It's not a humanity. Humanities deal with human things - note that history of Greece is a humanity, but the history of the dinosaurs (paleotology) is a science - and math does not deal with human things.
But anthropology is considered a science and deals with humans. Same with sociology. I'm not sure whether I'd consider mathematics a science or not, but the dealing with humans aspect is irrelevant.
It is still confidential. No-one outside the government is going to see it.
Back when they were doing the whole census thing, we were told that only the Census Bureau would have access to the information we give. Now we're being told that other government agencies will have access to it.
They lied to us. It's not surprising, really. Anyone who believed them at the time was a sucker, IMO.
I don't like SPAM, but when an ISP chooses to use MAPS RBL, they're censoring your email for you. Perhaps that's what you want, perhaps that's not what you want. But you never get the choice.
I'm sorry, did someone hold a gun to your head and make you choose the ISP you use?
It is rather hypocritical that/. clamors for one form of censorware, but fights against another, the forced censorship of internet connections in public schools and libraries, which is also a decision which is made without the input of the user, and which also supposedly protects the user from something which is bad for them.
The government isn't forcing me to use MAPS. No one is.
What disturbs me most about MAPS RBL is the small number of people that make a decision to add a mail server to it, and the same small number that can make the decision to remove it in the future or retain it.
I know this is a hard concept to grasp, but you don't have to use it if you don't want to.
If the government were doing this, there would be an outcry, but when a private company does it, it's fine.
Because you don't have to use that private company.
Bottom Line: MAPS RBL is not voluntary for the user, just for the ISP.
Very few ISPs use MAPS. You are free to choose one that doesn't. If you choose one that doesn't, you are free to implement MAPS on your own. Are you using an obscure definition of "voluntary," because that's about as voluntary as a service gets.
If the gvt is already paying for an internet connection to a library then why shouldn't they have the right to block what ever sites they don't want access.
My main problems are that it still (as of the 10/6 snapshot, anyway) doesn't have "don't underline links" active,
The option is there, and I think it works. It's called "underline links", so unchecking it should work.
It doesn't. It never has. Neither in Windows nor Linux.
But I did remember the other "feature" that I dislike, and it turns out to be the one that annoys me the most.
Mozilla steals focus (well, steals the top of the desktop) every time it loads a page.
One of the main reasons I avoid Windows is because the apps are always stealing focus from what I'm trying to do. Apps should treat start up like what I'm doing can not be inturrupted or humankind will perish. They should never, ever, ever, EVER (ever) steal focus when they do something. Mozilla does it on every single page load. It's annoying. It could not be more annoying if it came with a plug-in that squirted water in your face on every page load. It could not be more annoying if it repeatedly poked you in the forehead. It could not be more annoying if it defaulted to bright pink background with flashing green text. It could not be more annoying.
When I first heard of of Mozilla I was under the impression that it was trying to fix all of NS's mistakes (a big one being bloat) and to be open source. It seems to have missed the first goal by a large margin (I can get versions of IE 5 that are smaller than the windows version)
IE doesn't have tons of debugging code. If you compile from source with the debugging stuff disabled and without mail/news, you get a 6 MB tarball. My main problems are that it still (as of the 10/6 snapshot, anyway) doesn't have "don't underline links" active, it doesn't have that IE feature that when you go back, you go back to the spot on the page from which you left, and... well, I forget what the other one was. I guess it wasn't that big a deal.
Targetting results in more advertising being driven down my throat. I have bought computer parts online in the past. Now I get six or seven catalogs a month in the mail. I don't want them. I have no use for them. They are a waste of time and resources for me. Yet I still get them.
I am a professional researcher. I think I am competent enough to figure out what I want for myself.
This is analagous to everytime I buy a car, I've got to get under my car and inspect it's
braking system, it's steering system, it's fuel system, etc. so the damned car doesn't send
me and my family careening over a cliff or exploding on us.
If anything, this is part of the earth's natural climate change. Everyone knows that the earth's climate changes over the centuries...this is just a normal phenomenon that will continue.
Except the data clearly show that, while the temperature had been decreasing at a rate of about 1-2 degrees per year for a few thousand years, it has increased by about 15 degrees in the last hundred years.
Things are getting better, though. The degree that most greenhouse gasses (except carbon dioxide--thanks SUV owners) are being introduced into the atmosphere are either decreasing or on their way to decreasing.
How many musicians on napster gave their permission for their work to be distributed? Why do people
on slashdot complain about *their* copyrights being violated, yet vehemently defend their right to
violate the copyrights of musicians?
The gross oversimplification of Napster aside, how do you know that this person is not anti-Napster? Do you think you are the only Slashdot reader who in anti-Napster?
Do you think CNN or ABC or any professional news network would EVER allow such a comment to be aired?
No, they're much more subtle in their biases, almost to the point of dishonesty. At least Cmdr Taco is open and honest about his biases.
Of course not, because news is
supposed to be objective and un-biased.
Don't let the name at the top fool you. This is more of an editorial site that happens to report on news.
Now don't get me wrong, CNN, ABC and the like have their own issues when it comes
to bias, but if Slashdot ever hopes to be taken seriously as a news source, it has to start
acting professionally.
I don't think Slashdot is really trying to to be taken seriously as a news source. Like I said, it's more of a discussion/editorial site than anything else.
But what's the probability of flipping a coin 100 times and only getting heads?
(0.5)^100. But that's the same as the probability of getting any single sequence of heads and tails. The probability of having every odd flip come out heads and every even flip come out tails is also (0.5)^100. That's because each measurement is independent of another. No matter how many times you flip a coin or how many heads in a row you got previously, the chance of getting a heads on your next flip will always be 1/2. As a previos poster said, Lady Luck has no memory.
Furthermore, the probability of a successful Mars mission is not nearly as simple to calculate as a coin toss. It could be 1/3 or it could be 1/100000 and we just got lucky with the successes. Plus the measurements themselves are not necessarily independent.
Yes, but Franklin didn't live in an era were innocent children are attacked and killed every day
Sure he did.
where
pornographers make twice as much money as the regular film industry
Of course, porn isn't illegal, so this is irrelevant. Besides, from what I know about Franklin, he'd probably be one of the porn industry's best customers.
where Islamic fundamentalists
want to destroy America
No, he only lived during and just after the freakin' Revolutionary War, when terrorism was more than just something that might happen here someday. He gave up a hell of a lot more security than you are willing to just to make this country.
where crime and murder are so commonplace.
Which, of course, he did.
He'd have thought
differently if he lived today I'm sure.
Since he's dead, it's pretty much a moot point.
Without agencies like the FBI, CIA,
NSA etc. having sufficient powers to protect us, we are risking the lives of people, especially those who
are most vulnerable such as the poor.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That was the whole idea behind the United States in the first place.
Re:Ahh, memories. (gambling and astronomy,)
on
Comet LINEAR Erupts
·
· Score: 1
Now, I have to admit that a majority of my time in astronomy class was spent making the instructor look stupid, but, I seem to remember some little thing about orbital telescopes having significantly more resolution than terestrial ones.
Net necessarily. A sufficiently large telescope with adaptive optics can outperform the Hubble in terms of resolution. The main advantage to a space telescope is avoiding the atmosphere.
So, going under this (apparently mistaken) assumption, it would seem that an orbital telescope would give you better odds of observing something.
As someone else said, it has more to do with number of telescopes and percent of sky covered in a given period of time than resolution.
They might. They might improve the lives of your children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Many of the foundations of modern technology were laid by ancient Greek scientists. Knowing that the Earth is round and that it orbits the Sun was not particularly useful to them at the time, but without that knowledge, we would not have communications satellites.
Personally I think all that money could - and arguably should - be put to better use. Then when things are going better, we can move on.
The US budget for fiscal year 2001 set aside a total of $13.1 billion for NASA. Of that $2 billion is actually used for astronomy. Compare that with $67.5 billion for education, training, employment and social services; $218 billion on Medicaire; $426 billion on Social Security; and $306 billion for National Defense. I would say we do have our priorities straight when it comes to overall spending on scientific endeavors.
The safe way to upgrade ANY system is to delete and reinstall. Unless of course you are a Good Little Citizen(tm) and did everything the distro's CEO told you to do. The distribution does not know YOU. They don't know what software you installed outside of the package system. They don't know what configuration files you edited by hand. They don't know that package A is still needed by you even though it is deprecated in the upgrade.
A FreeBSD upgrade basically involves recompiling all of the core programs and reinstalling them. So essentially you are deleting and reinstalling, with the added benefit that all of your configuration files are still there, unedited. You then run a different program to diff the/etc files and you choose which files to update and which to leave alone. None of your ports are touched in the upgrade. If you are running stable, it's highly doubtful that you will need to recompile any ports, since they are designed to run on both stable and current.
For the record, I updated to 4.1 with no problems, using the same method I've been using to keep up with 4.0-STABLE.
Also for the record, I updated from Debian 2.0 to 2.1 just as easily. The only difference being that apt is slightly less flexible with edited config files, though that is offset by the fact that Debian upgrades require all of two commands and don't require a two hour recompiling session.
Why would you be so against advertisers gathering data about you based on various criteria and applying it to ads presented to you? Wouldn't you want to see ads that reflect your interests?
No.
The point is not getting ads for stuff you like. The point is that I should get to choose what company gets information about me and I should get to choose what information they get. I should not have my personal information taken from me without my knowledge and consent and sold to God Knows Who at the highest price.
Any only some of the Linux distros sport the features that FreeBSD has had for YEARS. FTP install-> Insert a boot floppy and FTP the rest over from a server
I installed my first version of Slackware like that back in 1996. As a matter of fact, I installed Redhat and Debian that way, too, until I lost my ethernet connection in 1998. Which Linux distro doesn't (and why is that a strike against Linux in general)?
CVSUP upgrades. To upgrade the system make update then make world.
To update Debian you type "apt-get update" then "apt-get upgrade." Which, btw is a whole lot faster than a "make world" since you aren't recompiling the entire freakin' system. Also someone wrote a third party utility called autorpm to update a Redhat system. It's not nearly as nifty as apt or cvsup, but it works.
Don't get me wrong. I like FreeBSD, but honestly, to this home user, there is very nearly negligible difference between a quality distro like Debian and FreeBSD. I can find likes and dislikes in both.
Where, exactly, are you supposed to draw this line? If play a prank that results in someone's death, you can be convicted for manslaughter, and if you run a hoax that results in someone losing money, you should be prosecuted for fraud.
I'm sorry. Did someone die because of this hoax? Did anyone lose money because of this hoax?
Also when the novelty of this wears off who is to say that this isn't to become like shareware where even the authors of widely used software died broke and lonely?
Phil Katz may have died lonely, but he certainly didn't die broke.
PS: Then again I might be wrong and Stephen King will make more money from this than he does from publishing with big name authors but then again cosidering he made 84 million dollars in 1996 alone I somehow doubt this.
Maybe he won't make as much as with a publisher, but so far he's made twice as much as I make in a year.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a humanity. Humanities deal with human things - note that history of Greece is a humanity, but the history of the dinosaurs (paleotology) is a science - and math does not deal with human things.
But anthropology is considered a science and deals with humans. Same with sociology. I'm not sure whether I'd consider mathematics a science or not, but the dealing with humans aspect is irrelevant.
Back when they were doing the whole census thing, we were told that only the Census Bureau would have access to the information we give. Now we're being told that other government agencies will have access to it.
They lied to us. It's not surprising, really. Anyone who believed them at the time was a sucker, IMO.
I'm sorry, did someone hold a gun to your head and make you choose the ISP you use?
It is rather hypocritical that /. clamors for one form of censorware, but fights against another, the forced censorship of internet connections in public schools and libraries, which is also a decision which is made without the input of the user, and which also supposedly protects the user from something which is bad for them.
The government isn't forcing me to use MAPS. No one is.
What disturbs me most about MAPS RBL is the small number of people that make a decision to add a mail server to it, and the same small number that can make the decision to remove it in the future or retain it.
I know this is a hard concept to grasp, but you don't have to use it if you don't want to.
If the government were doing this, there would be an outcry, but when a private company does it, it's fine.
Because you don't have to use that private company.
Bottom Line: MAPS RBL is not voluntary for the user, just for the ISP.
Very few ISPs use MAPS. You are free to choose one that doesn't. If you choose one that doesn't, you are free to implement MAPS on your own. Are you using an obscure definition of "voluntary," because that's about as voluntary as a service gets.
The First Amendment?
The option is there, and I think it works. It's called "underline links", so unchecking it should work.
It doesn't. It never has. Neither in Windows nor Linux.
But I did remember the other "feature" that I dislike, and it turns out to be the one that annoys me the most.
Mozilla steals focus (well, steals the top of the desktop) every time it loads a page.
One of the main reasons I avoid Windows is because the apps are always stealing focus from what I'm trying to do. Apps should treat start up like what I'm doing can not be inturrupted or humankind will perish. They should never, ever, ever, EVER (ever) steal focus when they do something. Mozilla does it on every single page load. It's annoying. It could not be more annoying if it came with a plug-in that squirted water in your face on every page load. It could not be more annoying if it repeatedly poked you in the forehead. It could not be more annoying if it defaulted to bright pink background with flashing green text. It could not be more annoying.
Woah. I guess that was a rant.
IE doesn't have tons of debugging code. If you compile from source with the debugging stuff disabled and without mail/news, you get a 6 MB tarball. My main problems are that it still (as of the 10/6 snapshot, anyway) doesn't have "don't underline links" active, it doesn't have that IE feature that when you go back, you go back to the spot on the page from which you left, and... well, I forget what the other one was. I guess it wasn't that big a deal.
Much like the anti-drug culture.
I know this will blow your mind, but not all mp3's are illegal. Some artists even encourage Napsterizing their music.
If Napster had started as a file-sharing community (as opposed to an MP3-file-sharing community), would it have run into these legal problems?
Yes, only it would also be facing lawsuits from the MPAA, the software industry, and major book publishers as well.
I am a professional researcher. I think I am competent enough to figure out what I want for myself.
You mean you don't? God help us all.
Except the data clearly show that, while the temperature had been decreasing at a rate of about 1-2 degrees per year for a few thousand years, it has increased by about 15 degrees in the last hundred years.
Things are getting better, though. The degree that most greenhouse gasses (except carbon dioxide--thanks SUV owners) are being introduced into the atmosphere are either decreasing or on their way to decreasing.
The gross oversimplification of Napster aside, how do you know that this person is not anti-Napster? Do you think you are the only Slashdot reader who in anti-Napster?
Actually, he changed his name back to Prince a few months ago.
I do watch TV and yet I'm a successful PhD student in astronomy. Funny that.
No, they're much more subtle in their biases, almost to the point of dishonesty. At least Cmdr Taco is open and honest about his biases.
Of course not, because news is supposed to be objective and un-biased.
Don't let the name at the top fool you. This is more of an editorial site that happens to report on news.
Now don't get me wrong, CNN, ABC and the like have their own issues when it comes to bias, but if Slashdot ever hopes to be taken seriously as a news source, it has to start acting professionally.
I don't think Slashdot is really trying to to be taken seriously as a news source. Like I said, it's more of a discussion/editorial site than anything else.
(0.5)^100. But that's the same as the probability of getting any single sequence of heads and tails. The probability of having every odd flip come out heads and every even flip come out tails is also (0.5)^100. That's because each measurement is independent of another. No matter how many times you flip a coin or how many heads in a row you got previously, the chance of getting a heads on your next flip will always be 1/2. As a previos poster said, Lady Luck has no memory.
Furthermore, the probability of a successful Mars mission is not nearly as simple to calculate as a coin toss. It could be 1/3 or it could be 1/100000 and we just got lucky with the successes. Plus the measurements themselves are not necessarily independent.
Sure he did.
where pornographers make twice as much money as the regular film industry
Of course, porn isn't illegal, so this is irrelevant. Besides, from what I know about Franklin, he'd probably be one of the porn industry's best customers.
where Islamic fundamentalists want to destroy America
No, he only lived during and just after the freakin' Revolutionary War, when terrorism was more than just something that might happen here someday. He gave up a hell of a lot more security than you are willing to just to make this country.
where crime and murder are so commonplace.
Which, of course, he did.
He'd have thought differently if he lived today I'm sure.
Since he's dead, it's pretty much a moot point.
Without agencies like the FBI, CIA, NSA etc. having sufficient powers to protect us, we are risking the lives of people, especially those who are most vulnerable such as the poor.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That was the whole idea behind the United States in the first place.
Net necessarily. A sufficiently large telescope with adaptive optics can outperform the Hubble in terms of resolution. The main advantage to a space telescope is avoiding the atmosphere.
So, going under this (apparently mistaken) assumption, it would seem that an orbital telescope would give you better odds of observing something.
As someone else said, it has more to do with number of telescopes and percent of sky covered in a given period of time than resolution.
The answer: no.
They might. They might improve the lives of your children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Many of the foundations of modern technology were laid by ancient Greek scientists. Knowing that the Earth is round and that it orbits the Sun was not particularly useful to them at the time, but without that knowledge, we would not have communications satellites.
Personally I think all that money could - and arguably should - be put to better use. Then when things are going better, we can move on.
The US budget for fiscal year 2001 set aside a total of $13.1 billion for NASA. Of that $2 billion is actually used for astronomy. Compare that with $67.5 billion for education, training, employment and social services; $218 billion on Medicaire; $426 billion on Social Security; and $306 billion for National Defense. I would say we do have our priorities straight when it comes to overall spending on scientific endeavors.
A FreeBSD upgrade basically involves recompiling all of the core programs and reinstalling them. So essentially you are deleting and reinstalling, with the added benefit that all of your configuration files are still there, unedited. You then run a different program to diff the /etc files and you choose which files to update and which to leave alone. None of your ports are touched in the upgrade. If you are running stable, it's highly doubtful that you will need to recompile any ports, since they are designed to run on both stable and current.
For the record, I updated to 4.1 with no problems, using the same method I've been using to keep up with 4.0-STABLE.
Also for the record, I updated from Debian 2.0 to 2.1 just as easily. The only difference being that apt is slightly less flexible with edited config files, though that is offset by the fact that Debian upgrades require all of two commands and don't require a two hour recompiling session.
No.
The point is not getting ads for stuff you like. The point is that I should get to choose what company gets information about me and I should get to choose what information they get. I should not have my personal information taken from me without my knowledge and consent and sold to God Knows Who at the highest price.
I installed my first version of Slackware like that back in 1996. As a matter of fact, I installed Redhat and Debian that way, too, until I lost my ethernet connection in 1998. Which Linux distro doesn't (and why is that a strike against Linux in general)?
CVSUP upgrades. To upgrade the system make update then make world.
To update Debian you type "apt-get update" then "apt-get upgrade." Which, btw is a whole lot faster than a "make world" since you aren't recompiling the entire freakin' system. Also someone wrote a third party utility called autorpm to update a Redhat system. It's not nearly as nifty as apt or cvsup, but it works.
Don't get me wrong. I like FreeBSD, but honestly, to this home user, there is very nearly negligible difference between a quality distro like Debian and FreeBSD. I can find likes and dislikes in both.
But it's not trademarked. Furthermore, sting.com has nothing to do with Sting the musician.
I'm sorry. Did someone die because of this hoax? Did anyone lose money because of this hoax?
Phil Katz may have died lonely, but he certainly didn't die broke.
PS: Then again I might be wrong and Stephen King will make more money from this than he does from publishing with big name authors but then again cosidering he made 84 million dollars in 1996 alone I somehow doubt this.
Maybe he won't make as much as with a publisher, but so far he's made twice as much as I make in a year.