Who has counted the bugs and security holes that were fixed without prior disclosure? It is like counting footsteps of two dinosaurs from their fossils and then comparing them for their health.
While I agree, I must say that Wikimedia Foundation has set its goal as 3 Million USD, while earlier it was only 1 Million USD. It is natural for ratios to be skewed.
Even though most people will never have to create a file greater than 2 GB, or many people don't worry about defragmentation and all the niceties, they all know that it is a better filesystem.
True. Normal people don't even know what is NTFS or FAT, except the "fact" everyone has heard, which say NTFS is better. Who wants to lose customers?
I would add one another thing: You cannot format a disk > 32 GB to FAT32 on Windows. Who knows if they are using Windows to format? So probably they are limited to it anyway.
Wow indeed! I log into #gentoo and when I do, I stay online. And you ask me why? Wow indeed!
Because I am a user, not a master! I get help and I try to help. I don't know most of the things. But I occasionally look into the window if some question is asked that I know. I am there to tell what I know. When I don't know, I stay quite.
Or did you wanted someone to tell you as soon as you asked a question that "hey! I don't know. I feel sorry for your problem and it should not have happened, bla, bla?". See, it is all reasonable to expect this reply. But when you are in a community of thousands (mind you, most of the people are connected to many channels at the same time), it is highly impractical to expect someone to babysit through your "IRC-Xperience!".
What you are refering to is Voyager 1. TFA is about Voyager 2. They are two different vehicles.
<wikipedia href="Heliosphere"> Evidence presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in May 2005 by Dr. Ed Stone suggests that the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed termination shock in December 2004, when it was about 94 AU from the sun, by virtue of the change in magnetic readings taken from the craft. In contrast, Voyager 2 began detecting returning particles when it was only 76 AU from the sun, in May 2006. This implies that the heliosphere may be irregularly shaped, bulging outwards in the sun's northern hemisphere and pushed inward in the south. </wikipedia>
Chinese didn't "invent" decimal time. Phrases like "in the 1/10000 th part of a chand" and words like paramchand (not accurate transliteration; chand = second) etc., are very common in Sanskrit text. Add the fact that Decimal system itself was invented in India only means that Decimal time was "invented" in India.
Why I am using double-quotes for "invented"? Because no one can invent time. As a human you want to divide time to keep track of it. And you can only do that using the numeral system you know! Indians knew decimal system so they divided it into factors of 10, Sumerians used sexagesimal system, so they divided it into 60.
It is not the division that bears any importance in invention. It is the device which one can use to measure. If you don't have clocks to measure 1/10000 th part of second, it means nothing to write it down. Ancient Chinese are no different.
It is simple. (As you can see from the other reply you have got.) US has a "big brother" attitude, it has been like that for a long time now. US economy runs by bullying other countries (this is a gross exaggeration but you get the idea - Iraq is the latest example where an idea that a country other than US has chemical weapons was enough to get majority people riled over it... or the constant "weinventedit" tag on control of internet by ICANN here on Slashdot... the history is filled with examples).
Plus, it is a free land where people who want to shed their cultural identities come all the time (not talking of aliens, but migration from Europe, Asia... etc.). It was also the biggest economy after fall of USSR, if you assume USSR had an "economy". It is but natural for average Americans to have a superiority complex.
And so they don't like UN, because it is a union of every other country. UN and USA have opposite agenda, former wants to listen to everyone while latter wants to have his own say in every matter. A mutual hatred is inevitable.
(UN is just a front of many nations... and most of them don't like this "big brother" attitude of America.)
While people are happy to quote how much USA spends on UN, they forget that it is to have a bigger piece of pie. If it were not for such large contributions, USA would have been expelled from UN after Iraq war started. One might have doubts but USA and UN both need each other.
I am in germany. My webpage is www.google.com (not www.google.de, not www.google.de/search?hl=en). It is the US site. And I don't see any thing. I have tried logging out and in again, deleting cache etc.)
I guess they are filtering the requests on the basis of IPs.
... faces up to 60 years in prison and a fine of $1.75 million.
Sometimes somethings result in someother things that nobody would have expected.
I feel sorry for this guy. But somehow I cannot come-up with any excuse as to why he should not be punished so harshly.
From TFA: "The U.S.-based Wikipedia Foundation, which is behind the popular compendium, was sued by three French nationals over a Wikipedia article that said they were gay activists."
The second FA uses the exact same wordings: "homosexuality was revealed on wikipedia". But if I were you, I would really not believe it:) Why? "Binoche did not rule on the whether the information contained in the article was defamatory and dismissed the plaintiffs' claim for damages."Emmanuel Binoche being the judge.
It looks more like someone saw a list of activists and edited it to become "gay" activists. And then these people went ahead and sued Wikimedia Foundation, instead of using the _infamous_ WHOIS database.
Reminds me of an incident that happened to one of my friend when he was in University of Aachen (Germany). He was returning to his room from somwhere when he saw a couple with a big rucksack leaving the hostel compound. After coming to his room he discovers that the couple were thieves! They broke two rooms and stole two laptops from there, third room was my friend's room, who was visited by another friend at that time. So it had two laptops, and two mobile phones, and a Canon PowerShot S2 IS (~400 EUR then). So they didn't go for the fourth room:)
Anyway, police arrived shortly after. My friend gives a call to his mobile phone and it rings! But the police denied tracing it down, saying it required paper-work. Of course his phone never rang again after a couple of hours... he was very pissed!
The wikipedia entry leaves me in confusion. It seems to say something I agree with, but derives something that I am not in agreement with.
See, this is my understanding (bear with me please):
At any given state, there are a set of societal norms. If you plot number of people on y-axis and total number of norms being followed by people on x-axis, a bell curve will be formed. Which means most of the people follow some of the rules and ignore others. On either of the two extremes you have theoretical entity. You need such entity to refer to such extremes because they don't exist in real life. Depending on which end you are looking at, this is either God or Devil.
Now this is how I differ from Moral realism and still agree to. "Murder is wrong"! Agreed. It is true, but for today. It won't be true in distant future. But for today, that is the truth. Because today is the world in which we live, the world that is all real, that is how much realistic "Murder is wrong" statement can be. As someone said above, there is certain amount of doubt about everything you cannot shed. The doubt about future. But for today it's all real.
Mathematically, the bell curve remains, the x-axis (the rules and norms) change with time. How they change is a problem of sociology and politics. That's how propaganda can be useful - to tilt the change in your favor. But it will change. Time changes, as they say. And since the norms change with time, so will the extremes.
Hmmm... I see them all the time. And I distinctly remember that several months ago (around 7-8 months ago) I used to see them so often it was annoying. I just started ignoring them, and now I don't even notice, except when I want to - then I see a lot of them.
If something is a "societal norm," does that make it right?
The question in itself is wrong. Can you see how? GP's statement is that "right or wrong is decided by society/societal norms". This statement cannot be questioned by "what makes right or wrong, right?"
For example, before British rule started, it was illegal in India to kill a Brahman. It was the worst offense one could do: suffering in Hell was sure, but no one would even see you (they will take bath, clean the path you have walked and so on... you will effectively die of Hunger if you are not caught and hanged.
But when British came, they introduced Civil laws and constitution, and the idea that no one is above the rules (though in practice, they themselves were above all the rules:) ). So they freely hanged Brahmans and killed Fakirs (Muslim religious figures), and at the end caused so much commotion, they had to suppress a lot many of rebellions.
Probably it is hard to see now, but consider yourself living in that time, being part of a normal Indian family, getting all riled up over people killing your holiest of things, doing unthinkable things. I for one know that it would not have been possible for me to appreciate the British rule that we take for granted nowadays.
But the main point is, how do you know we are not living in such a situation NOW? How do you know that people living 500 years from now will have same norms and sense of justice that we have now? If you look at the history, people have always changed. It all makes sense to just believe that they will be different, and somethings you think are right, will be held wrong!
(PS: You can see how important propaganda and brain-washing is important for the society to function. Something along the line of Captain Copyright:) )
Anonymous said it right. You are over-generalizing.
Show a 70+ year old person programming, or how to make a website, or make something in 3d and they will just look at you funny.
I think my father and my grand-father will disagree. When I was 17 I used to learn HTML, and was constantly asked by my grand-father about what is Internet and all. I couldn't give him any specific answer because all I had was a book on DHTML (and I needed all this for an exam). (This is in 2001 I think, remember I was in a remote part of India where Internet had not reached yet!) My grand-father is 90+.
Similarly, when my father learned about the stuff I am doing now days (molecular simulation, and 3D visualization of sorts), he told me that when he was learning physics he used to imagine that we could calculate all the properties of a substance by just simulating molecules, and we would not need any equation of states at all. But since it was in 1970s and he was stuck in India, he could not pursue this field. (He is a chemical engineer btw).
Compare that to a lot of stuff if I show to people of my age-group, they will just neglect it as reduntant or yeah-great-whatever attitude.
What I mean to say is, you are confusing knowledge with will to learn. A 12 year old kid is still trying to understand how the world around it works, while 70+ year old has seen a generation rise, govern and then fade into technological obscurity. They are not interested in learning inside-out of HTML, who knows if it is a sign of wisdom?
If one were to chose people for their wisdom, 70+ would be the right choice without question.
Well, that is the beauty of GPL, at least in theory. You can sell your company and your code will still remain under GPL up-to the date of license change. After which it all depends upon the community. And once you have a nice little follower community (that's why you are successful even after being open source!), they will not switch over to some proprietary technology over night. And your previous clients will also stick to the specifications you had while your program was open and will not change just because "Hey! This comes from Microsoft!! Let's migrate!!!":)
At least in theory. The whole GPL is built upon this theory. As some people said in the original thread, it will be interesting to see what happens after MS buys some open source company.
According to Karl Lillevold, a (lead) programmer for Real Player, Real Alternative is nothing but rebundled DLLs from Real Player in a wrapper for support other players. Thus, it is still exploitable.
Brought to you by a linux-user, Real(TM)-hater/uninstaller. I uninstall it on every computer I encounter:)
If it is a "survival tool", it's the survival tool of a few at the expense of the many.
This is such a narrow view of a skeptic. To every person religion offers something, and that is why it is a survival tool for everyone. Like this forum, religion is a form of sub-culture, a way people bond without knowing each other. Like every tool it is mis-used, and it might very well be a product of some "evil" brain, but it sells and continues to sell because at the end, people buy it. If it a survival tool for just a few, just a few would have survived religion/religious commitment. But that's not the case now is it?
Slashdot Mirror
Who has counted the bugs and security holes that were fixed without prior disclosure? It is like counting footsteps of two dinosaurs from their fossils and then comparing them for their health.
Count me in. A long time since I have been so glad.
:)
Life still has some good moments
While I agree, I must say that Wikimedia Foundation has set its goal as 3 Million USD, while earlier it was only 1 Million USD. It is natural for ratios to be skewed.
Not a Wiki-fanboi here.
That was exactly my point.
:)
Even though most people will never have to create a file greater than 2 GB, or many people don't worry about defragmentation and all the niceties, they all know that it is a better filesystem.
MS has a good marketing team
True. Normal people don't even know what is NTFS or FAT, except the "fact" everyone has heard, which say NTFS is better. Who wants to lose customers?
I would add one another thing: You cannot format a disk > 32 GB to FAT32 on Windows. Who knows if they are using Windows to format? So probably they are limited to it anyway.
Encryption is only for criminals.
Captain Copyright told me last night.
Thanks for a good laugh.
Wow indeed! I log into #gentoo and when I do, I stay online. And you ask me why? Wow indeed!
Because I am a user, not a master! I get help and I try to help. I don't know most of the things. But I occasionally look into the window if some question is asked that I know. I am there to tell what I know. When I don't know, I stay quite.
Or did you wanted someone to tell you as soon as you asked a question that "hey! I don't know. I feel sorry for your problem and it should not have happened, bla, bla?". See, it is all reasonable to expect this reply. But when you are in a community of thousands (mind you, most of the people are connected to many channels at the same time), it is highly impractical to expect someone to babysit through your "IRC-Xperience!".
I mean, duh!
What you are refering to is Voyager 1. TFA is about Voyager 2. They are two different vehicles.
<wikipedia href="Heliosphere">
Evidence presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in May 2005 by Dr. Ed Stone suggests that the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed termination shock in December 2004, when it was about 94 AU from the sun, by virtue of the change in magnetic readings taken from the craft. In contrast, Voyager 2 began detecting returning particles when it was only 76 AU from the sun, in May 2006. This implies that the heliosphere may be irregularly shaped, bulging outwards in the sun's northern hemisphere and pushed inward in the south.
</wikipedia>
Chinese didn't "invent" decimal time. Phrases like "in the 1/10000 th part of a chand" and words like paramchand (not accurate transliteration; chand = second) etc., are very common in Sanskrit text. Add the fact that Decimal system itself was invented in India only means that Decimal time was "invented" in India.
Why I am using double-quotes for "invented"? Because no one can invent time. As a human you want to divide time to keep track of it. And you can only do that using the numeral system you know! Indians knew decimal system so they divided it into factors of 10, Sumerians used sexagesimal system, so they divided it into 60.
It is not the division that bears any importance in invention. It is the device which one can use to measure. If you don't have clocks to measure 1/10000 th part of second, it means nothing to write it down. Ancient Chinese are no different.
More countries will stand against USA than Iraq etc. Successful people have more enemies.
:) It would probably not be expelled... I got carried away with my thinking...
But yeah
It is simple. (As you can see from the other reply you have got.) US has a "big brother" attitude, it has been like that for a long time now. US economy runs by bullying other countries (this is a gross exaggeration but you get the idea - Iraq is the latest example where an idea that a country other than US has chemical weapons was enough to get majority people riled over it... or the constant "weinventedit" tag on control of internet by ICANN here on Slashdot... the history is filled with examples).
Plus, it is a free land where people who want to shed their cultural identities come all the time (not talking of aliens, but migration from Europe, Asia... etc.). It was also the biggest economy after fall of USSR, if you assume USSR had an "economy". It is but natural for average Americans to have a superiority complex.
And so they don't like UN, because it is a union of every other country. UN and USA have opposite agenda, former wants to listen to everyone while latter wants to have his own say in every matter. A mutual hatred is inevitable.
(UN is just a front of many nations... and most of them don't like this "big brother" attitude of America.)
While people are happy to quote how much USA spends on UN, they forget that it is to have a bigger piece of pie. If it were not for such large contributions, USA would have been expelled from UN after Iraq war started. One might have doubts but USA and UN both need each other.
I am in germany. My webpage is www.google.com (not www.google.de, not www.google.de/search?hl=en). It is the US site. And I don't see any thing. I have tried logging out and in again, deleting cache etc.) I guess they are filtering the requests on the basis of IPs.
From TFA:
:) Why?
"The U.S.-based Wikipedia Foundation, which is behind the popular compendium, was sued by three French nationals over a Wikipedia article that said they were gay activists."
The second FA uses the exact same wordings: "homosexuality was revealed on wikipedia". But if I were you, I would really not believe it
"Binoche did not rule on the whether the information contained in the article was defamatory and dismissed the plaintiffs' claim for damages."Emmanuel Binoche being the judge.
It looks more like someone saw a list of activists and edited it to become "gay" activists. And then these people went ahead and sued Wikimedia Foundation, instead of using the _infamous_ WHOIS database.
ROFL.
Reminds me of an incident that happened to one of my friend when he was in University of Aachen (Germany). He was returning to his room from somwhere when he saw a couple with a big rucksack leaving the hostel compound. After coming to his room he discovers that the couple were thieves! They broke two rooms and stole two laptops from there, third room was my friend's room, who was visited by another friend at that time. So it had two laptops, and two mobile phones, and a Canon PowerShot S2 IS (~400 EUR then). So they didn't go for the fourth room :)
Anyway, police arrived shortly after. My friend gives a call to his mobile phone and it rings! But the police denied tracing it down, saying it required paper-work. Of course his phone never rang again after a couple of hours... he was very pissed!
The wikipedia entry leaves me in confusion. It seems to say something I agree with, but derives something that I am not in agreement with.
:)
See, this is my understanding (bear with me please):
At any given state, there are a set of societal norms. If you plot number of people on y-axis and total number of norms being followed by people on x-axis, a bell curve will be formed. Which means most of the people follow some of the rules and ignore others. On either of the two extremes you have theoretical entity. You need such entity to refer to such extremes because they don't exist in real life. Depending on which end you are looking at, this is either God or Devil.
Now this is how I differ from Moral realism and still agree to. "Murder is wrong"! Agreed. It is true, but for today. It won't be true in distant future. But for today, that is the truth. Because today is the world in which we live, the world that is all real, that is how much realistic "Murder is wrong" statement can be. As someone said above, there is certain amount of doubt about everything you cannot shed. The doubt about future. But for today it's all real.
Mathematically, the bell curve remains, the x-axis (the rules and norms) change with time. How they change is a problem of sociology and politics. That's how propaganda can be useful - to tilt the change in your favor. But it will change. Time changes, as they say. And since the norms change with time, so will the extremes.
I should write about it in detail sometime.
Hmmm... I see them all the time. And I distinctly remember that several months ago (around 7-8 months ago) I used to see them so often it was annoying. I just started ignoring them, and now I don't even notice, except when I want to - then I see a lot of them.
It would be nice to have an eye doctor's opinion on this topic. But check this out: http://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/spotsfloats.htm (1st link on google for eye floaters) and particular intersting description at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater
Yep! Those are dead cells. I read it somewhere and I am too tired to link now... everyone can see them if one focuses as close as possible.
The question in itself is wrong. Can you see how? GP's statement is that "right or wrong is decided by society/societal norms". This statement cannot be questioned by "what makes right or wrong, right?"
For example, before British rule started, it was illegal in India to kill a Brahman. It was the worst offense one could do: suffering in Hell was sure, but no one would even see you (they will take bath, clean the path you have walked and so on... you will effectively die of Hunger if you are not caught and hanged.
But when British came, they introduced Civil laws and constitution, and the idea that no one is above the rules (though in practice, they themselves were above all the rules
Probably it is hard to see now, but consider yourself living in that time, being part of a normal Indian family, getting all riled up over people killing your holiest of things, doing unthinkable things. I for one know that it would not have been possible for me to appreciate the British rule that we take for granted nowadays.
But the main point is, how do you know we are not living in such a situation NOW? How do you know that people living 500 years from now will have same norms and sense of justice that we have now? If you look at the history, people have always changed. It all makes sense to just believe that they will be different, and somethings you think are right, will be held wrong!
(PS: You can see how important propaganda and brain-washing is important for the society to function. Something along the line of Captain Copyright
I think my father and my grand-father will disagree. When I was 17 I used to learn HTML, and was constantly asked by my grand-father about what is Internet and all. I couldn't give him any specific answer because all I had was a book on DHTML (and I needed all this for an exam). (This is in 2001 I think, remember I was in a remote part of India where Internet had not reached yet!) My grand-father is 90+.
Similarly, when my father learned about the stuff I am doing now days (molecular simulation, and 3D visualization of sorts), he told me that when he was learning physics he used to imagine that we could calculate all the properties of a substance by just simulating molecules, and we would not need any equation of states at all. But since it was in 1970s and he was stuck in India, he could not pursue this field. (He is a chemical engineer btw).
Compare that to a lot of stuff if I show to people of my age-group, they will just neglect it as reduntant or yeah-great-whatever attitude.
What I mean to say is, you are confusing knowledge with will to learn. A 12 year old kid is still trying to understand how the world around it works, while 70+ year old has seen a generation rise, govern and then fade into technological obscurity. They are not interested in learning inside-out of HTML, who knows if it is a sign of wisdom?
If one were to chose people for their wisdom, 70+ would be the right choice without question.
Well, that is the beauty of GPL, at least in theory. You can sell your company and your code will still remain under GPL up-to the date of license change. After which it all depends upon the community. And once you have a nice little follower community (that's why you are successful even after being open source!), they will not switch over to some proprietary technology over night. And your previous clients will also stick to the specifications you had while your program was open and will not change just because "Hey! This comes from Microsoft!! Let's migrate!!!" :)
At least in theory. The whole GPL is built upon this theory. As some people said in the original thread, it will be interesting to see what happens after MS buys some open source company.
According to Karl Lillevold, a (lead) programmer for Real Player, Real Alternative is nothing but rebundled DLLs from Real Player in a wrapper for support other players. Thus, it is still exploitable.
:)
Brought to you by a linux-user, Real(TM)-hater/uninstaller. I uninstall it on every computer I encounter
This is such a narrow view of a skeptic. To every person religion offers something, and that is why it is a survival tool for everyone. Like this forum, religion is a form of sub-culture, a way people bond without knowing each other. Like every tool it is mis-used, and it might very well be a product of some "evil" brain, but it sells and continues to sell because at the end, people buy it. If it a survival tool for just a few, just a few would have survived religion/religious commitment. But that's not the case now is it?