I'm saddened that I spent the rest of high school, and several years afterwards, downing Tylenol PM every night.
I'm saddened that I found solace in alcohol, which does the trick a hell of a lot better than Tylenol PM. I drink at least a six-pack of beer a night, just to get my mind relaxed enough so that I can pass out.
You may already know this; and you don't explicitly say that you're using both alcohol and Tylenol simultaneously. But just in case you don't know this, and in case someone else here doesn't and is contemplating going this route:
don't mix alcohol and Tylenol (acetaminophen). Surprisingly small quantites can cause significant liver damage; if you have a history of alcoholism, comparatively small amounts of acetaminophen can kill you. Acetaminophen toxicity is the main issue; the alcohol simply enhances it. As a
good article on this subject from Cecil Adams points out:
The real problem with drugs like Tylenol is that the difference between a therapeutic (that is, medically effective) dose and a toxic one is surprisingly small. In adults the maximum safe dosage is four grams (eight 500-milligram tablets) over a 24-hour period. The toxic dose is a mere seven grams taken all at once.
P.S. While my insomnia is not as severe as yours, I do struggle with it, and I truly empathize.
Are there any video card manufacturers left who release other than binary only drivers?
Matrox releases open-source drivers for some of their product lines (e.g. the Millenium G series -- G400, G450, G550, etc.). The mga driver that comes along with X is the same as Matrox's, for that reason. And 2D performance under the open-sourced Matrox drivers is actually pretty damned good. This all sounds great, doesn't it? Unfortunately, Matrox's Linux support sucks, and the support for Matrox from the DRI project is fairly nonexistent right now. So if you do have any problems with the driver, or want to get 3D/DRI/hardware acceleration issues solved, you're gonna have to learn to hack the drivers/kernel modules yourself. Good luck.
Cecil Adams pointed out that it's a lot easier to switch than most people think. The way to do it isn't to label everything in both imperial units and metric units; it's to just do it. Instead of labelling each gallon jug of milk with the fact that one gallon = 3.74 liters, thus making the metric system seem comparatively complicated (when in fact, it's less so), the right thing to do is to get rid of gallon jugs and replace them with four liter containers. We see two liter and half-liter soda bottles running around and everyone's fine with it now. Remember a couple of "temperature calibration points" -- water freezes at 0C, 20C = a nice spring day, 34 = Miami in July -- and dealing with the temperature scale change becomes fairly easy. It's trivial when you just do it.
Oh, and as an aside, while you may be very comfortable with miles and pounds and gallons (and, I'd guess, Fahrenheit degrees), how many other imperial units are you comfortable with? Most people aren't familiar with very many. How many people are comfortable with rods, links, chains, bushels, and pecks? How many people understand fluid ounces and ounces of weight (not understand that there's a difference, but what that difference is, and how they're related)? Can you picture an acre in your head fairly accurately? Most people in the U.S. can't, despite the fact that it's the most commonly used unit of land area. For most of us, for most purposes, imperial units are useless because we don't even understand them. One thing that metric units buys you is that the whole thing hangs together, is internally consistent. If any of it makes sense, it all does. I can't visualize an acre, but I can easily visualize a hectare, the corresponding unit of the metric system -- a square that's 100 meters (a little longer than an American football field) on a side.
Aside from the initial jumpstart of energy required could it not sustain itself afterward using its own energy, perpetually maintaining itself once stability has been established?
Keeping the plasma hot enough for fusion to be possible is only part of the picture; you also have to solve the confinement issue. You not
only have to keep the ionized plasma confined (and no, a material "containment vessel" similar to what's used in fission reactors doesn't work; you need something
nonmaterial, such as strong magnetic fields), you also need that confinement to be within a very small volume for reaction rates to be sufficiently high (for any kinetic "collision"-ish process, reaction rates are proportional to the square of the density). Heat is necessary for the nuclei to be moving fast enough for fusion to take place; but heat is also the enemy of keeping the plasma at high density.
Please quote from your dictionary. It sounds like it might be an amusing diversion.
OK. From the American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition:
-----
community
1.
a. A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government.
b. The district or locality in which such a group lives.
2.
a. A group of people having common interests: the scientific community; the international business community.
b. A group viewed as forming a distinct segment of society: the gay community; the community of color.
3.
a. Similarity or identity: a community of interests.
b. Sharing, participation, and fellowship.
4. Society as a whole; the public.
5. Ecology.
a. A group of plants and animals living and interacting with one another in a specific region under relatively similar environmental conditions.
b. The region occupied by a group of interacting organisms.
-----
So I remain a bit puzzled by your comment. Given the number of Debian developers, and given that the principal barriers to entry are simply having some capability in something to do with the project, and wanting to contribute to it, I don't know how one wouldn't call it a community.
Debian has to be the biggest bunch of holier than thou morons...
This comment makes no sense. Debian is a community-developed project, and the community who develops it has the opinion that this is the right thing for them to do with their project. In no way are they holding a gun to your head, proselytizing at your doorstep, etc. Want to change how they do things? Join the developer community and start making your voice heard. Don't care enough, or just plain don't like Debian? Don't use it! But to say that they're "holier than thou" for deciding amongst themselves what to do with their project is like my calling you holier than thou for any principled stand you may take on any subject at all. It's just a personal choice, and you're allowed to make such choices about your life -- as are the Debian developers about their project.
Yeah, NetLibrary. I just discovered this recently. It works really, really well for me. My local library doesn't have the contract with them; but in this metro area, there's a reciprocity agreement with library memberships. A library card for my town makes me able to get one for the next town over, which does have access to NetLibrary. So I got a card from them too -- registered online, card snailmailed to me -- and now I can do NetLibrary from home.
If you haven't looked into whether your library, or one you otherwise have access to, has access to NetLibrary, you definitely should.
I worry that if the BOC joins in and asks for their $30M back, SCO goes bankrupt. If they go bankrupt, it's not like their lawsuits go away. Instead (IIRC, IANAL as usual) suits they filed are put on hold until after administration, while suits filed against them are voided with the option to re-file after administration. Stretching these out even more years wouldn't be a good result, I don't think. They need to be crushed in court.
Anyone who is a lawyer, or knows about corporate bankruptcy procedures, and can comment on this?
But then the question arises: What is this thing that you call a "moral compass?" What is morality then if there is no absolute standard from which to derive it? If morality is relative, then so is right and wrong.
If by "right and wrong" is relative, you mean that different people can have different ideas of what's right and what's wrong, then I agree. Without an absolute standard from which to derive morality, that sort of situation applies, yes.
Something that is good to you may not be necessarily what is good to the next person. If you are your own yardstick of morality, how can you say that something is inherently good or evil with any certainty or credibility to anyone but yourself?
I can't. I don't say that anything is inherently good or evil. I can't say such a thing without an absolute metric, you're right. So I don't say that. What I say instead is that, based on my morals, I think something is good or evil -- which is not the same thing as saying that something is inherently good or evil.
If your moral compass says that religion is evil, then why should we care or listen to what you have to say?
You don't have to. If it matters to me enough (which, right now, it doesn't), I might try to debate you about it. I might try to get you to agree that the assumptions upon which my moral sense is based, and the conclusions I draw from those assumptions (or at least the parts of these that are relevant to whatever issue we discuss), are worth following. You may or may not agree.
You may be right and wrong, but without absolute morality then your judgement, and indeed everyone's judgment becomes meaningless.
That doesn't logically follow. Your statement is based upon the same sort of assumption that the parent was making -- an assumption that the only thing that can provide meaning is an absolute outside ourselves. I certainly don't feel that way. My moral code is not based on my perception of an absolute code of right and wrong, and it absolutely has meaning to me. It may not have any meaning to you, but that's not the same thing as saying that it's meaningless.
You can argue that something is "good" if it benefits the majority but then what is it about the majority that is especial if there is no fixed good/evil? Is there any immorality in killing your rich father and use your inheritance money to feed the hungry and house the homeless, especially if you can get away with it? It benefits the majority, doesn't it?
This is a strawman. Kindly point out where I ever said that I assign good/evil or right/wrong by considering benefit or detriment to the majority. That's not how I work.
But then you'll say that killing is wrong because anybody has the right to live. But then, where does that right come from?
I'd put it differently. I'd say that I believe that depriving other people of life is wrong, by my personal sense of right and wrong. That's not the same thing as what you write above, and the difference is significant.
Is it some unalienable right? How can a right be unalienable if it's not based on absolute good and an unchanging standard? Rights themselves become meaningless if good/evil are relative.
Absolute rights don't exist if good and evil are relative, yes. Rights are freedoms, abilities, etc. that we have collectively decided are good things for people to have. Some of them, such as the right to walk down the street without being mugged, are rights we all pretty much agree that everyone should have. Others, such as the right to take whatever you want from others, we all pretty much agree that no one should have. And still others, such as the right to own automatic weapons, we are divided upon. And one can arrive at a personal opinion about all three of these without appeal to an absolute, objective standard outside ourselves.
That I believe, was the ultimate point of the parent.
I knew what his/her point was. I simply didn't agree with it; I think it's based upon assumptions (that there's no value in moral concepts that don't have the same, absolute value to everyone) that I'm not making. There's no logical reason or need to make those assumptions.
Putting XFree86 in non free would mean that all software which depends on X would have to move to contrib.
Not if that software is built upon the X.Org libraries etc., rather than the XFree86 base, which is what we were talking about (and why I said what I did about how, if Debian were using X.Org instead, then there's not much point in moving XF86 to non-free because there's not much point in keeping XF86 around at all.).
But The main issue isn't about freeness, but about that it is not legal to link something like VNC which is GPL with the new license.
Yeah, that I'm aware of. We were considering something else.
Second, you are right that XFree86 is on the outs with Debian. At least, that's my understanding. Putting it in nonfree is something I never thought about, and I suppose it's possible (maybe if there's a DD here, he/she can say whether it is or isn't). But I'm not sure what the point would be; if all the GUI apps in main are built using the libraries from an X.Org release, what would you use an XFree86 in nonfree for?
Hopefully, a DD will step in and comment if I've missed something here.
You miss the point, and fail to distinguish between two methods of obtaining true beliefs.
No. I simply don't personally use your "method," that's all.
One of them is a bad way, the other is good.
I agree with this statement! But I think we'd disagree as to which is which. Heh.
1. Your claim that you are able to determine right and wrong independant from God or the threat of hell is a testimony to your willingness to listen to subjective feelings about good and evil.
Of course.
Since you willingly concede that different people will have different conceptions, then you must also agree that such terms "right" and "wrong" are subjective. And without a God, or a yardstick, such understandings must be fluid.
Absolutely. Not only that, but I'd also claim that as a practical matter, such understandings are subjective even if there is a supreme being, because earnest believers will still differ in interpretation. I've known many many devout Christians in my life. None of them had identically the same moral sense as any of the others, since their interpretations of what they felt God wanted out of them were not all identically the same.
2. My point was a logical one - if there is no afterlife, no God, then there is no "right" or "wrong". The important question is not "could you know the right thing to do without the threat of eternal punishment", but rather "is there a right or wrong if there is no God or eternal punishment?"
And here is where we disagree. If, instead, you wrote your first sentence as "if there is no afterlife, no God, then there is no objective right or wrong, independent of human feelings" then I'd agree. I don't know how one comes up with an absolute, objective metric for measuring right and wrong in the absence of a supreme being. But that's different from saying that there's no right or wrong. I make decisions every day based on what seems to me to be morally right or wrong. Those decisions are made using my personal moral compass, rather than one imposed on me from without. But that doesn't make them any less an attempt to do right and not do wrong.
And this is one of the greatest hypocricies of the atheist position - a failure to acknowledge the logical conclusion, that "good" and "evil" only make sense when we consider the divine. Without any God, there is no right or wrong.
This is circular reasoning. You're saying "without any God, there is no right or wrong, because right and wrong only make sense if there is a God." And the source of this circular reasoning is the implicit assumption that the concepts of right and wrong only make sense if those concepts are absolute, objective ones. I don't see any logical reason to buy that.
Naturalists are probably deathly afraid of these conclusions for two reasons:
Well, I hope I've illustrated above that I, at least, am not deathly afraid of these conclusions, since I don't think the first one is bad, while I don't think the second one makes any logical sense. But anyway . . .
Oh, and what's a naturalist? Is that the same as an athiest?
1. It goes against every fibre of humans, because the truth is we do know good and evil, and that we know it because there is a God. The understanding is so overwhelming that even a logical conclusion denying "good" or "evil" is avoided, because it is counter to what we know a priori.
If it reassures you to think that some people feel that way, go for it. I can't speak for anyone but me. In my case, I don't have an overwhelming understanding that there is any supreme being. In fact, just the opposite.
I think claims require evidence, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think the concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent supreme being is pretty extraordinary . ..pretty far outside anything we encounter in our lives. So where's that extraordinarily c
I wonder whether you saw the news stories a couple of months back about the German cannibal. His defence against a manslaughter charge was that both he and his victim wanted to do it. Just wondering what you think of that defence.
Yes, I had heard/read about that. To tell you the truth, I don't know what I think of it (presuming, of course, that he's telling the truth; it's not an interesting situation for this discussion if he wasn't, and the victim really hadn't consented).
On one hand, my personal "ick" factor is very very high with this one. On the other hand, I personally don't think there should be a blanket illegality to suicide; that is, I don't think suicide is always wrong and should always be forbidden, because I think whatever else is true, we own ourselves. Was the victim of sound mind when he made the decision (to die and to be eaten afterwards)? Is it even possible to answer that question completely rationally (that is, can I judge that without my personal "ick" factor creating a bias that no one of sound mind could ever possibly make such a choice)?
Honestly, I don't know what I think about it.
Other than that the whole thing grosses me out of existence, that is.
It's fascinating how all questions on morality boil down to God's existence.
They do? I don't think so. What makes you think they do? The fact that I made my (negative) comments about belief? They were included not to make a statement about the basis for morality, but merely to illustrate a point: you, too, might find uncomfortable a world in which others get to decide for you the terms of your life.
With no God, there is no "right" or "wrong". Suddenly everything is neutral. It is then ever so convenient to deny God's existence as an excuse for what you want to excuse, and to then use nonsensical terms like "evil" when you want to appeal to morality, such as when you said most religions are evil institutions.
Such terms are not nonsensical at all. The fact that you don't see any basis for right and wrong outside of a belief in a supreme being doesn't mean that other people are similarly hobbled. I'm perfectly capable of judging right or wrong in my life without the threat of eternal hellfire, thank you very much.
So, which way is it? If you think these organisations are evil, then by what standard or law do you judge them to be evil.
What standard? My own. The one I've developed over the course of my life's experiences, which I think is mostly internally logically consistent, but ultimately (like all logical systems) is based on some assumptions about what's good and right, assumptions that seem kind and fair and that I can live with. And over the course of my life, through my life's experiences, I sometimes see holes in my logic, or even things which challenge my assumptions; and so my moral sense is refined. But it's something that I've generated, and am constantly re-assessing, for myself. And while external sources of course make and have made an impact on me (to use an extreme example, I'd probably be more likely to think murder was OK if I lived in a society where everyone thought murder was OK), my moral sense doesn't parrot anyone's list of dos and don'ts.
Surely you're not saying that you can't think of any reason to do the "right thing" in your life other than the threat of eternal punishment, are you?
There is nothing wrong with sex - you set up a strawman then attack it. The problem is in improper use of it. I don't care what you say - the thought of a man recording his wife (as I heard in one case) act in sex scenes makes me sick and angry.
Sick and angry enough to make it illegal for them to do so, even if that's what they both want to do?
The whole porn industry in general makes me angry - a comment which is bound to displease many slashdotters, as I know how popular pornography is.
No, what's popular is the idea of letting people live their own lives without our poking our noses into parts of their lives which aren't any of our business. If you and your wife want to invite a third consenting adult to join you, I may think that's immoral, and I may not want to do it myself; but it's none of my business what you and your wife do.
Sex should never involve multiple men. It should never involve having sex with another man's wife. It is an evil institution that damages the lives of people who participate in it, and those who view it.
Those are your opinions. In my opinion, life should not involve slavish belief in an unsubstantiated fairy tale about a hypothetical omnipotent being. And in my opinion, most religions are evil institutions that damage the lives of people who participate in them and interact with them. Those are my opinions. How fortunate for both of us that we live in a place where people are granted the freedom to pursue happiness as they see fit, and we can agree to disagree.
How many of you porn supporters can honestly say you'd be pleased if your daughter became a porn star, having sex with many different men in her life, for thousands of other men to view?
I wouldn't be pleased. I wouldn't be pleased if she became a fundamentalist, either. But I'm not about to make either thing illegal. It's her life; it would lose a lot of its meaning if I got to tell her what she could and could not do with it.
So, the standard model defines 16 particles. But if there are only those 16, then none of them have mass, so there must be another one, that magically provides mass for the others. Weird. You can't make this stuff up, folks... err... oh, wait.
Nice try. Apart from the fact that the article's description of the role of the Higgs in generating masses isn't quite correct, there's your implication that this is some what frivolous. Well, if you evaluate scientific theories by the accuracy of their predictions, an argument can be made that the standard model of elementary particle physics is the most successful scientific theory of all time -- ranging from making correct predictions of electrodynamic phenomena out to absolutely absurdly large numbers of significant digits, to making predictions about the numbers of certain types of particles that will exist ("there will be one more light neutrino species, but no more after that") -- subsequently confirmed.
There are a lot of things you can fairly criticize particle physicists about; but suggesting that the standard model is removed from reality isn't one of them.
Reminds me of the "dark energy" idea: "Well, we can only find 1/3 of the matter that we know should exist, so the rest is.. well, it's just the dark energy that we can't detect!"
Like many people, you've got "dark matter" and "dark energy" confused (I personally hate the "dark energy" term, and wish Michael Turner (I think it was him) hadn't coined it; but we're stuck with it now). And while either of them may someday turn out to have been a wrong turn in the history of cosmology, neither is an unfounded concept.
Is that most of the images get imaged processed to death. Without Kalman filtering and deconvolution algorithms they would look lame, and these algorithms can be done to images taken from Earthbound telescopes.
The high-redshift objects observations like this are intended to uncover have effectively no emission in the visible band by the time their light reaches Earth. What Earthbound telescope did you have in mind to produce this high-redshift infrared imaging?
This link
may help. The one thing it doesn't explain that most people don't go in already knowing is that neutron capture, and subsequent fission, of uranium is more likely (in nuclear physics terms, the fission cross-section is higher) if the neutrons are slowed down a bit from the energies they had when their parent nucleus fissioned.
and i never got it to work as it should (tm), though i use linux since uhm 4 years.
Really? I'm using it right now, and it works well for me. My only problem with it at this point is the extreme lack of documentation. I'm having to use the Pro Tools manual to figure out a lot of stuff about how Ardour works. But it's very nice.
My understanding was that Audacity was being made to do I/O through JACK; but I look at the Release Notes for this release and I don't see that.
Running Ardour through JACK (with realtime capabilities), I get sub-millisecond latencies and no XRUNs at all. I'd like to be able to use Audacity under similar terms.
Analyzing the motion of a disc which rotates about both an axis through the side (flipping) and an axis through the face simultaneously is a straightforward physics problem that decades of physics undergrads and grad students have had to solve as part of classical mechanics classes. The problems are typically phrased in "relevant to coin-tossing" form, as well. In my mechanics class, the problem was phrased something like "what ratio of angular velocities (around the two rotational axes) is necessary to have the coin have a 2/3 chance of landing with the same side facing up as that which started?"
Slashdot Mirror
I'm saddened that I spent the rest of high school, and several years afterwards, downing Tylenol PM every night.
I'm saddened that I found solace in alcohol, which does the trick a hell of a lot better than Tylenol PM. I drink at least a six-pack of beer a night, just to get my mind relaxed enough so that I can pass out.
You may already know this; and you don't explicitly say that you're using both alcohol and Tylenol simultaneously. But just in case you don't know this, and in case someone else here doesn't and is contemplating going this route: don't mix alcohol and Tylenol (acetaminophen). Surprisingly small quantites can cause significant liver damage; if you have a history of alcoholism, comparatively small amounts of acetaminophen can kill you. Acetaminophen toxicity is the main issue; the alcohol simply enhances it. As a good article on this subject from Cecil Adams points out:
P.S. While my insomnia is not as severe as yours, I do struggle with it, and I truly empathize.Are there any video card manufacturers left who release other than binary only drivers?
Matrox releases open-source drivers for some of their product lines (e.g. the Millenium G series -- G400, G450, G550, etc.). The mga driver that comes along with X is the same as Matrox's, for that reason. And 2D performance under the open-sourced Matrox drivers is actually pretty damned good. This all sounds great, doesn't it? Unfortunately, Matrox's Linux support sucks, and the support for Matrox from the DRI project is fairly nonexistent right now. So if you do have any problems with the driver, or want to get 3D/DRI/hardware acceleration issues solved, you're gonna have to learn to hack the drivers/kernel modules yourself. Good luck.
Do you ever buy soda in two liter bottles?
Cecil Adams pointed out that it's a lot easier to switch than most people think. The way to do it isn't to label everything in both imperial units and metric units; it's to just do it. Instead of labelling each gallon jug of milk with the fact that one gallon = 3.74 liters, thus making the metric system seem comparatively complicated (when in fact, it's less so), the right thing to do is to get rid of gallon jugs and replace them with four liter containers. We see two liter and half-liter soda bottles running around and everyone's fine with it now. Remember a couple of "temperature calibration points" -- water freezes at 0C, 20C = a nice spring day, 34 = Miami in July -- and dealing with the temperature scale change becomes fairly easy. It's trivial when you just do it.
Oh, and as an aside, while you may be very comfortable with miles and pounds and gallons (and, I'd guess, Fahrenheit degrees), how many other imperial units are you comfortable with? Most people aren't familiar with very many. How many people are comfortable with rods, links, chains, bushels, and pecks? How many people understand fluid ounces and ounces of weight (not understand that there's a difference, but what that difference is, and how they're related)? Can you picture an acre in your head fairly accurately? Most people in the U.S. can't, despite the fact that it's the most commonly used unit of land area. For most of us, for most purposes, imperial units are useless because we don't even understand them. One thing that metric units buys you is that the whole thing hangs together, is internally consistent. If any of it makes sense, it all does. I can't visualize an acre, but I can easily visualize a hectare, the corresponding unit of the metric system -- a square that's 100 meters (a little longer than an American football field) on a side.
Aside from the initial jumpstart of energy required could it not sustain itself afterward using its own energy, perpetually maintaining itself once stability has been established?
Keeping the plasma hot enough for fusion to be possible is only part of the picture; you also have to solve the confinement issue. You not only have to keep the ionized plasma confined (and no, a material "containment vessel" similar to what's used in fission reactors doesn't work; you need something nonmaterial, such as strong magnetic fields), you also need that confinement to be within a very small volume for reaction rates to be sufficiently high (for any kinetic "collision"-ish process, reaction rates are proportional to the square of the density). Heat is necessary for the nuclei to be moving fast enough for fusion to take place; but heat is also the enemy of keeping the plasma at high density.
Please quote from your dictionary. It sounds like it might be an amusing diversion.
OK. From the American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition:
-----
community
1.
a. A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government.
b. The district or locality in which such a group lives.
2.
a. A group of people having common interests: the scientific community; the international business community.
b. A group viewed as forming a distinct segment of society: the gay community; the community of color.
3.
a. Similarity or identity: a community of interests.
b. Sharing, participation, and fellowship.
4. Society as a whole; the public.
5. Ecology.
a. A group of plants and animals living and interacting with one another in a specific region under relatively similar environmental conditions.
b. The region occupied by a group of interacting organisms.
-----
So I remain a bit puzzled by your comment. Given the number of Debian developers, and given that the principal barriers to entry are simply having some capability in something to do with the project, and wanting to contribute to it, I don't know how one wouldn't call it a community.
HTH. HAND.
> Debian is a community-developed project
No it's not. It is an oligarchy of those who have commit bits to the debian source tree.
Which, according to the dictionary, is a community. Please try again.
This is usually firmware for a device connected to the pc..
Do we really need the sourcecode for it ?
Because Debian can't distribute the binary code and yet still be following the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
And where does this stop ? Should we not install linux
on computers with a non open source BIOS ?
Is Debian distributing that non open source BIOS, in violation of the DFSG?
What about devices with firmware already loaded and where it need not
be loaded by a driver from an OS, should we "ban" those as well ?
How is Debian distributing non-DSFG-compliant code in that case?
Care to bring up any more red herrings?
Debian has to be the biggest bunch of holier than thou morons...
This comment makes no sense. Debian is a community-developed project, and the community who develops it has the opinion that this is the right thing for them to do with their project. In no way are they holding a gun to your head, proselytizing at your doorstep, etc. Want to change how they do things? Join the developer community and start making your voice heard. Don't care enough, or just plain don't like Debian? Don't use it! But to say that they're "holier than thou" for deciding amongst themselves what to do with their project is like my calling you holier than thou for any principled stand you may take on any subject at all. It's just a personal choice, and you're allowed to make such choices about your life -- as are the Debian developers about their project.
Yeah, NetLibrary. I just discovered this recently. It works really, really well for me. My local library doesn't have the contract with them; but in this metro area, there's a reciprocity agreement with library memberships. A library card for my town makes me able to get one for the next town over, which does have access to NetLibrary. So I got a card from them too -- registered online, card snailmailed to me -- and now I can do NetLibrary from home.
If you haven't looked into whether your library, or one you otherwise have access to, has access to NetLibrary, you definitely should.
I worry that if the BOC joins in and asks for their $30M back, SCO goes bankrupt. If they go bankrupt, it's not like their lawsuits go away. Instead (IIRC, IANAL as usual) suits they filed are put on hold until after administration, while suits filed against them are voided with the option to re-file after administration. Stretching these out even more years wouldn't be a good result, I don't think. They need to be crushed in court.
Anyone who is a lawyer, or knows about corporate bankruptcy procedures, and can comment on this?
But then the question arises: What is this thing that you call a "moral compass?" What is morality then if there is no absolute standard from which to derive it? If morality is relative, then so is right and wrong.
If by "right and wrong" is relative, you mean that different people can have different ideas of what's right and what's wrong, then I agree. Without an absolute standard from which to derive morality, that sort of situation applies, yes.
Something that is good to you may not be necessarily what is good to the next person. If you are your own yardstick of morality, how can you say that something is inherently good or evil with any certainty or credibility to anyone but yourself?
I can't. I don't say that anything is inherently good or evil. I can't say such a thing without an absolute metric, you're right. So I don't say that. What I say instead is that, based on my morals, I think something is good or evil -- which is not the same thing as saying that something is inherently good or evil.
If your moral compass says that religion is evil, then why should we care or listen to what you have to say?
You don't have to. If it matters to me enough (which, right now, it doesn't), I might try to debate you about it. I might try to get you to agree that the assumptions upon which my moral sense is based, and the conclusions I draw from those assumptions (or at least the parts of these that are relevant to whatever issue we discuss), are worth following. You may or may not agree.
You may be right and wrong, but without absolute morality then your judgement, and indeed everyone's judgment becomes meaningless.
That doesn't logically follow. Your statement is based upon the same sort of assumption that the parent was making -- an assumption that the only thing that can provide meaning is an absolute outside ourselves. I certainly don't feel that way. My moral code is not based on my perception of an absolute code of right and wrong, and it absolutely has meaning to me. It may not have any meaning to you, but that's not the same thing as saying that it's meaningless.
You can argue that something is "good" if it benefits the majority but then what is it about the majority that is especial if there is no fixed good/evil? Is there any immorality in killing your rich father and use your inheritance money to feed the hungry and house the homeless, especially if you can get away with it? It benefits the majority, doesn't it?
This is a strawman. Kindly point out where I ever said that I assign good/evil or right/wrong by considering benefit or detriment to the majority. That's not how I work.
But then you'll say that killing is wrong because anybody has the right to live. But then, where does that right come from?
I'd put it differently. I'd say that I believe that depriving other people of life is wrong, by my personal sense of right and wrong. That's not the same thing as what you write above, and the difference is significant.
Is it some unalienable right? How can a right be unalienable if it's not based on absolute good and an unchanging standard? Rights themselves become meaningless if good/evil are relative.
Absolute rights don't exist if good and evil are relative, yes. Rights are freedoms, abilities, etc. that we have collectively decided are good things for people to have. Some of them, such as the right to walk down the street without being mugged, are rights we all pretty much agree that everyone should have. Others, such as the right to take whatever you want from others, we all pretty much agree that no one should have. And still others, such as the right to own automatic weapons, we are divided upon. And one can arrive at a personal opinion about all three of these without appeal to an absolute, objective standard outside ourselves.
That I believe, was the ultimate point of the parent.
I knew what his/her point was. I simply didn't agree with it; I think it's based upon assumptions (that there's no value in moral concepts that don't have the same, absolute value to everyone) that I'm not making. There's no logical reason or need to make those assumptions.
Putting XFree86 in non free would mean that all software which depends on X would have to move to contrib.
Not if that software is built upon the X.Org libraries etc., rather than the XFree86 base, which is what we were talking about (and why I said what I did about how, if Debian were using X.Org instead, then there's not much point in moving XF86 to non-free because there's not much point in keeping XF86 around at all.).
But The main issue isn't about freeness, but about that it is not legal to link something like VNC which is GPL with the new license.
Yeah, that I'm aware of. We were considering something else.
Yeah, but Debian is no longer supporting nonfree software with their next (sarge) release. Doesn't that put XFree86 back on the Outs with Debian?
Hi. You've got two independent issues here.
First of all, your statement about nonfree in sarge isn't exactly correct. The developers recently held a vote about this and voted to reaffirm their support for the nonfree section of the archive.
Second, you are right that XFree86 is on the outs with Debian. At least, that's my understanding. Putting it in nonfree is something I never thought about, and I suppose it's possible (maybe if there's a DD here, he/she can say whether it is or isn't). But I'm not sure what the point would be; if all the GUI apps in main are built using the libraries from an X.Org release, what would you use an XFree86 in nonfree for?
Hopefully, a DD will step in and comment if I've missed something here.
You miss the point, and fail to distinguish between two methods of obtaining true beliefs.
No. I simply don't personally use your "method," that's all.
One of them is a bad way, the other is good.
I agree with this statement! But I think we'd disagree as to which is which. Heh.
1. Your claim that you are able to determine right and wrong independant from God or the threat of hell is a testimony to your willingness to listen to subjective feelings about good and evil.
Of course.
Since you willingly concede that different people will have different conceptions, then you must also agree that such terms "right" and "wrong" are subjective. And without a God, or a yardstick, such understandings must be fluid.
Absolutely. Not only that, but I'd also claim that as a practical matter, such understandings are subjective even if there is a supreme being, because earnest believers will still differ in interpretation. I've known many many devout Christians in my life. None of them had identically the same moral sense as any of the others, since their interpretations of what they felt God wanted out of them were not all identically the same.
2. My point was a logical one - if there is no afterlife, no God, then there is no "right" or "wrong". The important question is not "could you know the right thing to do without the threat of eternal punishment", but rather "is there a right or wrong if there is no God or eternal punishment?"
And here is where we disagree. If, instead, you wrote your first sentence as "if there is no afterlife, no God, then there is no objective right or wrong, independent of human feelings" then I'd agree. I don't know how one comes up with an absolute, objective metric for measuring right and wrong in the absence of a supreme being. But that's different from saying that there's no right or wrong. I make decisions every day based on what seems to me to be morally right or wrong. Those decisions are made using my personal moral compass, rather than one imposed on me from without. But that doesn't make them any less an attempt to do right and not do wrong.
And this is one of the greatest hypocricies of the atheist position - a failure to acknowledge the logical conclusion, that "good" and "evil" only make sense when we consider the divine. Without any God, there is no right or wrong.
This is circular reasoning. You're saying "without any God, there is no right or wrong, because right and wrong only make sense if there is a God." And the source of this circular reasoning is the implicit assumption that the concepts of right and wrong only make sense if those concepts are absolute, objective ones. I don't see any logical reason to buy that.
Naturalists are probably deathly afraid of these conclusions for two reasons:
Well, I hope I've illustrated above that I, at least, am not deathly afraid of these conclusions, since I don't think the first one is bad, while I don't think the second one makes any logical sense. But anyway . . .
Oh, and what's a naturalist? Is that the same as an athiest?
1. It goes against every fibre of humans, because the truth is we do know good and evil, and that we know it because there is a God. The understanding is so overwhelming that even a logical conclusion denying "good" or "evil" is avoided, because it is counter to what we know a priori.
If it reassures you to think that some people feel that way, go for it. I can't speak for anyone but me. In my case, I don't have an overwhelming understanding that there is any supreme being. In fact, just the opposite. I think claims require evidence, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think the concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent supreme being is pretty extraordinary . . .pretty far outside anything we encounter in our lives. So where's that extraordinarily c
I wonder whether you saw the news stories a couple of months back about the German cannibal. His defence against a manslaughter charge was that both he and his victim wanted to do it. Just wondering what you think of that defence.
Yes, I had heard/read about that. To tell you the truth, I don't know what I think of it (presuming, of course, that he's telling the truth; it's not an interesting situation for this discussion if he wasn't, and the victim really hadn't consented).
On one hand, my personal "ick" factor is very very high with this one. On the other hand, I personally don't think there should be a blanket illegality to suicide; that is, I don't think suicide is always wrong and should always be forbidden, because I think whatever else is true, we own ourselves. Was the victim of sound mind when he made the decision (to die and to be eaten afterwards)? Is it even possible to answer that question completely rationally (that is, can I judge that without my personal "ick" factor creating a bias that no one of sound mind could ever possibly make such a choice)?
Honestly, I don't know what I think about it. Other than that the whole thing grosses me out of existence, that is.
It's fascinating how all questions on morality boil down to God's existence.
They do? I don't think so. What makes you think they do? The fact that I made my (negative) comments about belief? They were included not to make a statement about the basis for morality, but merely to illustrate a point: you, too, might find uncomfortable a world in which others get to decide for you the terms of your life.
With no God, there is no "right" or "wrong". Suddenly everything is neutral. It is then ever so convenient to deny God's existence as an excuse for what you want to excuse, and to then use nonsensical terms like "evil" when you want to appeal to morality, such as when you said most religions are evil institutions.
Such terms are not nonsensical at all. The fact that you don't see any basis for right and wrong outside of a belief in a supreme being doesn't mean that other people are similarly hobbled. I'm perfectly capable of judging right or wrong in my life without the threat of eternal hellfire, thank you very much.
So, which way is it? If you think these organisations are evil, then by what standard or law do you judge them to be evil.
What standard? My own. The one I've developed over the course of my life's experiences, which I think is mostly internally logically consistent, but ultimately (like all logical systems) is based on some assumptions about what's good and right, assumptions that seem kind and fair and that I can live with. And over the course of my life, through my life's experiences, I sometimes see holes in my logic, or even things which challenge my assumptions; and so my moral sense is refined. But it's something that I've generated, and am constantly re-assessing, for myself. And while external sources of course make and have made an impact on me (to use an extreme example, I'd probably be more likely to think murder was OK if I lived in a society where everyone thought murder was OK), my moral sense doesn't parrot anyone's list of dos and don'ts.
Surely you're not saying that you can't think of any reason to do the "right thing" in your life other than the threat of eternal punishment, are you?
There is nothing wrong with sex - you set up a strawman then attack it. The problem is in improper use of it. I don't care what you say - the thought of a man recording his wife (as I heard in one case) act in sex scenes makes me sick and angry.
Sick and angry enough to make it illegal for them to do so, even if that's what they both want to do?
The whole porn industry in general makes me angry - a comment which is bound to displease many slashdotters, as I know how popular pornography is.
No, what's popular is the idea of letting people live their own lives without our poking our noses into parts of their lives which aren't any of our business. If you and your wife want to invite a third consenting adult to join you, I may think that's immoral, and I may not want to do it myself; but it's none of my business what you and your wife do.
Sex should never involve multiple men. It should never involve having sex with another man's wife. It is an evil institution that damages the lives of people who participate in it, and those who view it.
Those are your opinions. In my opinion, life should not involve slavish belief in an unsubstantiated fairy tale about a hypothetical omnipotent being. And in my opinion, most religions are evil institutions that damage the lives of people who participate in them and interact with them. Those are my opinions. How fortunate for both of us that we live in a place where people are granted the freedom to pursue happiness as they see fit, and we can agree to disagree.
How many of you porn supporters can honestly say you'd be pleased if your daughter became a porn star, having sex with many different men in her life, for thousands of other men to view?
I wouldn't be pleased. I wouldn't be pleased if she became a fundamentalist, either. But I'm not about to make either thing illegal. It's her life; it would lose a lot of its meaning if I got to tell her what she could and could not do with it.
So, the standard model defines 16 particles. But if there are only those 16, then none of them have mass, so there must be another one, that magically provides mass for the others. Weird. You can't make this stuff up, folks... err... oh, wait.
Nice try. Apart from the fact that the article's description of the role of the Higgs in generating masses isn't quite correct, there's your implication that this is some what frivolous. Well, if you evaluate scientific theories by the accuracy of their predictions, an argument can be made that the standard model of elementary particle physics is the most successful scientific theory of all time -- ranging from making correct predictions of electrodynamic phenomena out to absolutely absurdly large numbers of significant digits, to making predictions about the numbers of certain types of particles that will exist ("there will be one more light neutrino species, but no more after that") -- subsequently confirmed.
There are a lot of things you can fairly criticize particle physicists about; but suggesting that the standard model is removed from reality isn't one of them.
Reminds me of the "dark energy" idea: "Well, we can only find 1/3 of the matter that we know should exist, so the rest is.. well, it's just the dark energy that we can't detect!"
Like many people, you've got "dark matter" and "dark energy" confused (I personally hate the "dark energy" term, and wish Michael Turner (I think it was him) hadn't coined it; but we're stuck with it now). And while either of them may someday turn out to have been a wrong turn in the history of cosmology, neither is an unfounded concept.
Is that most of the images get imaged processed to death. Without Kalman filtering and deconvolution algorithms they would look lame, and these algorithms can be done to images taken from Earthbound telescopes.
The high-redshift objects observations like this are intended to uncover have effectively no emission in the visible band by the time their light reaches Earth. What Earthbound telescope did you have in mind to produce this high-redshift infrared imaging?
This link may help. The one thing it doesn't explain that most people don't go in already knowing is that neutron capture, and subsequent fission, of uranium is more likely (in nuclear physics terms, the fission cross-section is higher) if the neutrons are slowed down a bit from the energies they had when their parent nucleus fissioned.
Actually, it's quite clear that you are not using Audacity, "right now"
Especially since I was talking about Ardour!
and i never got it to work as it should (tm), though i use linux since uhm 4 years.
Really? I'm using it right now, and it works well for me. My only problem with it at this point is the extreme lack of documentation. I'm having to use the Pro Tools manual to figure out a lot of stuff about how Ardour works. But it's very nice.
My understanding was that Audacity was being made to do I/O through JACK; but I look at the Release Notes for this release and I don't see that.
Running Ardour through JACK (with realtime capabilities), I get sub-millisecond latencies and no XRUNs at all. I'd like to be able to use Audacity under similar terms.
Analyzing the motion of a disc which rotates about both an axis through the side (flipping) and an axis through the face simultaneously is a straightforward physics problem that decades of physics undergrads and grad students have had to solve as part of classical mechanics classes. The problems are typically phrased in "relevant to coin-tossing" form, as well. In my mechanics class, the problem was phrased something like "what ratio of angular velocities (around the two rotational axes) is necessary to have the coin have a 2/3 chance of landing with the same side facing up as that which started?"
New scientific spin?
Read up on Maslow's hierarchy, you twit.
Try re-reading my post -- particularly the part about it not being an either/or thing.
Then try responding again, but this time without making yourself look like a flaming asshole.