I don't know how Rob&Co. go about getting interviews with people but I think Mr. Hawking would be a perfect interview for Slashdot. Somebody in the Q&A with CmdrTaco and Hemos the other day mentioned a perceived lack of non-Linux/OSS/computer news recently and this would take care of that nicely. I know that he is a very busy man but this would be the perfect interview format for him I think, he wouldn't have to put up with some guy in his office all day, he'd just read the questions and type his responses back when he could.
I would appreciate an interview with somebody with a differing view of technology but Cliff Stoll is not that. He has turned distinctly anti-technology in recent years to the point of near-fanaticism. I'm all for controlling technology and using it, not letting it use us, but I'm not going to ditch my computer and go grow apples as I've heard Mr. Stoll say we all should.
I cannot believe what a cool person Steve Wozniak is. From the first time I heard the story of him figuring out how to build the first Apple when everybody else thought it was impossible he's been my hardware hacker god. Between him, John Carmack, and various kernel hackers I know, it's a wonder I have any self-esteem left when I look at my own stuff.:)
I've never even heard of this thing. I still can't believe that the Gameboy/Color Gameboy is the best selling piece of gaming hardware ever. I never thought that thing would last even when I used to play Tetris on my old one for hours at a time.
Any ideas why the Gameboy did so much better than the technically better Atari Lynx (which had color like 8 years ago) and all the other handheld machines? It doesn't seem like any handheld has done that well besides the Gameboy.
You should have returned your disc because I've never seen any problems on any of the Matrix discs I've seen.
And anyway, the Matrix is far from the first DVD to have special content on it. The only special content problems I've seen is the MST3K-like commentary on Ghostbusters, which only worked sometimes.
Man, I would love that. I finally converted myself over to The GIMP for most of my formerly Photoshop needs but I still use DW for a lot of initial page design.
On a semi-related note: Can anybody recommend a good web editor for Linux? Pico has been my tool of choice for a long time but I need something more full-featured (visual table design, DHTML would be nice, etc) so I can stop rebooting to Windows.
One of the other articles I read (at PRNewswire) said Jobs was Apple's iCEO. Is that a misprint or are they extending the over-used lowercase i thing all over the company? Normally I would say it was a misprint but with the iMac, the iBook, etc., I figured it was possible. Strange, hackneyed, but possible.
I know nothing about IE so I don't know who's right or wrong. The point is that he put information in his post, you didn't even try. If you had put the info in the post I'm responding to in the other one, everybody would have been better off. The best thing about forums like this is that many people put in different bits of information and then others pick it apart, add new information, etc, to add to the whole.
I think you're right about some people in the Linux/geek/whatever community that it's all about bashing MS but that's not true for everybody. Some of us actually want to learn and while I might not like IE, I'm all for learning about how it works from people like yourself that do know. It might take a second longer to add something to the conversation rather than just flaming but it makes everybody better overall.
Next time you decide to post, remember the difference between your totally content-free post and the one above by Nerds. Nerds' post has actual information in it, yours is just flames. His is worth reading, yours is useless and only points you out to be a child (mentally if not chronologically). Taking 30 seconds to back up your statements would have made a world of difference.
Just another attempt to increase the signal in Slashdot's daily signal-to-noise battle.
Thank you for posting a resonable and well thought-out argument. It was much more than I expected and have received from people wishing to argue with me about guns. If the leadership of the NRA would choose to list actual arguments as you have, I would have a lot more respect for them. As it is, they only present weak, emotional arguments and I believe do a disrespect to all NRA members who are not extremists like them.
I may not agree with your first argument as I do not believe that there enough people in this country willing to take up their personal firearms against their friends and neighbors in the military to make a difference but I appreciate it none the less. Your other arguments are excellent and I will definately think about them.
Re:Well, this is the kind of thing you have to exp
on
Caught Before the Act
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· Score: 2
As soon as I saw the subject on your post I knew it was going to end with something along the lines of 'when you lose all the guns.' Those NRA commercials that focus on the disarming of England are the best laughs I get on the weekends. Good old monkey-buster (and hardcore Democrat until the winds of popularity changed under Reagan) Chuck Heston talking about how it's my 'God given right' to own high powered firearms and how the government will run our lives if we give up our precious guns. They never mention the fact that our government has firepower the likes of which most Americans will never see, much less have the ability (or the will) to fight against. And the 'We did it to England and they had a real army' argument doesn't work either because the English had the same weapons as the Americans at the time, definately not true today.
>Just because Patrick McNaughton "thought" he was only meeting somebody >playing a 13 year old (which I doubt because he had child porn on his computers),
That seems equally consistant with him thinking it was someone playing a 13 year old. It's not as if he would go along with that if he weren't in to that sort of thing.
How is his having actual child porn on his computer consistant with his thinking it was somebody playing a 13yr old? If he had the 13 year old girls on his computer, that makes it more likely that he's into 13 year olds, not people playing 13 year olds. I've seen pics of older people dressing up as youngsters, I'd believe that was his thing if he had pics like that.
Speaking of taking responsibilty on the net, I read yesterday that former Infoseek head and now jailbird Patrick McNaughton, who was caught crossing state lines to have sex with a minor he met on the net, is going to base his case on the fact that the net chat room was some sort of fantasy zone and he thought he was meeting somebody who was "role-playing" a 13 year old girl, not a real 13 year old. This is exactly the same buck-passing that is going on here. Both the gambler guy and McNaughton made the decision to do what they did but they refuse to take responsibilty for it because it was on the net.
Bull.
If this guy has a gambling habit, he needs to get help. The online casino doesn't know anything about him, nor does the credit card company. This isn't the same thing as a bartender kicking out a drunk, the barkeep can see the guy is a drunk, the online casino can't. Maybe the credit card company should have cut him off after they saw the $25K spent in a short time but why should they? They're in business to make money, not moral decisions for people. There are millions of gambling addicts who didn't rack up $25K in credit on the net, why should this guy get a free ride? Just because Patrick McNaughton "thought" he was only meeting somebody playing a 13 year old (which I doubt because he had child porn on his computers), why should that make a difference? If I kill somebody because I thought the guy would live through it, does that make me any less liable? Nope.
Giving people free passes to do whatever they want because it's the net or because it's on credit is the wrong path to go down. This guy should learn his lesson by working the rest of his life to pay back the money and McNaughton should do jail time because if they don't, who's to say they won't do the same thing again? After all, they didn't suffer any consequences the last time.
Doesn't Larry Wall (creator of Perl) work at O'Reilly now? If I'm remembering correctly, why is it that we haven't seen any Perl books written by him except the Camel book? I'm knocking the man, he rocks, but I'm just wondering. All the Perl books seem to be written by Christensen and the other Perl luminaries.
Maybe he's spending all his time on the next State of The Onion...
One thing I always find missing in discussions/rants about genetic engineering is the 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' sentiment. There are no global definitions of what 'pretty' means or 'smart' or anything else that makes people different from each other. Just because people have the choice to make their kid look a certain way doesn't mean all kids are going to look the same. People don't give their kids all the same haircuts, why would everybody give their kid the same nose/eye color/hair color?
Katz says that no parent would choose an ugly child when they could make a pretty one. I have never met a parent who didn't think their kid was the most beautiful example of childhood that has ever existed. Genetic engineering will give shallow people the chance to make a genetically good looking child (to their eyes) but that parent would have dressed their kid a certain way or cut their hair a certain way or made them get plastic surgery to mold the kid anyway, this is just another way for people to show the same stupid tendencies.
Genetic engineering will allow people to create what they think of as a beautiful/smart/athletic kid but since everybody has different ideas of what that means, it will still mean that humans will be as different as we have ever been in the past. I for one welcome the chance to not pass my genetic tendency to be overweight on to my kid, not out of vanity but out of love and the wish not to have to make my child live through the same things I have. That's the power of genetic engineering, not the ability to give my child blue eyes instead of my brown ones.
Isn't this basically the same as the case against the Rio, which RIAA lost? They said it was made to let people listen to pirated songs and the courts said it wasn't made for that and Diamond wasn't responsible if some people did use it for that. I don't see a difference between this suit and that one.
If things like radar detectors are legal and those have no other use than to evade capture for speeding, how can something that is used to exchanged files be banned because some people might use it for exchanging illegal files? Like one of the other posters said, crowbars can be used for breaking into cars but they aren't illegal.
No right to an opinion about religion? Ha. I know more about religion than most so-called religious people I know.
Do you think that agnostics/athiests have it any easier in this country? That's exactly why I choose not to outright bash other people's beliefs but to discuss things with them. I may not believe what you believe but actually I have a lot of respect for the way you espouse your beliefs in your previous posts, Amphigory.
And yes, I believe that even if there could be any less evidence for what you believe, that there would still almost as many Christians. That's because the point isn't evidence. The point is belief and faith, which need no evidence and are often strongest in the total absence of evidence. People need something to believe in, whether it's an almighty father figure or a thunder god or a trickster coyote or just themselves, as I believe.
I fail to see how basing your belief on what a human who is alive now tells you is more valid than basing it on what a human who was alive 2000 years ago tells you. Evolution deserves to be bashed because it doesn't work, it's got holes bigger than christianities by far.
Also, you can not prove a negative, hence you can not prove that there is No God.
I base my ideas on the work of many humans working together to discover truths about the world. That's my point.
If you believe evolution has holes, the point of science is to try to prove those holes exist and fix the theory or find a new theory. Every single person I've talked to who said they were for a competing theory to evolution only turned out to want to show what their ignorance of the theory saw as holes. They never actually show evidence for anything.
I would never try to prove there isn't a God, just as I wouldn't want to waste my time trying to prove unicorns don't exist.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, just because it says so in a book, any book, does not make it true or false. This is another great thing about science, no one position is ever held as the end-all-be-all truth of things until it is proven over and over again.
I never bash religion. I don't like it but I don't bash it. I try to explain the virtues of science but I believe bashing a differing position is never the way to explain why your position is good. This is why the creationist movement (to use an example of what I'm talking about, not necessarily because of our recent discussion) is so weak, they consistantly fail to show the strengths of their views, they just bash evolution. That's never the way to do things.
I've never thought that DVDAudio was going to go anywhere. IMO, it's going to be a niche market like Laserdiscs were to the home video market. A few loyal fans will be able to spend the money and tell the difference but most people won't want to give up their large CD collections for a more expensive technolgy that they won't be able to hear the difference of anyway. I still know people who can't tell the difference between a tape and a CD. Those people are not going to tell the difference between one digital audio format and another. All this delay is going to do is hurt the bottom line for the companies involved and give downloadable music a bigger chance to grow market share.
It sure is. But we admit it so that the failings don't become blockages to new learning. When one scientist says the Big Bang happened from a thing the size of a basketball, another can say "We don't know that" and then they can go off and find the truth of the situation later. When one religious person (my father for a close-to-home example) says "Fags are going to hell" I can't say "We don't know that" and go about trying to prove him wrong. He won't listen, nor is his position provable in any way.
I don't think anybody wants this story to turn into a 1500 post argument like the infamous Kansas evolution story but I have to say something about your mistaken beliefs about the universe. I'm no physicist but I am interested and I read alot.
First, no physicist I've ever read has ever said anything about the big bang happening from anything "about the size of a basketball." We have no idea what the thing was that spawned the BB was but physicists tend to agree that it was probably a singularity, a point of infinite density with no size as we think of the word, which are also thought to be at the center of black holes.
Second, "life" is not some mystical thing that had to spring in existence wheras before it didn't exist. Stuff just springing into existence only happens in the Bible. Life is all around us in so many different forms just on this planet that to say that life became us is silly, to use your word. "Life" is just a word that we use to talk about things that are not inanimate. Intelligent life, which is what you probably meant, is trickier to pin down but it still didn't just pop into existence, it's taken billions of years to get to us.
Last, even if the universe is only 1 nanosecond old to some outside alien presence, it's still a specific number of our years old to us and finding that number out is a valuable thing. Time, as you said, is a construct of humanity in the way that we measure it but time as a function of entropy in the universe is not a construct, nor is it meaningless. Even if we are in some VL computer, it's still life to us and really, it doesn't matter whether we're in a computer or not.
I'm not trying to bash you or anything, far from it. Anybody who really researches things like God and life is a-ok in my book. I'm just espousing some views of my own.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how Rob&Co. go about getting interviews with people but I think Mr. Hawking would be a perfect interview for Slashdot. Somebody in the Q&A with CmdrTaco and Hemos the other day mentioned a perceived lack of non-Linux/OSS/computer news recently and this would take care of that nicely. I know that he is a very busy man but this would be the perfect interview format for him I think, he wouldn't have to put up with some guy in his office all day, he'd just read the questions and type his responses back when he could.
Any other interest?
I would appreciate an interview with somebody with a differing view of technology but Cliff Stoll is not that. He has turned distinctly anti-technology in recent years to the point of near-fanaticism. I'm all for controlling technology and using it, not letting it use us, but I'm not going to ditch my computer and go grow apples as I've heard Mr. Stoll say we all should.
I cannot believe what a cool person Steve Wozniak is. From the first time I heard the story of him figuring out how to build the first Apple when everybody else thought it was impossible he's been my hardware hacker god. Between him, John Carmack, and various kernel hackers I know, it's a wonder I have any self-esteem left when I look at my own stuff. :)
I've never even heard of this thing. I still can't believe that the Gameboy/Color Gameboy is the best selling piece of gaming hardware ever. I never thought that thing would last even when I used to play Tetris on my old one for hours at a time.
Any ideas why the Gameboy did so much better than the technically better Atari Lynx (which had color like 8 years ago) and all the other handheld machines? It doesn't seem like any handheld has done that well besides the Gameboy.
You should have returned your disc because I've never seen any problems on any of the Matrix discs I've seen.
And anyway, the Matrix is far from the first DVD to have special content on it. The only special content problems I've seen is the MST3K-like commentary on Ghostbusters, which only worked sometimes.
Man, I would love that. I finally converted myself over to The GIMP for most of my formerly Photoshop needs but I still use DW for a lot of initial page design.
On a semi-related note: Can anybody recommend a good web editor for Linux? Pico has been my tool of choice for a long time but I need something more full-featured (visual table design, DHTML would be nice, etc) so I can stop rebooting to Windows.
One of the other articles I read (at PRNewswire) said Jobs was Apple's iCEO. Is that a misprint or are they extending the over-used lowercase i thing all over the company? Normally I would say it was a misprint but with the iMac, the iBook, etc., I figured it was possible. Strange, hackneyed, but possible.
Like I told my friend, comparing Fry's to BestBuy is like comparing Costco/PriceClub to CircleK.
I know nothing about IE so I don't know who's right or wrong. The point is that he put information in his post, you didn't even try. If you had put the info in the post I'm responding to in the other one, everybody would have been better off. The best thing about forums like this is that many people put in different bits of information and then others pick it apart, add new information, etc, to add to the whole.
I think you're right about some people in the Linux/geek/whatever community that it's all about bashing MS but that's not true for everybody. Some of us actually want to learn and while I might not like IE, I'm all for learning about how it works from people like yourself that do know. It might take a second longer to add something to the conversation rather than just flaming but it makes everybody better overall.
Next time you decide to post, remember the difference between your totally content-free post and the one above by Nerds. Nerds' post has actual information in it, yours is just flames. His is worth reading, yours is useless and only points you out to be a child (mentally if not chronologically). Taking 30 seconds to back up your statements would have made a world of difference.
Just another attempt to increase the signal in Slashdot's daily signal-to-noise battle.
I was about to ask how anything could get duller than Secret Wars. :)
Thank you for posting a resonable and well thought-out argument. It was much more than I expected and have received from people wishing to argue with me about guns. If the leadership of the NRA would choose to list actual arguments as you have, I would have a lot more respect for them. As it is, they only present weak, emotional arguments and I believe do a disrespect to all NRA members who are not extremists like them.
I may not agree with your first argument as I do not believe that there enough people in this country willing to take up their personal firearms against their friends and neighbors in the military to make a difference but I appreciate it none the less. Your other arguments are excellent and I will definately think about them.
As soon as I saw the subject on your post I knew it was going to end with something along the lines of 'when you lose all the guns.' Those NRA commercials that focus on the disarming of England are the best laughs I get on the weekends. Good old monkey-buster (and hardcore Democrat until the winds of popularity changed under Reagan) Chuck Heston talking about how it's my 'God given right' to own high powered firearms and how the government will run our lives if we give up our precious guns. They never mention the fact that our government has firepower the likes of which most Americans will never see, much less have the ability (or the will) to fight against. And the 'We did it to England and they had a real army' argument doesn't work either because the English had the same weapons as the Americans at the time, definately not true today.
>Just because Patrick McNaughton "thought" he was only meeting somebody
>playing a 13 year old (which I doubt because he had child porn on his computers),
That seems equally consistant with him thinking it was someone playing a 13 year old. It's not as if he would go along with that if he weren't in to that sort of thing.
How is his having actual child porn on his computer consistant with his thinking it was somebody playing a 13yr old? If he had the 13 year old girls on his computer, that makes it more likely that he's into 13 year olds, not people playing 13 year olds. I've seen pics of older people dressing up as youngsters, I'd believe that was his thing if he had pics like that.
You might be right. I don't have that one here at work so he might have.
Speaking of taking responsibilty on the net, I read yesterday that former Infoseek head and now jailbird Patrick McNaughton, who was caught crossing state lines to have sex with a minor he met on the net, is going to base his case on the fact that the net chat room was some sort of fantasy zone and he thought he was meeting somebody who was "role-playing" a 13 year old girl, not a real 13 year old. This is exactly the same buck-passing that is going on here. Both the gambler guy and McNaughton made the decision to do what they did but they refuse to take responsibilty for it because it was on the net.
Bull.
If this guy has a gambling habit, he needs to get help. The online casino doesn't know anything about him, nor does the credit card company. This isn't the same thing as a bartender kicking out a drunk, the barkeep can see the guy is a drunk, the online casino can't. Maybe the credit card company should have cut him off after they saw the $25K spent in a short time but why should they? They're in business to make money, not moral decisions for people. There are millions of gambling addicts who didn't rack up $25K in credit on the net, why should this guy get a free ride? Just because Patrick McNaughton "thought" he was only meeting somebody playing a 13 year old (which I doubt because he had child porn on his computers), why should that make a difference? If I kill somebody because I thought the guy would live through it, does that make me any less liable? Nope.
Giving people free passes to do whatever they want because it's the net or because it's on credit is the wrong path to go down. This guy should learn his lesson by working the rest of his life to pay back the money and McNaughton should do jail time because if they don't, who's to say they won't do the same thing again? After all, they didn't suffer any consequences the last time.
Doesn't Larry Wall (creator of Perl) work at O'Reilly now? If I'm remembering correctly, why is it that we haven't seen any Perl books written by him except the Camel book? I'm knocking the man, he rocks, but I'm just wondering. All the Perl books seem to be written by Christensen and the other Perl luminaries.
Maybe he's spending all his time on the next State of The Onion...
One thing I always find missing in discussions/rants about genetic engineering is the 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' sentiment. There are no global definitions of what 'pretty' means or 'smart' or anything else that makes people different from each other. Just because people have the choice to make their kid look a certain way doesn't mean all kids are going to look the same. People don't give their kids all the same haircuts, why would everybody give their kid the same nose/eye color/hair color?
Katz says that no parent would choose an ugly child when they could make a pretty one. I have never met a parent who didn't think their kid was the most beautiful example of childhood that has ever existed. Genetic engineering will give shallow people the chance to make a genetically good looking child (to their eyes) but that parent would have dressed their kid a certain way or cut their hair a certain way or made them get plastic surgery to mold the kid anyway, this is just another way for people to show the same stupid tendencies.
Genetic engineering will allow people to create what they think of as a beautiful/smart/athletic kid but since everybody has different ideas of what that means, it will still mean that humans will be as different as we have ever been in the past. I for one welcome the chance to not pass my genetic tendency to be overweight on to my kid, not out of vanity but out of love and the wish not to have to make my child live through the same things I have. That's the power of genetic engineering, not the ability to give my child blue eyes instead of my brown ones.
Isn't this basically the same as the case against the Rio, which RIAA lost? They said it was made to let people listen to pirated songs and the courts said it wasn't made for that and Diamond wasn't responsible if some people did use it for that. I don't see a difference between this suit and that one.
If things like radar detectors are legal and those have no other use than to evade capture for speeding, how can something that is used to exchanged files be banned because some people might use it for exchanging illegal files? Like one of the other posters said, crowbars can be used for breaking into cars but they aren't illegal.
No right to an opinion about religion? Ha. I know more about religion than most so-called religious people I know.
Do you think that agnostics/athiests have it any easier in this country? That's exactly why I choose not to outright bash other people's beliefs but to discuss things with them. I may not believe what you believe but actually I have a lot of respect for the way you espouse your beliefs in your previous posts, Amphigory.
And yes, I believe that even if there could be any less evidence for what you believe, that there would still almost as many Christians. That's because the point isn't evidence. The point is belief and faith, which need no evidence and are often strongest in the total absence of evidence. People need something to believe in, whether it's an almighty father figure or a thunder god or a trickster coyote or just themselves, as I believe.
I fail to see how basing your belief on what a human who is alive now tells you is more valid than basing it on what a human who was alive 2000 years ago tells you. Evolution deserves to be bashed because it doesn't work, it's got holes bigger than christianities by far.
Also, you can not prove a negative, hence you can not prove that there is No God.
I base my ideas on the work of many humans working together to discover truths about the world. That's my point.
If you believe evolution has holes, the point of science is to try to prove those holes exist and fix the theory or find a new theory. Every single person I've talked to who said they were for a competing theory to evolution only turned out to want to show what their ignorance of the theory saw as holes. They never actually show evidence for anything.
I would never try to prove there isn't a God, just as I wouldn't want to waste my time trying to prove unicorns don't exist.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, just because it says so in a book, any book, does not make it true or false. This is another great thing about science, no one position is ever held as the end-all-be-all truth of things until it is proven over and over again.
I never bash religion. I don't like it but I don't bash it. I try to explain the virtues of science but I believe bashing a differing position is never the way to explain why your position is good. This is why the creationist movement (to use an example of what I'm talking about, not necessarily because of our recent discussion) is so weak, they consistantly fail to show the strengths of their views, they just bash evolution. That's never the way to do things.
I've never thought that DVDAudio was going to go anywhere. IMO, it's going to be a niche market like Laserdiscs were to the home video market. A few loyal fans will be able to spend the money and tell the difference but most people won't want to give up their large CD collections for a more expensive technolgy that they won't be able to hear the difference of anyway. I still know people who can't tell the difference between a tape and a CD. Those people are not going to tell the difference between one digital audio format and another. All this delay is going to do is hurt the bottom line for the companies involved and give downloadable music a bigger chance to grow market share.
Science is fallible
It sure is. But we admit it so that the failings don't become blockages to new learning. When one scientist says the Big Bang happened from a thing the size of a basketball, another can say "We don't know that" and then they can go off and find the truth of the situation later. When one religious person (my father for a close-to-home example) says "Fags are going to hell" I can't say "We don't know that" and go about trying to prove him wrong. He won't listen, nor is his position provable in any way.
I don't think anybody wants this story to turn into a 1500 post argument like the infamous Kansas evolution story but I have to say something about your mistaken beliefs about the universe. I'm no physicist but I am interested and I read alot.
First, no physicist I've ever read has ever said anything about the big bang happening from anything "about the size of a basketball." We have no idea what the thing was that spawned the BB was but physicists tend to agree that it was probably a singularity, a point of infinite density with no size as we think of the word, which are also thought to be at the center of black holes.
Second, "life" is not some mystical thing that had to spring in existence wheras before it didn't exist. Stuff just springing into existence only happens in the Bible. Life is all around us in so many different forms just on this planet that to say that life became us is silly, to use your word. "Life" is just a word that we use to talk about things that are not inanimate. Intelligent life, which is what you probably meant, is trickier to pin down but it still didn't just pop into existence, it's taken billions of years to get to us.
Last, even if the universe is only 1 nanosecond old to some outside alien presence, it's still a specific number of our years old to us and finding that number out is a valuable thing. Time, as you said, is a construct of humanity in the way that we measure it but time as a function of entropy in the universe is not a construct, nor is it meaningless. Even if we are in some VL computer, it's still life to us and really, it doesn't matter whether we're in a computer or not.
I'm not trying to bash you or anything, far from it. Anybody who really researches things like God and life is a-ok in my book. I'm just espousing some views of my own.