You are begining to try my patience. You have been tried and found wanting.
Ah, there you go---I think your examples explain it all. "You are beginning to try my patience." So the correct use would be, "one whose patience RFID has tried..." As you can see, when something is very, er, bothersome, it tries someone's patience, not the person himself. Also, in your usage, "you have been tried and found wanting," well, it's in the sense of trial, test of worthiness (or a simple court trial)---and I doubt that the RFID tags were trying Space cowboy to see if he is worthy of using RFID tags for inventory.
Well, I guess the definition that my, er, Merriam-Webster's lists, "to subject to something (as undue strain or excessive hardship or provocation) that tests the powers of endurance," might possibly be used with a person as the D.O., as opposed to an object (i.e. any non-person), but IMHO, I think that particular usage in Space cowboy's writing in uncommon and possibly not idiomatic. If any of my writers (that is, if I were an editor---or when I was an editor) wrote a sentence like that, well, I'd probably ask him to revise it... as it might bring unnecessary attention to that particular sentence, drawing the reader's attention away from the story (it's for this very reason I don't write "he or she"---it's aesthetically displeasing).
I probably oughtn't respond to this, but since it's possibly a colloquial expression.... It's in the same vein as "I found it trying to...", or "it was not easy to".
If you remember that, in the examples you give, "try" is used intransitively (i.e. without a direct object...), or rather, it is use of "trying", an adjective derived from the verb "try" (but no longer functioning as a verb), it's probably "incorrect" (from a point of view of a prescriptive grammarian) to say "whom RFID has tried".
But of course, that's not to say if enough people use "try" that way, that could be standard usage (although I have a feeling that the specfic sense of "try" in that usage is, if it was every actually in standard usage, actually old and dying out.....).
Sorry, I signed a paper that said I wouldn't disclose that.
You are in violation of company protocols---in the Section 3, Article 21 of the paper that you signed, it says that you can't disclose that you can't disclose all sensitive information. Your resignation will be expected on my desk in the morning.
i thought about this a lot, since i started using online forums, including slashdot, and reading various blogs... traditionally, much "power" is given to those that can lash out the "last word" in any debate/argument/conversation. i'd like to call it the "last word syndrome."
Hmm, at first I thought, "Wait a minute, that's not beta. It's on the front page." But no, I was wrong: the logo clearly says beta.
But then, maybe Google is marking any 0.95 or even 0.99 versions as beta, until they are ready to release it into version 1 and really stop developing (er, bug-catching), until the Next Big Thing.
IMHO, I find perpetual beta status better than premature "official" releases (*coughwindowsmecough*): at least they are being honest.
And much of Google Beta stuff is usable as it is, isn't it? Where as some of the "official" releases is not (*coughwindowsmewindowssystemrecoverycough*).
And backward-compatibility to keep. Main problem with IE isn't really feature---tab-browsing? well, I admit it is my favorite feature in Mozilla/Firefox, but it's not such a difficult feature to code (IANACoder, but why would it be?), and I don't think Mozilla Foundation forgot to patent that feature;)---the real problem is with security: ActiveX.
Frankly, I don't know the details of how it works (other than a few major security issues (er, deletion/access to arbitrary file?) that came up recently), but from what I've been hearing, the way ActiveX was designed, it was designed to be powerful---like a root account, and thus open to much vulnerability. If IE is to compete with Firefox in security, ActiveX has to be secured airtight (now that would be difficult to code) or be discarded---but seeing how long it took M$ to dump DOS (remember that all Windows 'til 2000 (and NT, but it wasn't too popular in home PC) was basically a graphical front-end to DOS), I don't see them doing it until it's too late.
I give up, how is compiling it yourself a valid measure of security? Or do you honestly pour through every line of code following all logic and scrutinizing every letter for possible undesirable consequences, bugs, backdoors, etc? Riiiiight.
Well... in theory, you can look through the source to find any malicious code, and since they know you can look at the source, they won't even try programming adware-like capacity into it.
Also, in theory, if you have a software firewall, hackers will see the firewall and just know that your machine is totally secure (seeing that you took care to install a firewall) and just give up attacking. In theory.
You are a shithead. Or perhaps you don't have the italic variant of your default browser font installed on your computer, in which case you are incompetent. Which is it?
Hey, hey---'just because he uses lynx, doesn't mean he's stupid. It means he's a hacker. 'Better watch out.;)
The notion of science as being "objective" is quite dead among those in the know. You might want to pick up "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Kuhn, as the first example of a popular (i.e. read my millions) challenge to the notion of a "scientific method"
While I haven't read Kuhn, I've read him quoted in another book (a book about history of psychology), and he sounded like another ignorable (no, not ignoble, I mean ignorable) philosopher---as Feynmann says, philosophers say lots things about what's absolutely necessary for science (or simply about science), and they are wrong. Granted, my impression of him may be wrong, but his ideas about paradigm and revolutions of new ideas (and breaking of paradigm) is, well, simply not applicable in many cases---most notably, physics.
Ask any physicist---no matter what new discovery is made, no matter what happens, the physics that are taught today will continue to be taught: We know that Newton's Laws are incorrect. We still teach it in introductory physics. Why? Because it has proven to be correct (to a good approximation) under given conditions, and it gives good introduction to more advanced and more correct theories. Kuhn's ideas are applicable only to fields like psychology, which many respectable people would deny, is science.
Of course, I must admit using a somewhat narrow definition of science (one that doesn't include social science or political science, the greatest oxymoron I've ever known). Perhaps I should have said "physical science" since that would be narrow enough to exclude all social science junk and have possibility of including biology (to be on topic of this thread:).
And I do agree that Scientific Method might be antiquated, and it is not most definitely a cookbook recipe---followed step-by-step. In all cases, I don't think any scientist would disagree that the value of a theory is measured by its ability to predict. And I believe theory of evolution (specifically, "survival of fittest" and "emergence of new species as result of accumulation of small changes") is a little short on this prediction part, and a little too much on explanation (and we know, disregarding Occam's Razor, any fairy tale can explain all that evolutionism can) part.
PS. Oh, and no, science is not objective in its entirety(I don't think I claimed it to be---I only remember saying something like "see as an objective scientist"; and I think that only amounts to claims of existence of an objective person (which, in itself, is probably in doubt)). However, science (at least "experimental science") is based on experimental (or observational, where experiments cannot be performed---but those are on the lower rungs of science) verifications and is (or at least should be, when the principle of experimental verification is followed rigorously) very immune to personal biases
You can quite easily measure what proportion of a population of organisms survive in a certain environment.
And somehow, you are going to show that it was (in an objective way) "fit for survival"?
Of course, it was fit for survival because it survived, right? That's just about as logical as the anthropic principle.
Evolution prefectly adequatly explains the apearance of antibiotic resistant bacteria populations.
And how those bacteria became multi-celled algae and eventually even mammals? Evolution claims too much, given what experimental/observational evidences it can have.
It isn't that easy to devise an experiment to test many things in physics. Yet nowhere near this kind of fuss is made about ideas such as singularities...
Because nowhere near the kind of fuss biologists make about evolution is made about ideas such as singularities by physicists. Some physicists couldn't care less (by profession, at least) if singularities existed or not---can you say the same about evolution (by biologists)?
Your predictions and hypotheses, and I quote them here,
# Hypothesis: this particular sequence of DNA is the gene for a particularly sweet ear of corn.
# Prediction: if the DNA is copied into a standard variety of corn, the modified kernels will have a 10-12% increase in sugar content. ... # Hypothesis: mutations accumulate in human mitochondrial DNA at a fairly steady rate of number of mutations per generation.
# Prediction: for people whose genealogy is known for many generations, the number of differences in their mitochondrial DNA will correlate well with the number of generations to their last common maternal ancestor.
# Prediction: for a large sample of a regional population, the variations in mitochondrial DNA will point to a small number of maternal ancestors at some time corresponding to establishment of that population or a major environmental hardship for that population.
are not about evolution, per se. They are in the realm of molecular biology (a field of biology that I have the most respect for (well, if it's not obvious from the fact that it's the only field I could name)).
If you need a little pricking, I ask you this question: where, in your hypothesis and prediction, did you use the assumption (axiom, if you will) that the fittest survive? What your example shows is that there is something called genetic trait (and there has been no doubt about that since Mendel's work (which was ignored by everyone including evolutionists in his time) was accepted), and the fact that there is a chain of molecules (DNA) that contains such genetic information, which could, by some means unknown, can be changed (mutation) from time to time.
That's exactly what I mean by "evolution should be de-emphasized". Before the discovery of DNA, evolutionism was the only thing that kept biology outside theology---now that we have DNA and are able to see cells (one crucial part of biology---as important as atomic theory, according to Feynmann) directly, we don't need evolution for such ideological purpose anymore---and we never needed it for theoretical framework.
Can we have a "good scientific theory" in the area of astrophysics?
This is precisely the reason astronomers (note, there's a slight difference between astronomers and astrophysicists) are held in low esteem among physicists. But, even so, it's possible to have a resemblence to hypothesize-predict-experiment method: only that it's modified to hypothesize-predict-observe. Remember that the fundamental problem with evolutionism is not really the experiment part---it's the prediction part: theory of evolution is not able to give a concrete prediction which can be verified or disproven by experiment or observation.
Furthermore, the difference is that biology is "made" to depend on the theory of evolution by the incumbent biologists. There is no reason molecular biology need such assumption as "fittest survive and the tiny modifications in each generation 'builds up' to give rise to different species." We don't need evolution to make better crops or medicines. Physics, on the other hand, does not depend on astrophysics and puts it in the proper place---where newest theories of physics can be tested (by observation), and thus, by the process of Scientific Method, which must be modified most often and thus is wrong much of the time.
PS. BTW, I believe (I don't know which context it was taken from) when Rutherford said that all science is either physics or stamp-collecting, he meant that either a science has useful, mathematical theory that can be backed by experiments and observations (this is a paradigm led by classical and modern physics) or a science has absolutely no theory (nothing that's worth noting, anyway) and, lacking theory, resorts to collecting as much factoids as they can, without being able to make any sense out of the stamps they collected.
This is one of the best points you make. However, people were not quite ignorant at that time, having known somewhat of Gregom Mendel's work with genetics (not sure of my timeline here, but this was also one of the reasons Lamarkian evolution was rejected).
Er... I'd like to inform you that Gregor Mendel never lived to see his work ('wouldn't call it "life's work" since that wasn't his occupation) brought to light. One anecdote I heard (can't recall source; it's not on Wikipedia) was that Mendel sent his paper to Darwin to look over, and it was overlooked (or deliberately ignored). In any case, at the time of Darwin, people had no idea about inheritable traits, much less the physical manifestation of the carriers of those traits.
Also, many of Darwin's ideas (who knows what they are, I never read The Origin of Species myself) about evolution (or whatever is going on in nature, evolution or not), is thought to be wrong now---of course, that's not to say that it detracts anything from the current view of evolution as we have now; it's just a warning for those who make a god of Darwin, having escaped another god.
Crap should be shouted down, always. Evolution, no matter what you or 44% of Americans think about it, isn't religous or a bad scientific theory.
While I agree Creationism isn't science, almost by definition (it doesn't use the Scientific Method), I would hardly agree that evolutionism is a good scientific theory.
Where's the prediction of the theory? Where's the experimental verification of the prediction within the experimental error? Maybe I'm demanding this because I'm used to a more rigorous (and arguably, the only) science, that is to say, physics.
Then, for those of you who feel more comfortable with soft sciences (i.e. "stamp-collecting" sciences), well, where's the fourth step in the scientific method, "experiment"? Well, actually, I guess that isn't possible to begin with, since we lack the third step, "prediction from hypothesis" (and not some vague prediction like "organisms fit for survival survives"---something quantitative that can be measured!).
As you should see, if you can see as an objective scientist, evolutionism is not such a great science either---it's better than Creationism simply by virtue of just trying to imitate real sciences. Modern biology would benefit greatly from de-emphasis of evolution in the curriculum, and avoiding the turning-away of quite a few bright students who could have made great contributions in the fields of molecular biology and others (egh, never bothered to learn all the little fields in biology).
If you recall that there are small packet of people disbelieving Special Relativity (mostly trolls and Darwin Award candidates, but recently some research suggested that the second postulate of SR may be wrong in the long run---i.e. speed of light is variable over time comparable to the age of universe), despite a wealth of experimental evidences, well, why aren't you surprised that evolutionism is so well-accepted given the lack of unambiguous experimental (or, as is the case, "observational") evidence?
No, the clone brush would screw up the perspective
That's why you choose the sample point more than once---I think there was enough pattern on the bed (and yes, it's poorly edited enough that I can see which part of bed was also on the original picture!) to construct the perspective using clone brush: simply take the nearest pattern and don't use it more than twice.
Of course, you can always get all fancy, create a 2-D pattern from a good sample of the repeating pattern, use the perspective transform (er... it's been a while since I used it (since I left Windows and high school publishing)... was it called Skew or Perspective?), overlay it on the bed, using the original patterns to guide it to exact position and perspective, and then, finally, use eraser in airbrush mode to get a smooth erasing at the edge (of where the... victim was). (and the nonrepeating texture on the bed (er.... wrinkles?) can be generated using noise-generator + a few filters, or some marble texture, or simply making the fake pattern layer not 100% opaque (this will probably require using clone brush first to erase all traces of people first, and the fake pattern layer is simply for making the bed look naturally unoccupied).)
Good, now replace "Nefarious Program" with "Average Sysadmin", and you can see why MS has twice the server marketshare of Linux.
'Hope you are not a PHB---I'd hate to work under you, if you think an "average sysadmin" is as intelligent as a malware.
A virus or trojan cannot read documentations and its authors can't (or at least shouldn't---that's the whole idea!) know the exact distro/version of OS you are using. Your sysadmin, on the other hand, should be able to look in the documentation to see where the config files are kept---of course, unless your sysadmin happens to be one of the lusers, which gets pretty pathetic in that case (for the company using that sysadmin).
I think it was a much simpler problem than that---it just looks for the CD in the wrong device: under 2.4 kernel, if you use SCSI emulation (necessary for CD writing), your CD-RW is listed as a SCSI device (/dev/sdx). Under 2.6, since you don't need SCSI emulation for CD writing anymore, your CD-RW (unless it's really SCSI) is listed with all other IDE devices (/dev/hdx), and I think that particular release of Knoppix (version 3.6, I think) was tested only with 2.4 kernel, as the bootscript always looks under/dev/sdx for the CD-ROM.
Either that, or I missed something (or, still yet, I'm remembering something wrong---it's been long since I've used Knoppix).
Heh... Do you honestly think that if the bootleg CD's and DVD's that sell for $5 on a street corner...
Wait a minute---$5? For a bootleg CD? How much is a legit CD? A leg? I wouldn't pay $5 for something that I know cost less than half of that to make (at least in the case of CD's---'not too sure about DVD's).
It doesn't run on my PC.. yet I'm running linux now.
Maybe your computer simply can't (or isn't set-up in the BIOS to) boot from CD-ROM?
BTW, I found that one version of Knoppix was, er, sort of broken, when running with 2.6 kernel---it must have to do with the fact that 2.6 kernel now supports CD-W's without SCSI emulation; after loading the kernel, it can't find the CD in the drive to continue the boot-up process. Nevertheless, it still worked with 2.4 kernel (which was the default choice, anyway).
At least according to the styleguides most publications follow: titles (President, Chief, etc.) when used in vocative form, should be capitalized---even, say, "Mom" should be capitalized when one is calling out to her mommy (as in, "Mom!").
How is this parody? What is it parody of? It doesn't even sound like Apostle's Creed (for one, it's too long). Unless it's a mockery of a previously-existing, well-known work, it's just a mediocre sarcasm with no basis in real literature.
So, let's say "we" decide on Redhat with XFCe as the new standard for Linux. Will that mean that Debian will close their mailing lists, Novell immediately liquidates itself and all gnome and kde developers quietly rm their development directories and take up the torch of XFCe? Nope. If anything, an attempt to mandate one option out of many will antagonize a lot of people and make that option less popular then before.
An absolutely valid (and good!) point. However, there is some merit to having one good distro to recommend to a newbie, who doesn't even know what his tastes/needs are. After using Linux for a few years, I settled down into a minimalistic style (using Gentoo w/o KDE or Gnome, as smaller WM's like enlightenment and fluxbox suit me and my box better) but it took a while, and I think I really didn't have to "waste" (well, it was a learning experience, especially with LFS---but majority of people who have yet to move to Linux probably don't want to learn) so much time installing different distros.
If a major Linux-related organization made recommendation for newbies and publicized it well, it might make it easier for some people to finally move to Linux. Searching on Usenet or Google got me only so far, as far as good recommendation goes.
PS. Of course, the problem is, well, it's hard to recommend a single distro without alienating a whole lot... well, maybe somebody (else) should step up and take the hit.;)
how do you steal something that anyone is free to use ?
Short answer: By using it in a way that was not only unintended by the original creator but also counter to his purpose.
Did you know that it's possible to "steal" free newspaper (we have quite a few of those in Berkeley)? There's a local law passed against it not too long ago.
The newspaper was free (both as in beer and speech) for anyone to take, so long as they intended to read it (even if they don't end up reading it---too many articles are not worth the time glancing over, even). However, if someone was taking them for the explicit purpose of throwing them out---thus contrary to newspaper publisher's intentions---it becomes a crime.
PS. Well, in the context of GP's post this might not apply, though, since BSD-license seems to ('haven't RTFL) legally allow what M$ did---whether it was morally right or not (in the case of Berkeley newspaper incident, there was no law against stealing free newspaper, so what the mayor candidate (eventually elected) did was legal---but it didn't make it right and the mayor himself pushed for a legislation that made what he did illegal (probably not retroactive, though)).
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, there you go---I think your examples explain it all. "You are beginning to try my patience." So the correct use would be, "one whose patience RFID has tried..." As you can see, when something is very, er, bothersome, it tries someone's patience, not the person himself. Also, in your usage, "you have been tried and found wanting," well, it's in the sense of trial, test of worthiness (or a simple court trial)---and I doubt that the RFID tags were trying Space cowboy to see if he is worthy of using RFID tags for inventory.
Well, I guess the definition that my, er, Merriam-Webster's lists, "to subject to something (as undue strain or excessive hardship or provocation) that tests the powers of endurance," might possibly be used with a person as the D.O., as opposed to an object (i.e. any non-person), but IMHO, I think that particular usage in Space cowboy's writing in uncommon and possibly not idiomatic. If any of my writers (that is, if I were an editor---or when I was an editor) wrote a sentence like that, well, I'd probably ask him to revise it... as it might bring unnecessary attention to that particular sentence, drawing the reader's attention away from the story (it's for this very reason I don't write "he or she"---it's aesthetically displeasing).
If you remember that, in the examples you give, "try" is used intransitively (i.e. without a direct object...), or rather, it is use of "trying", an adjective derived from the verb "try" (but no longer functioning as a verb), it's probably "incorrect" (from a point of view of a prescriptive grammarian) to say "whom RFID has tried".
But of course, that's not to say if enough people use "try" that way, that could be standard usage (although I have a feeling that the specfic sense of "try" in that usage is, if it was every actually in standard usage, actually old and dying out.....).
You are in violation of company protocols---in the Section 3, Article 21 of the paper that you signed, it says that you can't disclose that you can't disclose all sensitive information. Your resignation will be expected on my desk in the morning.
I disagree.
(now, let's see who gets the last word. ;)
Hmm, at first I thought, "Wait a minute, that's not beta. It's on the front page." But no, I was wrong: the logo clearly says beta.
But then, maybe Google is marking any 0.95 or even 0.99 versions as beta, until they are ready to release it into version 1 and really stop developing (er, bug-catching), until the Next Big Thing.IMHO, I find perpetual beta status better than premature "official" releases (*coughwindowsmecough*): at least they are being honest.
And much of Google Beta stuff is usable as it is, isn't it? Where as some of the "official" releases is not (*coughwindowsmewindowssystemrecoverycough*).
Whew---for a moment, I thought, "Electrical pick-up? Are computer devices that sensitive to noise?"
Good thing I don't have to worry about signal-to-noise ratio of my computer PSU yet. :)
And backward-compatibility to keep. Main problem with IE isn't really feature---tab-browsing? well, I admit it is my favorite feature in Mozilla/Firefox, but it's not such a difficult feature to code (IANACoder, but why would it be?), and I don't think Mozilla Foundation forgot to patent that feature ;)---the real problem is with security: ActiveX.
Frankly, I don't know the details of how it works (other than a few major security issues (er, deletion/access to arbitrary file?) that came up recently), but from what I've been hearing, the way ActiveX was designed, it was designed to be powerful---like a root account, and thus open to much vulnerability. If IE is to compete with Firefox in security, ActiveX has to be secured airtight (now that would be difficult to code) or be discarded---but seeing how long it took M$ to dump DOS (remember that all Windows 'til 2000 (and NT, but it wasn't too popular in home PC) was basically a graphical front-end to DOS), I don't see them doing it until it's too late.
Well... in theory, you can look through the source to find any malicious code, and since they know you can look at the source, they won't even try programming adware-like capacity into it.
Also, in theory, if you have a software firewall, hackers will see the firewall and just know that your machine is totally secure (seeing that you took care to install a firewall) and just give up attacking. In theory.
Hey, hey---'just because he uses lynx, doesn't mean he's stupid. It means he's a hacker. 'Better watch out. ;)
While I haven't read Kuhn, I've read him quoted in another book (a book about history of psychology), and he sounded like another ignorable (no, not ignoble, I mean ignorable) philosopher---as Feynmann says, philosophers say lots things about what's absolutely necessary for science (or simply about science), and they are wrong. Granted, my impression of him may be wrong, but his ideas about paradigm and revolutions of new ideas (and breaking of paradigm) is, well, simply not applicable in many cases---most notably, physics.
Ask any physicist---no matter what new discovery is made, no matter what happens, the physics that are taught today will continue to be taught: We know that Newton's Laws are incorrect. We still teach it in introductory physics. Why? Because it has proven to be correct (to a good approximation) under given conditions, and it gives good introduction to more advanced and more correct theories. Kuhn's ideas are applicable only to fields like psychology, which many respectable people would deny, is science.
Of course, I must admit using a somewhat narrow definition of science (one that doesn't include social science or political science, the greatest oxymoron I've ever known). Perhaps I should have said "physical science" since that would be narrow enough to exclude all social science junk and have possibility of including biology (to be on topic of this thread :).
And I do agree that Scientific Method might be antiquated, and it is not most definitely a cookbook recipe---followed step-by-step. In all cases, I don't think any scientist would disagree that the value of a theory is measured by its ability to predict. And I believe theory of evolution (specifically, "survival of fittest" and "emergence of new species as result of accumulation of small changes") is a little short on this prediction part, and a little too much on explanation (and we know, disregarding Occam's Razor, any fairy tale can explain all that evolutionism can) part.
PS. Oh, and no, science is not objective in its entirety(I don't think I claimed it to be---I only remember saying something like "see as an objective scientist"; and I think that only amounts to claims of existence of an objective person (which, in itself, is probably in doubt)). However, science (at least "experimental science") is based on experimental (or observational, where experiments cannot be performed---but those are on the lower rungs of science) verifications and is (or at least should be, when the principle of experimental verification is followed rigorously) very immune to personal biases
And somehow, you are going to show that it was (in an objective way) "fit for survival"?
Of course, it was fit for survival because it survived, right? That's just about as logical as the anthropic principle.
Evolution prefectly adequatly explains the apearance of antibiotic resistant bacteria populations.
And how those bacteria became multi-celled algae and eventually even mammals? Evolution claims too much, given what experimental/observational evidences it can have.
It isn't that easy to devise an experiment to test many things in physics. Yet nowhere near this kind of fuss is made about ideas such as singularities...
Because nowhere near the kind of fuss biologists make about evolution is made about ideas such as singularities by physicists. Some physicists couldn't care less (by profession, at least) if singularities existed or not---can you say the same about evolution (by biologists)?
# Hypothesis: this particular sequence of DNA is the gene for a particularly sweet ear of corn.
# Prediction: if the DNA is copied into a standard variety of corn, the modified kernels will have a 10-12% increase in sugar content.
...
# Hypothesis: mutations accumulate in human mitochondrial DNA at a fairly steady rate of number of mutations per generation.
# Prediction: for people whose genealogy is known for many generations, the number of differences in their mitochondrial DNA will correlate well with the number of generations to their last common maternal ancestor.
# Prediction: for a large sample of a regional population, the variations in mitochondrial DNA will point to a small number of maternal ancestors at some time corresponding to establishment of that population or a major environmental hardship for that population.
are not about evolution, per se. They are in the realm of molecular biology (a field of biology that I have the most respect for (well, if it's not obvious from the fact that it's the only field I could name)).
If you need a little pricking, I ask you this question: where, in your hypothesis and prediction, did you use the assumption (axiom, if you will) that the fittest survive? What your example shows is that there is something called genetic trait (and there has been no doubt about that since Mendel's work (which was ignored by everyone including evolutionists in his time) was accepted), and the fact that there is a chain of molecules (DNA) that contains such genetic information, which could, by some means unknown, can be changed (mutation) from time to time.
That's exactly what I mean by "evolution should be de-emphasized". Before the discovery of DNA, evolutionism was the only thing that kept biology outside theology---now that we have DNA and are able to see cells (one crucial part of biology---as important as atomic theory, according to Feynmann) directly, we don't need evolution for such ideological purpose anymore---and we never needed it for theoretical framework.
Can we have a "good scientific theory" in the area of astrophysics?
This is precisely the reason astronomers (note, there's a slight difference between astronomers and astrophysicists) are held in low esteem among physicists. But, even so, it's possible to have a resemblence to hypothesize-predict-experiment method: only that it's modified to hypothesize-predict-observe. Remember that the fundamental problem with evolutionism is not really the experiment part---it's the prediction part: theory of evolution is not able to give a concrete prediction which can be verified or disproven by experiment or observation.
Furthermore, the difference is that biology is "made" to depend on the theory of evolution by the incumbent biologists. There is no reason molecular biology need such assumption as "fittest survive and the tiny modifications in each generation 'builds up' to give rise to different species." We don't need evolution to make better crops or medicines. Physics, on the other hand, does not depend on astrophysics and puts it in the proper place---where newest theories of physics can be tested (by observation), and thus, by the process of Scientific Method, which must be modified most often and thus is wrong much of the time.
PS. BTW, I believe (I don't know which context it was taken from) when Rutherford said that all science is either physics or stamp-collecting, he meant that either a science has useful, mathematical theory that can be backed by experiments and observations (this is a paradigm led by classical and modern physics) or a science has absolutely no theory (nothing that's worth noting, anyway) and, lacking theory, resorts to collecting as much factoids as they can, without being able to make any sense out of the stamps they collected.
Er... I'd like to inform you that Gregor Mendel never lived to see his work ('wouldn't call it "life's work" since that wasn't his occupation) brought to light. One anecdote I heard (can't recall source; it's not on Wikipedia) was that Mendel sent his paper to Darwin to look over, and it was overlooked (or deliberately ignored). In any case, at the time of Darwin, people had no idea about inheritable traits, much less the physical manifestation of the carriers of those traits.
Also, many of Darwin's ideas (who knows what they are, I never read The Origin of Species myself) about evolution (or whatever is going on in nature, evolution or not), is thought to be wrong now---of course, that's not to say that it detracts anything from the current view of evolution as we have now; it's just a warning for those who make a god of Darwin, having escaped another god.
While I agree Creationism isn't science, almost by definition (it doesn't use the Scientific Method), I would hardly agree that evolutionism is a good scientific theory.
Where's the prediction of the theory? Where's the experimental verification of the prediction within the experimental error? Maybe I'm demanding this because I'm used to a more rigorous (and arguably, the only) science, that is to say, physics.
Then, for those of you who feel more comfortable with soft sciences (i.e. "stamp-collecting" sciences), well, where's the fourth step in the scientific method, "experiment"? Well, actually, I guess that isn't possible to begin with, since we lack the third step, "prediction from hypothesis" (and not some vague prediction like "organisms fit for survival survives"---something quantitative that can be measured!).
As you should see, if you can see as an objective scientist, evolutionism is not such a great science either---it's better than Creationism simply by virtue of just trying to imitate real sciences. Modern biology would benefit greatly from de-emphasis of evolution in the curriculum, and avoiding the turning-away of quite a few bright students who could have made great contributions in the fields of molecular biology and others (egh, never bothered to learn all the little fields in biology).
If you recall that there are small packet of people disbelieving Special Relativity (mostly trolls and Darwin Award candidates, but recently some research suggested that the second postulate of SR may be wrong in the long run---i.e. speed of light is variable over time comparable to the age of universe), despite a wealth of experimental evidences, well, why aren't you surprised that evolutionism is so well-accepted given the lack of unambiguous experimental (or, as is the case, "observational") evidence?
That's why you choose the sample point more than once---I think there was enough pattern on the bed (and yes, it's poorly edited enough that I can see which part of bed was also on the original picture!) to construct the perspective using clone brush: simply take the nearest pattern and don't use it more than twice.
Of course, you can always get all fancy, create a 2-D pattern from a good sample of the repeating pattern, use the perspective transform (er... it's been a while since I used it (since I left Windows and high school publishing)... was it called Skew or Perspective?), overlay it on the bed, using the original patterns to guide it to exact position and perspective, and then, finally, use eraser in airbrush mode to get a smooth erasing at the edge (of where the... victim was). (and the nonrepeating texture on the bed (er.... wrinkles?) can be generated using noise-generator + a few filters, or some marble texture, or simply making the fake pattern layer not 100% opaque (this will probably require using clone brush first to erase all traces of people first, and the fake pattern layer is simply for making the bed look naturally unoccupied).)
'Hope you are not a PHB---I'd hate to work under you, if you think an "average sysadmin" is as intelligent as a malware.
A virus or trojan cannot read documentations and its authors can't (or at least shouldn't---that's the whole idea!) know the exact distro/version of OS you are using. Your sysadmin, on the other hand, should be able to look in the documentation to see where the config files are kept---of course, unless your sysadmin happens to be one of the lusers, which gets pretty pathetic in that case (for the company using that sysadmin).
Either that, or I missed something (or, still yet, I'm remembering something wrong---it's been long since I've used Knoppix).
Wait a minute---$5? For a bootleg CD? How much is a legit CD? A leg? I wouldn't pay $5 for something that I know cost less than half of that to make (at least in the case of CD's---'not too sure about DVD's).
Maybe your computer simply can't (or isn't set-up in the BIOS to) boot from CD-ROM?
BTW, I found that one version of Knoppix was, er, sort of broken, when running with 2.6 kernel---it must have to do with the fact that 2.6 kernel now supports CD-W's without SCSI emulation; after loading the kernel, it can't find the CD in the drive to continue the boot-up process. Nevertheless, it still worked with 2.4 kernel (which was the default choice, anyway).
You mean the Adobe Reader 7 (Linux) Beta that Adobe pulled off their website?
"Now piss off, grammar Nazi."
Not quite. It should actually be,
"Now piss off, Grammar Nazi."
At least according to the styleguides most publications follow: titles (President, Chief, etc.) when used in vocative form, should be capitalized---even, say, "Mom" should be capitalized when one is calling out to her mommy (as in, "Mom!").
How is this parody? What is it parody of? It doesn't even sound like Apostle's Creed (for one, it's too long). Unless it's a mockery of a previously-existing, well-known work, it's just a mediocre sarcasm with no basis in real literature.
An absolutely valid (and good!) point. However, there is some merit to having one good distro to recommend to a newbie, who doesn't even know what his tastes/needs are. After using Linux for a few years, I settled down into a minimalistic style (using Gentoo w/o KDE or Gnome, as smaller WM's like enlightenment and fluxbox suit me and my box better) but it took a while, and I think I really didn't have to "waste" (well, it was a learning experience, especially with LFS---but majority of people who have yet to move to Linux probably don't want to learn) so much time installing different distros.
If a major Linux-related organization made recommendation for newbies and publicized it well, it might make it easier for some people to finally move to Linux. Searching on Usenet or Google got me only so far, as far as good recommendation goes.
PS. Of course, the problem is, well, it's hard to recommend a single distro without alienating a whole lot... well, maybe somebody (else) should step up and take the hit. ;)
Short answer: By using it in a way that was not only unintended by the original creator but also counter to his purpose.
Did you know that it's possible to "steal" free newspaper (we have quite a few of those in Berkeley)? There's a local law passed against it not too long ago.
The newspaper was free (both as in beer and speech) for anyone to take, so long as they intended to read it (even if they don't end up reading it---too many articles are not worth the time glancing over, even). However, if someone was taking them for the explicit purpose of throwing them out---thus contrary to newspaper publisher's intentions---it becomes a crime.
PS. Well, in the context of GP's post this might not apply, though, since BSD-license seems to ('haven't RTFL) legally allow what M$ did---whether it was morally right or not (in the case of Berkeley newspaper incident, there was no law against stealing free newspaper, so what the mayor candidate (eventually elected) did was legal---but it didn't make it right and the mayor himself pushed for a legislation that made what he did illegal (probably not retroactive, though)).
Just off the top of my head, one feature I can think of is: ability to install spyware remotely.
You know that's what the users want---millions of spyware users can't be wrong!