if we place science above our Creator then the results shall be futile
Right. Great multipurpose statement there. There are so many more eloquent statements that could address the issue of stem cell research instead of hiding in the Christian equivalent of a Zen Koan. I happen to be for research, so I won't help you out. Next time you post about your religion, how about actually saying something about your views?
I am a Christian. Now before you start flaming me for believing in stuff, just hear me out. Another guy came off all rightous in response to this story, attracting some well-deserved flames for his views. I would like to offer the rational Christian view. I believe God created the universe, with all the physics that hold it together. However, I do not deem to tell God how He should do stuff. If He works through evolution, that's cool. It makes His design cooler for being self-modifying. If he works through subatomic particles that we haven't even discovered yet, that makes it evel cooler that He started it all.
Having said that, I think it's crazy how some fundamentalists still think they know that God is against science of any kind. They are OK with breeding dogs and horses to suit their needs -- even good with masturbating bulls to get their semen for artificial insemination. Some of them start to get squeemish when I mention these things, but we have been playing with genetics for the longest time, and have reaped the benifits. Now, I can't figure out how cloning or even forming living cells from nutrient-rich baths can be 'playing God' more than any other science.
In fact I can -- people use life as a 'proof' that God exists. Unfortunately, any proof of God's existance would negate the need for faith, so it is doubtful whether such will ever exist. In these people's lives, they need to be able to say: 'Look at that foal -- it is proof that God exists'. If we can create life, therefore, we will be like God. This is flawed, for God is so much more than just something that creates life.
The body parts, fresh from the slaughter, would be incinerated just like any other medical waste. These phoetuses exist without the research that uses them. So should we let the phoetus be lost instead of furthering medical research that could help less phoetuses be aborted? Yes, not all abortions are from a knowing destruction. The ethics of this topic are loaded, but I think that if we can use these things, it is better than throwing them away. Nobody wants to rip unborn children from the womb to research them.
AC said: Don't do anything wrong. Then you won't have to worry about the police tracking you. Problem solved, mmkay?
Like you keep your nose clean? Have you ever:
Jaywalked
Copied music from a friend
Copied non-free software from a friend
Photocopied an entire textbook/manual
Driven while over the legal alchohol limit (but still 'ok to drive')
Driven over the speed limit (like ever)
Parked (briefly) in front of a no-parking zone
Been in the posession (of course not inhaling) of narcotics
All of these things are illegal (at least in my country). This does not mean they are wrong. 'Just don't do anything wrong' is a very broad statement, and does not solve the bigger problem of getting fair laws. In fact, it was illegal in my country (South Africa) to have sex with a person of a different race or the same sex, to speak against the government was not illegal but often punished. If everyone had taken your view, we would still be in the old apartheid era. That Mandela dude was just a troublemaker -- he just 'shouldn't have done anything wrong'.
OK, now I'm entering rant mode. America itself was founded on lawbreaking. The Boston tea party? I could go on, but I suppose I should have ignored you. The problem is that the laws aren't always fair, meaning that not everything 'against the law' is 'wrong' (and vice versa). Think about that.
Music has no such value. It must be made to have value, legally. As such it will always be necessary to motivate people to purchase it...
I don't quite follow what you are saying. Are you saying that society must be made to support 'ideas people'? Or are you saying that the only way these people can be supported is by passing laws that grant them the 'right' to profit disproportionally to their time?
I agree that the car example was a bit alien and far removed from the current situation. And remember that this whole thread was about advertising, not people copying copyrighted works illegally. It is not illegal to fast forward through ads, or just skip to another channel (yet). This is what we are talking about.
The point I was trying to make is not that people can make their own art or ideas and therefore they are worthless, just that the worth of anything in a free market is determined by the demand for it. When the demand goes down, the worth goes down. The problem is that people tend to think differently about ideas. They see them as inherently worthless or valuable, regardless of the demands of the public.
I do not want a world without art. I also do not think that not being able to make a decent living as an artist will stop people from being artists. This is why we are saying the business model will have to change. Instead of 'making stuff have value, legally', why not just sell a product that people will buy. There is always a threshold of difficulty, as you pointed out with the car, and getting back to the advertising, they need to find a way that people will not switch away from the ads, not force people to watch ads.
Imagine a patent free world. Rather, imagine a world where the automobile does not consist of only patented parts. Now imagine having an easy way of making automobiles at home for a fraction of the price asked by automobile manufacturers. This would make the automobile industry decidedly nervous, but would have nothing to do with copyright infringement. It would have to do with supply and demand.
You mention that the IP based companies are suffering. This might be not because they are being screwed over, but because they were doing well in the first place due to lucky coincedence which procected their 'right' to profit. Unfortunately, people will always try to pay less for the same product. They will buy cheap imitation breakfast cereal that costs less than the original if it is not significantly different. They will buy cheap clothes if they are not significantly inferior to expensive clothes. This is the way of the consumer. This is why people go to sales and bargain-hunt.
It seems that your respect for so-called intellectual property goes so deep that you are exhorting people to buy the expensive stuff, because of some moral obligation to repay the creators of their wares. This has never been the way of the consumer. A hard-working but unskilled woodworker could not charge more for his product because it took him longer to make, just as a skilled musician is not expected to ask less for his music which he composes for fun. They are forced to ask what the market will pay or not be payed at all.
Where this is all going is that you need to innovate to make money from any endeavor. It is becoming more difficult to rely on the difficulty of obtaining alternatives in the entertainment industry, and they will go under if they do not respond. However, people will continue to seek out good deals and pay as little as possible for as much as possible. It's just human nature. Deal with it.
The parent poster was referring to the fact that ownership of anything is a pretty interesting idea. Land even more so -- stable ownership of land is a gift of society, so there is no real guarantee of ownership when you leave (or get thrown off) some land you saw as 'yours' if there is no larger society there to acknowledge your ownership.
So the Muslims were expanding into other territories. These terretories did not start of populated, nor did they remain in the same hands for very long in historical terms. So who does the land 'belong' to?
Should the United states be abandoned and left to the remaining native Americans? Should Africa be swept clean of Europeans and left to native Africans? If so, which native Africans. The first tribe to occupy the land, or the second who took it by force or the third who paid them for it?
I for one don't like the idea of proprietary software. This argument is one of the reasons why Stallman doesn't like the wording 'Open Source' instead of 'Free software'. It's about what's important -- the freedom of the software. So call me a gnat, but I try to advocate the use of Free software and open standards.
In many cases I pester people for the same reason they pester me. They pester me to install Word because I dare to not be able to open their files. I pester them because they send me files I can't open or because I can't just copy the programs they used to make the documents because that would be illegal. It's not that hard to understand.
I can think of one big thing: Automatic layout of graphics so that they are near their references and so that text flows nicely around them. This is the biggest thing I have against gui tools for documents with figures and tables -- it becomes hell to move them around only to find that now the next page is only half filled with text.
Also, I use Matlab for large scale data analysis. Large Monte Carlo simulations cannot be aggregated in Excel. I incorporate the results in my LaTeX file as an include, so when I change the simulation the results change automatically in my document.
If you have a Word solution to these issues, please let me know.
For that lab equipment you need to interface to, check out Comedi. The equipment might be on the list.
Inserting trends is done by highlighting the graph on which you have graphed your points and then going to Insert|Statistics. The regressions are only available on the XY chart type. I found this out by going to help and typing "trend line" in the search field.
The clipboard thing is getting really old. If you want to use apps with consistent cut and paste, use only KDE and GTK apps. They are unified now. Of course, if you are using an app that is unaware of their clipboard, use the old highlight and middle click thing. It's not a hard rule to explan --- the old apps look old anyway, so its easy to say, well the old apps are different. Just like old Windows apps (anyone remember those funky Delphi widgets?)
That's kinda the point of these pebbles. I have seen a lot of work on this reactor technology, and waste is an important concern. The Fuel spere pebbles safely encase the nuclear material -- you can handle them and throw them around a bit. "The silicon carbide coatings that surround the uranium fuel particles within the pebble form a miniature pressure vessel. This pressure vessel provides a highly efficient barrier against the release of fission products during operation." - from the linked-to site
Clipboard: KDE and Gnome apps both support a clipboard very similar to the one Windows has. There is generic X clipboard functionality you are talking about, but the popular apps contained in most distros support 'windows-like' copy and pasting. Some apps don't support it, because they were written before it became popular.
Mice do not advertise their buttons. However, newer versions of Windows assume that people have a wheel whether they have one or not. This is why you can plug in a wheelmouse in a running Windows box and have the wheel work.
If you like that assumption, that's fine, but having the system configured for the hardware that is currently running is pretty cool for me.
I don't know what distro you have been using, but Mandrake (and Gentoo) always have a settings wizard where you select the mousewheel mouse type that has just worked for me every time.
Apps have to support the mousewheel -- not X or the OS. If there is a particular app you use a lot that does not support the mousewheel, why not give the developers a shout? They might put it in if you request the feature politely. If you can code, you might be able to add it yourself.
So let me get this straight. You believe that Stalman has this plan for world domination that he started cooking up in 1984 and he has been waiting patiently since then (for all of 20 years). Waiting to spring this on the world and then... (3) Profit!
Of course, it might be that he really believes in his cause and is acting as altruistically as he claims. But that would just be crazy. Everyone knows no-one does anything that they don't profit from.
Of course, you could say that he profits by feeling that he acts morally, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
Time for some Karma whoring: the 80/20 rule is actually
Pareto's Principle, which states that 20% of the input produces 80% of the results and other generalizations.
I have to bite here. The FSF is not concerned with the dissolution of all the laws that today are bundled together under 'intelletual property'. In fact, they use these laws to their advandage to keep their software free. Perhaps you should look into their philosophy before bashing them for something that they do not really stand for.
If you do not want to read the links, it boils down to Stallman not believing that software should be owned, but a common good. This is already established legal terminology, so nothing to do with communism or taking peoples livelihood away.
Just because people have been making money in a certain way doesn't mean that this method of making money should be protected. People can make money in many ways and should explore other options when one seems to be heading for obsolescence.
Of course, uncompressed PDFs are even bigger. PDF is a subset of PS leaving out the programming language elements and adding support for some nifty features, including compressed text streams.
If your looking for a PDF distiller, you can just use this collection of apps. Not dead easy to install, but perfectly usable.
Many, many versions of the Bible can be downloaded for free and read using e-sword (list of Bibles here). That's free but not libre. Open source readers are available from Crosswire
You're ignoring the convective heat transfer coefficient for water.
You can do that, because we are just assuming that all the energy dissipated exits in the water, thus we can only look at the temperature increase of the water to find that energy.
So essentially you want to build a SIMULINK clone, much like those Octave guys building a Matlab clone?
No. Essentially we want to build a dynamic chemical process simulator. Something like this http://www.aspentech.com/includes/product.cfm?Indu stryID=9&ProductID=128. Interestingly, we have already built a system on top of Simulink that does a lot of what we want to do, but we have taken it about as far as it will go. We need to develop our own framework to get some extra speed and to avoid having to work around some stuff in Simulink that stops us from doing what we want.
I think I should be clear about something. We are not aiming to create a commercial product, but rather something more useful for teaching modelling and control than big, locked commercial packages.
In our lab, we have copies of Aspen Dynamic, Hisys and a few other dynamic simulators which aim to be very accurate. Unfortunately it is not really possible to tinker with the internals of these packages, and that can be very rewarding when learning about simulation/modelling.
The software we have in mind will first aim to be able to do simple thermo (we have a thermo properties specialist on the team) and unit processes will be developed by students as part of their post graduate coursework. The engine design will be based largely on CAPE-open, which gives us most of the framework we need, along with making provision for proprietary thermo/units/solvers.
So we don't have to convince anybody that our simulations will beat Aspen, just that it works and gives at least realistic qualitative results.
I am currently completing my Master's in Process control at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. I am not doing this alone -- our university will be working together with the Process Control departments of two other South African universities.
I have extensive experience in programming and hands-on process experience. I think I am not totally unprepared. So, feel free to ramble.
This is obviously a reference to the "americans spent lots of money researching a pen that would work in weightless environment, russians used pencils" urban legend. Guess whether it is true or not.
Slashdot Mirror
if we place science above our Creator then the results shall be futile
Right. Great multipurpose statement there. There are so many more eloquent statements that could address the issue of stem cell research instead of hiding in the Christian equivalent of a Zen Koan. I happen to be for research, so I won't help you out. Next time you post about your religion, how about actually saying something about your views?
I am a Christian. Now before you start flaming me for believing in stuff, just hear me out. Another guy came off all rightous in response to this story, attracting some well-deserved flames for his views. I would like to offer the rational Christian view. I believe God created the universe, with all the physics that hold it together. However, I do not deem to tell God how He should do stuff. If He works through evolution, that's cool. It makes His design cooler for being self-modifying. If he works through subatomic particles that we haven't even discovered yet, that makes it evel cooler that He started it all.
Having said that, I think it's crazy how some fundamentalists still think they know that God is against science of any kind. They are OK with breeding dogs and horses to suit their needs -- even good with masturbating bulls to get their semen for artificial insemination. Some of them start to get squeemish when I mention these things, but we have been playing with genetics for the longest time, and have reaped the benifits. Now, I can't figure out how cloning or even forming living cells from nutrient-rich baths can be 'playing God' more than any other science.
In fact I can -- people use life as a 'proof' that God exists. Unfortunately, any proof of God's existance would negate the need for faith, so it is doubtful whether such will ever exist. In these people's lives, they need to be able to say: 'Look at that foal -- it is proof that God exists'. If we can create life, therefore, we will be like God. This is flawed, for God is so much more than just something that creates life.
The body parts, fresh from the slaughter, would be incinerated just like any other medical waste. These phoetuses exist without the research that uses them. So should we let the phoetus be lost instead of furthering medical research that could help less phoetuses be aborted? Yes, not all abortions are from a knowing destruction. The ethics of this topic are loaded, but I think that if we can use these things, it is better than throwing them away. Nobody wants to rip unborn children from the womb to research them.
Looks like supervisory strategies to me (my german is not great).
Like you keep your nose clean? Have you ever:
All of these things are illegal (at least in my country). This does not mean they are wrong. 'Just don't do anything wrong' is a very broad statement, and does not solve the bigger problem of getting fair laws. In fact, it was illegal in my country (South Africa) to have sex with a person of a different race or the same sex, to speak against the government was not illegal but often punished. If everyone had taken your view, we would still be in the old apartheid era. That Mandela dude was just a troublemaker -- he just 'shouldn't have done anything wrong'.
OK, now I'm entering rant mode. America itself was founded on lawbreaking. The Boston tea party? I could go on, but I suppose I should have ignored you. The problem is that the laws aren't always fair, meaning that not everything 'against the law' is 'wrong' (and vice versa). Think about that.
Music has no such value. It must be made to have value, legally. As such it will always be necessary to motivate people to purchase it...
I don't quite follow what you are saying. Are you saying that society must be made to support 'ideas people'? Or are you saying that the only way these people can be supported is by passing laws that grant them the 'right' to profit disproportionally to their time?
I agree that the car example was a bit alien and far removed from the current situation. And remember that this whole thread was about advertising, not people copying copyrighted works illegally. It is not illegal to fast forward through ads, or just skip to another channel (yet). This is what we are talking about.
The point I was trying to make is not that people can make their own art or ideas and therefore they are worthless, just that the worth of anything in a free market is determined by the demand for it. When the demand goes down, the worth goes down. The problem is that people tend to think differently about ideas. They see them as inherently worthless or valuable, regardless of the demands of the public.
I do not want a world without art. I also do not think that not being able to make a decent living as an artist will stop people from being artists. This is why we are saying the business model will have to change. Instead of 'making stuff have value, legally', why not just sell a product that people will buy. There is always a threshold of difficulty, as you pointed out with the car, and getting back to the advertising, they need to find a way that people will not switch away from the ads, not force people to watch ads.
Imagine a patent free world. Rather, imagine a world where the automobile does not consist of only patented parts. Now imagine having an easy way of making automobiles at home for a fraction of the price asked by automobile manufacturers. This would make the automobile industry decidedly nervous, but would have nothing to do with copyright infringement. It would have to do with supply and demand.
You mention that the IP based companies are suffering. This might be not because they are being screwed over, but because they were doing well in the first place due to lucky coincedence which procected their 'right' to profit. Unfortunately, people will always try to pay less for the same product. They will buy cheap imitation breakfast cereal that costs less than the original if it is not significantly different. They will buy cheap clothes if they are not significantly inferior to expensive clothes. This is the way of the consumer. This is why people go to sales and bargain-hunt.
It seems that your respect for so-called intellectual property goes so deep that you are exhorting people to buy the expensive stuff, because of some moral obligation to repay the creators of their wares. This has never been the way of the consumer. A hard-working but unskilled woodworker could not charge more for his product because it took him longer to make, just as a skilled musician is not expected to ask less for his music which he composes for fun. They are forced to ask what the market will pay or not be payed at all.
Where this is all going is that you need to innovate to make money from any endeavor. It is becoming more difficult to rely on the difficulty of obtaining alternatives in the entertainment industry, and they will go under if they do not respond. However, people will continue to seek out good deals and pay as little as possible for as much as possible. It's just human nature. Deal with it.
Oh well, I am bored. So here goes:
The parent poster was referring to the fact that ownership of anything is a pretty interesting idea. Land even more so -- stable ownership of land is a gift of society, so there is no real guarantee of ownership when you leave (or get thrown off) some land you saw as 'yours' if there is no larger society there to acknowledge your ownership.
So the Muslims were expanding into other territories. These terretories did not start of populated, nor did they remain in the same hands for very long in historical terms. So who does the land 'belong' to?
Should the United states be abandoned and left to the remaining native Americans? Should Africa be swept clean of Europeans and left to native Africans? If so, which native Africans. The first tribe to occupy the land, or the second who took it by force or the third who paid them for it?
Not quite so easy.
I for one don't like the idea of proprietary software. This argument is one of the reasons why Stallman doesn't like the wording 'Open Source' instead of 'Free software'. It's about what's important -- the freedom of the software. So call me a gnat, but I try to advocate the use of Free software and open standards.
In many cases I pester people for the same reason they pester me. They pester me to install Word because I dare to not be able to open their files. I pester them because they send me files I can't open or because I can't just copy the programs they used to make the documents because that would be illegal. It's not that hard to understand.
I can think of one big thing: Automatic layout of graphics so that they are near their references and so that text flows nicely around them. This is the biggest thing I have against gui tools for documents with figures and tables -- it becomes hell to move them around only to find that now the next page is only half filled with text.
Also, I use Matlab for large scale data analysis. Large Monte Carlo simulations cannot be aggregated in Excel. I incorporate the results in my LaTeX file as an include, so when I change the simulation the results change automatically in my document.
If you have a Word solution to these issues, please let me know.
For that lab equipment you need to interface to, check out Comedi. The equipment might be on the list.
Inserting trends is done by highlighting the graph on which you have graphed your points and then going to Insert|Statistics. The regressions are only available on the XY chart type. I found this out by going to help and typing "trend line" in the search field.
The clipboard thing is getting really old. If you want to use apps with consistent cut and paste, use only KDE and GTK apps. They are unified now. Of course, if you are using an app that is unaware of their clipboard, use the old highlight and middle click thing. It's not a hard rule to explan --- the old apps look old anyway, so its easy to say, well the old apps are different. Just like old Windows apps (anyone remember those funky Delphi widgets?)
That's kinda the point of these pebbles. I have seen a lot of work on this reactor technology, and waste is an important concern. The Fuel spere pebbles safely encase the nuclear material -- you can handle them and throw them around a bit. "The silicon carbide coatings that surround the uranium fuel particles within the pebble form a miniature pressure vessel. This pressure vessel provides a highly efficient barrier against the release of fission products during operation." - from the linked-to site
Clipboard: KDE and Gnome apps both support a clipboard very similar to the one Windows has. There is generic X clipboard functionality you are talking about, but the popular apps contained in most distros support 'windows-like' copy and pasting. Some apps don't support it, because they were written before it became popular. Mice do not advertise their buttons. However, newer versions of Windows assume that people have a wheel whether they have one or not. This is why you can plug in a wheelmouse in a running Windows box and have the wheel work.
If you like that assumption, that's fine, but having the system configured for the hardware that is currently running is pretty cool for me.
I don't know what distro you have been using, but Mandrake (and Gentoo) always have a settings wizard where you select the mousewheel mouse type that has just worked for me every time.
Apps have to support the mousewheel -- not X or the OS. If there is a particular app you use a lot that does not support the mousewheel, why not give the developers a shout? They might put it in if you request the feature politely. If you can code, you might be able to add it yourself.
So let me get this straight. You believe that Stalman has this plan for world domination that he started cooking up in 1984 and he has been waiting patiently since then (for all of 20 years). Waiting to spring this on the world and then ... (3) Profit!
Of course, it might be that he really believes in his cause and is acting as altruistically as he claims. But that would just be crazy. Everyone knows no-one does anything that they don't profit from.
Of course, you could say that he profits by feeling that he acts morally, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
Time for some Karma whoring: the 80/20 rule is actually Pareto's Principle, which states that 20% of the input produces 80% of the results and other generalizations.
Perhaps that should have been Stallman...
I have to bite here. The FSF is not concerned with the dissolution of all the laws that today are bundled together under 'intelletual property'. In fact, they use these laws to their advandage to keep their software free. Perhaps you should look into their philosophy before bashing them for something that they do not really stand for.
If you do not want to read the links, it boils down to Stallman not believing that software should be owned, but a common good. This is already established legal terminology, so nothing to do with communism or taking peoples livelihood away.
Just because people have been making money in a certain way doesn't mean that this method of making money should be protected. People can make money in many ways and should explore other options when one seems to be heading for obsolescence.
Of course, uncompressed PDFs are even bigger. PDF is a subset of PS leaving out the programming language elements and adding support for some nifty features, including compressed text streams.
If your looking for a PDF distiller, you can just use this collection of apps. Not dead easy to install, but perfectly usable.
Many, many versions of the Bible can be downloaded for free and read using e-sword (list of Bibles here). That's free but not libre. Open source readers are available from Crosswire
You're ignoring the convective heat transfer coefficient for water.
You can do that, because we are just assuming that all the energy dissipated exits in the water, thus we can only look at the temperature increase of the water to find that energy.
Almost as stupid as calling something Mandrake Linux just because about 1MiB out of about 800MiB installed is the Linux kernel?
So essentially you want to build a SIMULINK clone, much like those Octave guys building a Matlab clone?
u stryID=9&ProductID=128. Interestingly, we have already built a system on top of Simulink that does a lot of what we want to do, but we have taken it about as far as it will go. We need to develop our own framework to get some extra speed and to avoid having to work around some stuff in Simulink that stops us from doing what we want.
No. Essentially we want to build a dynamic chemical process simulator. Something like this http://www.aspentech.com/includes/product.cfm?Ind
I think I should be clear about something. We are not aiming to create a commercial product, but rather something more useful for teaching modelling and control than big, locked commercial packages.
In our lab, we have copies of Aspen Dynamic, Hisys and a few other dynamic simulators which aim to be very accurate. Unfortunately it is not really possible to tinker with the internals of these packages, and that can be very rewarding when learning about simulation/modelling.
The software we have in mind will first aim to be able to do simple thermo (we have a thermo properties specialist on the team) and unit processes will be developed by students as part of their post graduate coursework. The engine design will be based largely on CAPE-open, which gives us most of the framework we need, along with making provision for proprietary thermo/units/solvers.
So we don't have to convince anybody that our simulations will beat Aspen, just that it works and gives at least realistic qualitative results.
I am currently completing my Master's in Process control at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. I am not doing this alone -- our university will be working together with the Process Control departments of two other South African universities.
I have extensive experience in programming and hands-on process experience. I think I am not totally unprepared. So, feel free to ramble.
This is obviously a reference to the "americans spent lots of money researching a pen that would work in weightless environment, russians used pencils" urban legend. Guess whether it is true or not.