I know this thread is cold at this point, but I wanted to reply.
If you think my post is racist, you completely missed the point of my post. This is how the internet was born. It was concieved and built in the US decades ago, originally under DARPA. Then it slowly expanded. As any expensive computer technology, it was expanded in a way that maximized the infrastructure already available. That is how we've come to where we are today. The east DIDN'T make the internet. They came on much much later, when all this infrastructure was already established.
The fact that you think this is all racist says more about yourself than about my comments. I recommend educating yourself before making baseless accusations on others.
Science doesn't demand proof. However, it is based on what is quantifiable and verifiable.
But more importantly, science is based on the fact that it is FALSIFIABLE. Science is always open to the fact that new evidence can come about that disproves an established theory/law. A theories that are currently accepted, are so because we have found lots of evidence to support them, but have been unable to find evidence that breaks them. At some point in the future we might, or we might not. Until we find something to disprove a theory/law, one that has already been well established with evidence, then we have no reason to think that said theory/law is wrong.
And that's what makes science fundamentally incompatible with religion.
Science doesn't demand perfect proof, but it does demand supporting evidence.
Religion purports to BE perfect proof, and actively discourages the searching of evidence, especially evidence that would contradict the religion.
Quite simple. People who believe in something strongly enough are willing to die for it, even if by reasonable standards that belief is bogus.
When you believe in anything so strongly that you will do anything to support that belief, you are capable of incredible things, including self-sacrifice as well as mass genocide. Christians have been killed in holy wars. Christians have killed others in holy wars. It would be comical if it wasn't so tragic.
That's why I can't bring myself to support any major religion. A persons sense of spirituality is just that, the persons. As soon as you start throwing dogma and crap into it, it is no longer about spirituality. It is about control. If God truly did pass his/her/its divine will to the people of the world, don't you think that he would have given everyone the same thing? Since this is obviously not the case, there are only two possible conclusions. God, as defined by the myriad religions, doesn't exist. If God *does* exist, then he is a malicious bastard that thrives on the suffering that he caused, and has more in common with K'thulu than the supposed "loving" god everyone seems to claim him to be.
The internet was originally conceived, designed, and implemented in the USA at a time where hardware was at a premium, and corners were cut to conserve that limited resource. DNS was just one of the results of that era. However, it is the most visible because it is the front end means for people to find each other. That means there is now a very well established standard, used by people across the entire globe, that is very difficult to change.
Changing all the DNS servers in the world to switch from ASCII to Unicode is NOT trivial. The fact that some societies have used non-latin characters for thousands of years is completely and utterly irrelevant. THEY didn't make the internet. They simply bolted themselves on to an existing infrastructure.
I agree that progress needs to be made to accomodate non-latin characters, but to have people whining about "how they want it, and want it now"... That's just ridiculous. It's like waltzing into a house that was built 40 years ago and having a tantrum because the stairs are too steep and the house is too squished. Major structural renovations take time, effort, and careful planning. And there is nothing you can do to avoid that, short of implementing cheap stop-gap measures that are virtually guaranteed to cause even bigger unintended headaches later on.
I think it makes perfect sense. Look at the ideology:
a) They like having a big powerful authoritarian figure they can look up to. b) They don't let facts or reality get in the way of their beliefs. They'll happily eat the information that their "authority" will give them.
I wish I had mod points to mod this whole threat as trolling, cause it's the biggest pile of crap I've heard yet on slashdot.
Bush didn't lie? Hello? You don't consider "twisting the facts to suit your agenda" as lying?
Americans haven't lost much in the way of rights? Are you MAD? I guess Habius Corpus means nothing to you? Torture camps? The ability to declare martial law on a whim? The US is making a beeline towards becoming a police state, but people would prefer to stick their head in the sand and pretend it's not actually happening.
Iraq is a "win"? Given that it's been widely reported that Iraq was better off while Hussein was still in power, how is this a good thing? Thousands upon thousands of innocent people have been outright murdered as a direct result of the US invasion. Beacon of freedom, my posterior. I swear that the term "freedom" has become a completely mangled, useless word, because of people like you who throw it around mindlessly. No, by all reasonable metrics, Iraq was a complete and utter failure. Billions dumped into a war that didn't have to happen, and with no genuine benefit to anyone except maybe Haliburton shareholders. Osama, who orchestrated the destruction of the world trade centre and related loss of life, is "no longer important". Extremism has been greatly intensified, dramatically increasing the likelyhood and frequency of more terrorist attacks upon the US.
I take particular exception (and what prompted this comment) to your idiotic statement of this being a "grand and noble experiment". Last I checked, most people considered loss of life of this magnitude to be a a complete and utter disaster. If you honestly think wars, death and suffering is grand and noble, then you've been watching way too many propoganda videos.
Nuclear war may well start in the middle east, but there is no doubt that the USA will be the trigger because of their idiotic foreign policy. It's the attitude of people like you that cause the rest of the world to look at America with the abhorance that it does.
Sure I can get Asterisk and whatnot for free, but you still need the hardware to run it on, and I have been unable to find info anywhere on how to build a cheap PBX. I look at the hardware that you can plug into a PCI slot (sold by the vendor that makes Asterisk), and the prices are so high that when all is said and done, I might as well just buy an actual commercial phone switch.
How does one going about making a cheap PBX that has a few external POTS lines, and a half dozen or so internal lines?
I was going to raise the same point. And at face value, the point is perfectly valid. However, there are some critical differences:
The entire way that windows handles permissions and access rights is flawed right from the beginning, as is thoroughly described in the article. One correction I would make is that you MUST run as admin just to use the computer properly in most cases. Hell as an example, *Quickbooks* demands administrative access to function. WTF?
OSX handles things in a much saner and more transparent manner. Everything is controlled and properly isolated by virtue of being based on unix.
Additionally, Microsoft loves to tie all the different features into each other like a bowl of spaghetti. They went to great pains to integrate IE and WM into Windows, so that they would be "inseparable". That's a far cry from simply bundling in an antivirus or a browser. Not only was Microsoft doing everything they could to make sure that their version of software must under all circumstances always be on the system and used in some capacity or another, they've also ruined the security of the system even furthur because they tied what amounts to user application software into the core of the OS.
And never mind the fact that Microsoft was forbidding OEMs from including alternate versions of software.
I hope to god no one ever writes a virus like that, cause I'm sure there would be a lot of people (myself included) who would make every possible effort to spread that baby far and wide!;)
That is true, but the economics issues discussed are also high level discussions. Those discussions don't get to that fine level of detail, such as one specific music company in Russia, unless that detail is critical to a given nation's well being.
The day that mp3s have the same level of importance as genocide or nuclear holocaust, is the day.... I can't come up with a metaphore to truely express how utterly pathetic and hopless we would be as a human race.
While the argument you are giving does have strong merit, it completely ignores one critical issue: Patents and Laws.
The single biggest reason why so many manufacturers, big and small, don't have linux drivers is because the OSS code they write would expose elements of their product that they'd prefer were kept under lock and key. Or worse, the technology they are using is licensed from someone else and so they are not allowed to expose such technical interfaces by contract and law, even if they wanted to.
Of course, we could get into a whole "Kill Software Patents" tirade, but this is reality as it stands at this point in time.
I am not a kernel/driver developer so I don't know the specific nuances of this stuff, so this leads to a question. Based on the links you gave, the userspace ABI is supposedly stable. So could binary drivers not be written to THAT spec, and improve stability to boot because the kernel can kill off an unruly driver?
I must be an oddball too then, because I consider myself left leaning, and I consider everything you just described as unacceptable.
I don't know where you got your bizarre view of what "left-wingers" are, but there's a big difference between "live and let live", and "sticking one's head in the sand".
I am very firmly anti-oppression, regardless of its many guises. I have muslem friends who are very nice. I have christian friends who are very nice. I have christian transsexual friends who I care about greatly. I will stand by all of them.
But I believe the world would be a better place if people like Osama Bin Laden, and Fred Phelps took bullets to the head.
What is this crap about "leftist ideology"? Why is it that when a conservative doesn't like what someone else says, it's "leftist ideology" and then just dismisses it out of hand?
The validity of a critique IS dependant on who says it. This is REALITY.
Are you telling me that the opinion of some high school drop-out living in his parents basement, is just as valid as someone who has a degree is sociology and has spent years travelling the world learning about and trying to help with major social issues?
I know personally of someone who *refuses* to believe that the glass ceiling exists, or that racism and oppression exists.
People are NOT all created equal, with equally valid opinions on matters. There is nothing ad hominem about it. Hell, you're not even using "ad hominem" in the correct context! It seems to me like you're simply using sophisticated terms like "ad hominem" or "cognitive dissonance" to make yourself sound more knowledgable than you really are.
If this is an example of typical right-wing thinking, brand me leftist. I'll take reality over nonsensical "ideologies" any day.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this thread is cold at this point, but I wanted to reply.
If you think my post is racist, you completely missed the point of my post. This is how the internet was born. It was concieved and built in the US decades ago, originally under DARPA. Then it slowly expanded. As any expensive computer technology, it was expanded in a way that maximized the infrastructure already available. That is how we've come to where we are today. The east DIDN'T make the internet. They came on much much later, when all this infrastructure was already established.
The fact that you think this is all racist says more about yourself than about my comments. I recommend educating yourself before making baseless accusations on others.
Sortakinda.
Science doesn't demand proof. However, it is based on what is quantifiable and verifiable.
But more importantly, science is based on the fact that it is FALSIFIABLE. Science is always open to the fact that new evidence can come about that disproves an established theory/law. A theories that are currently accepted, are so because we have found lots of evidence to support them, but have been unable to find evidence that breaks them. At some point in the future we might, or we might not. Until we find something to disprove a theory/law, one that has already been well established with evidence, then we have no reason to think that said theory/law is wrong.
And that's what makes science fundamentally incompatible with religion.
Science doesn't demand perfect proof, but it does demand supporting evidence.
Religion purports to BE perfect proof, and actively discourages the searching of evidence, especially evidence that would contradict the religion.
Quite simple. People who believe in something strongly enough are willing to die for it, even if by reasonable standards that belief is bogus. When you believe in anything so strongly that you will do anything to support that belief, you are capable of incredible things, including self-sacrifice as well as mass genocide. Christians have been killed in holy wars. Christians have killed others in holy wars. It would be comical if it wasn't so tragic. That's why I can't bring myself to support any major religion. A persons sense of spirituality is just that, the persons. As soon as you start throwing dogma and crap into it, it is no longer about spirituality. It is about control. If God truly did pass his/her/its divine will to the people of the world, don't you think that he would have given everyone the same thing? Since this is obviously not the case, there are only two possible conclusions. God, as defined by the myriad religions, doesn't exist. If God *does* exist, then he is a malicious bastard that thrives on the suffering that he caused, and has more in common with K'thulu than the supposed "loving" god everyone seems to claim him to be.
The internet was originally conceived, designed, and implemented in the USA at a time where hardware was at a premium, and corners were cut to conserve that limited resource. DNS was just one of the results of that era. However, it is the most visible because it is the front end means for people to find each other. That means there is now a very well established standard, used by people across the entire globe, that is very difficult to change.
Changing all the DNS servers in the world to switch from ASCII to Unicode is NOT trivial. The fact that some societies have used non-latin characters for thousands of years is completely and utterly irrelevant. THEY didn't make the internet. They simply bolted themselves on to an existing infrastructure.
I agree that progress needs to be made to accomodate non-latin characters, but to have people whining about "how they want it, and want it now"... That's just ridiculous. It's like waltzing into a house that was built 40 years ago and having a tantrum because the stairs are too steep and the house is too squished. Major structural renovations take time, effort, and careful planning. And there is nothing you can do to avoid that, short of implementing cheap stop-gap measures that are virtually guaranteed to cause even bigger unintended headaches later on.
That's all well and good, but I find it frustrating that with all the talk about SPF, I have yet to see any recommendations on the SPF level.
I mean, is SPF 15 good enough? I have fair skin, so I've always used SPF 45.
Also, which brand is preferable? Coppertone?
I think it makes perfect sense. Look at the ideology:
a) They like having a big powerful authoritarian figure they can look up to.
b) They don't let facts or reality get in the way of their beliefs. They'll happily eat the information that their "authority" will give them.
Basically, FOSS didn't stand a chance.
I wish I had mod points to mod this whole threat as trolling, cause it's the biggest pile of crap I've heard yet on slashdot.
Bush didn't lie? Hello? You don't consider "twisting the facts to suit your agenda" as lying?
Americans haven't lost much in the way of rights? Are you MAD? I guess Habius Corpus means nothing to you? Torture camps? The ability to declare martial law on a whim? The US is making a beeline towards becoming a police state, but people would prefer to stick their head in the sand and pretend it's not actually happening.
Iraq is a "win"? Given that it's been widely reported that Iraq was better off while Hussein was still in power, how is this a good thing? Thousands upon thousands of innocent people have been outright murdered as a direct result of the US invasion. Beacon of freedom, my posterior. I swear that the term "freedom" has become a completely mangled, useless word, because of people like you who throw it around mindlessly. No, by all reasonable metrics, Iraq was a complete and utter failure. Billions dumped into a war that didn't have to happen, and with no genuine benefit to anyone except maybe Haliburton shareholders. Osama, who orchestrated the destruction of the world trade centre and related loss of life, is "no longer important". Extremism has been greatly intensified, dramatically increasing the likelyhood and frequency of more terrorist attacks upon the US.
I take particular exception (and what prompted this comment) to your idiotic statement of this being a "grand and noble experiment". Last I checked, most people considered loss of life of this magnitude to be a a complete and utter disaster. If you honestly think wars, death and suffering is grand and noble, then you've been watching way too many propoganda videos.
Nuclear war may well start in the middle east, but there is no doubt that the USA will be the trigger because of their idiotic foreign policy. It's the attitude of people like you that cause the rest of the world to look at America with the abhorance that it does.
What about hardware?
Sure I can get Asterisk and whatnot for free, but you still need the hardware to run it on, and I have been unable to find info anywhere on how to build a cheap PBX. I look at the hardware that you can plug into a PCI slot (sold by the vendor that makes Asterisk), and the prices are so high that when all is said and done, I might as well just buy an actual commercial phone switch.
How does one going about making a cheap PBX that has a few external POTS lines, and a half dozen or so internal lines?
They've found Klingons on Uranus!
I say this was just a test of their accuracy, and that their REAL goal is to carve the name CHAIRFACE on the surface of the moon.
It's posts like this, that point out the need for a "TMI" moderation type. :)
I was going to raise the same point. And at face value, the point is perfectly valid. However, there are some critical differences:
The entire way that windows handles permissions and access rights is flawed right from the beginning, as is thoroughly described in the article. One correction I would make is that you MUST run as admin just to use the computer properly in most cases. Hell as an example, *Quickbooks* demands administrative access to function. WTF?
OSX handles things in a much saner and more transparent manner. Everything is controlled and properly isolated by virtue of being based on unix.
Additionally, Microsoft loves to tie all the different features into each other like a bowl of spaghetti. They went to great pains to integrate IE and WM into Windows, so that they would be "inseparable". That's a far cry from simply bundling in an antivirus or a browser. Not only was Microsoft doing everything they could to make sure that their version of software must under all circumstances always be on the system and used in some capacity or another, they've also ruined the security of the system even furthur because they tied what amounts to user application software into the core of the OS.
And never mind the fact that Microsoft was forbidding OEMs from including alternate versions of software.
Slashdot needs a "Whoosh" mod. I'm not sure if that would be a +1 or a -1 though.
I hope to god no one ever writes a virus like that, cause I'm sure there would be a lot of people (myself included) who would make every possible effort to spread that baby far and wide! ;)
Think of the children?
But only for those of us who make more than $1,000,000 a year.....
Net.
That is true, but the economics issues discussed are also high level discussions. Those discussions don't get to that fine level of detail, such as one specific music company in Russia, unless that detail is critical to a given nation's well being.
The day that mp3s have the same level of importance as genocide or nuclear holocaust, is the day.... I can't come up with a metaphore to truely express how utterly pathetic and hopless we would be as a human race.
While the argument you are giving does have strong merit, it completely ignores one critical issue: Patents and Laws.
The single biggest reason why so many manufacturers, big and small, don't have linux drivers is because the OSS code they write would expose elements of their product that they'd prefer were kept under lock and key. Or worse, the technology they are using is licensed from someone else and so they are not allowed to expose such technical interfaces by contract and law, even if they wanted to.
Of course, we could get into a whole "Kill Software Patents" tirade, but this is reality as it stands at this point in time.
I am not a kernel/driver developer so I don't know the specific nuances of this stuff, so this leads to a question. Based on the links you gave, the userspace ABI is supposedly stable. So could binary drivers not be written to THAT spec, and improve stability to boot because the kernel can kill off an unruly driver?
Luxury!
I had to catch a bird and press it's beak against a revolving stone slab!
When you say "early" and "late", could you be more specific? How early is early? 30s? 20s? Fresh out of the womb? Ditto with late.
Does your 'program' filter out 'ainfully obvious' slashdot 'spam' such as 'yours'?
Awww! Now we can't speculate any more and make amusing comments!
:P
Way to be a party pooper.
What's with this "liberal enclave" bullshit?
Can't people discuss *anything* anymore without turning it into some drooling bi-partisian nonsense?
This is why the world things the Americans are barking insane. You've polarized yourselves to the point of incredulity.
I must be an oddball too then, because I consider myself left leaning, and I consider everything you just described as unacceptable.
I don't know where you got your bizarre view of what "left-wingers" are, but there's a big difference between "live and let live", and "sticking one's head in the sand".
I am very firmly anti-oppression, regardless of its many guises. I have muslem friends who are very nice. I have christian friends who are very nice. I have christian transsexual friends who I care about greatly. I will stand by all of them.
But I believe the world would be a better place if people like Osama Bin Laden, and Fred Phelps took bullets to the head.
What is this crap about "leftist ideology"? Why is it that when a conservative doesn't like what someone else says, it's "leftist ideology" and then just dismisses it out of hand?
The validity of a critique IS dependant on who says it. This is REALITY.
Are you telling me that the opinion of some high school drop-out living in his parents basement, is just as valid as someone who has a degree is sociology and has spent years travelling the world learning about and trying to help with major social issues?
I know personally of someone who *refuses* to believe that the glass ceiling exists, or that racism and oppression exists.
People are NOT all created equal, with equally valid opinions on matters. There is nothing ad hominem about it. Hell, you're not even using "ad hominem" in the correct context! It seems to me like you're simply using sophisticated terms like "ad hominem" or "cognitive dissonance" to make yourself sound more knowledgable than you really are.
If this is an example of typical right-wing thinking, brand me leftist. I'll take reality over nonsensical "ideologies" any day.