Although I share your appreciation for the finer points of the 2.6.7 vintage, I feel that there are other vintages of similar quality that are underappreciated. For example, after a rough taste of 2.6.0 and its immediate successors---which apparently didn't much care for my USB bus---I settled on a lovely compile of 2.6.4 which I cherished for several months with nary a complaint.
I wasn't aware that in journalism it was considered appropriate to be paid by the subject of your reporting even if you disclose it. You don't see the oil-sector analyst for CNN Money holding down a consulting gig with Exxon, even an openly-acknowledged one.
These blogs only get the coverage they do because of the sexiness of new technology. In terms of readership, they're below many literary magazines, and the most well-known part of literary magazines is the fact that their readership is rather small.
Hell, The Nation has orders of magnitude more readers than DailyKos.
I know that PA gets paid by game companies, and I wouldn't trust them as an unbiased source of reviews for the companies and products they're paid by. Even if they're not being explicitly bought off, there may be a tendency to be nicer to the people who are nice to you by giving you money (or free stuff). I might follow their link to something, but if I was really interested in unbiased reviews, I'd look elsewhere. Anandtech, for example, makes an attempt to avoid this sort of thing so they can remain as unbiased as possible, both in fact and appearance.
Similarly, knowing that a blogger is on the payroll of a political campaign, in any guise, would make me avoid getting my political news from them, or at least taking it with a large grain of salt, as they may have a tendency to be nicer to the people who are paying them, even if there was no request to do so.
So, in terms of giving people confidence in your reporting, I think it'd be better to avoid taking money from the people you're reporting on. For Penny Arcade this is not really a problem, because they're primarily a web comic, not a source of game-industry news.
He seems to believe he was doing technical consulting, but it seems he was paid twice as much as the non-famous-blogger technical consultants, and from the Dean campaign's point of view the reason to hire him was to influence his writing.
So not unethical on his point of view if he didn't realize that was the goal, but it does seem to be influence-buying under the guise of hiring a technical consultant.
But you're not nearly as popular as sites like FreeRepublic or DailyKos.
(Although of those two DailyKos is, IMO, somewhat more analytical, but you still know before reading any article on there which side it's going to take.)
The most popular blogs out there are mostly packs of lies. People like hardcore partisan blogs that will always spin their side as good and their opponents as bad. There are few (no?) blogs that take nuanced, case-by-case views of the issues, and support whichever side they think is right in each given situation.
You have never read a scientific journal. Most of the theories discussed are not proven correct, but merely supported with varying amounts of evidence.
Scientific theories are not things that have been proven to be correct. For example, the theory of relativity was called such long before it was experimentally verified.
I agree that there's evidence for genetic change, for example in bacteria, but the specific claim that humans evolved from previous mammals is backed up mostly by circumstantial evidence. It's likely to be true, but it's not very well documented, and the actual claims keep changing every decade or so.
As a proud enlightenment user, I'll have you know that e does not tie up my 3d graphics card at all. It merely ties up my CPU, as things were meant to be.
Math is definitely different: Barring actual errors on the part of the mathematicians, mathematical theorems are proven to be correct. The most accepted and important ones have been checked over by many, many people, and so are exceedingly likely to be factual statements.
Chemistry has more room for error, but there are quite a few "facts" in Chemistry that are known to a high degree of certainty. That water is H2O can reasonably be called a "fact", rather than merely a "theory", as it's pretty much 100% likely to be true.
Explaining evolution, on the other hand, is an enterprise more akin to coming up with a theory about the fall of the Roman empire, or a model of global warming. There may be plenty of evidence, but it's difficult, at least given what we currently know, to prove it the way one might prove a mathematical theorem, or even know it to the certainty that we know the results in chemistry commonly called "facts".
The entire point of the Unix account system is that you can give people accounts on your system with restricted privileges. As opposed to Windows, where (until recently) any user could touch anything, on Unix systems users can only touch certain things. Thus, you can safely give people accounts on, say, a compile-farm to run their code. Or a Beowulf cluster to run overnight simulations. All without them all having access to everyone else's accounts, or being able to mess up the server.
The older servers still run Solaris on Sun hardware, but Sun hardware is just so much slower and more expensive than commodity x86 hardware that they've been migrating to Linux on x86.
This is exploitable by anyone with a local account on the machine, which includes those who can login over ssh. This affects literally thousands of servers. Now everyone with access to your Beowulf cluster has root on your Beowulf cluster. Every student that can login and use pine to read their email on your university's Linux email server now has root on the email server. Etc.
Local means "has an account on the machine". It does not mean "physically at the computer". This can be exploited remotely by anyone with a login account on the machine who can login via ssh or telnet. If you're running, say, a university's Linux server, this is a major problem, as now all your students and professors have root.
No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States; and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them shall, without the consent of the congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.
This only prohibits those who "hold any office of profit or trust under [the United States]" from accepting titles, which I think has been interpreted to mean those who hold a position in government (although I could be wrong there).
As a bit of trivia, Canada also has a prohibition (the Nickle Resolution) against its citizens accepting foreign titles, including British peerage titles---even though it recognizes the Queen as titular head of state. I believe several other Commonwealth countries (Australia and New Zealand?) have similar prohibitions on British honors.
It's essentially equivalent to the various "medals of honor" that many countries give out. For historical reasons, the British peerage system is much more complicated than the honorary awards of most countries, because it used to be an system of hierarchical real titles, rather than the honorary ones it is today.
That's true on the whole, but Europe invented the concept of a well-rounded liberal arts education, and some universities, like Oxford, still practice it to some extent.
result of the complicated British rules, actually
on
Sir Peter Molyneux?
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· Score: 1
Americans not being entitled to use the styling "Sir" isn't particular to the United States: The rather complex rules of the British peerage system include a stipulation that "Sir" can only be used by individuals who are subjects of the Monarch of the United Kingdom. The historical reason is that the entire peerage system was once an actual system of fealty, and so awarding a title to a foreigner was just an honorary exercise, while awarding a title to a subject of the Monarch was "substantive", more like bestowing a position on them. Of course, the distinction between "honorary" and "substantive" titles is now rather anachronistic, since they're now all pretty much just honorary.
Here is how it works: The blue states have a Democratic majority, but the majority of their money is held by Republicans. The reason is that this wealthy minority is very wealthy. The rich people in New York City and Connecticut are largely Republican, but form a minority of the population. They essentially fund the rest of the population. These states can make ends meet because they are rich. If I were in charge of Connecticut, I could make ends meet too. Nobody can make ends meet in Alabama, Democrat or Republican, because it's poor.
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Although I share your appreciation for the finer points of the 2.6.7 vintage, I feel that there are other vintages of similar quality that are underappreciated. For example, after a rough taste of 2.6.0 and its immediate successors---which apparently didn't much care for my USB bus---I settled on a lovely compile of 2.6.4 which I cherished for several months with nary a complaint.
On k5 we'd vote this sort of crap down and it'd never get posted.
I wasn't aware that in journalism it was considered appropriate to be paid by the subject of your reporting even if you disclose it. You don't see the oil-sector analyst for CNN Money holding down a consulting gig with Exxon, even an openly-acknowledged one.
These blogs only get the coverage they do because of the sexiness of new technology. In terms of readership, they're below many literary magazines, and the most well-known part of literary magazines is the fact that their readership is rather small.
Hell, The Nation has orders of magnitude more readers than DailyKos.
I know that PA gets paid by game companies, and I wouldn't trust them as an unbiased source of reviews for the companies and products they're paid by. Even if they're not being explicitly bought off, there may be a tendency to be nicer to the people who are nice to you by giving you money (or free stuff). I might follow their link to something, but if I was really interested in unbiased reviews, I'd look elsewhere. Anandtech, for example, makes an attempt to avoid this sort of thing so they can remain as unbiased as possible, both in fact and appearance.
Similarly, knowing that a blogger is on the payroll of a political campaign, in any guise, would make me avoid getting my political news from them, or at least taking it with a large grain of salt, as they may have a tendency to be nicer to the people who are paying them, even if there was no request to do so.
So, in terms of giving people confidence in your reporting, I think it'd be better to avoid taking money from the people you're reporting on. For Penny Arcade this is not really a problem, because they're primarily a web comic, not a source of game-industry news.
He seems to believe he was doing technical consulting, but it seems he was paid twice as much as the non-famous-blogger technical consultants, and from the Dean campaign's point of view the reason to hire him was to influence his writing.
So not unethical on his point of view if he didn't realize that was the goal, but it does seem to be influence-buying under the guise of hiring a technical consultant.
But you're not nearly as popular as sites like FreeRepublic or DailyKos.
(Although of those two DailyKos is, IMO, somewhat more analytical, but you still know before reading any article on there which side it's going to take.)
The most popular blogs out there are mostly packs of lies. People like hardcore partisan blogs that will always spin their side as good and their opponents as bad. There are few (no?) blogs that take nuanced, case-by-case views of the issues, and support whichever side they think is right in each given situation.
You have never read a scientific journal. Most of the theories discussed are not proven correct, but merely supported with varying amounts of evidence.
Scientific theories are not things that have been proven to be correct. For example, the theory of relativity was called such long before it was experimentally verified.
I agree that there's evidence for genetic change, for example in bacteria, but the specific claim that humans evolved from previous mammals is backed up mostly by circumstantial evidence. It's likely to be true, but it's not very well documented, and the actual claims keep changing every decade or so.
As a proud enlightenment user, I'll have you know that e does not tie up my 3d graphics card at all. It merely ties up my CPU, as things were meant to be.
Math is definitely different: Barring actual errors on the part of the mathematicians, mathematical theorems are proven to be correct. The most accepted and important ones have been checked over by many, many people, and so are exceedingly likely to be factual statements.
Chemistry has more room for error, but there are quite a few "facts" in Chemistry that are known to a high degree of certainty. That water is H2O can reasonably be called a "fact", rather than merely a "theory", as it's pretty much 100% likely to be true.
Explaining evolution, on the other hand, is an enterprise more akin to coming up with a theory about the fall of the Roman empire, or a model of global warming. There may be plenty of evidence, but it's difficult, at least given what we currently know, to prove it the way one might prove a mathematical theorem, or even know it to the certainty that we know the results in chemistry commonly called "facts".
It depends on the area, but in Texas, high school football often runs a surplus, especially at the schools that have the star athletes you speak of.
The entire point of the Unix account system is that you can give people accounts on your system with restricted privileges. As opposed to Windows, where (until recently) any user could touch anything, on Unix systems users can only touch certain things. Thus, you can safely give people accounts on, say, a compile-farm to run their code. Or a Beowulf cluster to run overnight simulations. All without them all having access to everyone else's accounts, or being able to mess up the server.
The older servers still run Solaris on Sun hardware, but Sun hardware is just so much slower and more expensive than commodity x86 hardware that they've been migrating to Linux on x86.
It's the sysadmins of University email and webservers across the country going apeshit as suddenly the entire student body potentially has root...
This is exploitable by anyone with a local account on the machine, which includes those who can login over ssh. This affects literally thousands of servers. Now everyone with access to your Beowulf cluster has root on your Beowulf cluster. Every student that can login and use pine to read their email on your university's Linux email server now has root on the email server. Etc.
Local means "has an account on the machine". It does not mean "physically at the computer". This can be exploited remotely by anyone with a login account on the machine who can login via ssh or telnet. If you're running, say, a university's Linux server, this is a major problem, as now all your students and professors have root.
The relevant Constitutional clause reads:
No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States; and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them shall, without the consent of the congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.
This only prohibits those who "hold any office of profit or trust under [the United States]" from accepting titles, which I think has been interpreted to mean those who hold a position in government (although I could be wrong there).
As a bit of trivia, Canada also has a prohibition (the Nickle Resolution) against its citizens accepting foreign titles, including British peerage titles---even though it recognizes the Queen as titular head of state. I believe several other Commonwealth countries (Australia and New Zealand?) have similar prohibitions on British honors.
It's essentially equivalent to the various "medals of honor" that many countries give out. For historical reasons, the British peerage system is much more complicated than the honorary awards of most countries, because it used to be an system of hierarchical real titles, rather than the honorary ones it is today.
That's true on the whole, but Europe invented the concept of a well-rounded liberal arts education, and some universities, like Oxford, still practice it to some extent.
Americans not being entitled to use the styling "Sir" isn't particular to the United States: The rather complex rules of the British peerage system include a stipulation that "Sir" can only be used by individuals who are subjects of the Monarch of the United Kingdom. The historical reason is that the entire peerage system was once an actual system of fealty, and so awarding a title to a foreigner was just an honorary exercise, while awarding a title to a subject of the Monarch was "substantive", more like bestowing a position on them. Of course, the distinction between "honorary" and "substantive" titles is now rather anachronistic, since they're now all pretty much just honorary.
Tried it three times now, and it's segfaulted each time.
Here is how it works: The blue states have a Democratic majority, but the majority of their money is held by Republicans. The reason is that this wealthy minority is very wealthy. The rich people in New York City and Connecticut are largely Republican, but form a minority of the population. They essentially fund the rest of the population. These states can make ends meet because they are rich. If I were in charge of Connecticut, I could make ends meet too. Nobody can make ends meet in Alabama, Democrat or Republican, because it's poor.