"Honestly, I don't know how you're going to fix this aspect of the OS without doing what Microsoft has done - compromise fundamental stability and security in favor of useability."
Stability is not antithetical to usability. If anything, reliability improves usability, since it means that things work more consistently. Security can be a pain, but basic stuff like having separate root and user accounts isn't too much of an issue.
IMHO, the problems with Linux's usability have more to do with the availability and quality of GUI config tools, and the lack of a standard target for third-party developers to build against, which in turn makes it tricky to install third-party binary applications. Making Linux usable by the masses is doable. Both the technology and the standardization efforts are in place. It just has yet to gel.
It appears they were collected properly, as long as you wanted to prove that "People who use Linux" == "People who use Linux"
You are ignoring that people who use Linux are not necessarily people who only use Linux. There is a difference between using both Linux and Windows but focusing more on Windows and using both Linux and Windows but focusing more on Linux.
"Why would anyone want to innovate if not to profit from his innovations?"
You're kidding, right?
I got news for you. People innovate, engineer, program, research, etc., in large part because they have an itch to do so. Money is important as a motivater since it can allow people to feed themselves as they continue on with work, and it can allow people to buy better tools, work harder, or encourage people to keep plugging along during the drudge work that is inevitably involved in such enterprises. However, money is only a partial motivator.
"I have anti-aliased fonts in Windows. It ain't slow"
Um, Windows does *not* antialias fonts in the normal range of point size because it tends to just look fuzzy. Unless you regularly look at 7-point or 24-point fonts in Windows, you probably have rarely seen font antialiasing at work. What Windows *does* do is use font hinting to make the fonts readable at different point sizes. However, that is not the same as antialiasing.
"Sure, I could write GNOME stuff in Python or Ruby or Scheme - but how many Bonobo objects are written in these languages? How reusable is my code going to be if I do this? Not very, I suspect."
From the bits and pieces that I have understood, Bonobo doesn't care about the language in which Bonobo objects are written. That's the whole point of it.
"However, even if the New Testament happens to have all its historical facts straight, that doesn't give the slightest suggestion that any of the supernatural claims it makes are true. (Perhaps you've heard of historical novels?)"
The closest thing to a historical novel at the time were the "historical romances." These tended to cover love, adventure, quests, and miracles that are more "theatrical" than those of the Gospels The Gospels fit far better in the genre of ancient biography, and in comparison with the historical romances are less flowery. Some of the flourishes of historical romance show up in apocryphical gospels. An example of the difference in tone between the apocryphals and the canonical gospels is here.
"Some of the peripheral claims are testable and fail, e.g. the ability of believers to drink poison without coming to harm."
Um, that claim comes from an ending of Mark that is not in the earliest manuscripts of Mark and is nowadays known to be spurious. In fact, the earliest known manuscripts of Mark end in a conjunction, which is extremely unusual, like ending a book in mid-sentence. The likelihood is that the original ending has been lost; maybe the last page fell out of the codex. There are two "endings" of Mark found in manuscripts, one a very short ending, and the longer one with which you are familiar. See here.
This deals with the "kingdom" issues. Make of it what you will.
"The only reason the Christian God has hung around so long is because he is defined as untestable."
That is not nearly so true as you might think. The New Testament makes a lot of historical fact claims, that are potentially falsifiable. If enough archaeologists "get lucky," Christianity's factual foundations could very well be torpedoed.
"So yes, I backdoor, and I document it internally (hardcopy stored in a safe). Its just an extra insurance policy for when some moron that I worked for 6 years ago does something stupid."
Did you ever think of what would happen if a cracker found out about such a backdoor? Just because you do your best to keep it a secret doesn't mean that crackers can't find out about it.
In my house, the DSL supplier ended up being Brightnet because SBC kept giving us the runaround. It looks to me like if the line sharing abandonment sticks, we may become stuck with SBC's nonsense again.:(
"Realistically, though, students have learned that they only need to spit back some boilerplate about how The Tempest represents dead white male colonialism and racism in the technocratic magician's domination of the person of color, Caliban."
If I even tried that, my Shakespeare professor would have either laughed or scowled in my face.
"So at a tech conference about a year ago, I met this guy working for the company formerly known as Bell Labs. He claims that it's common insider knowledge there that the transistor wasn't actually invented by them; it was reverse-engineered from some transistors that were found in the wreckage of that crashed UFO at Roswell NM!"
I wonder if the guy really believed what he was saying or if he just had a dry sense of humor and was trying to mess with your head.
I was wondering when Slashdot itself would post a link rebutting Euroseti's pseudoscience. What's a wonder to me is that Slashdot didn't update the article by adding a link to here when this comment pointed it out.
"Doesn't the use it or loose it rule apply anyhow, Linux has been out for ages, the source codes there for anyone to look at. SCO should have cried wolf a long time ago, they have no excuse."
"Use it or lose it" only officially applies to trademarks.
"So do we have property rights because they actually make most people better off, or are they fundamental rights - an end in themselves. In fact the truth is the latter. Where property rights impinge on the common good (whatever that is) we have to sacrifice them - even though the Constitution might suggest otherwise." [emphasis mine]
I think you meant that the truth is the former. The latter would mean that property rights were fundamental.
"This has been said before, but as copyrighted works ascend into the public domain, tools such as DeCSS will no longer fall under the DMCA category of items whose primary function is to protect copyrighted works. Now they are legitimately required to *free* newly UNcopyrighted works."
However, for DeCSS to be legally available once the copyrights on the DVDs expire, it has to continue to be illegally available until then.
"I am less than sympathetic towards Kevin Mitnick. He committed a crime, and he got punished for it. Poor baby."
I'm inclined to agree. The injustice was not that Mitnick was tried and convicted for his crimes, but that he was treated as if he were some super-dangerous uberhacker, when in fact, he caused a lot more hassle than damage. The government imbued him with this mystique that is out-of-balance with what he actually accomplished.
"If you commit an act in your country which is legal in your country, how can you be prosecuted for that act in another country?"
If what you do in one country affects what happens in another, then things get sticky because the action in question crosses jurisdictions. If at part of the border of Virginia there was a sidewalk, and you stood in a neighboring state and spit on that sidewalk, have you done anything illegal? You are outside Virginia state lines, but what you did affects what is within the state lines.
"Can you name anything else the designers of the firearm thought you might do with it, other than attempt to kill something/somebody with it?"
It might have been better to say that guns can be used for more than just murder. Guns can be used in self-defense or as a military tool. Certain guns are even useful for hunting. In short, there are both legal and illegal uses for guns.
"I watched Firefly for a few episodes and found it very boring."
Understandable. The first couple episodes of Firefly weren't that impressive. Somehow the tension was lacking. From the episode "Out of Gas" onward, though, Firefly had gotten up to speed.
Slashdot Mirror
"Honestly, I don't know how you're going to fix this aspect of the OS without doing what Microsoft has done - compromise fundamental stability and security in favor of useability."
Stability is not antithetical to usability. If anything, reliability improves usability, since it means that things work more consistently. Security can be a pain, but basic stuff like having separate root and user accounts isn't too much of an issue.
IMHO, the problems with Linux's usability have more to do with the availability and quality of GUI config tools, and the lack of a standard target for third-party developers to build against, which in turn makes it tricky to install third-party binary applications. Making Linux usable by the masses is doable. Both the technology and the standardization efforts are in place. It just has yet to gel.
A few points:
"An rpm doesn't include a list of all rpms it requires, just libs, and neither does the rpm database."
Wrong.
RPMs include *both* a list of the RPMs it requires and files as well.
You are ignoring that people who use Linux are not necessarily people who only use Linux. There is a difference between using both Linux and Windows but focusing more on Windows and using both Linux and Windows but focusing more on Linux.
"Why would anyone want to innovate if not to profit from his innovations?"
You're kidding, right?
I got news for you. People innovate, engineer, program, research, etc., in large part because they have an itch to do so. Money is important as a motivater since it can allow people to feed themselves as they continue on with work, and it can allow people to buy better tools, work harder, or encourage people to keep plugging along during the drudge work that is inevitably involved in such enterprises. However, money is only a partial motivator.
"I have anti-aliased fonts in Windows. It ain't slow"
Um, Windows does *not* antialias fonts in the normal range of point size because it tends to just look fuzzy. Unless you regularly look at 7-point or 24-point fonts in Windows, you probably have rarely seen font antialiasing at work. What Windows *does* do is use font hinting to make the fonts readable at different point sizes. However, that is not the same as antialiasing.
"Sure, I could write GNOME stuff in Python or Ruby or Scheme - but how many Bonobo objects are written in these languages? How reusable is my code going to be if I do this? Not very, I suspect."
From the bits and pieces that I have understood, Bonobo doesn't care about the language in which Bonobo objects are written. That's the whole point of it.
The closest thing to a historical novel at the time were the "historical romances." These tended to cover love, adventure, quests, and miracles that are more "theatrical" than those of the Gospels The Gospels fit far better in the genre of ancient biography, and in comparison with the historical romances are less flowery. Some of the flourishes of historical romance show up in apocryphical gospels. An example of the difference in tone between the apocryphals and the canonical gospels is here.
Um, that claim comes from an ending of Mark that is not in the earliest manuscripts of Mark and is nowadays known to be spurious. In fact, the earliest known manuscripts of Mark end in a conjunction, which is extremely unusual, like ending a book in mid-sentence. The likelihood is that the original ending has been lost; maybe the last page fell out of the codex. There are two "endings" of Mark found in manuscripts, one a very short ending, and the longer one with which you are familiar. See here.
This deals with the "kingdom" issues. Make of it what you will.
"The only reason the Christian God has hung around so long is because he is defined as untestable."
That is not nearly so true as you might think. The New Testament makes a lot of historical fact claims, that are potentially falsifiable. If enough archaeologists "get lucky," Christianity's factual foundations could very well be torpedoed.
"So yes, I backdoor, and I document it internally (hardcopy stored in a safe). Its just an extra insurance policy for when some moron that I worked for 6 years ago does something stupid."
Did you ever think of what would happen if a cracker found out about such a backdoor? Just because you do your best to keep it a secret doesn't mean that crackers can't find out about it.
In my house, the DSL supplier ended up being Brightnet because SBC kept giving us the runaround. It looks to me like if the line sharing abandonment sticks, we may become stuck with SBC's nonsense again. :(
"Realistically, though, students have learned that they only need to spit back some boilerplate about how The Tempest represents dead white male colonialism and racism in the technocratic magician's domination of the person of color, Caliban."
If I even tried that, my Shakespeare professor would have either laughed or scowled in my face.
"So at a tech conference about a year ago, I met this guy working for the company formerly known as Bell Labs. He claims that it's common insider knowledge there that the transistor wasn't actually invented by them; it was reverse-engineered from some transistors that were found in the wreckage of that crashed UFO at Roswell NM!"
I wonder if the guy really believed what he was saying or if he just had a dry sense of humor and was trying to mess with your head.
It's more like seventeen years, not seven.
"This kind of stuff has been on the Internet for years [news] but Disney seems to pretend it doesn't exist."
That may be because it's unfeasible for Disney to hunt down and pursue every last infringer.
I was wondering when Slashdot itself would post a link rebutting Euroseti's pseudoscience. What's a wonder to me is that Slashdot didn't update the article by adding a link to here when this comment pointed it out.
From the C&D letter:
"In the meantime, however, be advised that PCI-SIG will not tolerate coexistance of your website in its present form."
That pretty much says "pull the site down" to most laymen.
"Doesn't the use it or loose it rule apply anyhow, Linux has been out for ages, the source codes there for anyone to look at. SCO should have cried wolf a long time ago, they have no excuse."
"Use it or lose it" only officially applies to trademarks.
I think you meant that the truth is the former. The latter would mean that property rights were fundamental.
"This has been said before, but as copyrighted works ascend into the public domain, tools such as DeCSS will no longer fall under the DMCA category of items whose primary function is to protect copyrighted works. Now they are legitimately required to *free* newly UNcopyrighted works."
However, for DeCSS to be legally available once the copyrights on the DVDs expire, it has to continue to be illegally available until then.
"I am less than sympathetic towards Kevin Mitnick. He committed a crime, and he got punished for it. Poor baby."
I'm inclined to agree. The injustice was not that Mitnick was tried and convicted for his crimes, but that he was treated as if he were some super-dangerous uberhacker, when in fact, he caused a lot more hassle than damage. The government imbued him with this mystique that is out-of-balance with what he actually accomplished.
"don't you think it devious that they'd wait until MS had DRM in all of their latest products before bringing up a lawsuit?"
:)
Not really. They have to wait for MS to infringe before they can sue for infringment.
"If you commit an act in your country which is legal in your country, how can you be prosecuted for that act in another country?"
If what you do in one country affects what happens in another, then things get sticky because the action in question crosses jurisdictions. If at part of the border of Virginia there was a sidewalk, and you stood in a neighboring state and spit on that sidewalk, have you done anything illegal? You are outside Virginia state lines, but what you did affects what is within the state lines.
"Can you name anything else the designers of the firearm thought you might do with it, other than attempt to kill something/somebody with it?"
It might have been better to say that guns can be used for more than just murder. Guns can be used in self-defense or as a military tool. Certain guns are even useful for hunting. In short, there are both legal and illegal uses for guns.
"I watched Firefly for a few episodes and found it very boring."
Understandable. The first couple episodes of Firefly weren't that impressive. Somehow the tension was lacking. From the episode "Out of Gas" onward, though, Firefly had gotten up to speed.