1. Let us assume Bush and his administration are "me, basically rational, basically GOOD people trying to do the best that they can".
2. Therefore, Bush and his administration are "me, basically rational, basically GOOD people trying to do the best that they can".
How can you dispute that???
And I also love how you try to say that the victims of Katrina are themselves to blame. Millions of words have been written about Katrina and it has been made very clear that the Federal Government failed. First they failed to provide levys which should have prevented the flooding. Secondly they did not respond to the disaster properly causing many needless deaths after the hurricane was over.
As far as the satelite, it is clear that the Bush administration wants to steer NASAs priorities away from Earth study. They even removed the Earth study portion from their mission statement. It is also well known what they do want to steer nasa towards -- manned missions to the moon and mars. And I have yet to see a good justification on why we should spend hundreds of billions of dollars on these missions and we should sacrifice studying the earth for them. So yes the blame falls entirely on Bushes shoulders for that.
And in the last 5 years bush was able to get the budgets he wants, so he cant blame congress for that.
Really? Novgorod had a thriving democratic society long before any western european nation did.
I guess thats the new type of racism saying certain cultures are just too dumb and backward to have the democracy of western countries. Just like other types of racism it is born out of stupidity and ignorance. So before saying something stupid like this again, try to really look into the histories of the countries. You may be surprised to find out who is been working for democracy and who against.
Another very good one is freeciv. Freeciv may look much cheesier than the regular civilizations but in AI it surpasses it by far. I suppose it helps that it is developed by players of the game.
The OSX kernel is not open source. It is based on an open source kernel (BSD) and Apple released an open sourced OS which is supposed to be somewhat similar to OSX (Darwin). But OSX itself is definitely not open source.
Apple used open source code from the BSD project which is licensed under the BSD license and not the GPL. The BSD license allows you to take open source code and close source it.
In addition the official Nvidia drivers (inlcuding the Linux and OSX ones) have never been open source.
You make a good point. This is why Apple will never be really big. This is why they originally failed in the PC business and their current computer business is stalling. They just want to control everything. They will not let the creativity of the entire computer industry work in favor of their products.
Essentially, Apple wants anything running on an Apple product to be either developed and provided by Apple or provided by another party which is under contract from Apple so that Apple still has control over the software. As you said, that is a recipe for failure, because things new and exciting usually come from unexpected places, which means Apple will never feature anything new and exciting, which means they will always be trying to catch up.
Admittedly they have had some success with mobile devices, and that is because people are not yet used to running third party software on mobile devices. But that is going to change soon, and then the iPhone will be just like the Apple computers -- an expensive and cute looking gadget which never supports the software you need.
It will be a shame too, because hardware-wise this phone is far ahead of anything else out there, because it completely removes the key pad and replaces it with a huge screen.
"This must have been literally translated from Russian. Most other languages are hilarious when literally translated without changing cases or tenses"
I certainly hope this is the reason, but lets face it, up to now slashdot editors have not really needed translation problems to serve us broken english.
hey they have to earn their keep, you know. Ninetendo hired the same PR firm that caused slashdot to be the biggest whores for apple ever. Now they have to work for ninetendo, and that involves badmouthing the ps3. For several reasons the xbox is not really as much of a competitor to the wii as the ps3 is.
Gee, I guess when you get appointed to government by some generals that pulled off a military coup, you do not really need to know what the hell you are talking about.
Its not like he needs to impress the voters or anything.
He is in the business of squeezing every last dollar out of those original three star wars movies, by releasing and re-releasing all kinds of bastardized versions until even his biggest fans start hating him.
By the way, Lucas should not complain how expensive movies are, he is mostly to blame for this. His new star wars movies were an example of everything that is wrong about expensive movies. They were completely unimaginitive and boring, and the only thing that made anyone want to see them was the sheer ammount money thrown on the screen (as well as the money spent on advertizing).
If you make a good movie, people will see it even if it is not super expensive.
"Since intelligent design is an ideology, then opposition to ID is also an ideology"
This is not true. Opposition to ID can be (and usually is) based on very non-ideological scientific grounds. The scientific grounds are that ID is not proven by physical evidence or experimentation. Or, even more to the point, as stated the ID theory is such that it cannot possibly be proven by physical evidence or experimentation. Mind you, that does not mean ID is false, it may very well be true (and i am sure it is true in a way, being christian myself), but it means that it is outside of the realm of science.
"I disagree with ID,"
Do you really think anyone believes this? Why do all the people of slashdot that put up some religious point of view start out by lying about being religious?
one should not assume, that because somebody is religious it automatically means they are against science or want to change scientific findings. Most major Christian religions have no bones with science.
So lets not blame the whole religious population on the actions of few loud fundamentalists.
And what exactly are they not following through on? I know their products are in perpetual beta status, but they are still damn useful and I use them all the time. I think the perpetual beta is a lawsuit avoidance scheme more than anything else.
Some of their beta products, such as Gmail are much more polished than all the competition out there.
Even the link included in the slashdot article shows that the ask.com market share actually FELL over last year. So how is Ask.com "a rising star" then?
Ask.com is using the questionable AOL business model. That is they advertise a lot on TV and traditional media in order to draw in users that are new to the internet. That's all good and all but those new to the internet users eventually become slightly more experienced and learn that everybody else actually uses google for search, so they switch too. Thus, just like AOL ask.com more or less trains future clients of their competitors.
But meanwhile Ask.com keep the advertisement dollars flowing which gets them a nice favorable articles in Forbes and apparently they have decided to pay for some Slashvertisements as well.
The article talks about Google news which is not a search engine and thus it does not compete with Ask.com. Google news does not pretend to offer impartial results or to search the whole web.
I quickly scanned some of the alleged hate speech, I am not sure if it qualifies as hate speech, but I see how Google may be affraid that they would get too much complaints if it shows up on the front page of google news. Also I don't think dailykos or democratic underground contain "the same kind of hate speech".
I dont know how do you know about private political contributions of Google's employees. Arent those supposed to be private? But even if you are correct, what does that have to do with anything?
Google's agreement to censor results in China may be a legitimate reason to boycott but if one does that one should also boycott all the other large internet companies which do the same thing. Yahoo is much worse because they actually give Chinese authorities information that lands people in jail.
Generally, I do not think that by itself DRM is morally wrong. But considering some of the DRM proposals out there it makes complete sense that the FSF should oppose them. And this has nothing to do with music or movies. It has to do with free software.
In other words some of the DRM proposals out there may actually make it impossible to run legally obtained free software on computers. For example, hardware based software verification may make it impossible to load Linux on any PC.
Also most DRM schemes rely not only on secrcy of passwords and codes, but secrecy of the process of decoding itself. Now everyone here knows that this is a completely stupid strategy and security by obscurity is no security at all, but thats the way things are working out. When the process is secret, this automaticaly means that it cannot be performed by free software. I.e., if one writes free software to do it they risk legal liability as free (as in open source) software inherently reveals the process.
So in other words even if one ignores the anti-DRM idealism, the fact still remains that the current proposed DRM protection schemes can basically make it impossible to use free software for many if not most tasks.
so we just have to find, iron, titanium, aluminum, rubber, copper, whatever the hell rocket fuel is made out of, and all the other elements that make up a rocket on the moon. Oh and we have to build all the facilities from mines to forges and factories that would be required to build the ships. And we have to lift the thousands of workers that usually build space ships to the moon. Tbhis is going to be a real money saver.
Here is an idea, lets forget the whole space colonization thing coz it aint happening any time soon. Let us use the space programs for actual science, to actually improve our knowledge so that some time we may actually have the technology we may decide to do space colonization if we wanted to.
Amd right now we can do our science much easier with robots into space which do not require any oxygen, water, or food.
see that is pure briliance. now it will be much easier to put humans on the moon which will be great because it will advance the ultimate purpose of putting humans on the moon which is...
hmmmm what the hell was the purpose of putting humans on the moon ??? Oh thats right there was this speech about four or five years ago, where Bush really wanted to be compared to Kenedy and so he started talking about putting people on the moon.
But then again I remember this other earlier speech where bush (again wanting to sound like kenedy) challenged Americans to give up 300 hours a year for community service. So which one of you people has done their community service this year? And no if you did it because you got a drunk driving violation that doesnt count.
Lets face it -- nobody did their community service. The few people that may have done some community service probably did not do it because of that speech, but for an entirely different reason. In fact everyone (including the biggest bush supporters) kind of forgot about that speech and the whole community service "challenge". So lets forget about the moon thing too. It's just as silly.
These speeches happened long ago and they served their purpose. I.e. everyone in the media talked about how similar bush is to Kenedy. And then there were these really cute arguments about whether he was more Kenedy like or more Churchill like. Or whether he was really the second Lincoln. Can we just forget about this whole period... lets face it... it is kind of embarassing.
If there is anything to do on the moon we can have some robots do it. That probably wont be a problem though because it is doubtful there is anything to do up there. In the Apolo missions they tried to do everything they could... they even lifted a cool little jeep up there to do some moon offroading. What else is there?
Lets face it the last several years the country has been clouded by a culture of stupidity. And it is no wonder that children's ability to understand sciance is good at young age but drops off sharply at high school because high school is where children are exposed to the 'adult' culture and politics.
Lets face it everyone knows how stupidity penetrated politics, I dont have to spell it out. But from there it spread out and went everywhere. All of a sudden anyone remotely intelligent on TV was deemed to be part of the "old liberal media" even if they were not liberal at all.
Every one on television and in popular culture was pressured to show and give credit to the point of view of stupidity and complete idiocy or they risked being labeled part of the old liberal media. Half wits that specialized in entertaining complete uneducated idiots (like the various radio talk show hosts) were elevated to respected status. Don't get me started on bill oreilly.
And the most offensive thing is that stupidity invaded popular culture under the disguise of religion. Every complete moron that went on TV perpetuating some lowest common denominator 'theory' awlays said that he was taking directions from jesus himself and therefore one could not use logical arguments against him because that made one a godless liberal elitist that disrespects ordinary americans. As if believing in God gave everyone the right... no, the duty and repsonsibility of being as stupid as possible.
One wonders how we never saw an intelligent promoter of Christianity on TV. I know they exist, because I have read their writings, but for some reason when you turn on your television set all you see is some half wit foaming at the mouth bible thumping neo fascist.
And dont get me started about popular culture. We worship dumb bimbos that act like sluts but assure everyone that they are good christians. Oh and where we once had comics that made us think now we have... larry the cable guy.
Its not even only stupidity... it is mediocrity at every level of culture... just like the comedians are not very funny, the younger actors are not especially good at acting, the movie directors suck at directing, the newscasters do no serious journalism, the popular writers cant write very well, the policy makers make terrible foreign policy etc. Mediocrity is being worshipped and talent, intelligence, etc. are being punished.
Meanwhile university professors are eyed with a lot of suspicion, there are organizations being started for the purpose of spying on proffessors and reporting the "dangerous ones", think-tanks have sprung up so that no journalist ever has to ask the opinion of a university proffessor if they need an "expert".
Some kids are born smarter and some arent. But in order to learn one need not only be smart one need to want to learn. When stupidity is being worshipped and intelligent or otherwise talented people are simply embarassed of their talent, then fewer and fewer kids will want to learn.
Slashdot Mirror
More like slay the embezzler.
Is it that difficult to type "Brin" ?
Wow, this is brilliant reasoning:
1. Let us assume Bush and his administration are "me, basically rational, basically GOOD people trying to do the best that they can".
2. Therefore, Bush and his administration are "me, basically rational, basically GOOD people trying to do the best that they can".
How can you dispute that???
And I also love how you try to say that the victims of Katrina are themselves to blame. Millions of words have been written about Katrina and it has been made very clear that the Federal Government failed. First they failed to provide levys which should have prevented the flooding. Secondly they did not respond to the disaster properly causing many needless deaths after the hurricane was over.
As far as the satelite, it is clear that the Bush administration wants to steer NASAs priorities away from Earth study. They even removed the Earth study portion from their mission statement. It is also well known what they do want to steer nasa towards -- manned missions to the moon and mars. And I have yet to see a good justification on why we should spend hundreds of billions of dollars on these missions and we should sacrifice studying the earth for them. So yes the blame falls entirely on Bushes shoulders for that.
And in the last 5 years bush was able to get the budgets he wants, so he cant blame congress for that.
Really? Novgorod had a thriving democratic society long before any western european nation did.
I guess thats the new type of racism saying certain cultures are just too dumb and backward to have the democracy of western countries. Just like other types of racism it is born out of stupidity and ignorance. So before saying something stupid like this again, try to really look into the histories of the countries. You may be surprised to find out who is been working for democracy and who against.
I agree, GalCiv II certainly has a very tough AI.
Another very good one is freeciv. Freeciv may look much cheesier than the regular civilizations but in AI it surpasses it by far. I suppose it helps that it is developed by players of the game.
Menia zavut Edmund.
I guess there may be some benefit of being forced to learn Russian and all its infuriating padezhi after all.
The OSX kernel is not open source. It is based on an open source kernel (BSD) and Apple released an open sourced OS which is supposed to be somewhat similar to OSX (Darwin). But OSX itself is definitely not open source.
Apple used open source code from the BSD project which is licensed under the BSD license and not the GPL. The BSD license allows you to take open source code and close source it.
In addition the official Nvidia drivers (inlcuding the Linux and OSX ones) have never been open source.
You make a good point. This is why Apple will never be really big. This is why they originally failed in the PC business and their current computer business is stalling. They just want to control everything. They will not let the creativity of the entire computer industry work in favor of their products.
Essentially, Apple wants anything running on an Apple product to be either developed and provided by Apple or provided by another party which is under contract from Apple so that Apple still has control over the software. As you said, that is a recipe for failure, because things new and exciting usually come from unexpected places, which means Apple will never feature anything new and exciting, which means they will always be trying to catch up.
Admittedly they have had some success with mobile devices, and that is because people are not yet used to running third party software on mobile devices. But that is going to change soon, and then the iPhone will be just like the Apple computers -- an expensive and cute looking gadget which never supports the software you need.
It will be a shame too, because hardware-wise this phone is far ahead of anything else out there, because it completely removes the key pad and replaces it with a huge screen.
"This must have been literally translated from Russian. Most other languages are hilarious when literally translated without changing cases or tenses"
I certainly hope this is the reason, but lets face it, up to now slashdot editors have not really needed translation problems to serve us broken english.
Bullshit, this is not about peer review, because the papers will not be reviewed by peers (i.e. other scientists) but politicians.
And there are already mechanisms for peer review in the American scientific community that do not require government censorship.
hey they have to earn their keep, you know. Ninetendo hired the same PR firm that caused slashdot to be the biggest whores for apple ever. Now they have to work for ninetendo, and that involves badmouthing the ps3. For several reasons the xbox is not really as much of a competitor to the wii as the ps3 is.
Gee, I guess when you get appointed to government by some generals that pulled off a military coup, you do not really need to know what the hell you are talking about.
Its not like he needs to impress the voters or anything.
But he was never able to use affirmations to get his TV show high ratings. I remember distinclty reading that he was trying to do that.
Which is a shame because the TV show was funny and clever and better than most shows out there.
So, my point is, it does not work all the time.
He is in the business of squeezing every last dollar out of those original three star wars movies, by releasing and re-releasing all kinds of bastardized versions until even his biggest fans start hating him.
By the way, Lucas should not complain how expensive movies are, he is mostly to blame for this. His new star wars movies were an example of everything that is wrong about expensive movies. They were completely unimaginitive and boring, and the only thing that made anyone want to see them was the sheer ammount money thrown on the screen (as well as the money spent on advertizing).
If you make a good movie, people will see it even if it is not super expensive.
You make no sense whatsoever.
"Since intelligent design is an ideology, then opposition to ID is also an ideology"
This is not true. Opposition to ID can be (and usually is) based on very non-ideological scientific grounds. The scientific grounds are that ID is not proven by physical evidence or experimentation. Or, even more to the point, as stated the ID theory is such that it cannot possibly be proven by physical evidence or experimentation. Mind you, that does not mean ID is false, it may very well be true (and i am sure it is true in a way, being christian myself), but it means that it is outside of the realm of science.
"I disagree with ID,"
Do you really think anyone believes this? Why do all the people of slashdot that put up some religious point of view start out by lying about being religious?
one should not assume, that because somebody is religious it automatically means they are against science or want to change scientific findings. Most major Christian religions have no bones with science. So lets not blame the whole religious population on the actions of few loud fundamentalists.
And what exactly are they not following through on? I know their products are in perpetual beta status, but they are still damn useful and I use them all the time. I think the perpetual beta is a lawsuit avoidance scheme more than anything else.
Some of their beta products, such as Gmail are much more polished than all the competition out there.
They would not extradite the mass murderer Pinochet, but that hacker gets sent back.
Before anyone actually buys this terrible book please check out this hilarious review:
c fm
http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.
And no I will not get any money if you click on the review.
Even the link included in the slashdot article shows that the ask.com market share actually FELL over last year. So how is Ask.com "a rising star" then?
Ask.com is using the questionable AOL business model. That is they advertise a lot on TV and traditional media in order to draw in users that are new to the internet. That's all good and all but those new to the internet users eventually become slightly more experienced and learn that everybody else actually uses google for search, so they switch too. Thus, just like AOL ask.com more or less trains future clients of their competitors.
But meanwhile Ask.com keep the advertisement dollars flowing which gets them a nice favorable articles in Forbes and apparently they have decided to pay for some Slashvertisements as well.
The article talks about Google news which is not a search engine and thus it does not compete with Ask.com. Google news does not pretend to offer impartial results or to search the whole web.
I quickly scanned some of the alleged hate speech, I am not sure if it qualifies as hate speech, but I see how Google may be affraid that they would get too much complaints if it shows up on the front page of google news. Also I don't think dailykos or democratic underground contain "the same kind of hate speech".
I dont know how do you know about private political contributions of Google's employees. Arent those supposed to be private? But even if you are correct, what does that have to do with anything?
Google's agreement to censor results in China may be a legitimate reason to boycott but if one does that one should also boycott all the other large internet companies which do the same thing. Yahoo is much worse because they actually give Chinese authorities information that lands people in jail.
Generally, I do not think that by itself DRM is morally wrong. But considering some of the DRM proposals out there it makes complete sense that the FSF should oppose them. And this has nothing to do with music or movies. It has to do with free software.
In other words some of the DRM proposals out there may actually make it impossible to run legally obtained free software on computers. For example, hardware based software verification may make it impossible to load Linux on any PC.
Also most DRM schemes rely not only on secrcy of passwords and codes, but secrecy of the process of decoding itself. Now everyone here knows that this is a completely stupid strategy and security by obscurity is no security at all, but thats the way things are working out. When the process is secret, this automaticaly means that it cannot be performed by free software. I.e., if one writes free software to do it they risk legal liability as free (as in open source) software inherently reveals the process.
So in other words even if one ignores the anti-DRM idealism, the fact still remains that the current proposed DRM protection schemes can basically make it impossible to use free software for many if not most tasks.
so we just have to find, iron, titanium, aluminum, rubber, copper, whatever the hell rocket fuel is made out of, and all the other elements that make up a rocket on the moon. Oh and we have to build all the facilities from mines to forges and factories that would be required to build the ships. And we have to lift the thousands of workers that usually build space ships to the moon. Tbhis is going to be a real money saver.
Here is an idea, lets forget the whole space colonization thing coz it aint happening any time soon. Let us use the space programs for actual science, to actually improve our knowledge so that some time we may actually have the technology we may decide to do space colonization if we wanted to.
Amd right now we can do our science much easier with robots into space which do not require any oxygen, water, or food.
see that is pure briliance. now it will be much easier to put humans on the moon which will be great because it will advance the ultimate purpose of putting humans on the moon which is ...
... lets face it ... it is kind of embarassing.
... they even lifted a cool little jeep up there to do some moon offroading. What else is there?
hmmmm what the hell was the purpose of putting humans on the moon ??? Oh thats right there was this speech about four or five years ago, where Bush really wanted to be compared to Kenedy and so he started talking about putting people on the moon.
But then again I remember this other earlier speech where bush (again wanting to sound like kenedy) challenged Americans to give up 300 hours a year for community service. So which one of you people has done their community service this year? And no if you did it because you got a drunk driving violation that doesnt count.
Lets face it -- nobody did their community service. The few people that may have done some community service probably did not do it because of that speech, but for an entirely different reason. In fact everyone (including the biggest bush supporters) kind of forgot about that speech and the whole community service "challenge". So lets forget about the moon thing too. It's just as silly.
These speeches happened long ago and they served their purpose. I.e. everyone in the media talked about how similar bush is to Kenedy. And then there were these really cute arguments about whether he was more Kenedy like or more Churchill like. Or whether he was really the second Lincoln. Can we just forget about this whole period
If there is anything to do on the moon we can have some robots do it. That probably wont be a problem though because it is doubtful there is anything to do up there. In the Apolo missions they tried to do everything they could
Lets face it the last several years the country has been clouded by a culture of stupidity. And it is no wonder that children's ability to understand sciance is good at young age but drops off sharply at high school because high school is where children are exposed to the 'adult' culture and politics.
... no, the duty and repsonsibility of being as stupid as possible.
... larry the cable guy.
... it is mediocrity at every level of culture ... just like the comedians are not very funny, the younger actors are not especially good at acting, the movie directors suck at directing, the newscasters do no serious journalism, the popular writers cant write very well, the policy makers make terrible foreign policy etc. Mediocrity is being worshipped and talent, intelligence, etc. are being punished.
Lets face it everyone knows how stupidity penetrated politics, I dont have to spell it out. But from there it spread out and went everywhere. All of a sudden anyone remotely intelligent on TV was deemed to be part of the "old liberal media" even if they were not liberal at all.
Every one on television and in popular culture was pressured to show and give credit to the point of view of stupidity and complete idiocy or they risked being labeled part of the old liberal media. Half wits that specialized in entertaining complete uneducated idiots (like the various radio talk show hosts) were elevated to respected status. Don't get me started on bill oreilly.
And the most offensive thing is that stupidity invaded popular culture under the disguise of religion. Every complete moron that went on TV perpetuating some lowest common denominator 'theory' awlays said that he was taking directions from jesus himself and therefore one could not use logical arguments against him because that made one a godless liberal elitist that disrespects ordinary americans. As if believing in God gave everyone the right
One wonders how we never saw an intelligent promoter of Christianity on TV. I know they exist, because I have read their writings, but for some reason when you turn on your television set all you see is some half wit foaming at the mouth bible thumping neo fascist.
And dont get me started about popular culture. We worship dumb bimbos that act like sluts but assure everyone that they are good christians. Oh and where we once had comics that made us think now we have
Its not even only stupidity
Meanwhile university professors are eyed with a lot of suspicion, there are organizations being started for the purpose of spying on proffessors and reporting the "dangerous ones", think-tanks have sprung up so that no journalist ever has to ask the opinion of a university proffessor if they need an "expert".
Some kids are born smarter and some arent. But in order to learn one need not only be smart one need to want to learn. When stupidity is being worshipped and intelligent or otherwise talented people are simply embarassed of their talent, then fewer and fewer kids will want to learn.