.uk domains are actually open to any registrant from any country, but personally I think that's just an oversight of Nominet and that national domains should be for residents only
So a British citizen resident elsewhere who runs a UK oriented site (i.e. me), should not get a.uk domain?
What happens if someone with a.uk domain ceases to be resident in the UK? (me again).
Would you also ban people setting up British companies (which is quick and cheap) purely to own a bunch of.uk domains?
Residence qualifications are too difficult to enforce fairly.
As far as privacy goes, I agree that Nominet's policy is right. I do not hide my details, but then I do not particularly want to.
"A being created an unobservable, eternal spirit", that's just plain boring. But if it's an artifact of how our brain operates, how glorious it is in its complexity. The materialist is not dumbfounded or threatened by this complexity, but awestruck by it.
Three points:
1) It is more important to believe what is true than what is more awesome.
2) Which is more glorious is arguable anyway given the glorious nature of God: for monotheists the universe is a reflection of a still greater glory.
3) I suspect consciousness is an emergent property of intelligence, but God created a universe in which intelligence emerges and in which it leads to conciousness (I cannot imagine one without the other).
Can you please tell me of any major religion that claims this?
It appears that setting up a straw man gets you modded "insightful" on Slashdot, provided you run with the mob's prejudices.
I can see a potential problem for religions that believe in reincarnation, in that they now have to explain why none seems to remember past lives on other planets, but the monotheistic religions are just fine.
Most Christians, at least, expect God to have created other intelligent beings. There have been books published on the issue.
Are you atheists capable of arguing with what we really believe, or are your arguments so weak that they can only prevail against a straw man? People like you are rapidly convincing me of the latter.
If you want professional looking documents, then PDF output is essential. Have you ever compared the same document in Word (or OO for that matter) and PDF versions? There is a HUGE difference.
Therefore Word is not feature complete unless a PDF printer is added. Open Office/Star Office is.
For corporate use you should really have in-house templates.
OOImpress is completely compatible with Powerpoint, the output looks identical with the same document, so one cannot possibly look more professional than the other.
You car analogy misses one important thing. People are confident with cars, they are frightened of computers. Funnily enough people get more confident after switching to Linux: in other words people being nervous about computers helps MS, which may account for a lot.
It sounds like the Muslim is not all that different from my (fairly mainstream Christian) view, except I attach somewhat less importance to belief per se.
Someone who believes the universe is a divine monarchy can never honestly embrace secular democracy. They can use it to gain power, but that does not involve a personal buy-in. I think you just proved the argument made in some other comments, that anti-religious bigots are just are bad as religious fundamentalists.
Your statement deliberately misuses language (the use of the word "monarchy") to mislead. What sort of tortured logic could possibly lead to the conclusion that relations between human beings (all fallible, sinful and fundamentally equal), should follow the same model as relations between human beings and God (fundamentally greater and qualitatively different)?
Christian doctrines, such as original sin, are a very strong argument for democracy. This is why there are very old traditions of Christian egalitarianism. Of course they were not dominant, because they were suppressed, but they existed and kept recurring.
I do not think omnipotence includes being able to do the logically impossible.
All the formulations I have seen of it either involve a logical contradiction, or fall apart in some other way when looked at closely.
Consider the "can God make a stone heavier than He can lift" version.
Firstly, God can move any finite mass. Now, does the concept of infinite mass make sense? A vertical gravity well?
If not, clearly God cannot do this, because there is a logical contradiction between your concept of weight and the task.
What you allow the concept of infinite weight? Then the same answer, God can move them. Picture a universe containing two vertical gravity wells with a stone at the bottom of each. Can God move them further apart? Yes, in which case he still cannot create a stone to heavy to lift. However this is because he cannot create a still heavier stone because of the logical contradiction in the idea of a mass greater than infinity (what would that gravity well look like?).
Is it better to be a good person and not believe in God, or to believe in God but not be a good person?
or:
Can a person who does not believe in God be more pleasing to God than at least some of the people who do believe in God.
It is very difficult to word this precisely in a way that someone not familiar with my religion will interpret in the same way I do. A useful exercise in clarifying my thoughts!
The connection with evangelical religion is that if you do not believe that people have to have particular beliefs to please God, "go to heaven" etc., then spreading those beliefs ceases to be all important. Not unimportant (because the truth matters), but less pressing.
I agree with you to an extent, but what I would say is that the most important thing is people's relationship with God, and that depends on more than their beliefs.
I read an article (in a Catholic magazine) once by an atheist journalist who said that if he became convinced that God existed he would rush off and join a monastery. However, he simply did not believe that that God existed. A mistake of fact should not permanently keep him away from God. If he is entirely sincere do you think he will eventually stand any worse before God than a believer, simply because the latter got their facts right?
This is the first time I have heard this. Most Buddhists I have come across are just as keen on their theology being right as Christians or Muslims.
Of course there is a lot of variety in Buddhist views on issues like this.
I also think there is something fundamentally dishonest about the idea that you can help someone by teaching them something you know to be false. Being honestly mistaken is one thing, a lie is quite another.
And, of course, there are plenty of Buddhist fundamentalists from being just as nasty as those of other religions, and just as keen to spread their religion by any means.
if we go to Saudi Arabia, they want us to respect their culture (or face Sharia). If they come here, respect for our culuture is slim to none.
If anything the lack of symmetry is the other way around.
As far as I know the Saudis have not managed to impose Sharia law in Britain.
On the other hand many British people have got off more lightly on breaking Saudi laws than a Saudi would have done because of diplomatic pressure (of course if you are from a less powerful country like the Sri Lankan teenager the Saudis are currently framing and executing you are in real trouble). Furthermore Saudi Arabia is (slowly) modernising, partly because of western pressure.
Can you tell me of any European countries that are likely to legalise honour killings or forced marriage, or reintroduce sodomy laws? If not how exactly is your way of life threatened?
Some items on your list (like a "repressed view of nudity and sexuality") seem to simply boil down to not liking people having different views to your own. People are entitled to have any view of sexuality they like provided they do not try to coerce others. That is called freedom and is an important part of my way of living.
KIO slaves work better and more reliably than Gnome-vfs, and work in all KDE apps.
I do not know if the Gnome equivalent can do what Kparts does. I do know it is not actually used the same way: AFAIK you cannot, for example, view a spreadsheet in Nautilus.
The point is not necessarily that Gnome cannot do it, it is that KDE makes it easy.
I actually think Gnome very elegant and I tried switching to it twice, but after a while I simply ran into too many things that did not work as well.
Some Linux distros come with tools to make setting up Apache easy as well. I just set up a test LAMP stack on my Mandriva desktop and it was very simple, apart form one well known and documented problem (you need to install MySQL before mod_php). All point and click, of course.
Ubuntu can install a LAMP stack for you when you install the OS. I do not find configuration of Apache on Ubuntu so easy though.
it has to be a one-click, no-brains migration process as well.
That is a ludicrously high bar. No OS has one click install, let alone migration. Not Linux, not MacOS, and certainly not Windows.
It you are not comfortable installing an OS, either buy a PC with the OS you want pre-installed, or get someone else to install it for you. Neither is very difficult to do for Linux.
1. xorg crashes are rare: possibly a vmware issue. Certainly not a reason for not using Linux as your main OS. 2. No ideas. Why can you not do a fresh install for Linux? Is this a policy issue rather than a Linux issue as such? 3. You can write scripts for Kmail with DCOP. There are other scriptable mail clients as well. Of course Exchange integration is another matter, but that does not seem to be your problem. 4. Tweak your settings. I have had people who had to move from Linux to Windows complain about Windows fonts too. 5. Get a wifi card that is known to work well on Linux. 6. Use Konqueror 7. What does that mean? KDE has a Windows like taskbar by default, and alt + tab works? Gnome can be configured to look the same as well (put the taskbar applet in the same panel as the main menu).
Hmmm... that's a strange thing to criticize... this is a pretty standard practice in US criminal law - cooperate, forfeit your right to a trial, and you get off easy.
Except that the rest of the world regards it as a loathsome practice designed to get someone in jail for something, even when there is a lack of conclusive evidence against them. It is getting criminal convictions through coercion rather than evidence.
Re:You don't need MS Office to create .doc files
on
Does ODF Have a Future?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Which PDF viewer sucks?
I far prefer to read a document in KPDF than in a word processor: it looks neater and it is easier to navigate around.
If YOUR PDF viewer sucks, then use a different one.
Do speakers of American English have a way of distinguishing what I would call a cinema from what I would call a theatre? Do you add and adjective, or do you just assume the context makes it clear?
The other problem with it is that by forcing the cost to be paid at purchase, rather than on disposal, it removes the incentive to re-use.
The best thing to do with an old PC is to try and find a new use for it (or sell it to someone who can use it). If disposal is free, it will, in many cases, become cheaper to simply let the government dispose of it.
Small companies have market share: they have a small market share.
The judge is saying that this company has no market share at all. It does not use the patent itself, so it is unfair to stop Ebay from using the patented idea, becuase Merc Exchange suffer no loss as a result of Ebays use.
Please note this only affects the injunction: Merc Exchange still gets damages.
I have found all versions of FF from 1.0 to 2.0.0.4 tend to sometimes store a password unasked, and then automatically fill in the password (but not the username) on my next visit to the site.
I have never heard of anyone else having this problem, and I cannot reliably reproduce it, but it does happen occasionally.
If someone already has a hosting account that offers php and nothing else
Not common enough. Every hosting service I have looked at offers at least Perl as well, most several other languages.
are they going to have two seperate hosting accounts (expensive)?
Most of the cheap hosts charge per site, expensive ones really should not be offering just PHP.
possibility for users who can barely program to hack in thier own changes,
Now, that is the killer, IMHO. It is very easy to learn PHP and alter or extend apps. PHP CMS tend to also have very flexible and easy to use templating systems. The good documentation helps a lot.
That is my point, PHP does have genuine advantages.
That i
Slashdot Mirror
What happens if someone with a .uk domain ceases to be resident in the UK? (me again).
Would you also ban people setting up British companies (which is quick and cheap) purely to own a bunch of .uk domains?
Residence qualifications are too difficult to enforce fairly.
As far as privacy goes, I agree that Nominet's policy is right. I do not hide my details, but then I do not particularly want to.
It appears that setting up a straw man gets you modded "insightful" on Slashdot, provided you run with the mob's prejudices.
I can see a potential problem for religions that believe in reincarnation, in that they now have to explain why none seems to remember past lives on other planets, but the monotheistic religions are just fine.
Most Christians, at least, expect God to have created other intelligent beings. There have been books published on the issue.
Are you atheists capable of arguing with what we really believe, or are your arguments so weak that they can only prevail against a straw man? People like you are rapidly convincing me of the latter.
If you want professional looking documents, then PDF output is essential. Have you ever compared the same document in Word (or OO for that matter) and PDF versions? There is a HUGE difference.
Therefore Word is not feature complete unless a PDF printer is added. Open Office/Star Office is.
For corporate use you should really have in-house templates.
OOImpress is completely compatible with Powerpoint, the output looks identical with the same document, so one cannot possibly look more professional than the other.
You car analogy misses one important thing. People are confident with cars, they are frightened of computers. Funnily enough people get more confident after switching to Linux: in other words people being nervous about computers helps MS, which may account for a lot.
Thanks,
It sounds like the Muslim is not all that different from my (fairly mainstream Christian) view, except I attach somewhat less importance to belief per se.
They can use it to gain power, but that does not involve a personal buy-in.
I think you just proved the argument made in some other comments, that anti-religious bigots are just are bad as religious fundamentalists.
Your statement deliberately misuses language (the use of the word "monarchy") to mislead. What sort of tortured logic could possibly lead to the conclusion that relations between human beings (all fallible, sinful and fundamentally equal), should follow the same model as relations between human beings and God (fundamentally greater and qualitatively different)?
Christian doctrines, such as original sin, are a very strong argument for democracy. This is why there are very old traditions of Christian egalitarianism. Of course they were not dominant, because they were suppressed, but they existed and kept recurring.
I do not think omnipotence includes being able to do the logically impossible.
All the formulations I have seen of it either involve a logical contradiction, or fall apart in some other way when looked at closely.
Consider the "can God make a stone heavier than He can lift" version.
Firstly, God can move any finite mass. Now, does the concept of infinite mass make sense? A vertical gravity well?
If not, clearly God cannot do this, because there is a logical contradiction between your concept of weight and the task.
What you allow the concept of infinite weight? Then the same answer, God can move them. Picture a universe containing two vertical gravity wells with a stone at the bottom of each. Can God move them further apart? Yes, in which case he still cannot create a stone to heavy to lift. However this is because he cannot create a still heavier stone because of the logical contradiction in the idea of a mass greater than infinity (what would that gravity well look like?).
I suppose the simplest form of the question is:
Is it better to be a good person and not believe in God, or to believe in God but not be a good person?
or:
Can a person who does not believe in God be more pleasing to God than at least some of the people who do believe in God.
It is very difficult to word this precisely in a way that someone not familiar with my religion will interpret in the same way I do. A useful exercise in clarifying my thoughts!
The connection with evangelical religion is that if you do not believe that people have to have particular beliefs to please God, "go to heaven" etc., then spreading those beliefs ceases to be all important. Not unimportant (because the truth matters), but less pressing.
I agree with you to an extent, but what I would say is that the most important thing is people's relationship with God, and that depends on more than their beliefs.
I read an article (in a Catholic magazine) once by an atheist journalist who said that if he became convinced that God existed he would rush off and join a monastery. However, he simply did not believe that that God existed. A mistake of fact should not permanently keep him away from God. If he is entirely sincere do you think he will eventually stand any worse before God than a believer, simply because the latter got their facts right?
This is the first time I have heard this. Most Buddhists I have come across are just as keen on their theology being right as Christians or Muslims.
Of course there is a lot of variety in Buddhist views on issues like this.
I also think there is something fundamentally dishonest about the idea that you can help someone by teaching them something you know to be false. Being honestly mistaken is one thing, a lie is quite another.
And, of course, there are plenty of Buddhist fundamentalists from being just as nasty as those of other religions, and just as keen to spread their religion by any means.
As far as I know the Saudis have not managed to impose Sharia law in Britain.
On the other hand many British people have got off more lightly on breaking Saudi laws than a Saudi would have done because of diplomatic pressure (of course if you are from a less powerful country like the Sri Lankan teenager the Saudis are currently framing and executing you are in real trouble). Furthermore Saudi Arabia is (slowly) modernising, partly because of western pressure.
Can you tell me of any European countries that are likely to legalise honour killings or forced marriage, or reintroduce sodomy laws? If not how exactly is your way of life threatened?
Some items on your list (like a "repressed view of nudity and sexuality") seem to simply boil down to not liking people having different views to your own. People are entitled to have any view of sexuality they like provided they do not try to coerce others. That is called freedom and is an important part of my way of living.
KIO slaves work better and more reliably than Gnome-vfs, and work in all KDE apps.
I do not know if the Gnome equivalent can do what Kparts does. I do know it is not actually used the same way: AFAIK you cannot, for example, view a spreadsheet in Nautilus.
The point is not necessarily that Gnome cannot do it, it is that KDE makes it easy.
I actually think Gnome very elegant and I tried switching to it twice, but after a while I simply ran into too many things that did not work as well.
I wish I have not used up the last of my mod points earlier today.
People have been slow to switch to Apache 2, but, now that people are and most modules are available, Apache might regain some ground.
Incidentally, IIS was in almost as strong a position (looking at the "Top Servers Across All Domains" graph) early in 2002, and slipped again.
Well, that is a surprise! Why not drop the apples to oranges comparison and compare c# to Java?
Webmin is easy enough to use.
Some Linux distros come with tools to make setting up Apache easy as well. I just set up a test LAMP stack on my Mandriva desktop and it was very simple, apart form one well known and documented problem (you need to install MySQL before mod_php). All point and click, of course.
Ubuntu can install a LAMP stack for you when you install the OS. I do not find configuration of Apache on Ubuntu so easy though.
It you are not comfortable installing an OS, either buy a PC with the OS you want pre-installed, or get someone else to install it for you. Neither is very difficult to do for Linux.
1. xorg crashes are rare: possibly a vmware issue. Certainly not a reason for not using Linux as your main OS.
2. No ideas. Why can you not do a fresh install for Linux? Is this a policy issue rather than a Linux issue as such?
3. You can write scripts for Kmail with DCOP. There are other scriptable mail clients as well. Of course Exchange integration is another matter, but that does not seem to be your problem.
4. Tweak your settings. I have had people who had to move from Linux to Windows complain about Windows fonts too.
5. Get a wifi card that is known to work well on Linux.
6. Use Konqueror
7. What does that mean? KDE has a Windows like taskbar by default, and alt + tab works? Gnome can be configured to look the same as well (put the taskbar applet in the same panel as the main menu).
Except that the rest of the world regards it as a loathsome practice designed to get someone in jail for something, even when there is a lack of conclusive evidence against them. It is getting criminal convictions through coercion rather than evidence.
Which PDF viewer sucks?
I far prefer to read a document in KPDF than in a word processor: it looks neater and it is easier to navigate around.
If YOUR PDF viewer sucks, then use a different one.
Do speakers of American English have a way of distinguishing what I would call a cinema from what I would call a theatre? Do you add and adjective, or do you just assume the context makes it clear?
The other problem with it is that by forcing the cost to be paid at purchase, rather than on disposal, it removes the incentive to re-use.
The best thing to do with an old PC is to try and find a new use for it (or sell it to someone who can use it). If disposal is free, it will, in many cases, become cheaper to simply let the government dispose of it.
Small companies have market share: they have a small market share.
The judge is saying that this company has no market share at all. It does not use the patent itself, so it is unfair to stop Ebay from using the patented idea, becuase Merc Exchange suffer no loss as a result of Ebays use.
Please note this only affects the injunction: Merc Exchange still gets damages.
I have found all versions of FF from 1.0 to 2.0.0.4 tend to sometimes store a password unasked, and then automatically fill in the password (but not the username) on my next visit to the site.
I have never heard of anyone else having this problem, and I cannot reliably reproduce it, but it does happen occasionally.
That is my point, PHP does have genuine advantages. That i