that there are so many different gods and dogmas especial when it comes to the explanation of nature and reality should be an additional easily graspable argument that not all of the can be true although their believes think that only one can be true.
> No I am not saying that religion has no place in the world, it seems to put the believers minds at ease Exactly. That is what opium can do quite well.
> However religion and science should not be in the same ring. I really don't see a ring for religion except the mind-numbing when I look more closely.
> Let these so called christians debate with other and see what they love. It is not so easy. Unlike atheists like me, the so-called christians and also the muslims, jews etc. have strong opinions not only about what they should or should not do, but what I should or should not be allowed to do. I have no problem about Christians believing they will rot in hell if they have sex before marriage or sex with a condom, but I do not see why they should mess with what others do in that respect.
And this is one of the most ugly aspects of religion, predominantly the book-religions that have their origin in desert people: they have a built-in imperative to force their own fairy-tale beliefs upon others.
On first sight, it won't harm to, while accepting Evolution, believe in God, the easter bunny or anything else nobody has ever seen and nobody has ever come up with any indication for existince.
However, this would really be totally schizophrenic: it would require somebody to base his acceptance about what is on something that is completely without any logical cause (God) and something that has been derived from many pieces of unrelated evidence (Science). I don't see how this can go together in any reasonable way. How should one decide when to believe and when to require evidence? Somebody who believes in God could just as well believe in Creationism or some other silly fairy tale.
The argument of some religious people, some of them calling themselves scientists is that science cannot answer all questions and religion comes in then: why was there the big bang etc. Of course science cannot and will never be able to answer all question. But what good is it to believe in some fairy tale answer for those unanswerable questions instead of just accepting that we simply dont know? Isn't it evident that "answering" the question about why there was a big bang with "God did it" makes everything just more complicated instead of easier? Why is there "God" then? We do not gain anything by this "answer" but we lose a lot.
I think it is evident that there simply is no place for religion to answer the wonders of what is anymore. None of the explanations for how stuff works thousands of religions came up with ever turned out to be true or remotely sensible.
That leaves religion as some kind of ethical instance: maybe it cannot explain nature and reality, but it tells us how to behave ethically, no? I think, this is actually not true either, on the contrary: ethical behavior comes from the human ability of compassion. It is biologically built into us. No need for God here either. It is no coincidence that practically all mahir rules of ethics, save some details about sexual behavior, are identical between religions: you dont kill, you dont cause pain, you dont steal etc. The role of religions here is to make it unnecessary to *think* about ethics. After all God told us the does and donts. And that is the problem: when it is not necessary to think about ethics any more, compassion can be switched off. Yes, it is not right to kill, but its ok to kill that criminal. Yes it is not ok to cause pain, but it is ok with that slave or that member of another religion.
Religion is opium, because its sole purpose is to make thinking unnecessary and make people feel comfy in their self-rightous ignorance.
that detention is a rather anchronistic measure to motivate students. I always find it amazing when clueless teachers try to motivate students to study by using studying or hanging around school as a punishment. I am amazed to see how 1900 US schools still are. And principals being proud about their being 1900.
I'd love it: Wikipedia not just as an encyclopedia but as a knowledge resource. This would mean that what is in Wikipedai is more than one would expect from an encyclopedia: more per entry and more entries. Both is already to some extent the case: some articles contain by far more information than your average encyclopedia (mostly articles about music bands etc.)... and there are far more articles about e.g. TV series than any encyclopedia would want to contain.
So already, there is a grey area with regard to notability. And I say: thats good. I would welcome a policy change that allows even more and an even wider scope.
However, a few technical and organizational modificaitons would be necessary: - seperate "notable" content from additional and detail content, dont put it all into the same huge article. - create additional article types for background knowledge, related textbook-like information or proofs - make the content markup less chaotic and less ugly for humans, and better parsable for computers - allow "knowledge pieces", maybe in a separate namespace about every day knowledge and about entities that are not described by nouns, e.g. allow WP to contain articles about concepts represented by verbs or adjectives - make the connection between the dictionary and the concept entries better
But most importantly: stop thinking about WP as an encyclopedia in the classical sense. Classical encyclopedias are what they are because their creation had to be done with limited resources: a limited number of experts, and you had to put it into a limited number of books so you can sell it. None of these limitations applie to WP.
WP is already something new, but it could be even more innovative.
That happens when you let clueless people who are proud of their Windows certifications mess with it. I know several companies and research institutions where people who probably got less pay set up a Linux based system that just works. Flawlessly.
I think there are some essential issues still totally unclear and it is therefore impossible to make a judgement if this will become successful with the masses and with those who are interested in an open system with open licenses for the knowledge. "Highlight authors" sounds good, but when an article is created collaboratively by dozens or more authors, how should that be done in practice? And why? After all, what counts is the overall quality of the article, not who puts his/her name under it.
Also, in what other ways will this improve over Wikipedia? From the blog one can guess that one important way will be that knols might not be restricted to typical "encyclopedic" knowledge -- so not just "notable" entries (though this is already a gray area in Wikipedai). I welcome this: I think there is no need really to restrict the entries to just whatever somebody thinks is "notable". The use of a semantic resource about close to everything imaginable would actually quite big, both for humans and for computers.
And that brings me to my next point: will this be yet another text-only resource (what will be the editing method/language? Wikimedia syntax and the associated parsers are really the ugliest, most terrible piece of software in existence) or will there be a way to do semantic markup in addition? In other words, will at least part of this be usable by computers, and I mean computers other than the ones owned by Google (anyone getting a feeling why Google might be interested in doing this in the first place... ?:) )
And finally: what will the license on these pieces of knowledge be? Will it be possible to download all of it at once (as it is currently with Wikipedia dumps)?
... or do not really care about enough. It would really be easy: if people wouldn't buy CDs or wouldn't buy CDs that do not allow to make personal copies, record companies would quickly start to sell CDs where this is allowed. If people wouldn't give the power to politicians who are more interested in protecting the rights of record companies and large industries, there would be laws that grant you the right to do this and maybe more. Obviously, the majority doesn't care enough about this to change either their practice of consuming or their practice of voting or both.
So no matter how often the/. crowd will gather here and cry foul over pracitces like this, the situation won't change until you have gone out to your non-/. neighbors and friends and motivated them to change their behavior. I am sure the RIAA and other companies couldn't care less about a bunch of global geeks who get rid of their aggressions posting in blogs and/. comments.
And by the way: yes, all that record company and RIAA stuff is quite outrageous and all, but if you want to learn about those things that really matter, look at Monsanto & Co. I'd still prefer to live in a world where I cannot legally copy some crappy CD than in one where each crop and animal is patented, licensed and owned by a company.
... it doesn't (necessarily) show fraud at all: as usual with graphs there are many explanations why one could observe data that way and some explanations might be more plausible than others. Explanations are also not mutually exclusive.
My interpretation and guess what the most plausible explanation is would be: there are regions where a high number of voters favort Putin and those voters are highly motivated to express that preference and vote. On the other hand, those who oppose Putin to a high degree do not see any reasonable alternative and either stay at home, or the view that go to vote, vote blank/illegal with a higher probability.
This behavior is consistent with what can be observed in other elections with a similar situation, and it is consistent with the actual political situation in Russia. People who do not understand or know the situation might have a hard time to understand that many people in Russia actually *do* support Putin and are quite enthusiastic about it, but that has been the case.
Anyone who knew the political situation in Russia knew already long before that Putin's party would win a that no ballot stuffing would be necessary for it. And exactly that was one of the reasons for the low voter turnout of opponents.
Voter behavior is not logically/mathematically optimal but the result of psychology.
Yes we do not understand. Maybe because we come from a country where the end user is responsible for what he does and where it would be impossible for the hardware manufacturer to get sued for the mere possibility of using the device for illegal sharing. It is hard to believe that the situation in the USA is really like you describe it. How is it possible that knives and guns are still getting sold there? After all the manufacturer could get sued if somebody uses them to do something illegal with them.
I dont understand: how can they know what license is on those files? If I want to share the home videos or my own recorded MP3s the prevent me from doing this?
That is a major malfunction and the product they sell is crap if this is really the case. Nobody "has" to do this. Whether or not sharing is allowed or not is for the user to decide and take responsability not some boot-licking hardware manufacturer.
I am sure FF has more users than OpenSuse. However, OpenSuse is among the three most used Linux distros, and in central Europe probably among the top two or one . Also, the comparison with OpenSuse was more an example -- I certainly would find an article about the FF version 3 or even a beta for version 3 apropriate. But a tiny bugfix update like this? How do articles actually make it to the frontpage on Slashdot?
Yes, I use Firefox, happy user and all, but how is such a minor update news worth to make it on the title page? Just as a comparison: when OpenSuse 10.2 was released (or was it 10.1) not a single of the many submitted articles was published on Slashdot.
is decent, out-of-the box holyday handling. Every 2cent paper calender gives me much more information on that than practically all Opensource calendar programs. Most programs rely on "event files" that you have to download and that simply mark the days as holydays by showing a whole day event. The quality of the event files is often low, does not distinguish between regions or religious and state holidays and it is hard to handle several of these event files at once (e.g. when doing business in Europe with seval countries). But just handling the holydays as events also prevents decent scheduling, e.g. automatically moving a repeating event to the next non-holyday.
The best program, though also far from perfect in that respect, on Linux is still korganizer. Evolution and Lightning/Sunbird just suck.
No real need to worry then. And what a nice coincidence that these insights come just at the time when nuclear power is getting lobbied as a wonderful climate preserving technology for the future.
We are looking forward to a bright nuclear powered future just like in the fifties again. Thank you Mr. Atom!
You said you have tried quite a few linux distros, among them Ubuntu, and you claim nothing comes even close to OpenSUSE.
What, then, are the big advantages of OpenSUSE over Ubuntu? I know both distros, and I do not see that clear superiority of OpenSUSE. I think both distros have their respective strengths and weaknesses.
So why do you disagree and think that OpenSUSE is a clear winner?
and it sounds like you just defend your own fairy tale. What I talked about is not an extreme version of religion at all. It is the very nature of religion to replace reason with faith and to demand that somebody believes in only the dogma of this religion and not in that of the thousands of other, equally absurd religions that have been and still are in existance. That does not prevent people from being good in arithmetics, but it prevents them from thinking scientifically. It does not prevent them from thinking scientifically in some aspects, but it always makes them hit those walls when they come to some "truth" of their religion where they *must* have "faith".
The only interesting question about religion is which kind of biological mechanism it is that causes that irrational lust of believing in the fairy tales of your peer group.
I know that scientists are prone to superstition. These astrophysicists commit the same error many commit - they feel they need to explain complexity with even more complexity and with complexity that is not grounded on any facts whatsoever and that is exchangable by an infinite number of equally absurd theories.
In the concrete argument: there is nothing that forbids those astrophysicists to observe the beauty and order of the universe without any creator. There is no reason to make up a creator other than the infantile wish to explain something that cannot be explained by an antropocentric fairy tale.
Yes, religion can blind people who are otherwise quite smart - so what?
At best, this is wishful thinking. Science and religion have a lot to do with each other and they are simply incompatible.
Religious thinking and scientific thinking are opposites: religion is based on the habit of accepting any kind of nonsense simply because somebody else tells you. It is based on the requirement that you MUST NOT question anything, because that makes you a sinner, a shame for your religion or similar.
Most religions still try to explain the world and the universe or how they came into being. How this is done, not only contradicts the scientific thinking but also often simply contradicts established scientific theories and tries to replace them with absurd superstitional nonsense.
And even when it comes to something that really has got nothing to do with science: ethics, religion is more a hindrance than an asset. Again, it is dogma and unquestioned rules instead of true compassion and emphaty that are at work and how that can fail miserably can be observed every day when religious fanatics use their very religion to abduct, murder, rape or just force their own views on everyone else.
Just out of curiosity: does anyone know if there is some framwork based on PHP5 that is comparable to Rails? There are a couple of things I do not like about Ruby/Rails too much -- lacking Unicode support, localization not part of the core framework, HTML templates not editable with standard HTML editors. Would some PHP framework solve these issues? How about Java frameworks?
I do not know US law but according to the laws in European countries, that is exactly the only thing that matters and makes sense here. This is totally independent of the license that was used for the picture.
Slashdot Mirror
> Happiness does arise from living up to standards of right, and engaging with family, neighbor and stranger.
..
That might be true, but what is right is not what is in the bible or what the dogma of old men who call themselves "priests" says. On the contrary: this is often wrong, because it sets some silly tradition or what can be interpreted from a stone-old book over what compassion and human feeling would dictate.
> True religion
True religion? What is that supposed to be? I just see religion as it happens, as it exists in reality. And everything about true religion is incompatible with reason and enlightenment based on what is instead of what one wants to be.
Regarding your "God is the computer the universe is running on" argument: in the very basic sense this would just mean that what you call "God" is just another word for "laws of nature". This notion of God has nothing to do whatsoever with a God who created, who designed, who listens to prayers or whatever other things make the Gods of religions Gods. This God is so abstract that it is irrelevant.
And that brings us to the second point: if God cannot be seen and does not in any way interfere, if everything observable can be explained without god or be equally unexplainable, what then is the point of inventing the concept of some God in the first place? Sounds like a desperate attempt to not abandon something your grandparents told you about and that you are emotionally attached to.
There is an infinite number of things that can be imagined but would be unprovable. None of these things can be disproved, but what is the point of insisting on their existance? The great invisible Hubu in the center of the Mars is equally likely as the God of Christians. I could invent a whole story about her and you wouldn't be able to disprove it. Does it mean that the great invisible Hubu exists? Of course not you would say. It just doesnt make sense to assume that everything that cannot be disproven exists. And that applies to the Christian God as well as to all the thousands of other Gods and fairy-tale beings humankind invented.
> If you say that you have some right to make that choice for another person,
I never said that, on the contrary. Read again:
"Unlike atheists like me, the so-called christians and also the muslims, jews etc. have strong opinions not only about what they should or should not do, but what I should or should not be allowed to do.
I have no problem about Christians believing they will rot in hell if they have sex before marriage or sex with a condom, but I do not see why they should mess with what others do in that respect."
Its usually religious people who care strongly about the choices of other persons and it is religious fanatics who care about what others should be allowed to do or not fanatically. It is usually religious people who care in a way that ignores the pure compassion with other people and establishes some "higher principle" like the "will of god" or the "principles of islam". Where it is ok to stone a woman who has been raped or make the life of somebody miserable who loves another man.
I was trying to keep my quick post free of references to any specific religion. Of course the fact that there are so many different gods and dogmas especial when it comes to the explanation of nature and reality should be an additional easily graspable argument that not all of the can be true although their believes think that only one can be true.
> No I am not saying that religion has no place in the world, it seems to put the believers minds at ease
Exactly. That is what opium can do quite well.
> However religion and science should not be in the same ring.
I really don't see a ring for religion except the mind-numbing when I look more closely.
> Let these so called christians debate with other and see what they love.
It is not so easy. Unlike atheists like me, the so-called christians and also the muslims, jews etc. have strong opinions not only about what they should or should not do, but what I should or should not be allowed to do.
I have no problem about Christians believing they will rot in hell if they have sex before marriage or sex with a condom, but I do not see why they should mess with what others do in that respect.
And this is one of the most ugly aspects of religion, predominantly the book-religions that have their origin in desert people: they have a built-in imperative to force their own fairy-tale beliefs upon others.
On first sight, it won't harm to, while accepting Evolution, believe in God, the easter bunny or anything else nobody has ever seen and nobody has ever come up with any indication for existince.
However, this would really be totally schizophrenic: it would require somebody to base his acceptance about what is on something that is completely without any logical cause (God) and something that has been derived from many pieces of unrelated evidence (Science). I don't see how this can go together in any reasonable way. How should one decide when to believe and when to require evidence? Somebody who believes in God could just as well believe in Creationism or some other silly fairy tale.
The argument of some religious people, some of them calling themselves scientists is that science cannot answer all questions and religion comes in then: why was there the big bang etc.
Of course science cannot and will never be able to answer all question. But what good is it to believe in some fairy tale answer for those unanswerable questions instead of just accepting that we simply dont know? Isn't it evident that "answering" the question about why there was a big bang with "God did it" makes everything just more complicated instead of easier? Why is there "God" then? We do not gain anything by this "answer" but we lose a lot.
I think it is evident that there simply is no place for religion to answer the wonders of what is anymore. None of the explanations for how stuff works thousands of religions came up with ever turned out to be true or remotely sensible.
That leaves religion as some kind of ethical instance: maybe it cannot explain nature and reality, but it tells us how to behave ethically, no?
I think, this is actually not true either, on the contrary: ethical behavior comes from the human ability of compassion. It is biologically built into us. No need for God here either. It is no coincidence that practically all mahir rules of ethics, save some details about sexual behavior, are identical between religions: you dont kill, you dont cause pain, you dont steal etc.
The role of religions here is to make it unnecessary to *think* about ethics. After all God told us the does and donts. And that is the problem: when it is not necessary to think about ethics any more, compassion can be switched off. Yes, it is not right to kill, but its ok to kill that criminal. Yes it is not ok to cause pain, but it is ok with that slave or that member of another religion.
Religion is opium, because its sole purpose is to make thinking unnecessary and make people feel comfy in their self-rightous ignorance.
that detention is a rather anchronistic measure to motivate students. I always find it amazing when clueless teachers try to motivate students to study by using studying or hanging around school as a punishment.
I am amazed to see how 1900 US schools still are.
And principals being proud about their being 1900.
I'd love it: Wikipedia not just as an encyclopedia but as a knowledge resource. This would mean that what is in Wikipedai is more than one would expect from an encyclopedia: more per entry and more entries. Both is already to some extent the case: some articles contain by far more information than your average encyclopedia (mostly articles about music bands etc.) ... and there are far more articles about e.g. TV series than any encyclopedia would want to contain.
So already, there is a grey area with regard to notability. And I say: thats good. I would welcome a policy change that allows even more and an even wider scope.
However, a few technical and organizational modificaitons would be necessary:
- seperate "notable" content from additional and detail content, dont put it all into the same huge article.
- create additional article types for background knowledge, related textbook-like information or proofs
- make the content markup less chaotic and less ugly for humans, and better parsable for computers
- allow "knowledge pieces", maybe in a separate namespace about every day knowledge and about entities that are not described by nouns, e.g. allow WP to contain articles about concepts represented by verbs or adjectives
- make the connection between the dictionary and the concept entries better
But most importantly: stop thinking about WP as an encyclopedia in the classical sense. Classical encyclopedias are what they are because their creation had to be done with limited resources: a limited number of experts, and you had to put it into a limited number of books so you can sell it. None of these limitations applie to WP.
WP is already something new, but it could be even more innovative.
That happens when you let clueless people who are proud of their Windows certifications mess with it.
I know several companies and research institutions where people who probably got less pay set up a Linux based system that just works. Flawlessly.
I think there are some essential issues still totally unclear and it is therefore impossible to make a judgement if this will become successful with the masses and with those who are interested in an open system with open licenses for the knowledge.
... ? :) )
"Highlight authors" sounds good, but when an article is created collaboratively by dozens or more authors, how should that be done in practice? And why? After all, what counts is the overall quality of the article, not who puts his/her name under it.
Also, in what other ways will this improve over Wikipedia? From the blog one can guess that one important way will be that knols might not be restricted to typical "encyclopedic" knowledge -- so not just "notable" entries (though this is already a gray area in Wikipedai).
I welcome this: I think there is no need really to restrict the entries to just whatever somebody thinks is "notable". The use of a semantic resource about close to everything imaginable would actually quite big, both for humans and for computers.
And that brings me to my next point: will this be yet another text-only resource (what will be the editing method/language? Wikimedia syntax and the associated parsers are really the ugliest, most terrible piece of software in existence) or will there be a way to do semantic markup in addition? In other words, will at least part of this be usable by computers, and I mean computers other than the ones owned by Google (anyone getting a feeling why Google might be interested in doing this in the first place
And finally: what will the license on these pieces of knowledge be? Will it be possible to download all of it at once (as it is currently with Wikipedia dumps)?
... or do not really care about enough.
/. crowd will gather here and cry foul over pracitces like this, the situation won't change until you have gone out to your non-/. neighbors and friends and motivated them to change their behavior. I am sure the RIAA and other companies couldn't care less about a bunch of global geeks who get rid of their aggressions posting in blogs and /. comments.
It would really be easy: if people wouldn't buy CDs or wouldn't buy CDs that do not allow to make personal copies, record companies would quickly start to sell CDs where this is allowed.
If people wouldn't give the power to politicians who are more interested in protecting the rights of record companies and large industries, there would be laws that grant you the right to do this and maybe more.
Obviously, the majority doesn't care enough about this to change either their practice of consuming or their practice of voting or both.
So no matter how often the
And by the way: yes, all that record company and RIAA stuff is quite outrageous and all, but if you want to learn about those things that really matter, look at Monsanto & Co.
I'd still prefer to live in a world where I cannot legally copy some crappy CD than in one where each crop and animal is patented, licensed and owned by a company.
that one cannot simply deploy RoR on Apache. That is what remains the big advantage of perl and especially PHP-based solutions and frameworks.
... it doesn't (necessarily) show fraud at all: as usual with graphs there are many explanations why one could observe data that way and some explanations might be more plausible than others. Explanations are also not mutually exclusive.
My interpretation and guess what the most plausible explanation is would be: there are regions where a high number of voters favort Putin and those voters are highly motivated to express that preference and vote. On the other hand, those who oppose Putin to a high degree do not see any reasonable alternative and either stay at home, or the view that go to vote, vote blank/illegal with a higher probability.
This behavior is consistent with what can be observed in other elections with a similar situation, and it is consistent with the actual political situation in Russia. People who do not understand or know the situation might have a hard time to understand that many people in Russia actually *do* support Putin and are quite enthusiastic about it, but that has been the case.
Anyone who knew the political situation in Russia knew already long before that Putin's party would win a that no ballot stuffing would be necessary for it. And exactly that was one of the reasons for the low voter turnout of opponents.
Voter behavior is not logically/mathematically optimal but the result of psychology.
Making noises with a violin is not necessarily "playing the violin".
Yes we do not understand. Maybe because we come from a country where the end user is responsible for what he does and where it would be impossible for the hardware manufacturer to get sued for the mere possibility of using the device for illegal sharing. It is hard to believe that the situation in the USA is really like you describe it. How is it possible that knives and guns are still getting sold there? After all the manufacturer could get sued if somebody uses them to do something illegal with them.
Or not?
I dont understand: how can they know what license is on those files? If I want to share the home videos or my own recorded MP3s the prevent me from doing this?
That is a major malfunction and the product they sell is crap if this is really the case. Nobody "has" to do this. Whether or not sharing is allowed or not is for the user to decide and take responsability not some boot-licking hardware manufacturer.
I am sure FF has more users than OpenSuse. However, OpenSuse is among the three most used Linux distros, and in central Europe probably among the top two or one .
Also, the comparison with OpenSuse was more an example -- I certainly would find an article about the FF version 3 or even a beta for version 3 apropriate. But a tiny bugfix update like this? How do articles actually make it to the frontpage on Slashdot?
Yes, I use Firefox, happy user and all, but how is such a minor update news worth to make it on the title page?
Just as a comparison: when OpenSuse 10.2 was released (or was it 10.1) not a single of the many submitted articles was published on Slashdot.
So why is this worth its own article on Slashdot?
Good for her ... should make it easy for her to find some emplayment that doesn't put her in the midst of fundamentalist idiots.
is decent, out-of-the box holyday handling. Every 2cent paper calender gives me much more information on that than practically all Opensource calendar programs. Most programs rely on "event files" that you have to download and that simply mark the days as holydays by showing a whole day event. The quality of the event files is often low, does not distinguish between regions or religious and state holidays and it is hard to handle several of these event files at once (e.g. when doing business in Europe with seval countries).
But just handling the holydays as events also prevents decent scheduling, e.g. automatically moving a repeating event to the next non-holyday.
The best program, though also far from perfect in that respect, on Linux is still korganizer. Evolution and Lightning/Sunbird just suck.
No real need to worry then. And what a nice coincidence that these insights come just at the time when nuclear power is getting lobbied as a wonderful climate preserving technology for the future.
We are looking forward to a bright nuclear powered future just like in the fifties again. Thank you Mr. Atom!
You said you have tried quite a few linux distros, among them Ubuntu, and you claim nothing comes even close to OpenSUSE.
What, then, are the big advantages of OpenSUSE over Ubuntu? I know both distros, and I do not see that clear superiority of OpenSUSE. I think both distros have their respective strengths and weaknesses.
So why do you disagree and think that OpenSUSE is a clear winner?
and it sounds like you just defend your own fairy tale.
What I talked about is not an extreme version of religion at all. It is the very nature of religion to replace reason with faith and to demand that somebody believes in only the dogma of this religion and not in that of the thousands of other, equally absurd religions that have been and still are in existance.
That does not prevent people from being good in arithmetics, but it prevents them from thinking scientifically. It does not prevent them from thinking scientifically in some aspects, but it always makes them hit those walls when they come to some "truth" of their religion where they *must* have "faith".
The only interesting question about religion is which kind of biological mechanism it is that causes that irrational lust of believing in the fairy tales of your peer group.
I know that scientists are prone to superstition. These astrophysicists commit the same error many commit - they feel they need to explain complexity with even more complexity and with complexity that is not grounded on any facts whatsoever and that is exchangable by an infinite number of equally absurd theories.
In the concrete argument: there is nothing that forbids those astrophysicists to observe the beauty and order of the universe without any creator. There is no reason to make up a creator other than the infantile wish to explain something that cannot be explained by an antropocentric fairy tale.
Yes, religion can blind people who are otherwise quite smart - so what?
At best, this is wishful thinking. Science and religion have a lot to do with each other and they are simply incompatible.
Religious thinking and scientific thinking are opposites: religion is based on the habit of accepting any kind of nonsense simply because somebody else tells you. It is based on the requirement that you MUST NOT question anything, because that makes you a sinner, a shame for your religion or similar.
Most religions still try to explain the world and the universe or how they came into being. How this is done, not only contradicts the scientific thinking but also often simply contradicts established scientific theories and tries to replace them with absurd superstitional nonsense.
And even when it comes to something that really has got nothing to do with science: ethics, religion is more a hindrance than an asset. Again, it is dogma and unquestioned rules instead of true compassion and emphaty that are at work and how that can fail miserably can be observed every day when religious fanatics use their very religion to abduct, murder, rape or just force their own views on everyone else.
In order to be a scientist and religious one has to be capable of doublethink.
Just out of curiosity: does anyone know if there is some framwork based on PHP5 that is comparable to Rails?
There are a couple of things I do not like about Ruby/Rails too much -- lacking Unicode support, localization not part of the core framework, HTML templates not editable with standard HTML editors.
Would some PHP framework solve these issues?
How about Java frameworks?
I do not know US law but according to the laws in European countries, that is exactly the only thing that matters and makes sense here. This is totally independent of the license that was used for the picture.