But this is all beside the point, really, in a discussion of the validity of ID as opposed to other, better models. Because in science, proof is not what we're looking for. We're looking for extreme likelihood, as in 99% certainty. Even this may be fallible, but it's worked better than any other system at uncovering the workings of the universe.
So your point is certainly valid, if academic. It may be true that science can't "prove" evolution or the extreme age of the Earth, but by that token it can't prove 100% to anyone else on/. that you're real and not some Turing Test beating simulation, or that the world outside our houses is real and not some variation on the Matrix. For all I know, given the extent to which I've checked for verification,/. exists nowhere besides in my computer. But we'd all be very ignorant, deranged people if we gave serious credence to these ideas, even if there's a lingering 0.00001% chance one or more of them is true. People who avoid this kind of derangement are not following their "opinions," but rather those answers most highly likely to be true. Calling this "opinion" is an abuse of the language and a misunderstanding of science.
Yeah, but the joke's on him when he gets his degree, which will turn out to actually be a bachelor's in Internet-based pharmaceutical sales. It's his own fault - he should have seen it coming when trolling forums was a course requirement.
Microsoft's goal with the ribbon was to make an interface that better encompassed the large amount of bloat (*cough*) features that have been added to MS Office over the years. I've never used the ribbon, as I'm on Office 2003 at work and OOo at home, but I have to admit to admiring its appearance. It definitely looks like it was designed by someone who cares about user interfaces, rather than by someone from Microsoft.
Still, I really don't see the point of duplicating it in OOo. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that in the wake of the ribbon, having a classic Office interface might be a feature of OOo, rather than a flaw. As in, OOo might pick up users specifically because it doesn't have the ribbon. And I haven't even brought up the fact that it gobbles up screen real estate that would be better used on your sci-fi novel. (Oh look, I mentioned it.) I hope this gets scuttled, and fast.
Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
Slow down, not all of us have memorizt every single participle yet.
No, I'm pretty sure they're still around. They're the ones with the topless chick on the third page, right?
They were until they were bought by Oracle, and now the topless chicks work directly for Larry Ellison. Page 3 is now ad space - you can buy it, in fact, however the cost is rather prohibitive and depends on the number of processors on your graphic designer's workstation.
There was also, IIRC, some noise in one of their recent filings about its popularity in Russia, so I guess it can be handy for controlling botnets or something.:)
That makes no sense. Tomatoes weren't even introduced to italy until the late 15th century, and weren't ever really popular there (partly due, I'm sure, to the fact that tomatoes are members of the deadly nightshade family.)
"Weren't ever"... until sometime prior to 2000, since that year was the first time I visited Italy and tomatoes seemed to be a pretty damned popular ingredient. But I also suspect they've been popular there for more than nine years because it was in the seventeenth century that the modern use of the word pizza took root in Naples, a city that still boats the world's oldest pizzeria (Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba), which started serving pizza with marinara sauce in 1738. The pizza margherita, which prominently features sliced tomatoes, was invented at Pizzeria Brandi in 1889.
(Er... glad I was able to contribute to this discussion of the ongoing SCO debacle.:)
The proper domains of the US government are to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty... The true answer to your post lies in the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, clause 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
I think this is missing the point of the question. Even when copyright and patent law was more sane in the US - before the CTEA and other laws were passed, before business method and software patents were allowed - the US government directly funded research and the benefits were enormous, and arguably were more efficient uses of tax revenue (and loans from China) than the bailout and stimulus money we're spending now. Reversing bad IP law is a great idea, but that only gets us back to where we were a few decades ago, so reverting to a Constitutionally pure IP ecosystem is only part of the solution.
Of course private companies also have driven innovation - look at Google today, or Bell Labs a few years back. And that innovation would benefit us more under the rectified Constitutional IP proposal you describe, but what about all the public research? I agree with TFA: inventing an improved battery and giving it to private industry to exploit patent-free would do a world of good, for us and for the private companies involved.
Zerth's Generalization
As any thread grows, it shall approach the output of an infinite amount of monkeys typing randomly. All past and current pet peeves shall come into play, many bad analogies shall occur, and someone will compare the topic to something else of a magnitude that is completely out of proportion.
You know who else typed randomly and had pet peeves? The Nazis.
What is it about a some iPhone users that makes them think that the general rule of lending and new product pricing doesn't apply to them? When a new product comes out, its costs more.
I'd suggest that perhaps the most vociferous iPhone users decrying this contract-influenced pricing structure are also die-hard Macophiles, and lead you to draw our own conclusions about why the latest and greatest seems mandatory to them. (*cough* fanboys *cough*)
At the risk of getting -1 Offtpic by being a little too meta... Flamebait? Really? Who are these mods who throw Flamebait and Troll around at perfectly decent Slashdotters? I don't see any Flamebaiting in the parent comment. Overratedness maybe, but not Flamebaiting. Whichever mod threw a Flamebat at Vancorps, fess up and explain yourself, or may you be subject to the merciless judgment of meta-moderation!
The United States has neither liberal nor conservative parties in power, and hasn't in a very long time (not that this observation should be interpreted as one of those meaningless "you get the same thing with either party" comments, either - the parties are different, even if there is overlap). I agree, though, that pandering to the Reality Makes Us Feel Icky crowd is a flaw common to both major parties, so prostitution is likely to remain illegal in most states in order to "keep us safe," and to "uphold our values," not to mention to "protect the children."
What percentage would have bought the item had there been no free alternative?
That is always impossible to say. It is certainly a good argument against a copyright holder claiming lost sales, but not a good argument in favor of abolishing strong copyright protections. (Those exist, I'm just saying "none of them would have bought it anyway" isn't a good one.)
I agree that time travel can be lazy. I used to love it, but it's been drastically overdone on film and television. Now I see it as a trap that screenwriters fall into when they want to connect elements of a story that shouldn't be able to connect.
In the Star Trek franchise The Voyage Home made novel use of it. At least it seemed novel at the time, and it made for an entertaining romp. But then came Generations. And then First Contact. And now this. That's four of the eleven Star Trek films, all reliant upon time travel in some way. Rather a lot, IMHO. And that's not counting the endless time travel episodes, stretching from TOS right up to Enterprise. What irks me most about time travel on Star Trek, though, is how it's treated as a novel, surprising development every time it happens. "What, he's from the future?" "What, we've been transported back to the 20th century?" "What, they changed history?" These future-folk should really get used to time travel: it's as commonplace as pizza.
Windows 2000 was faster - you were right to hold off on upgrading. 2000 was a great product compared to NT, and from a performance standpoint it was notably better than its successor... until XP got a security overhaul and many bugfixes in SP2. At or around that time PCs had become powerful enough to run XP more or less as well as 2000, and the driver situation had improved as well.
So your argument was fine. It's not inconsistent to have stuck with 2000 when XP came out, yet enjoy using XP today.
Hear hear. I've always been impressed by the way new OS X versions make the system feel much snappier, despite the new bells and whistles. The only caveat to your argument is the upcoming obsolescence of PowerPC systems. In the very near future your G4 will be powerful enough to run the latest OS X... it just won't speak the right instruction set.
JParrot's passed on! It's no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now history! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-JPARROT!!
"Aunt Tilly, you really shouldn't use Google Docs because you won't be able to patch it if you encounter problems with it. And that would seriously violate your freedoms.
Er... you do know how to patch software by adding in a source patch and recompiling, right? That's obviously the bit that comes before you run a make test just to be safe and then make install, and then you restart the service's daemon. This is all stuff you do in that terminal window I showed you last week. But then, you probably write all the C code for your patches in a terminal-based editor anyway.
Because it would draw attention to the VA. You know, the socialized healthcare system that severely reduced care costs. And we can't have people noticing the VA, because everyone knows that Socialism Doesn't Work (TM).
Does it surprise you that opening the CLI is the first instinct of many people on this site? Conider the source of the advice. I use the CLI regularly on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It's my gut reaction, too. But I'm not a reasonable representative of Aunt Tilly.
I have no doubt that you can find numerous examples of Slashdotters recommending the terminal window, however I don't think you're comparing the OSes fairly. People rarely do. Most of the critiques of Linux seem to echo from 1997 and are almost as dated as MC Hammer. (The same, I should add in fairness, goes for most of the BSOD jokes criticizing Windows, which are more apt for the NT/9x days.) I wish these discussions could take place in 2009 more often.
There may be malware for Windows, but at no point does one have to go into a CLI to install or run an application. Until the community address Linux's deficiencies, you are just another fanboy troll.
I forgot Slashdot was founded in 1997. Was your comment posted with the initial launch? Because that's closer to the last time I remember having to use a CLI in Linux to perform any basic tasks than 2009 is. It's really only the advanced stuff that requires text editing, but to be fair that's not much different than is the case with Windows. I could make similar comments about Registry edits of application settings under HKLM, and they're similarly outside the average user's experience.
I think the perceived CLI-ness of Linux has a lot more to do with who uses it and what kinds of things they do with it than it does with real-world comparisons. For example, in a comparison of tasks like "Install this OS on an OS-less computer" and "Surf the web" and "Edit this document" the two OSes are more or less the same. Prior to Vista, an installation task (which admittedly most people rarely have to do) would have been harder with Windows than with Linux, but MS has caught up with their image-based installation. Linux has similarly caught up on the desktop arrangement and available software.
As for Ubuntu, the real thing keeping me back from using it is the gnome interface. There are basically two problems I have with it, the first is right what you point out, to be blunt, I find gnome and to a lesser extent, gtk, to be ugly. I really don't like it. It works, but QT is much nicer looking.
While I'm not as negative about Gnome as most KDE users are, I think it's worth noting that if you don't like Gnome the companion Kubuntu 9.04 release is quite good this time around. If you tried the Kubuntu releases in 2008 and felt dissatisfied by their earlier KDE 4 builds, 9.04's KDE 4.2 is worth a look. I'm very likely converting to it today, given my enjoyable evaluation of it yesterday. The desktop in the new Kubuntu is simply beautiful, and I can finally say that a Linux desktop has become innovative rather than immitative.
Slashdot Mirror
But this is all beside the point, really, in a discussion of the validity of ID as opposed to other, better models. Because in science, proof is not what we're looking for. We're looking for extreme likelihood, as in 99% certainty. Even this may be fallible, but it's worked better than any other system at uncovering the workings of the universe.
So your point is certainly valid, if academic. It may be true that science can't "prove" evolution or the extreme age of the Earth, but by that token it can't prove 100% to anyone else on /. that you're real and not some Turing Test beating simulation, or that the world outside our houses is real and not some variation on the Matrix. For all I know, given the extent to which I've checked for verification, /. exists nowhere besides in my computer. But we'd all be very ignorant, deranged people if we gave serious credence to these ideas, even if there's a lingering 0.00001% chance one or more of them is true. People who avoid this kind of derangement are not following their "opinions," but rather those answers most highly likely to be true. Calling this "opinion" is an abuse of the language and a misunderstanding of science.
I hope you get a good grade.
Nine more posts and he gets an A!
Yeah, but the joke's on him when he gets his degree, which will turn out to actually be a bachelor's in Internet-based pharmaceutical sales. It's his own fault - he should have seen it coming when trolling forums was a course requirement.
Microsoft's goal with the ribbon was to make an interface that better encompassed the large amount of bloat (*cough*) features that have been added to MS Office over the years. I've never used the ribbon, as I'm on Office 2003 at work and OOo at home, but I have to admit to admiring its appearance. It definitely looks like it was designed by someone who cares about user interfaces, rather than by someone from Microsoft.
Still, I really don't see the point of duplicating it in OOo. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that in the wake of the ribbon, having a classic Office interface might be a feature of OOo, rather than a flaw. As in, OOo might pick up users specifically because it doesn't have the ribbon. And I haven't even brought up the fact that it gobbles up screen real estate that would be better used on your sci-fi novel. (Oh look, I mentioned it.) I hope this gets scuttled, and fast.
Slow down, not all of us have memorizt every single participle yet.
Sun? Didn't they go out of business or something?
No, I'm pretty sure they're still around. They're the ones with the topless chick on the third page, right?
They were until they were bought by Oracle, and now the topless chicks work directly for Larry Ellison. Page 3 is now ad space - you can buy it, in fact, however the cost is rather prohibitive and depends on the number of processors on your graphic designer's workstation.
There was also, IIRC, some noise in one of their recent filings about its popularity in Russia, so I guess it can be handy for controlling botnets or something. :)
No. In Russia, botnets control Linux.
That makes no sense. Tomatoes weren't even introduced to italy until the late 15th century, and weren't ever really popular there (partly due, I'm sure, to the fact that tomatoes are members of the deadly nightshade family.)
"Weren't ever" ... until sometime prior to 2000, since that year was the first time I visited Italy and tomatoes seemed to be a pretty damned popular ingredient. But I also suspect they've been popular there for more than nine years because it was in the seventeenth century that the modern use of the word pizza took root in Naples, a city that still boats the world's oldest pizzeria (Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba), which started serving pizza with marinara sauce in 1738. The pizza margherita, which prominently features sliced tomatoes, was invented at Pizzeria Brandi in 1889.
(Er ... glad I was able to contribute to this discussion of the ongoing SCO debacle. :)
The proper domains of the US government are to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty ... The true answer to your post lies in the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, clause 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
I think this is missing the point of the question. Even when copyright and patent law was more sane in the US - before the CTEA and other laws were passed, before business method and software patents were allowed - the US government directly funded research and the benefits were enormous, and arguably were more efficient uses of tax revenue (and loans from China) than the bailout and stimulus money we're spending now. Reversing bad IP law is a great idea, but that only gets us back to where we were a few decades ago, so reverting to a Constitutionally pure IP ecosystem is only part of the solution.
Of course private companies also have driven innovation - look at Google today, or Bell Labs a few years back. And that innovation would benefit us more under the rectified Constitutional IP proposal you describe, but what about all the public research? I agree with TFA: inventing an improved battery and giving it to private industry to exploit patent-free would do a world of good, for us and for the private companies involved.
Zerth's Generalization As any thread grows, it shall approach the output of an infinite amount of monkeys typing randomly. All past and current pet peeves shall come into play, many bad analogies shall occur, and someone will compare the topic to something else of a magnitude that is completely out of proportion.
You know who else typed randomly and had pet peeves? The Nazis.
What is it about a some iPhone users that makes them think that the general rule of lending and new product pricing doesn't apply to them? When a new product comes out, its costs more.
I'd suggest that perhaps the most vociferous iPhone users decrying this contract-influenced pricing structure are also die-hard Macophiles, and lead you to draw our own conclusions about why the latest and greatest seems mandatory to them. (*cough* fanboys *cough*)
At the risk of getting -1 Offtpic by being a little too meta ... Flamebait? Really? Who are these mods who throw Flamebait and Troll around at perfectly decent Slashdotters? I don't see any Flamebaiting in the parent comment. Overratedness maybe, but not Flamebaiting. Whichever mod threw a Flamebat at Vancorps, fess up and explain yourself, or may you be subject to the merciless judgment of meta-moderation!
The United States has neither liberal nor conservative parties in power, and hasn't in a very long time (not that this observation should be interpreted as one of those meaningless "you get the same thing with either party" comments, either - the parties are different, even if there is overlap). I agree, though, that pandering to the Reality Makes Us Feel Icky crowd is a flaw common to both major parties, so prostitution is likely to remain illegal in most states in order to "keep us safe," and to "uphold our values," not to mention to "protect the children."
What percentage would have bought the item had there been no free alternative?
That is always impossible to say. It is certainly a good argument against a copyright holder claiming lost sales, but not a good argument in favor of abolishing strong copyright protections. (Those exist, I'm just saying "none of them would have bought it anyway" isn't a good one.)
Sorry, AC, I'll try to pay attention to every game in Star Trekdom from now on to make sure I don't say anything inaccurate on Slashdot. :)
Speaking as somebody with 4 shelves of Star Trek books, piss off. Trekker sounds totally gay. I am proud to call myself a Trekkie.
I just threw out all my Star Trek books, and the DVD collection too, because the timeline they took place in has been erased. Such a waste.
I agree that time travel can be lazy. I used to love it, but it's been drastically overdone on film and television. Now I see it as a trap that screenwriters fall into when they want to connect elements of a story that shouldn't be able to connect.
In the Star Trek franchise The Voyage Home made novel use of it. At least it seemed novel at the time, and it made for an entertaining romp. But then came Generations. And then First Contact. And now this. That's four of the eleven Star Trek films, all reliant upon time travel in some way. Rather a lot, IMHO. And that's not counting the endless time travel episodes, stretching from TOS right up to Enterprise. What irks me most about time travel on Star Trek, though, is how it's treated as a novel, surprising development every time it happens. "What, he's from the future?" "What, we've been transported back to the 20th century?" "What, they changed history?" These future-folk should really get used to time travel: it's as commonplace as pizza.
[P.S. If I'm just missing the joke, then just ignore me]
Whooosh indeed. :)
Windows 2000 was faster - you were right to hold off on upgrading. 2000 was a great product compared to NT, and from a performance standpoint it was notably better than its successor ... until XP got a security overhaul and many bugfixes in SP2. At or around that time PCs had become powerful enough to run XP more or less as well as 2000, and the driver situation had improved as well.
So your argument was fine. It's not inconsistent to have stuck with 2000 when XP came out, yet enjoy using XP today.
Hear hear. I've always been impressed by the way new OS X versions make the system feel much snappier, despite the new bells and whistles. The only caveat to your argument is the upcoming obsolescence of PowerPC systems. In the very near future your G4 will be powerful enough to run the latest OS X ... it just won't speak the right instruction set.
JParrot's passed on! It's no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now history! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-JPARROT!!
A geek's service call with a clueless relative:
"Aunt Tilly, you really shouldn't use Google Docs because you won't be able to patch it if you encounter problems with it. And that would seriously violate your freedoms.
Er ... you do know how to patch software by adding in a source patch and recompiling, right? That's obviously the bit that comes before you run a make test just to be safe and then make install, and then you restart the service's daemon. This is all stuff you do in that terminal window I showed you last week. But then, you probably write all the C code for your patches in a terminal-based editor anyway.
Hello? Aunt Tilly?"
Because it would draw attention to the VA. You know, the socialized healthcare system that severely reduced care costs. And we can't have people noticing the VA, because everyone knows that Socialism Doesn't Work (TM).
Does it surprise you that opening the CLI is the first instinct of many people on this site? Conider the source of the advice. I use the CLI regularly on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It's my gut reaction, too. But I'm not a reasonable representative of Aunt Tilly.
I have no doubt that you can find numerous examples of Slashdotters recommending the terminal window, however I don't think you're comparing the OSes fairly. People rarely do. Most of the critiques of Linux seem to echo from 1997 and are almost as dated as MC Hammer. (The same, I should add in fairness, goes for most of the BSOD jokes criticizing Windows, which are more apt for the NT/9x days.) I wish these discussions could take place in 2009 more often.
There may be malware for Windows, but at no point does one have to go into a CLI to install or run an application. Until the community address Linux's deficiencies, you are just another fanboy troll.
I forgot Slashdot was founded in 1997. Was your comment posted with the initial launch? Because that's closer to the last time I remember having to use a CLI in Linux to perform any basic tasks than 2009 is. It's really only the advanced stuff that requires text editing, but to be fair that's not much different than is the case with Windows. I could make similar comments about Registry edits of application settings under HKLM, and they're similarly outside the average user's experience.
I think the perceived CLI-ness of Linux has a lot more to do with who uses it and what kinds of things they do with it than it does with real-world comparisons. For example, in a comparison of tasks like "Install this OS on an OS-less computer" and "Surf the web" and "Edit this document" the two OSes are more or less the same. Prior to Vista, an installation task (which admittedly most people rarely have to do) would have been harder with Windows than with Linux, but MS has caught up with their image-based installation. Linux has similarly caught up on the desktop arrangement and available software.
As for Ubuntu, the real thing keeping me back from using it is the gnome interface. There are basically two problems I have with it, the first is right what you point out, to be blunt, I find gnome and to a lesser extent, gtk, to be ugly. I really don't like it. It works, but QT is much nicer looking.
While I'm not as negative about Gnome as most KDE users are, I think it's worth noting that if you don't like Gnome the companion Kubuntu 9.04 release is quite good this time around. If you tried the Kubuntu releases in 2008 and felt dissatisfied by their earlier KDE 4 builds, 9.04's KDE 4.2 is worth a look. I'm very likely converting to it today, given my enjoyable evaluation of it yesterday. The desktop in the new Kubuntu is simply beautiful, and I can finally say that a Linux desktop has become innovative rather than immitative.