I have the feeling that the last question demanded a little more response than was given.
I too am a college student who is very busy and whose vote is "up for grabs." I agree with this statement. I would really like to see some more detailed information from the candidates. I, however, take issue with the fact that the average American is _this_ superficial. Maybe I'm a little nieve, but the example of the "how the candidates feel about abortion" infographic is not too terribly deep, and maybe someone could get something from this.
Alas, I think our candidates are getting fluffy. When the issue of not teaching evolution in schools came up, Bill Bradley was the only one who spoke out for evolution. The others skated the issue. This seems like a pretty important issue to me. Might it relate to education in America? Does "I support better education" mean teaching that the world is flat and that the earth is about 4,000 years old?
I think that my vote will probably go to Bradley simply because he is the only liberal (or candidate in general) who appears to have any balls. I am really tired of politicians who don't take a stand on anything at all. My visits to Algore2000 have been a painful reminder that a candidate may "get it" that the Internet can be a valuable tool, but they will almost always misuse it.
A low-content website is as big a slap in the face to the Internet as I can think of. This is the "Information Super-highway" isn't it? Sites that provide media without content merely waste bandwidth and my time.
I like Katz because he never fails to piss people off who take opensource to be some kind of religious movement.
I agree that Katz's articles can appear to actually suck insight from an issue, but even more embarrasing is the community's response to Katz.
Katz is something that all the antisocial geeks need. I agree that geeks have a high earning potential in the economy today. Many geeks even control indirectly where society is going.
Even if Katz is completely off-base on _everything_ he has ever said (I think that he can also be right on), he still gets technically minded people to view technology in a social context.
It is the people who understand society and its inner workings who ultimately control it. Many geeks get so preoccupied with the technology and the culture around geekdom, that they isolate them selves from a broader understanding of the world.
The mark of a good journalist is that he can insight people to think. Katz has never made any pretense that he could code. Sometimes he gets technical issues wrong, but that is where we set him straight. He does appear to be very open to criticism and reform. These are traits that are worth more than gold in the journalism profession today.
Give the guy a break. Turn off your computer. Go outside. It's a beautiful day.
Well, I think for most people, they concider GTK beautiful because it allows for more customizable theming for the user. That being said, I think most of the themes for GTK are ugly. I'd rather have functionality above looks anyway.
I have to say that I'm impressed by qt. It seems like it is relatively light weight and does more than other "archaic" widget sets.
Ofcourse nothing will ever look as good as Athena!
No reason to feel bad. I think that FreeBSD is an excellent way (better than linux) to get into *nix. No it does not have a point and click installation program like Caldera OpenLinux, but it is a "real" BSD style *nix that is very coherent. Many linux distros would be well advised to do things like FreeBSD. System setup is, for the most part, done in/stand/sysinstall. This is way different from say RedHat who has a control-panel and a Xconfigurator and a soundconf and... and... etc. Anything in FreeBSD that is not set up in/stand/sysinstall is set up in the standard BSD ways. This should not be intimidating if you really want to learn UNIX. There is a wealth of documentation out there on http://www.freebsd.org. Just my $.02. I really like FreeBSD. I've been a Linux user for a long time and I made the switch to BSD this year. FreeBSD is like the linux distro that I wish I could have had. I'm now dabbling in OpenBSD which is a do-it-yourselfer's dream. It makes UNIX fun:-) I promise. -Peter
Well said. A couple of points of clarification though. My point about Catholicism is that in fact the (generally) accepted version of the 10 Commandments actually does exclude the commandment about idolatry. They split the coveting commandment into two parts to still have 10 commandments.
I would argue that the crusades were primarily religious in nature. If you don't agree, then surely you must concede that religion was the facilitator. How else do you explain the Children's Crusade (tm). Even if the church's original plans were to sell the children into slavery, religion still was the selling point for those children's parents!
I laud your point that people must take responcibilty for their morality. I think this was a point that I myself tried to make. My point was not to bash Catholicism, but merely to point out that they have non-trivial differences between them and other sects of Christianity reguarding ethics. The Catholics' 10 Commandments have no prohibitions against idolatry. A Southern Baptist (ask one) would strongly oppose that. My point was that morality is subjective and that no god can dish it out. People have to think. This discussion is proof that we do!
Another thing that you said that I have to take issue with is that the NAZI's did not have religion. Their religion was the party and the diety was Hitler. Contrary to anything you may have heard, _Hitler was no atheist_. In fact there is much record to indicate that he was inspired by none other than Martin Luther. Luther was not secret about his anti-semitism. Had the NAZIs been geeks they would have realized that Jews can code just as well as anybody else. The reason that many non-Jews were persecuted was that they did not subscribe to the religion of nationalism! This is a credit to the clergy that had the moral character to think for themselves.
I believe that your accusation that science is a religion is off base. Science is a highly effective methodology of extracting and testing data. Good (and true) science is no more a religion than is arithmetic. Furthermore I would argue (as did the US supreme court) that Humanism is not a religion. The reason for this is that Humanism is a methodology of finding positive traints in humans and working to augment them. A precept of humanism is that one not take things on faith.
I will agree that I have met people who are rabidly atheist. This is a danger. People need to be aware that at the point you are taking things on faith, you are getting lazy. Point well taken. However, when atheists say,"I do not believe in god," you have to remember that they are not asserting positively that there is no god. They are merely saying that they have no reason to believe in gods than in giant invisible elephants that cause society to misbehave.
Yes I believe that people should become more well read on the study of religion. Hey I started out as a good Lutheran boy. I have studied in-depth the bible and Judeo-Christian traditions. I have studied Islam, the various Buddhist schools of thought, Baha'is, and a vast number of other not so major ones. As for your comment about Hinduism, they have a lot of good mythology and a wealth of wisdom. I especially like the number of stories about how Ganesha got his elephant's head.:-) I like it better than greek mythology.
Agnosticism is the ability to question all, and a good trait it is. Being a humanist does not make you open minded, but practicing its methods goes a long way.
I believe that the vast majority of geeks tend to be liberal and also atheist or atleast agnostic. I also think that this is not a problem and that I personally work to reinforce these traits in myself and others that I meet.
There is a difference between liberalism as a philosophy and liberalism as a political view. Liberalism works to secure rights and equal treatment for all. This is vastly different than competing ideologies such as nationalism, which strive to secure rights and privledges for a specific subset of society.
In this respect, I believe that geeks are inherently liberal. For example, I did not see a band of US nationalist geeks opposed to the contributions to the GNOME project by foriegners or to a primarily international KDE.
This brings up why geeks (or most of them) are not religious. When so many true geeks collaborate over the internet on such truely awe inspiring projects as Linux or Apache, how can people not be filled with a sense that humanity is on the right track? This faith in humanity and the no-whining attitude that people should improve themselves is called humanism (for a full explaination see http:/www.secularhumanism.org).
When people believe in the positive aspects of people, there are few reasons to believe in gods. This realization spawns secular humanists who are highly moral and highly motivated. I don't wait around for gods to make humanity better. I don't believe that gods do good things. If you look back through history, gods are a leading cause of death!
Then comes the question about morality. How can you have morality without an objective moral code? My answer to that is that objective moral codes are not objective. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the moral code is a tablet of set in stone rules. These are even the same for Catholics as Protestants! Is idolatry a sin? If you are Protestant then yes. If Catholic then no. Honoring thy father and mother? Yes if you mean that the woman is property and the man has the financial obligation to care for the folks.
After all the conflicting stories are read (geeks like to read). They make the (right) conclusion that religion is ethical bloatware. Religion only clouds judgement in moral situations. Just as that animated paper clip in Microsoft Office, geeks turn it off, or better yet use a humanist OS like Linux!
The same people who brought us LessTiff also have been working on a project to replace X while still trying to preserve the good things about X. They seem to have some lib ideas for their Y (pronounced OO) Windows. http://www.hungry.org/products/Ywindows/
Another note: if X is so dated and clunky, what about SGI? I thought that IRIX uses X. I can't envision a much better media OS! Maybe they know something I don't. Hopefully they will share:-)
--God is a crutch for the codependant! http://www.secularhumanism.org
Carl Sagan must have been rolling in his grave.
on
EDtv
·
· Score: 2
This movie lost Carl Sagan's balls somewhere. Sagan was a rational freethinking person in the tradition of Ingersol and Asimov as more his contemporary. The young atheist played by Foster did a great job of defending rationalism against the rabidly religious Matthew McConaughey--until her loins start burning for him.
She then decides to take her experience on faith, never thinking that maybe the 16 or how ever many hours of recorded static could mean something or that maybe, as a scientist, she could push for a repeat of the experiment with another person?
Maybe they could have produced a movie without falling back into the "you've got to have faith" mentality, but they sure didn't. Contact had so much promise, but finally undermined Carl's strong belief in rationalism and the betterment of humanity with a stupid religious message about faith.
Contact was crap. It makes me sick when I see "For Carl" on the screen of the moview.
Slashdot Mirror
I too am a college student who is very busy and whose vote is "up for grabs." I agree with this statement. I would really like to see some more detailed information from the candidates. I, however, take issue with the fact that the average American is _this_ superficial. Maybe I'm a little nieve, but the example of the "how the candidates feel about abortion" infographic is not too terribly deep, and maybe someone could get something from this.
Alas, I think our candidates are getting fluffy. When the issue of not teaching evolution in schools came up, Bill Bradley was the only one who spoke out for evolution. The others skated the issue. This seems like a pretty important issue to me. Might it relate to education in America? Does "I support better education" mean teaching that the world is flat and that the earth is about 4,000 years old?
I think that my vote will probably go to Bradley simply because he is the only liberal (or candidate in general) who appears to have any balls. I am really tired of politicians who don't take a stand on anything at all. My visits to Algore2000 have been a painful reminder that a candidate may "get it" that the Internet can be a valuable tool, but they will almost always misuse it.
A low-content website is as big a slap in the face to the Internet as I can think of. This is the "Information Super-highway" isn't it? Sites that provide media without content merely waste bandwidth and my time.
-Peter
I agree that Katz's articles can appear to actually suck insight from an issue, but even more embarrasing is the community's response to Katz.
Katz is something that all the antisocial geeks need. I agree that geeks have a high earning potential in the economy today. Many geeks even control indirectly where society is going.
Even if Katz is completely off-base on _everything_ he has ever said (I think that he can also be right on), he still gets technically minded people to view technology in a social context.
It is the people who understand society and its inner workings who ultimately control it. Many geeks get so preoccupied with the technology and the culture around geekdom, that they isolate them selves from a broader understanding of the world.
The mark of a good journalist is that he can insight people to think. Katz has never made any pretense that he could code. Sometimes he gets technical issues wrong, but that is where we set him straight. He does appear to be very open to criticism and reform. These are traits that are worth more than gold in the journalism profession today.
Give the guy a break. Turn off your computer. Go outside. It's a beautiful day.
-Peter
I have to say that I'm impressed by qt. It seems like it is relatively light weight and does more than other "archaic" widget sets.
Ofcourse nothing will ever look as good as Athena!
No reason to feel bad. I think that FreeBSD is an excellent way (better than linux) to get into *nix. No it does not have a point and click installation program like Caldera OpenLinux, but it is a "real" BSD style *nix that is very coherent. Many linux distros would be well advised to do things like FreeBSD. System setup is, for the most part, done in /stand/sysinstall. This is way different from say RedHat who has a control-panel and a Xconfigurator and a soundconf and ... and ... etc. Anything in FreeBSD that is not set up in /stand/sysinstall is set up in the standard BSD ways. This should not be intimidating if you really want to learn UNIX. There is a wealth of documentation out there on http://www.freebsd.org. Just my $.02. I really like FreeBSD. I've been a Linux user for a long time and I made the switch to BSD this year. FreeBSD is like the linux distro that I wish I could have had. I'm now dabbling in OpenBSD which is a do-it-yourselfer's dream. It makes UNIX fun :-) I promise. -Peter
Well said. A couple of points of clarification though. My point about Catholicism is that in fact the (generally) accepted version of the 10 Commandments actually does exclude the commandment about idolatry. They split the coveting commandment into two parts to still have 10 commandments.
:-) I like it better than greek mythology.
I would argue that the crusades were primarily religious in nature. If you don't agree, then surely you must concede that religion was the facilitator. How else do you explain the Children's Crusade (tm). Even if the church's original plans were to sell the children into slavery, religion still was the selling point for those children's parents!
I laud your point that people must take responcibilty for their morality. I think this was a point that I myself tried to make. My point was not to bash Catholicism, but merely to point out that they have non-trivial differences between them and other sects of Christianity reguarding ethics. The Catholics' 10 Commandments have no prohibitions against idolatry. A Southern Baptist (ask one) would strongly oppose that. My point was that morality is subjective and that no god can dish it out. People have to think. This discussion is proof that we do!
Another thing that you said that I have to take issue with is that the NAZI's did not have religion. Their religion was the party and the diety was Hitler. Contrary to anything you may have heard, _Hitler was no atheist_. In fact there is much record to indicate that he was inspired by none other than Martin Luther. Luther was not secret about his anti-semitism. Had the NAZIs been geeks they would have realized that Jews can code just as well as anybody else. The reason that many non-Jews were persecuted was that they did not subscribe to the religion of nationalism! This is a credit to the clergy that had the moral character to think for themselves.
I believe that your accusation that science is a religion is off base. Science is a highly effective methodology of extracting and testing data. Good (and true) science is no more a religion than is arithmetic. Furthermore I would argue (as did the US supreme court) that Humanism is not a religion. The reason for this is that Humanism is a methodology of finding positive traints in humans and working to augment them. A precept of humanism is that one not take things on faith.
I will agree that I have met people who are rabidly atheist. This is a danger. People need to be aware that at the point you are taking things on faith, you are getting lazy. Point well taken. However, when atheists say,"I do not believe in god," you have to remember that they are not asserting positively that there is no god. They are merely saying that they have no reason to believe in gods than in giant invisible elephants that cause society to misbehave.
Yes I believe that people should become more well read on the study of religion. Hey I started out as a good Lutheran boy. I have studied in-depth the bible and Judeo-Christian traditions. I have studied Islam, the various Buddhist schools of thought, Baha'is, and a vast number of other not so major ones. As for your comment about Hinduism, they have a lot of good mythology and a wealth of wisdom. I especially like the number of stories about how Ganesha got his elephant's head.
Agnosticism is the ability to question all, and a good trait it is. Being a humanist does not make you open minded, but practicing its methods goes a long way.
I believe that the vast majority of geeks tend to be liberal and also atheist or atleast agnostic. I also think that this is not a problem and that I personally work to reinforce these traits in myself and others that I meet.
There is a difference between liberalism as a philosophy and liberalism as a political view. Liberalism works to secure rights and equal treatment for all. This is vastly different than competing ideologies such as nationalism, which strive to secure rights and privledges for a specific subset of society.
In this respect, I believe that geeks are inherently liberal. For example, I did not see a band of US nationalist geeks opposed to the contributions to the GNOME project by foriegners or to a primarily international KDE.
This brings up why geeks (or most of them) are not religious. When so many true geeks collaborate over the internet on such truely awe inspiring projects as Linux or Apache, how can people not be filled with a sense that humanity is on the right track? This faith in humanity and the no-whining attitude that people should improve themselves is called humanism (for a full explaination see http:/www.secularhumanism.org).
When people believe in the positive aspects of people, there are few reasons to believe in gods. This realization spawns secular humanists who are highly moral and highly motivated. I don't wait around for gods to make humanity better. I don't believe that gods do good things. If you look back through history, gods are a leading cause of death!
Then comes the question about morality. How can you have morality without an objective moral code? My answer to that is that objective moral codes are not objective. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the moral code is a tablet of set in stone rules. These are even the same for Catholics as Protestants! Is idolatry a sin? If you are Protestant then yes. If Catholic then no. Honoring thy father and mother? Yes if you mean that the woman is property and the man has the financial obligation to care for the folks.
After all the conflicting stories are read (geeks like to read). They make the (right) conclusion that religion is ethical bloatware. Religion only clouds judgement in moral situations. Just as that animated paper clip in Microsoft Office, geeks turn it off, or better yet use a humanist OS like Linux!
-Peter
The same people who brought us LessTiff also have been working on a project to replace X while still trying to preserve the good things about X. They seem to have some lib ideas for their Y (pronounced OO) Windows.
:-)
http://www.hungry.org/products/Ywindows/
Another note: if X is so dated and clunky, what about SGI? I thought that IRIX uses X. I can't envision a much better media OS! Maybe they know something I don't. Hopefully they will share
--God is a crutch for the codependant!
http://www.secularhumanism.org
She then decides to take her experience on faith, never thinking that maybe the 16 or how ever many hours of recorded static could mean something or that maybe, as a scientist, she could push for a repeat of the experiment with another person?
Maybe they could have produced a movie without falling back into the "you've got to have faith" mentality, but they sure didn't. Contact had so much promise, but finally undermined Carl's strong belief in rationalism and the betterment of humanity with a stupid religious message about faith.
Contact was crap. It makes me sick when I see "For Carl" on the screen of the moview.