I think Bill reflects a pretty common philosophy in our society. Bill and Melinda Gates' philanthropy has convinced me that they are genuinely nice people who care an awful lot about the world's problems and are taking both a smart and a very dedicated approach to solving them. I think there is an idea common in our society that when running a business, there are no ethics other than desire for profit. I've heard it referred to as the Pecuniary Pseudo-Truth. "If it's profitable, it's true." An otherwise ethical person can abandon all ethics in pursuit of profit and can justify it to himself. In all honesty, I can't deny that it's something I struggle with on a much smaller scale than Bill Gates.
I thought the whole point of the opening on Tattooine was that Luke was bored to tears on his home planet, and that his whole life up until this point was a choice between tendin' to the vaporators and picking up power converters at Tosche Station.
You forgot Bulls eyeing womprats. That's exciting... sort of.
I haven't paid for a computer in years. Since I run Linux, I usually can just pick up whatever friends or family are throwing away due to its being too old and slow. Vista looks like a windfall for me.
I honestly have to disagree based on my experience, but maybe you're right about some science teachers. When I was in public school, every science class began by teaching the scientific method. If the scientific method is taught correctly, it's obvious that this is not a method for discovering absolute truth, but an effort to describe the world based on what we're seeing. It also seems that most, if not all, science classes I had from public school through university had at least one point where the teacher said something to the effect of, "We used to believe A, because of a,b and c, but now due to the discovery of d which seems to disagree with A, we believe B which is consistent with a,b,c and d." This always left me open to the idea that e could come along to disprove B and force the scientific community to come up with C. I really think so long as the scientific method is taught well and some history is given on the evolution of scientific theories, the teacher shouldn't need to preface every concept with, "Now this is only a theory, but we believe that..." I think that should be intuitively obvious.
I was going to reply to the article, but you said exactly what I wanted to say, so I decided to reply to you. Just to add my perspective. I'm a devoutly religious christian. I go to church every week, and I believe that God created the earth and all the creatures on it. I suppose you could say that I believe in "Intelligent Design." But science is the application of the scientific method to discover more about the world. Creationism isn't science. If you want to teach about Creationism in school, then you can do so in classes on theology, philosophy, or even current political events, but it has no place in a science class. I'm also confused by Christians who are so intimidated by the theory of evolution. If you believe the Bible to be the word of an omniscient, omnipotent God, than the results of ongoing observation and experimentation just shouldn't be threatening to you. Learn all you can and trust that when you die, God will help you fill in the blanks.
Fundamental issues with open source software development
From the article :
This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend
And later :
First of all, there will always be exceptions to every rule. For example, I believe that relatively few complaints listed here apply to the Open Source browser Firefox [2] which continues to surpass my expectations. I'm discussing general trends that I've noticed, not specific cases. Secondly, I don't think that these are unresolvable problems. The purpose of this document is to raise awareness -- not to mindlessly complain -- in hopes that the Open Source community may begin to change their mind-set about some of these issues and work towards improving them.
I'd argue that the last paragraph I quoted indicates that these are not fundamental problems with Open Source Development, but merely common problems with Open Source Development. The author seemed to overuse the word fundamental throughout the article. Sorry to be nitpicky, but the title suggested a very different article than what I found. I was expecting something more along the lines of, "Open source software will never be useful, because the open source development model is fundamentally flawed in such and such a way."
Of course that would have merited a very different response, such as, "You're clearly being payed by (Insert evil proprietary software company here)".
Other than the lousy title and the gratuitous use of the word "fundamental", this article seemed very mild, obvious, and full of information that gets regurgitated on Slashdot every two days or so.
I don't understand how Republicans get away with this level of hypocrisy. They are in favor of privitization and less Government regulation of businesses, except when it comes to what can be said in the media. Republicans are in favor of states' rights, except when it comes to a state choosing to allow same-sex marraige.
This is a very good comment (although I think in all fairness, it could probably be applied to both parties). I myself am a religious person who would like to see the federal government weakened relative to local governments. I think there's tremendous waste throughout all levels of government. I think taxes could be significantly lower, and I feel like the more the federal government keeps their hands out of charity, schools, and businesses, the better those organizations run. Rhetorically, I suppose I'm very close to a republican, but I've always been very disturbed by the willingness of party members to compromise these principles to accomplish their goals. For example, I don't like the idea of gay marriage, but I would never support a constitutional amendment banning it. The issuing of marriage licenses is a power granted to states and I think it needs to remain with the states. I don't like courts overturning laws passed by elected officials, even if the decision of the courts is in my favor. Businesses that promote lewdness won't get my money. I don't need the FCC to protect me or my children. Deficits and excessive government spending are negative things, I don't think military spending should be an exception to that rule. I think bills that go through legislatures should be clear and concise in their focus. Bills that are loaded with things unrelated to their primary focus are wrong, even if everything in there is OK. I can't bring myself to support a party where the ends always justify the means. I guess I'm just not Machiavellian enough. This is probably while I'll always be politically marginal, but at least I can live with myself.
People also don't seem to realize that there's quite a lot of breadth in the field. I'm a programmer, who uses Linux at home and has sysadmins to help me with the Windows boxes at work. People are always shocked at how little I know about the latest features in Excel and MS Word. They give me this "You're a computer professional?" look and leave feeling good that they're better with computers than I am.
Don't spread this around. It's been very beneficial to me that people think computers are emotional. Often, when I make something work on a computer, I get the response, "I did that exact thing and it didn't work for me." I always respond that the computer knows that I'm a professional and is intimidated by me. Then I don't have to explain to people that they clearly didn't do the same thing or it would have worked.
I thought I'd addressed your first concern in my original comment. I said they were anti-mormon for the first fifty years or so of their existance and that they had mellowed. I'll clarify my language for your sake. The Tribune has become a very respectable and reasonably unbiased source for the news in my opinion. I brought up their history in response to the original comment which seemed to characterize the paper as being slanted toward the LDS church. That is a characterization which I believe to be unsupportable. As to the Tribune's overall reporting on the SCO debacle, I'm unqualified to comment as I've been out of Utah and I've not taken the Tribune for some years. I looked up the article, because upon reading the original posters comment, I thought that his characterization would be a very odd position for the Tribune to take. On reading the article, I found that he was representing their position inaccurately, and that, in fact, the religion of SCO executives was not even mentioned. I posted in order to explain why I was originally skeptical while reading the parent post.
Others hava already shown the snippett from the article and commented on how you've mischaracterized the information, but I thought I'd also point out that "The Salt Lake Tribune" began as a reaction against "The Deseret News", the latter being owned by the LDS church. For the first fifty or so years of its existance, the Tribune was a decidedly anti-mormon publication. The LDS church no longer owns the Deseret News and the tribune has mellowed, but it's still not a paper you'd turn to for a pro-mormon perspective on anything.
Now that file sharings on the decline, record sales should begin to rebound, thus proving the RIAA's claims about the cause of their woes. who wants to put down bets about what effect this will have on sales.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
Rachmaninoff didn't start playing piano until he was in his thirties.
But even if technological freedom issues like the DMCA aren't the only factor in a voting decision, they still might tip the balance for some voters in some races. Even that is enough to make a difference. Legislators do seem to care what their constituents think, and they do seem to have a fear of doing something that looks stupid afterward.
Speaking of this, I live in Nevada and have been trying to figure out where my representatives stand on issues involving digital rights. It hasn't been easy. There are obviously some very high profile figures in this fight (Hollings, Boucher, etc.), but I'm not in a position to vote for or against any of these individuals. Does anyone know a place I can see how my representatives have voted on certain issues? These sorts of issues would profoundly affect how I vote.
I use Linux at home, but at work they gave me a windows machine. We're mostly an AS400 shop and I guess the client access tools for the as400 are better on Windows. If anyone knows differently, please tell me and I'll try to convince someone to let me change.
I think I must have missed something here. I'm a Utahn who supported Hatch in the 2000 election, but decided not to support him when I discovered he was the sole sponsor of the DMCA in the Senate. I wrote him a few letters about technology and copyright laws and all I got back were letters saying "That's why I sponsored the DMCA." What has he done that was so friendly to technological freedom. The truth is hatch is in for life in Utah, and it makes little difference, but I'd like to know why I should support him in the future since that seems to be a prevalent opinion.
I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date, and the 'unstable' distribution being so... well... unstable.
I use testing and I'm pretty happy with it. It's more stable than most distributions and it's fairly up to date. I agree with most of your buddies other points, but there is a nice middle of the road Debian distro.
I want more anti-piracy protection on Microsoft software. I have several friends I've been trying to convince to use Linux for a while now. The problem is they already know Windows and they all got it for free.
I try to tell them it would be better not to pirate, but they don't listen. None of these guys would buy Microsoft products. They're all poor college students like me. Software piracy is the only thing keeping Windows alive with college and high school students. If anti-piracy methods became really effective, Microsoft products would lose the rising generation. That would be swell. Microsoft being able to enforce anti-piracy measures is the thing that will make Linux a viable alternative on the desktop.
"The way to address the record industry's concerns about loss of revenue is by finding other means of compensation, Fisher says, such as a tax increase on blank CDs. The major record labels may eventually push for that tax, or a tax on CD burners."
I've bought a lot of blank cd's. I'm about to buy a cd burner. I have never burned music on to any of them. I use them for linux distributions and to transport other large binary files. All free software, I don't pirate. I sure hope they don't tax these devices I use for legal purposes just because some people don't use them legally.
''This is a sociological problem and we have got to work it out,'' adds Galuten. ''I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music.''
What kind of hard drive are they talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
Thank goodness, I always name my booleans 'b'. I'll copyright "if (b) {".
I think Bill reflects a pretty common philosophy in our society. Bill and Melinda Gates' philanthropy has convinced me that they are genuinely nice people who care an awful lot about the world's problems and are taking both a smart and a very dedicated approach to solving them. I think there is an idea common in our society that when running a business, there are no ethics other than desire for profit. I've heard it referred to as the Pecuniary Pseudo-Truth. "If it's profitable, it's true." An otherwise ethical person can abandon all ethics in pursuit of profit and can justify it to himself. In all honesty, I can't deny that it's something I struggle with on a much smaller scale than Bill Gates.
You forgot Bulls eyeing womprats. That's exciting ... sort of.
I haven't paid for a computer in years. Since I run Linux, I usually can just pick up whatever friends or family are throwing away due to its being too old and slow. Vista looks like a windfall for me.
I honestly have to disagree based on my experience, but maybe you're right about some science teachers. When I was in public school, every science class began by teaching the scientific method. If the scientific method is taught correctly, it's obvious that this is not a method for discovering absolute truth, but an effort to describe the world based on what we're seeing. It also seems that most, if not all, science classes I had from public school through university had at least one point where the teacher said something to the effect of, "We used to believe A, because of a,b and c, but now due to the discovery of d which seems to disagree with A, we believe B which is consistent with a,b,c and d." This always left me open to the idea that e could come along to disprove B and force the scientific community to come up with C. I really think so long as the scientific method is taught well and some history is given on the evolution of scientific theories, the teacher shouldn't need to preface every concept with, "Now this is only a theory, but we believe that ..." I think that should be intuitively obvious.
I was going to reply to the article, but you said exactly what I wanted to say, so I decided to reply to you. Just to add my perspective. I'm a devoutly religious christian. I go to church every week, and I believe that God created the earth and all the creatures on it. I suppose you could say that I believe in "Intelligent Design." But science is the application of the scientific method to discover more about the world. Creationism isn't science. If you want to teach about Creationism in school, then you can do so in classes on theology, philosophy, or even current political events, but it has no place in a science class. I'm also confused by Christians who are so intimidated by the theory of evolution. If you believe the Bible to be the word of an omniscient, omnipotent God, than the results of ongoing observation and experimentation just shouldn't be threatening to you. Learn all you can and trust that when you die, God will help you fill in the blanks.
I play the banjo.
Pac Man made me fat! I've gotta find a lawyer.
Fundamental issues with open source software development
From the article :
This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend
And later :
First of all, there will always be exceptions to every rule. For example, I believe that relatively few complaints listed here apply to the Open Source browser Firefox [2] which continues to surpass my expectations. I'm discussing general trends that I've noticed, not specific cases. Secondly, I don't think that these are unresolvable problems. The purpose of this document is to raise awareness -- not to mindlessly complain -- in hopes that the Open Source community may begin to change their mind-set about some of these issues and work towards improving them.
I'd argue that the last paragraph I quoted indicates that these are not fundamental problems with Open Source Development, but merely common problems with Open Source Development. The author seemed to overuse the word fundamental throughout the article. Sorry to be nitpicky, but the title suggested a very different article than what I found. I was expecting something more along the lines of, "Open source software will never be useful, because the open source development model is fundamentally flawed in such and such a way."
Of course that would have merited a very different response, such as, "You're clearly being payed by (Insert evil proprietary software company here)".
Other than the lousy title and the gratuitous use of the word "fundamental", this article seemed very mild, obvious, and full of information that gets regurgitated on Slashdot every two days or so.
This is a very good comment (although I think in all fairness, it could probably be applied to both parties). I myself am a religious person who would like to see the federal government weakened relative to local governments. I think there's tremendous waste throughout all levels of government. I think taxes could be significantly lower, and I feel like the more the federal government keeps their hands out of charity, schools, and businesses, the better those organizations run. Rhetorically, I suppose I'm very close to a republican, but I've always been very disturbed by the willingness of party members to compromise these principles to accomplish their goals. For example, I don't like the idea of gay marriage, but I would never support a constitutional amendment banning it. The issuing of marriage licenses is a power granted to states and I think it needs to remain with the states. I don't like courts overturning laws passed by elected officials, even if the decision of the courts is in my favor. Businesses that promote lewdness won't get my money. I don't need the FCC to protect me or my children. Deficits and excessive government spending are negative things, I don't think military spending should be an exception to that rule. I think bills that go through legislatures should be clear and concise in their focus. Bills that are loaded with things unrelated to their primary focus are wrong, even if everything in there is OK. I can't bring myself to support a party where the ends always justify the means. I guess I'm just not Machiavellian enough. This is probably while I'll always be politically marginal, but at least I can live with myself.
People also don't seem to realize that there's quite a lot of breadth in the field. I'm a programmer, who uses Linux at home and has sysadmins to help me with the Windows boxes at work. People are always shocked at how little I know about the latest features in Excel and MS Word. They give me this "You're a computer professional?" look and leave feeling good that they're better with computers than I am.
Don't spread this around. It's been very beneficial to me that people think computers are emotional. Often, when I make something work on a computer, I get the response, "I did that exact thing and it didn't work for me." I always respond that the computer knows that I'm a professional and is intimidated by me. Then I don't have to explain to people that they clearly didn't do the same thing or it would have worked.
I thought I'd addressed your first concern in my original comment. I said they were anti-mormon for the first fifty years or so of their existance and that they had mellowed. I'll clarify my language for your sake. The Tribune has become a very respectable and reasonably unbiased source for the news in my opinion. I brought up their history in response to the original comment which seemed to characterize the paper as being slanted toward the LDS church. That is a characterization which I believe to be unsupportable. As to the Tribune's overall reporting on the SCO debacle, I'm unqualified to comment as I've been out of Utah and I've not taken the Tribune for some years. I looked up the article, because upon reading the original posters comment, I thought that his characterization would be a very odd position for the Tribune to take. On reading the article, I found that he was representing their position inaccurately, and that, in fact, the religion of SCO executives was not even mentioned. I posted in order to explain why I was originally skeptical while reading the parent post.
Others hava already shown the snippett from the article and commented on how you've mischaracterized the information, but I thought I'd also point out that "The Salt Lake Tribune" began as a reaction against "The Deseret News", the latter being owned by the LDS church. For the first fifty or so years of its existance, the Tribune was a decidedly anti-mormon publication. The LDS church no longer owns the Deseret News and the tribune has mellowed, but it's still not a paper you'd turn to for a pro-mormon perspective on anything.
In the Inquirer article, I don't see where SCO claims HP is clear. HP claims that they don't infringe on SCO's IP. And they don't.
Now that file sharings on the decline, record sales should begin to rebound, thus proving the RIAA's claims about the cause of their woes. who wants to put down bets about what effect this will have on sales.
Rachmaninoff didn't start playing piano until he was in his thirties.
And it comes in handy if you're network guys can't seem to keep the proxy up for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch.
Speaking of this, I live in Nevada and have been trying to figure out where my representatives stand on issues involving digital rights. It hasn't been easy. There are obviously some very high profile figures in this fight (Hollings, Boucher, etc.), but I'm not in a position to vote for or against any of these individuals. Does anyone know a place I can see how my representatives have voted on certain issues? These sorts of issues would profoundly affect how I vote.
I use Linux at home, but at work they gave me a windows machine. We're mostly an AS400 shop and I guess the client access tools for the as400 are better on Windows. If anyone knows differently, please tell me and I'll try to convince someone to let me change.
I think I must have missed something here. I'm a Utahn who supported Hatch in the 2000 election, but decided not to support him when I discovered he was the sole sponsor of the DMCA in the Senate. I wrote him a few letters about technology and copyright laws and all I got back were letters saying "That's why I sponsored the DMCA." What has he done that was so friendly to technological freedom. The truth is hatch is in for life in Utah, and it makes little difference, but I'd like to know why I should support him in the future since that seems to be a prevalent opinion.
I use testing and I'm pretty happy with it. It's more stable than most distributions and it's fairly up to date. I agree with most of your buddies other points, but there is a nice middle of the road Debian distro.
I try to tell them it would be better not to pirate, but they don't listen. None of these guys would buy Microsoft products. They're all poor college students like me. Software piracy is the only thing keeping Windows alive with college and high school students. If anti-piracy methods became really effective, Microsoft products would lose the rising generation. That would be swell. Microsoft being able to enforce anti-piracy measures is the thing that will make Linux a viable alternative on the desktop.
"The way to address the record industry's concerns about loss of revenue is by finding other means of compensation, Fisher says, such as a tax increase on blank CDs. The major record labels may eventually push for that tax, or a tax on CD burners." I've bought a lot of blank cd's. I'm about to buy a cd burner. I have never burned music on to any of them. I use them for linux distributions and to transport other large binary files. All free software, I don't pirate. I sure hope they don't tax these devices I use for legal purposes just because some people don't use them legally.
''This is a sociological problem and we have got to work it out,'' adds Galuten. ''I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music.'' What kind of hard drive are they talking about?