"Very few Christians believe much of the Old Testament."
Huh? The OT is part of the bible and is part of the basis of Christianity. Being a Christian REQUIRES one to believe the OT.
It doesn't require you to believe the literal text of any part of the Bible. The only requirement for being a Christian is following (the example set by) Christ. (Which, by the way, not many self-proclaimed Christians try to do at the best of their possibilities, and obviously even less manage to pull off).
While you can't prove that there is no god (or similar esoteric entity), you can still prove that certain forms of religion are wrong and self-contradicting. Like Islam, Christianity and all this creationist stuff...
Not really. Although you can show quite simply how much of the factoids contained in their sacred books are inconsistent with what science shows us, this does neither prove the religion wrong, nor it proves them to be self-contradicting.
First of all, nothing (not even in the sacred books themselves) says that the sacred books are supposed to be read literally (and no, their claiming of being the Word of God does not automatically imply that they should be read literally). Of course, this does raise the question on who and when and how can go beyond the literal meaning, and the moment religion becomes an instrument of power, rather than more simply a collection of ethical rules and myths and stuff to support it (which is pretty soon in the history of every religion, of course), the powers-to-be claim to hold the only possible key to interpretation (e.g. the Church was strongly opposed to having a Bible in the new languages that formed across Europe, rather than in Latin, because then "everybody could read it", where 'reading' is to be intended not (only) in the literal sense, but more in the deeper sense of trying to understand the deepest meanings of the Book). By the way, except for the literal creationists, creationism by itself is not incompatible with what science tells us about the universe, although compatible approaches (such as intelligent design) are scientifically useless.
Secondly, when you go look at the substance of the religions, these are not inherently wrong, nor self-contradicting. What is contradicting (or more specifically substantially hypocrite) is most of the time the behavior of many believers.
You believe that gameplay can't be copyrighted. You cherry picked some unnamed and unknown sites that support your believe about gameplay and copyright.
Gameplay cannot be copyrighted. There are solid cases in international copyright case history to support this claim, the first that comes to my mind is the one involving Scrabble and the Italian variant Scarabeo. Mattel went after EG, and lost the case because the game mechanics were not protectable under any form (copyright, trademark, patent).
Linux isn't good for them either. The joo-joo (remember that?) linux flash player is shit and can't deal with full screen video
Please stop spreading this bullshit. I've been able to play HD content in Flash fullscreen on my Linux machine (x86_64, Debian unstable) for at least the past year, using the 'lab' version of the 64bit Flash plugin
Video support in X.org is one thing, but NVIDIA cards are also used for high-performance computing via the CUDA environment. OpenCL (a potential alternative to CUDA) is mentioned as being part of Nouveau, but CUDA is a well-established solution.
So what's the status now of HPC with NVIDIA cards?
Exactly the same as before: you use the proprietary driver, like you had to do before this annoucement anyway. And in fact, Linux has been supported better than Windows as an HPC platform by nvidia.
To develop algorithms, Yes, you will need math skills but that will not be sufficient. you will need also the knowledge of the dataset you want to process. You do not analyse Facebook data the same way as Afganistan images from UAVs or LHC events.
So you will have specialists that will tell you how the data need to be analysed.
You as IT specialist will need the basic math skills to apply what they told you to.
Math is not sufficient in most cases.
The best mathematician in the world will not be able to tell you how to simulate a galaxy or how to go from a diffraction pattern to the structure of a protein.
If it is these stuff that you want to code. CS is not the major you should have chosen.
The question was not whether maths was sufficient, but whether it was necessary. If you had any math skills, you'd know the difference 8-P
No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.
Sorry, but that's simply wrong. One of the foundations of anarchy is that no man should rule another. Whether and how that's practically possible is obviously a very longly debatable topic, but if you have the strong ruling the weak you don't have anarchy (biacracy, maybe?)
Well, you looked it up wrong. One of the pillars of anarchy is that man should not have power over man, whereas democracy is based on the idea that the majority should have the power to impose its will over the rest of the population. The only case when anarchy and direct democracy match is when you have a 100% agreement on everything.
+10 informative
The whole FLOSS mindset is not and has never been about democracy, in the sense of "rule of the people", but always about anarcho-communism, in the sense of "self-rule with sharing of resources".
Rather than "-1 Troll", the original article should rather get one of those "obvious post is obvious" macro images. Saying that open source is not a democracy is like saying that the sun isn't green. Except that apparently some people apparently do believe the former.
Other OSs have a similar problem as Windows is such a huge market that many commercial app developers will restrict their products to only windows releases. And users choose (well.. in some cases atleast) the OS with the most apps, and on and on it goes.
Seems to be the same problem in search. Google has millions of data points of search terms co-related with the link that was clicked and all that data has trained their algorithm such that any competing algorithm would find it very hard to catch up.
There's a substantial difference on the way the monopoly was achieved (anti-competitive tactics vs better quality).
Do people become environmentally friendly in a large scale only when they don't have any other choice left?
Indeed, as otherwise they usually have no compelling reason to make the effort to be less wastey and more efficient. Being efficient, reducing waste, optimizing use and re-use, etc requires efforts. It requires you to think about possible reuses, it requires you to split discard materials into recyclables, organic, etc. So it's usually more 'efficient' (psychologically) to be less efficient (resource-wise).
It is Fascist.
Try to pass through a slum with a million people without sewers and see how green it is.
Science without considering human wellbeing is not a good thing.
While I get your point, fascism was in fact much less disregarding of general human welbeing than many capitalistic societies. For example, in Italy fascism was what laid out the basic infrastructure of the social welfare state (meaning essential housing, schooling and healthcare for everybody regardless of census, and leading to a consequent general improvement of the health and literacy of the population). It also brought forth the sanitations of swampy areas in the center-north Italy, with consequent reduction of endemic diseases such as malaria. So I seriously fail to see what's fascist about the article (given that it even lacks the _negative_ aspects of Fascism, such as the total lack of freedom of expression and all the other consequences of a totalitarian government, or the racist degeneration that came with its attachment to Nazism).
Personally, I find the article useless, in the sense that it doesn't tell me anything non-obvious: scarcity of resources leads to very efficient use (and re-use), lack of resources leads to the use of alternatives, abundance of resources leads to waste. Wow that's surprising. People that waste could learn from the people that are efficient. Wow that's even more surprising. The article also fails to point out how it's possible to increase efficiency and reduce waste _without_ carrying over the negative aspects of slum life, but it'll never happen because the behavioral patterns of human don't shift towards efficiency unless there's a pressing need for it.
Has anyone else noticed the “dark gamma” cancer that came over the Internet since the dawn of cheap LCD displays?
I have a couple of very carefully calibrated displays here, and pretty much everything on YouTube and every image on the net has a way too deep gamma.
Which is caused by the LCDs (especially the cheap ones) all being extremely white and having a distorted gamma by default.
It’s really annoying, since I always have to switch the color profile when I want to see anything in those videos. And images I create for the web end up looking very white on Joe Sixpack’s displays.:(
I wish there was a way to punch every display company boss in the face for not enforcing proper calibration.:/
I did notice that the displays on both my laptops were much brighter than my old CRT displays, so I set my Windows and X to use a 0.7 gamma which is more or less enough to compensate, but I think I've been luckier than you with what I've come across the interwebs.
Finally, world opinion was mixed to the invasion. Thirty six countries were involved in the invasion so it's hard to claim that "world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq" is completely wrong. More countries opposed the invasion that supported it, but opinion was at least mixed. Unless of course you get your news from NPR.
Not only more countries opposed the invasion than supported it, of those that supported it you had very strong opposition to it within the populace, even though the governors jumped on the Iraq invasion bandwagon hoping to gather some crumbs for the Iraq reconstructio and oil extraction contracts
A hole has been found in Linux kernel versions stretching back eight years that is 'as trivial as it can get to exploit', according to the Google employees who discovered it.
Julien Tinnes and Tavis Ormandy, the security researchers who discovered the vulnerability, have already issued a patch for the flaw. According to a blog post written by Tinnes on Thursday, the hole "affects all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels since 2001 on all architectures", and is "the public vulnerability affecting the greatest number of kernel versions".
Eight year is a pretty 'good' record, but Windows still wins by 7 more (NT3.5 released in 1994, more or less the time of release of Linux 1.0). Also notice that then Linux bug was fixed almost contextually with its report, whereas the one this article is about has not not been fixed 6 months+ after the report was acknowledged. This is where open source wins.
Give me a break. I only ever use it for Firebug anymore and even that's becoming more rare as the tools for Safari and Chrome improve. Firefox will be irrelevant within 3 years, and still wondering where they went wrong.
Opera's Dragonfly is definitely on par with FF Firebug, if you're still looking for an alternative.
"[Firefox] the past two years have seen... Opera close the features gap significantly." Are we re-writing documented history? Opera is the longest running GUI Web browser, first to use tabs, sessions, customizable skins, ACID 2 & 3 compliant, download management panel, widget support, and a whole host of other features Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Google have taken and continue to take from Opera ASA. I suppose when your non-Opera Web browser lacks the security track record Opera possesses, delusive jealousy becomes a factor.
I wouldn't write it off as delusive jealousy, maybe it's just plain ignorance: I'm starting to think that Opera should do a better job at advertising its constant being one (when not several) step(s) ahead of the competition. Firefox, after all, has always had much more aggressive campaigning, which combined with its starting off from the vast Mozilla suite fanbase, and the fact that it's open source, put it in a much more favorable position, so that if and when people actually get to try Opera, they've already seen all the features in FF 'already', even though Opera implemented them first.
For example, when Opera started supporting GreaseMonkey scripts as user javascript?
Well, Opera's UserJS feature was deployed at more or less the same time as the GM extension for Firefox, so it's hard to say who invented the thing first if you just look at user javascript enhancements, but the UserJS feature in Opera builds on top of an older "browser JS" feauture, an Opera-updated javascript file that is used to fix broken sites (i.e. sites that intentionally misbehave after crappy browser detection), so the UserJS feature roots in Opera are rather older than the inception of Firefox' GM. Obviously, Opera's support for GM scripts via UserJS was implemented _after_ GM. Additionally, due to its roots, Opera's 'native' UserJS can do a range of things that GM scripts cannot do, since it triggers earlier and is not sandboxed the way GM is. So, yep, Opera still got there first, and is still ahead of the competition.
from the country that invented it! But I doubt it will fly with the people. They would recognize it.. No?
Sadly, many of us aren't able to. OTOH, since the principal news sources are under Berlusconi's control, how would they ever even realize what's really happening?
Slashdot Mirror
"Very few Christians believe much of the Old Testament."
Huh? The OT is part of the bible and is part of the basis of Christianity. Being a Christian REQUIRES one to believe the OT.
It doesn't require you to believe the literal text of any part of the Bible. The only requirement for being a Christian is following (the example set by) Christ. (Which, by the way, not many self-proclaimed Christians try to do at the best of their possibilities, and obviously even less manage to pull off).
While you can't prove that there is no god (or similar esoteric entity), you can still prove that certain forms of religion are wrong and self-contradicting. Like Islam, Christianity and all this creationist stuff...
Not really. Although you can show quite simply how much of the factoids contained in their sacred books are inconsistent with what science shows us, this does neither prove the religion wrong, nor it proves them to be self-contradicting.
First of all, nothing (not even in the sacred books themselves) says that the sacred books are supposed to be read literally (and no, their claiming of being the Word of God does not automatically imply that they should be read literally). Of course, this does raise the question on who and when and how can go beyond the literal meaning, and the moment religion becomes an instrument of power, rather than more simply a collection of ethical rules and myths and stuff to support it (which is pretty soon in the history of every religion, of course), the powers-to-be claim to hold the only possible key to interpretation (e.g. the Church was strongly opposed to having a Bible in the new languages that formed across Europe, rather than in Latin, because then "everybody could read it", where 'reading' is to be intended not (only) in the literal sense, but more in the deeper sense of trying to understand the deepest meanings of the Book). By the way, except for the literal creationists, creationism by itself is not incompatible with what science tells us about the universe, although compatible approaches (such as intelligent design) are scientifically useless.
Secondly, when you go look at the substance of the religions, these are not inherently wrong, nor self-contradicting. What is contradicting (or more specifically substantially hypocrite) is most of the time the behavior of many believers.
You believe that gameplay can't be copyrighted. You cherry picked some unnamed and unknown sites that support your believe about gameplay and copyright.
Gameplay cannot be copyrighted. There are solid cases in international copyright case history to support this claim, the first that comes to my mind is the one involving Scrabble and the Italian variant Scarabeo. Mattel went after EG, and lost the case because the game mechanics were not protectable under any form (copyright, trademark, patent).
I wonder if they're going to archive stuff like identi.ca too, or any other related platform.
Linux isn't good for them either. The joo-joo (remember that?) linux flash player is shit and can't deal with full screen video
Please stop spreading this bullshit. I've been able to play HD content in Flash fullscreen on my Linux machine (x86_64, Debian unstable) for at least the past year, using the 'lab' version of the 64bit Flash plugin
Video support in X.org is one thing, but NVIDIA cards are also used for high-performance computing via the CUDA environment. OpenCL (a potential alternative to CUDA) is mentioned as being part of Nouveau, but CUDA is a well-established solution.
So what's the status now of HPC with NVIDIA cards?
Exactly the same as before: you use the proprietary driver, like you had to do before this annoucement anyway. And in fact, Linux has been supported better than Windows as an HPC platform by nvidia.
To develop algorithms, Yes, you will need math skills but that will not be sufficient. you will need also the knowledge of the dataset you want to process. You do not analyse Facebook data the same way as Afganistan images from UAVs or LHC events.
So you will have specialists that will tell you how the data need to be analysed. You as IT specialist will need the basic math skills to apply what they told you to.
Math is not sufficient in most cases. The best mathematician in the world will not be able to tell you how to simulate a galaxy or how to go from a diffraction pattern to the structure of a protein.
If it is these stuff that you want to code. CS is not the major you should have chosen.
The question was not whether maths was sufficient, but whether it was necessary. If you had any math skills, you'd know the difference 8-P
No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.
Sorry, but that's simply wrong. One of the foundations of anarchy is that no man should rule another. Whether and how that's practically possible is obviously a very longly debatable topic, but if you have the strong ruling the weak you don't have anarchy (biacracy, maybe?)
Anarchy is direct democracy. I looked it up.
Well, you looked it up wrong. One of the pillars of anarchy is that man should not have power over man, whereas democracy is based on the idea that the majority should have the power to impose its will over the rest of the population. The only case when anarchy and direct democracy match is when you have a 100% agreement on everything.
+10 informative The whole FLOSS mindset is not and has never been about democracy, in the sense of "rule of the people", but always about anarcho-communism, in the sense of "self-rule with sharing of resources". Rather than "-1 Troll", the original article should rather get one of those "obvious post is obvious" macro images. Saying that open source is not a democracy is like saying that the sun isn't green. Except that apparently some people apparently do believe the former.
Try using an SVG as a background-image, for example.
Other OSs have a similar problem as Windows is such a huge market that many commercial app developers will restrict their products to only windows releases. And users choose (well.. in some cases atleast) the OS with the most apps, and on and on it goes.
Seems to be the same problem in search. Google has millions of data points of search terms co-related with the link that was clicked and all that data has trained their algorithm such that any competing algorithm would find it very hard to catch up.
There's a substantial difference on the way the monopoly was achieved (anti-competitive tactics vs better quality).
Do people become environmentally friendly in a large scale only when they don't have any other choice left?
Indeed, as otherwise they usually have no compelling reason to make the effort to be less wastey and more efficient. Being efficient, reducing waste, optimizing use and re-use, etc requires efforts. It requires you to think about possible reuses, it requires you to split discard materials into recyclables, organic, etc. So it's usually more 'efficient' (psychologically) to be less efficient (resource-wise).
It is Fascist. Try to pass through a slum with a million people without sewers and see how green it is. Science without considering human wellbeing is not a good thing.
While I get your point, fascism was in fact much less disregarding of general human welbeing than many capitalistic societies. For example, in Italy fascism was what laid out the basic infrastructure of the social welfare state (meaning essential housing, schooling and healthcare for everybody regardless of census, and leading to a consequent general improvement of the health and literacy of the population). It also brought forth the sanitations of swampy areas in the center-north Italy, with consequent reduction of endemic diseases such as malaria. So I seriously fail to see what's fascist about the article (given that it even lacks the _negative_ aspects of Fascism, such as the total lack of freedom of expression and all the other consequences of a totalitarian government, or the racist degeneration that came with its attachment to Nazism).
Personally, I find the article useless, in the sense that it doesn't tell me anything non-obvious: scarcity of resources leads to very efficient use (and re-use), lack of resources leads to the use of alternatives, abundance of resources leads to waste. Wow that's surprising. People that waste could learn from the people that are efficient. Wow that's even more surprising. The article also fails to point out how it's possible to increase efficiency and reduce waste _without_ carrying over the negative aspects of slum life, but it'll never happen because the behavioral patterns of human don't shift towards efficiency unless there's a pressing need for it.
Has anyone else noticed the “dark gamma” cancer that came over the Internet since the dawn of cheap LCD displays?
I have a couple of very carefully calibrated displays here, and pretty much everything on YouTube and every image on the net has a way too deep gamma. Which is caused by the LCDs (especially the cheap ones) all being extremely white and having a distorted gamma by default.
It’s really annoying, since I always have to switch the color profile when I want to see anything in those videos. And images I create for the web end up looking very white on Joe Sixpack’s displays. :(
I wish there was a way to punch every display company boss in the face for not enforcing proper calibration. :/
I did notice that the displays on both my laptops were much brighter than my old CRT displays, so I set my Windows and X to use a 0.7 gamma which is more or less enough to compensate, but I think I've been luckier than you with what I've come across the interwebs.
Finally, world opinion was mixed to the invasion. Thirty six countries were involved in the invasion so it's hard to claim that "world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq" is completely wrong. More countries opposed the invasion that supported it, but opinion was at least mixed. Unless of course you get your news from NPR.
Not only more countries opposed the invasion than supported it, of those that supported it you had very strong opposition to it within the populace, even though the governors jumped on the Iraq invasion bandwagon hoping to gather some crumbs for the Iraq reconstructio and oil extraction contracts
Goolge has the simplicity aspect right.
I *really* hate Google for destroying the right-click copy-link-location. Maybe I'll change to Bing, it does not do that.
What's that? right-click copy-link-address works perfectly for me on Google search links in Opera
Linux has it's own version of such bugs. Yes, even with the 'many eyes' looking at the source, it does happen, F/OSS is no panacea.
From http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-332141.html
A hole has been found in Linux kernel versions stretching back eight years that is 'as trivial as it can get to exploit', according to the Google employees who discovered it.
Julien Tinnes and Tavis Ormandy, the security researchers who discovered the vulnerability, have already issued a patch for the flaw. According to a blog post written by Tinnes on Thursday, the hole "affects all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels since 2001 on all architectures", and is "the public vulnerability affecting the greatest number of kernel versions".
Eight year is a pretty 'good' record, but Windows still wins by 7 more (NT3.5 released in 1994, more or less the time of release of Linux 1.0). Also notice that then Linux bug was fixed almost contextually with its report, whereas the one this article is about has not not been fixed 6 months+ after the report was acknowledged. This is where open source wins.
Give me a break. I only ever use it for Firebug anymore and even that's becoming more rare as the tools for Safari and Chrome improve. Firefox will be irrelevant within 3 years, and still wondering where they went wrong.
Opera's Dragonfly is definitely on par with FF Firebug, if you're still looking for an alternative.
"[Firefox] the past two years have seen ... Opera close the features gap significantly." Are we re-writing documented history? Opera is the longest running GUI Web browser, first to use tabs, sessions, customizable skins, ACID 2 & 3 compliant, download management panel, widget support, and a whole host of other features Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Google have taken and continue to take from Opera ASA. I suppose when your non-Opera Web browser lacks the security track record Opera possesses, delusive jealousy becomes a factor.
I wouldn't write it off as delusive jealousy, maybe it's just plain ignorance: I'm starting to think that Opera should do a better job at advertising its constant being one (when not several) step(s) ahead of the competition. Firefox, after all, has always had much more aggressive campaigning, which combined with its starting off from the vast Mozilla suite fanbase, and the fact that it's open source, put it in a much more favorable position, so that if and when people actually get to try Opera, they've already seen all the features in FF 'already', even though Opera implemented them first.
For example, when Opera started supporting GreaseMonkey scripts as user javascript?
Well, Opera's UserJS feature was deployed at more or less the same time as the GM extension for Firefox, so it's hard to say who invented the thing first if you just look at user javascript enhancements, but the UserJS feature in Opera builds on top of an older "browser JS" feauture, an Opera-updated javascript file that is used to fix broken sites (i.e. sites that intentionally misbehave after crappy browser detection), so the UserJS feature roots in Opera are rather older than the inception of Firefox' GM. Obviously, Opera's support for GM scripts via UserJS was implemented _after_ GM. Additionally, due to its roots, Opera's 'native' UserJS can do a range of things that GM scripts cannot do, since it triggers earlier and is not sandboxed the way GM is. So, yep, Opera still got there first, and is still ahead of the competition.
From the article: "The GPU will also be execute C++ code."
They integrate a C++ interpreter (or JIT compiler) into their graphics chip?
That's a misinterpretation of part of the NVIDIA CUDA propaganda stuff: better C++ support in NVCC
from the country that invented it! But I doubt it will fly with the people. They would recognize it.. No?
Sadly, many of us aren't able to. OTOH, since the principal news sources are under Berlusconi's control, how would they ever even realize what's really happening?
"They" can't care -- they are are a legal construct, the Immortal, Soulless Corporation.
Uh, no, they are the human beings taking the decisions and ultimately responsible for _everything_ enacted by the company they manage.
"This is _exactly_ what we feared would happen."
And what "_exactly_" is that, exactly? Do you really think they want to kill humans?
It's more like they don't care, to the point of criminally trying to withold the information that proves that their products are health hazards.