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User: n8willis

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  1. Re:Beatifully Ambiguous Writing on The Shallow Roots of the Human Family Tree · · Score: 1
    Indeed, and the opposite is true as well -- if your parents didn't have any children, the odds are that you won't either. Thus the tradition of childlessness is passed down from father to son.

    Many remaining celibate as their fathers before them.

  2. Re:What can we do? on Zimmermann, Encrypted VoIP, and Uncle Sam · · Score: 1
    Not one of Sen. McCarthy's victims was actually thrown in a gulag. Think about that. They weren't fired by the government.


    No, actually, Milo Radulovich was fired by the government, the US Air Force. Three cheers for minimal research, kids!
  3. On the up side ... on Places Feature Cut From Firefox 2 · · Score: 1

    The world has been spared a feature with a vague, incomprehensible, metaphorically incorrect, and just plain stupid name.

    n

  4. Re:If the Christian Allegory bugged you... on Behind the Scenes of Narnia's Special Effects · · Score: 1
    - Abandon their fixation on money and wealth and lead a life where they dedicated themselves to the well being of their fellow man and not to lining their pockets

    - Stop supporting politicians and institutions who are proponents and purveyors of wars and killing.


    The thing is, there are people who do this, but they have little to no influence on society as a whole. Or rather, American society. Primarily because American society takes little notice of people who are not fixated on money and wealth, and who have little money and wealth. I'm serious. The people who spend all their time working with homeless shelters and so on get no PR, because they make very little money doing it and apart from Christmas nobody in society at large takes much notice of them. Which is the real problem. America and post-industrialized society in general is dominated by wealth-obsession, from Christians in predominantly Christian countries to atheists in predominantly atheist countries, to Buddhists in prdominantly Buddhist countries. Wealth-obsession cuts in prety much every direction.

    If you want to see people who expend all their time and effort to work for the poor, you have to go to where the poorest people are. You see some in the US, you see lots in the third world. And yeah, most of the people who build hospitals in the third world or run medical clinics in the third world on their vacation time do so out of their religious convictions. But it still isn't news here.

    Or, to put it another way, you're not going to see people who actually *do* walk the walk on television, because more or less by definition if they really are walking the walk they're doing it without public relations or media coverage or fundraisers. Consider Mother Teresa, whom everybody knows. She got famous because other people took notice of her and what she actually was doing day-in and day-out, not because she went out and got a TV show. But she's gone now, and there is still tons of relief work and ministering to people being done in Calcutta, but do any of us know who's doing it? I certainly never hear any names on the news anymore.

    Anyway, my original bottom line was that people who do spend their life serving other people's needs pretty much aren't going to get noticed, no matter what their motivation for doing it. I'm positive that there are a lot of athiests who do Meals on Wheels, but there are a lot of Christians too.
  5. Re:One slight difference on A Solution for the Ten Letter Acrostic Puzzle? · · Score: 1

    Well, but dictionary words are just the bases, correct? I seem to remember that Greek has more tenses & so on than English. Whereas English doesn't alter root words as much, relying on "helping verbs" -- or whatever the scientific words for those are.

    By which I'm not saying that ancient Greek had *more* words than modern English, but depending on whether Greek has more cases, tenses and voices, et cetera, (sorry for the Latin...) the variations could significantly close the gap when considering the actual words available.

    N

  6. The *foot*? on Bad Day To Be Sony · · Score: 1

    I'd say this comes closer to shooting yourself in the face.

  7. Tv shows on DVD on 'NBC Nightly News' to Be Shown on Internet · · Score: 3, Funny

    Sweet! Now it's only a matter of time before they release the entire series on DVD. Me I can't wait to get Season One -- David Brinkley, John Chancellor, the best the absolute best.

    Not to mention the epic storylines that year: Vietnam, Apollo 13, the Beatles breaking up (holy crap! who saw that coming?), the Kent State tie-in. Must-see classics, every ep. Frankly the shows gone down the past couple of years, but can you blame them? The set the bar too high, nobody can write like that anymore.

  8. Dammit on 20 Lawmakers Want to Kill Your Television · · Score: 1

    Yet another misleading headline to an article not about Ned's Atomic Dustbin . Just when I think this place is finally developing some musical taste. Bollocks.

  9. Re:What's the deal? on Serenity Opens Today · · Score: 1
    I often think that those who are unimpressed with the show felt so because it paints a very unglamorous pictures of the future.


    On the contrary, most of the people I talk to who dislike it cite:

    1. The goofy Cowboy costumes
    2. The goofy Cowboy plots
    3. The dialogue
    4. The acting
    5. All the other accumulated goofy Cowboy elements


    Frankly, dystopian futures are the dominant style, and have been for quite a while. Probably going back to Fahrenheit 451, but that's not a scholarly opinion.

    Are you saying The Matrix movies depicted a glamorous future? Minority Report? The Star Wars flicks? Terminator movies? The Alien movies? Twelve Monkeys? Blade Runner?

    Or take TV -- the new Battlestar Galactica series? The Farscape series? How about Babylon 5? Or further back, Blake's Seven, Red Dwarf, etc. etc. Essentially the Star Trek franchise was the only one that lived within a completely aniseptic everything-is-nice-and-glamorous future.

    Dystopia dominates. People who don't like Firefly don't like the content of the show. I have nothing against you if you do like the show, but you must take the criticisms of others as what they are, not dismiss them as unqualified by alleging that they are confused by the premise or unaccustomed to the "unglamourous" future.

    n
  10. Re:SIP is the path on VoIP Going Wireless · · Score: 1

    I've said it before but it bears repeating: big whoop -- for one key reason: it still uses closed, patented, proprietary CODECS for compressing sending and synching the voice data.

    Using SIP is a tiny piece of the overall platform, and Gizmo is closed in all the other ways -- first and foremost the codecs.

    N

  11. Re:Phone Gaim? on Open Source Alternative for Skype · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The Gaim developers don't talk about it because the Linspire guys have only released the "source" in completely unusable form and refuse to answer simple questions about it. Plus, they didn't make it a plugin that normal users could install, they forked the code and hacked it together. They're trying to weasel the GPL, as they usually do.

    What's more, it's based on an ancient fork of Gaim, so the developers naturally don't have time to waste on it. It'd be great if the Gaim folks added some softphone capabilities, but they'll likely do it starting from the modern codebase. Or someone else will write a plugin.

    Last but not least, the people who created and then later abandoned phonegaim did so because they turned their efforts to creating the closed-source, proprietary replacement for it: Gizmo.

    This they have no intention of putting under an open-source license either. They like to use the word "open" as much as possible on their web site to confuse people into thinking they're open source, but they're not. Frankly the more I learn about Linspire, the less I like them, for just such actions as these. Give your money to a company that supports free software.

  12. Re:Open source alternative added value on Open Source Alternative for Skype · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Baloney. They use the same codecs as everyone else:

    http://www.google.com/talk/developer.html#codecs

    And they didn't create any of them.

  13. Useless! on The Real Hitchhiker's Guide? · · Score: 1
    Shouldn't a real Hitchhiker's Guide feed you content depending on:
    1. who you are
    2. where you are
    3. when you last had lunch with Zaphod Beeblebrox


    Really. It's called research, people.
  14. Fingerprint, schmingerprint on Fingerprint Recognition with Linux & IBM's T42 · · Score: 1

    You know they're insecure because you can already buy commercial advertising space in people's fingerprints online.

    n

  15. Sure, if you have no local mail spool on Thunderbird 1.0 RC1 Released · · Score: 2, Informative

    For each email account, you can choose whether the mail goes into an account-specific Inbox OR a "global Inbox". So you can have all your mail in one big Inbox, if that's what you like.

    Yeah, unless you want to use Thunderbird with your local mail spool (or "movemail" as the code calls it for no reason) -- in which case, you're out of luck: it doesn't use the global inbox (see bugzilla bug 263013) the mail notification sounds don't work (see bug 270186), and in general you get treated like a third-class citizen.

    Which is inconvenient, ironic, and a shame, considering the disproportionate number of Thunderbird users who are on Unix-like systems, and thus have local mail delivery as an important (if not THE most important) account.

  16. Re:Open letter to British Press. on 2004 Election Weirdness Continues · · Score: 1

    For the love of Jefferson, will someone please tell the British press that Democrat is a noun and not an adjective? Every friggin time they talk about US politics, it's "Democrat candidate John Kerry" or "Democrat Senator from South Dakota."

    It's the Democratic party and the Republican party. A Republican politician is a Republican. A Democratic politician is a Democrat.

    I'm over here doing *my* part, telling people not to refer to the United Kingdon as "England." But does anybody say thanks? Noooo....

  17. NEARLY Ready??? on 7 hour BBS Documentary Nearly Ready · · Score: 1

    So that's it? Some tv show is nearly ready?

    I'd say that this is nearly news.

  18. MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL on Accelerating IPv6 Adoption With Proxy Servers · · Score: 1

    C'mon -- you know you want to!!!

  19. Re:I call bullshit.. on George Lucas Speaks on Trilogy Changes · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I seem to recall a Terry Gilliam comment (from interview or Brazil commentary) where he says he can't understand the fad of directors retreading their old projects years later.

    It was something like "that was 20 years ago, why would I want to go back and do it all over again? That movie is already finished, I have new ones I want to work on."

    If only the others understood....

  20. I'm sorry, he's on an intergalatic cruise ... on Simulating the Whole Universe · · Score: 1

    ... in his office.

  21. Re:Objective audio analysis on 2nd Multi-Format 128kbps Public Listening Test · · Score: 1

    Or better yet, they could learn once and for all that asking people for opinions on how good something sounds to them does not result in quantifiable data, and go home early.

    No matter how you encode it, an opinion is an opinion, nothing more.

  22. Re:Homophones... on Opera Promises Voice-Operated Web Browser · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, but text-based search cannot distinguish between homographs, like bow (as in tie a ribbon into a...) and bow (as in one end of a ship). So there are trade-offs either way.

  23. Stick a Done in me, I'm Forked on Fedora Prepares For Xorg Instead of XFree86 · · Score: 2, Funny

    OK ... for the benefit of those of us who don't hack X in our spare time: is the Xorg implementation the same as the "freedesktop.org" implementation (at http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/xserver) or are they separate and distinct? (Or maybe just separate?)

    Either way, how about brainstorming-up a better project name? I personally like "Product X" but that may already be taken.

    N

  24. Re:I don't get how a bootable CD will help... on Is the Key to Linux a Games-Based Distro? · · Score: 1

    Well, it wouldn't necessarily have to boot directly into the game. Say the boot loader offers you booting into the game and booting into the rest of the distro. That way, you could offer the game as normal and still have people check out the rest of the contents when they were curious.

    Yeah, there's no guarantee that anybody EVER would, of course, but you know that some people would.

    Who knows how successful it would be, but I like the idea so much - piggybacking a linux distro with a successful game. It'd be an ingenious subversive marketing plan. And it's a concept that only works because of LiveCD distributions, which is something that didn't even exist until just recently. That's what I find innovative and fascinating about the idea.

  25. Re:It will take more than just any game, on Is the Key to Linux a Games-Based Distro? · · Score: 1

    If it's a LiveCD game, it would run on 95% of all the desktops; I think that's what the poster was suggesting.