Other countries don't come under the heading of "minorities". I accept that/. will be US-centric at times, but this is ridiculous. It's quite simple: the Internet originated in the USA. Today, it is international. So, any control over it should be exerted by some international body. Simple enough for you -- or were you just trolling?
"angry replies and no agreements" -- I guess it wouldn't occur to you that, if this is the case, it's possible you might be wrong? Look, I wasn't getting on your case for the sake of it; but really, in a piece specifically about Galileo getting "closest-ever-yet" to Io, asking *what* Io is, is, well.... fill in the blank.
Wrong. Deep Blue was tuned to play against Kasparov, true. But even its predecessor could regularly beat Grandmasters ten years ago, without being `coached' to play specifically against them.
I don't have a number for total moves, but the the number of possible chess games is something like 321**6300,or roughly 10**15790. But this brute force approach to chess programming is not interesting. In practice, chess programs play better, the more able they are to leverage their `brute force' calculating ability with algorithms that mimic a human approach to evaluating positions.
That's right: Deep Thought was Deep Blue's predecessor. It couldn't beat Kasparov, but it did take down some great names: Bent Larsen, for example, in a tournament at Long Beach in 1988, where it tied for first place with Tony Miles, ahead of Tal. It lost only one game in this event, to Walter Browne.
So do a web search, or (gasp!) consult an encyclopaedia. Don't expect people to spoon-feed you. Sorry; but really, I don't want/. posts dumbed down to the extent that everyone can understand them without knowing *any* background. Perhaps the "hard words" should be explained too?
Sure, "the media" does not exist. But if you look at the kind of coverage Linux gets in "mainstream" media, you will see that Andrew Leonard is far more clueful than most. Be fair to the guy: he can't be right 100% of the time (neither can you or I). The stuff about "excessive media attention" was just a tag-line, anyway. The focus of this little piece was the "application of quantitative data gathering tactics" to the Open Source phenomenon. The qoute about ESR is exactly right: all his papers on the subject rely exclusively on annecdotal evidence. There's nothing wrong with this, but it is a limitation. The remark about "tampering", while a little silly in refering to the hords of/.-crazed hackers madly rushing from poll to poll `skewing the data', still makes a valid point -- how do researchers intend to stop the poll results being skewed? Is a form on a web page really random sampling anyway? Perhaps it would be better if people tried harder to pick out the essence of what a "Linux article" is saying, rather than getting hung up on the old "Media is clueless! Linux rules! Rah! Rah! Rah!" riff.
This quotation tells us that the author has read/. now and again, has seen the usual jokes when an on-line survey is mentioned: "go get 'em, boys", etc, and has taken these comments a tad more seriously than they warranted. Andrew, those people were joking!.
I'm not a Linux developer, but I write about Linux and maintain a hopefully-useful set of Linux resources on my website. Serious, well-thought-out questions from newbies are always welcome, and I'm happy to spend some time giving them a helpful answer; trouble is, I don't seem to get many. The most typical question is most succintly paraphrased as, "would you do my homework for me, please?". Now that pisses me off. It does seem that some newcomers to Linux just don't get it. For me, Linux is first and foremost about doing it yourself. Sure, if you run into trouble, ask away; but the basic dedication to hacking at problems has to be there. Hell, the amount of Linux information on the Web now means that most problems can be solved by RTFM, given a sufficiently large value for `M'!
The religious and the scientific ways of looking at the world are two mutually-incompatible systems. Either one believes in the rule of causality, or one believes in some white-bearded Nobodaddy from on high saying "let there be light". Sure, evolution is a theory; most of our scientific "facts" are theories. How many of them do you think should not be taught in schools for fear this will offend some redneck? Anti-evolutionism has strong roots in the US; then, so does the burning and lynching of blacks. The roots of both lie in the ignorance and prejudice of the mob. Over-wrought comparison? I think not. After all, I'm sure some Bible-bashing headcase somewhere can, using "scripture" make just as convincing a case that "the black man has no soul" as that "teaching evolution is evil". The hoo-hah over the teaching of scientific theories in science class is not a case of "individual rights" or "freedom of worship"; it is about a society decided on a system of values: I hope the US makes the right choice.
Arthur Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers" is the best reference I know of for this stuff. No, Galileo wasn't a heretic; he just wasn't very politic, in fact deliberately provocative, and feel foul of the academnic establishment of his day, who, being influential men, pulled a few strings in the Vatican; and the rest followed. As for torture, he was "shown the instruments" and asked to retract, which he did post-haste. He didn't have to do that, since he was not under arrest, and the temporal authority of the Papacy even in those times didn't extend very far -- he could have gone to live in The Netherlands, for instance. Oh, and while we're on my hobby horse, he didn't say "nevertheless, it does move", either -- I think Brecht invented that.
Wonders will never cease; through the murk of one of these endless "Yuurp sucks! Goddamn commies!" threads that/. sees so much of, shines a post with something to say. Generally, the best political/historic post on/. in a long time. If this doesn't make 5, then the moderators are reading too much Ayn Rand (it rots the brain, you know).
Just one caveat:
be said: they did oppose the Nazis flatly and forthrightly. They were alone among the political parties to draw an absolute line against the Nazis as evil --not mistaken, not misled on a few points, nor "a little carried away and prone to exaggerate", but evil per se and to be opposed at all costs. They took Hitler, Roehm & co. at their word and warned that these men would bring murder to the streets as a regular implement of policy and start a war with the Allies again. All of their leaders paid the ultimate price. As did a number of reporters and editors who had the indiscretion or bravery to ridicule the Nazis or report on acts of terrorism and assassination.
Well, this is not so. The Communists and Nazis collaborated on several occasions -- the Berlin rent strike, for instance. The KPD's attitude to the Nazis fluctuated in accordance with the 3rd International line, as handed down from Moscow. Let's not make too many martyrs here, either. Some leaders certainly ended up in the camps; other, ironically enough, ended up in Stalin's camps; and others toed the party line to emerge as the leaders of the DDR.
It was the SPD, and only the SPD, who consistently opposed Hitler.
And he delivered on time. Ceasing reparations and the re-arming along with a number of large scale public works like the Autobahn turned the German econmy around like a miracle while the economies of France and the United States and GB continued to swirl around the drain.
OK, make that two caveats! I don't think the Geramn economy was really turned around. Hitler's economic miracle was a short-term affair. It was based on unsustainable, non-productive expenditure (armaments), and could only be maintainted by plunder and conquest.
Oh, boy... How in God's name did this get moderated up to 5? The long list of "stuff you can't do in Yuurp" is just plain wrong. This is not "informative", it's bullshit. Oh, and ESR never said a word abou Social Democracy, he was on about Socialist (and naziism, whatever that is). It's true that some governments in Europe are social-democratic; but capitalism thrives here just as it does in the US of A. As for this "physical coercion" business: er, you do live in the US, right? Have you ever examined what the "War against Drugs" allows *your* government to do to you? Haven't you ever heard of Waco? I could go on. Look, most countries in the world today are capitalist, and are in no way *fundamentally different* from each other. Please stop painting the US as some sort of libertarian paradise. It's a modern Western capitalist society, no more, no less.
Some people in this discussion are asking what's new in 2.4. Well, Joe Pranevich seems to be the de facto source for whats new and exciting in kernel releases, so see his The Wonderful World of Linux 2.4 for more info.
Hair too long??!! What are you insinuating? Some of my best friends are vicars, and only a few of them are tranvestites! (Er, excuse me, this is irrelevant, isn't it? yeah, well, it's not easy to pad these slashdot threads out, you know).
(Signed)
Brigadier Sir Charles Armstrong (Mrs)
P.S. I have never kissed the editor of the radio times </python pastiche>
Oh God! I've just become as one with those people who do the Parrot sketch at parties! Kiss me, Hardy! Urgghhhhh....
Hmm, yeah, now that I think of it, I was talking about the Doom binaries -- not the same thing as the source. Self, take a hundred lines: "I must not post without thinking"...
Well, I may be mistaken, but did MS ever write such stuff about CP/M, or OS/2, or whatever? This piece is beneath comment (so why am I commenting on it? I'll leave that question to the philosophers). But really, this is sad in a way. MS was a giant of its time; whatever your feelings about win9x or NT, there is something vaguely distasteful about being in on the death throes. Avert your gaze, people, as the "market leader", which once could stamp all over the smaller, whimpier dionsaurs is reduced to printing drivel like this on its own home page (does this mean it can no longer bribe^H^H^H^H^Hfund "independent" organisations to do the dirty work?) Maybe it's just me, but this has the stink of desperation about it. Move along now, folks, ain't nothing to see here.
But didn't slackware used to include it? Perhaps this is why it went away -- I note it's not on any of the CDs I have lying around here, but I'm sure I've seen it on a Slackware CD in the past.
Not so. Unless the publishing agreement explicitly states otherwise, a freelancer is selling first serial publication rights only. What is true is that a lot of publishers are trying to expand the control they have over an author's work. As a freelance writer, I am of course glad to see the courts exerting control over this. I am puzzled why anyone could not be -- unless you approve of corporations acruing additional rights at the expense of individuals. Of course, as you point out, the coming of electronic media raises some new issues about what exactly constitues "republishing". Copying for personal use, as in your example, is clearly not the same as taking the article and reprinting it in a paper or on-line publication, without so much as crediting the author, let alone paying for the right to publish it. This happens, and I don't like it. By the way, a freelancer isn't in a "work for hire" arrangement; he sells the product of his labour, not the labour itself. Note for moderator(s): this comment isn't "insightful"; it's wrong.
These are two separate issues, which should not be conflated. An article for a newspaper is not "data". Any writing which an author sells to a publisher is protected by copyright; to my knowledge, information collected about me by a marketing firm is not so protected -- or, at least, I don't hold the copyright on the portion of the database that applies to me. Arguably, such information is "public domain"; but whether it is or not doesn't affect the status of published writing.
"what is in effect public domain stuff". But that's just the point -- a writer's work isn't public domain. My writing, for example, belongs to me, I own the copyright on it. All that those newspapers have paid for is limited publishing rights. They want more publishing rights (in order to make more money, remember -- they're not in this for their health), then they pay more. Simple.
Not so. Unless the publishing agreement explicitly states otherwise, a freelancer is selling first serial publication rights only. What is true is that a lot of publishers are trying to expand the control they have over an author's work. As a freelance writer, I am of course glad to see the courts exerting control over this. I am puzzled why anyone could not be -- unless you approve of corporations acruing additional rights at the expense of individuals. Of course, as you point out, the coming of electronic media raises some new issues about what exactly constitues "republishing". Copying for personal use, as in your example, is clearly not the same as taking the article and reprinting it in a paper or on-line publication, without so much as crediting the author, let alone paying for the right to publish it. This happens, and I don't like it. By the way, a freelancer isn't in a "work for hire" arrangement; he sells the product of his labour, not the labour itself.
You don't give any motivation for the Israelis to attack the ship; and merely *assert* that the evidence is overwhelming. The evidence presented on the website, however, is circumstantial at best. I don't tar everyone who disagrees with me as an anti-Semite; but what else does what say to someone who comes out with (I quote from memory): "On that day I became a Palestinian. Never forget, never forgive."? Hell, let's nail them for making Pilate crucify Jesus while we're about it! The point about friendly fire stands, I think, unless you can *prove* otherwise. And you can't. Why in God's name would the Israelis risk alienating their only ally? It doesn't make sense.
By the way, it was no secret, though not terribly relevant, that the Soviets were in Vietnam -- I've always taken it for granted that Vietnam was a proxy war.
Slashdot Mirror
Other countries don't come under the heading of "minorities". I accept that /. will be US-centric at times, but this is ridiculous. It's quite simple: the Internet originated in the USA. Today, it is international. So, any control over it should be exerted by some international body. Simple enough for you -- or were you just trolling?
"angry replies and no agreements" -- I guess it wouldn't occur to you that, if this is the case, it's possible you might be wrong? Look, I wasn't getting on your case for the sake of it; but really, in a piece specifically about Galileo getting "closest-ever-yet" to Io, asking *what* Io is, is, well.... fill in the blank.
Wrong. Deep Blue was tuned to play against Kasparov, true. But even its predecessor could regularly beat Grandmasters ten years ago, without being `coached' to play specifically against them.
I don't have a number for total moves, but the the number of possible chess games is something like 321**6300,or roughly 10**15790. But this brute force approach to chess programming is not interesting. In practice, chess programs play better, the more able they are to leverage their `brute force' calculating ability with algorithms that mimic a human approach to evaluating positions.
That's right: Deep Thought was Deep Blue's predecessor. It couldn't beat Kasparov, but it did take down some great names: Bent Larsen, for example, in a tournament at Long Beach in 1988, where it tied for first place with Tony Miles, ahead of Tal. It lost only one game in this event, to Walter Browne.
So do a web search, or (gasp!) consult an encyclopaedia. Don't expect people to spoon-feed you. Sorry; but really, I don't want /. posts dumbed down to the extent that everyone can understand them without knowing *any* background. Perhaps the "hard words" should be explained too?
Sure, "the media" does not exist. But if you look at the kind of coverage Linux gets in "mainstream" media, you will see that Andrew Leonard is far more clueful than most. Be fair to the guy: he can't be right 100% of the time (neither can you or I). The stuff about "excessive media attention" was just a tag-line, anyway. The focus of this little piece was the "application of quantitative data gathering tactics" to the Open Source phenomenon. The qoute about ESR is exactly right: all his papers on the subject rely exclusively on annecdotal evidence. There's nothing wrong with this, but it is a limitation. The remark about "tampering", while a little silly in refering to the hords of /.-crazed hackers madly rushing from poll to poll `skewing the data', still makes a valid point -- how do researchers intend to stop the poll results being skewed? Is a form on a web page really random sampling anyway? Perhaps it would be better if people tried harder to pick out the essence of what a "Linux article" is saying, rather than getting hung up on the old "Media is clueless! Linux rules! Rah! Rah! Rah!" riff.
This quotation tells us that the author has read /. now and again, has seen the usual jokes when an on-line survey is mentioned: "go get 'em, boys", etc, and has taken these comments a tad more seriously than they warranted. Andrew, those people were joking!.
I'm not a Linux developer, but I write about Linux and maintain a hopefully-useful set of Linux resources on my website. Serious, well-thought-out questions from newbies are always welcome, and I'm happy to spend some time giving them a helpful answer; trouble is, I don't seem to get many. The most typical question is most succintly paraphrased as, "would you do my homework for me, please?". Now that pisses me off. It does seem that some newcomers to Linux just don't get it. For me, Linux is first and foremost about doing it yourself. Sure, if you run into trouble, ask away; but the basic dedication to hacking at problems has to be there. Hell, the amount of Linux information on the Web now means that most problems can be solved by RTFM, given a sufficiently large value for `M'!
The religious and the scientific ways of looking at the world are two mutually-incompatible systems. Either one believes in the rule of causality, or one believes in some white-bearded Nobodaddy from on high saying "let there be light". Sure, evolution is a theory; most of our scientific "facts" are theories. How many of them do you think should not be taught in schools for fear this will offend some redneck? Anti-evolutionism has strong roots in the US; then, so does the burning and lynching of blacks. The roots of both lie in the ignorance and prejudice of the mob. Over-wrought comparison? I think not. After all, I'm sure some Bible-bashing headcase somewhere can, using "scripture" make just as convincing a case that "the black man has no soul" as that "teaching evolution is evil". The hoo-hah over the teaching of scientific theories in science class is not a case of "individual rights" or "freedom of worship"; it is about a society decided on a system of values: I hope the US makes the right choice.
Arthur Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers" is the best reference I know of for this stuff. No, Galileo wasn't a heretic; he just wasn't very politic, in fact deliberately provocative, and feel foul of the academnic establishment of his day, who, being influential men, pulled a few strings in the Vatican; and the rest followed. As for torture, he was "shown the instruments" and asked to retract, which he did post-haste. He didn't have to do that, since he was not under arrest, and the temporal authority of the Papacy even in those times didn't extend very far -- he could have gone to live in The Netherlands, for instance. Oh, and while we're on my hobby horse, he didn't say "nevertheless, it does move", either -- I think Brecht invented that.
Just one caveat:
Well, this is not so. The Communists and Nazis collaborated on several occasions -- the Berlin rent strike, for instance. The KPD's attitude to the Nazis fluctuated in accordance with the 3rd International line, as handed down from Moscow. Let's not make too many martyrs here, either. Some leaders certainly ended up in the camps; other, ironically enough, ended up in Stalin's camps; and others toed the party line to emerge as the leaders of the DDR.
It was the SPD, and only the SPD, who consistently opposed Hitler.
OK, make that two caveats! I don't think the Geramn economy was really turned around. Hitler's economic miracle was a short-term affair. It was based on unsustainable, non-productive expenditure (armaments), and could only be maintainted by plunder and conquest.
Oh, boy... How in God's name did this get moderated up to 5? The long list of "stuff you can't do in Yuurp" is just plain wrong. This is not "informative", it's bullshit. Oh, and ESR never said a word abou Social Democracy, he was on about Socialist (and naziism, whatever that is). It's true that some governments in Europe are social-democratic; but capitalism thrives here just as it does in the US of A. As for this "physical coercion" business: er, you do live in the US, right? Have you ever examined what the "War against Drugs" allows *your* government to do to you? Haven't you ever heard of Waco? I could go on. Look, most countries in the world today are capitalist, and are in no way *fundamentally different* from each other. Please stop painting the US as some sort of libertarian paradise. It's a modern Western capitalist society, no more, no less.
Just a small point: Galileo wasn't a heretic, and the Inquisition didn't torture him.
Some people in this discussion are asking what's new in 2.4. Well, Joe Pranevich seems to be the de facto source for whats new and exciting in kernel releases, so see his The Wonderful World of Linux 2.4 for more info.
Hair too long??!! What are you insinuating? Some of my best friends are vicars, and only a few of them are tranvestites! (Er, excuse me, this is irrelevant, isn't it? yeah, well, it's not easy to pad these slashdot threads out, you know).
(Signed)
Brigadier Sir Charles Armstrong (Mrs)
P.S.
I have never kissed the editor of the radio times </python pastiche>
Oh God! I've just become as one with those people who do the Parrot sketch at parties! Kiss me, Hardy! Urgghhhhh....
Hmm, yeah, now that I think of it, I was talking about the Doom binaries -- not the same thing as the source. Self, take a hundred lines: "I must not post without thinking"...
Well, I may be mistaken, but did MS ever write such stuff about CP/M, or OS/2, or whatever? This piece is beneath comment (so why am I commenting on it? I'll leave that question to the philosophers). But really, this is sad in a way. MS was a giant of its time; whatever your feelings about win9x or NT, there is something vaguely distasteful about being in on the death throes. Avert your gaze, people, as the "market leader", which once could stamp all over the smaller, whimpier dionsaurs is reduced to printing drivel like this on its own home page (does this mean it can no longer bribe^H^H^H^H^Hfund "independent" organisations to do the dirty work?) Maybe it's just me, but this has the stink of desperation about it. Move along now, folks, ain't nothing to see here.
But didn't slackware used to include it? Perhaps this is why it went away -- I note it's not on any of the CDs I have lying around here, but I'm sure I've seen it on a Slackware CD in the past.
Whoops! Sorry about that! Only the last sentence *should* have been posted -- damn Lynx remembers too much...
Not so. Unless the publishing agreement explicitly states otherwise, a freelancer is selling first serial publication rights only. What is true is that a lot of publishers are trying to expand the control they have over an author's work. As a freelance writer, I am of course glad to see the courts exerting control over this. I am puzzled why anyone could not be -- unless you approve of corporations acruing additional rights at the expense of individuals. Of course, as you point out, the coming of electronic media raises some new issues about what exactly constitues "republishing". Copying for personal use, as in your example, is clearly not the same as taking the article and reprinting it in a paper or on-line publication, without so much as crediting the author, let alone paying for the right to publish it. This happens, and I don't like it. By the way, a freelancer isn't in a "work for hire" arrangement; he sells the product of his labour, not the labour itself. Note for moderator(s): this comment isn't "insightful"; it's wrong.
These are two separate issues, which should not be conflated. An article for a newspaper is not "data". Any writing which an author sells to a publisher is protected by copyright; to my knowledge, information collected about me by a marketing firm is not so protected -- or, at least, I don't hold the copyright on the portion of the database that applies to me. Arguably, such information is "public domain"; but whether it is or not doesn't affect the status of published writing.
"what is in effect public domain stuff". But that's just the point -- a writer's work isn't public domain. My writing, for example, belongs to me, I own the copyright on it. All that those newspapers have paid for is limited publishing rights. They want more publishing rights (in order to make more money, remember -- they're not in this for their health), then they pay more. Simple.
Not so. Unless the publishing agreement explicitly states otherwise, a freelancer is selling first serial publication rights only. What is true is that a lot of publishers are trying to expand the control they have over an author's work. As a freelance writer, I am of course glad to see the courts exerting control over this. I am puzzled why anyone could not be -- unless you approve of corporations acruing additional rights at the expense of individuals. Of course, as you point out, the coming of electronic media raises some new issues about what exactly constitues "republishing". Copying for personal use, as in your example, is clearly not the same as taking the article and reprinting it in a paper or on-line publication, without so much as crediting the author, let alone paying for the right to publish it. This happens, and I don't like it. By the way, a freelancer isn't in a "work for hire" arrangement; he sells the product of his labour, not the labour itself.
By the way, it was no secret, though not terribly relevant, that the Soviets were in Vietnam -- I've always taken it for granted that Vietnam was a proxy war.