It has to be said, though, that I also quoted without regard for context to underline my statement about Islam and its prophet. I have to admit that I was to lazy to properly research this issue in the readily available full translations of the Koran. For this I'm sorry.
Your comment is very true. Nor have I read the bible, or any other holy book for that matter. You're very right to point out that I quoted out of context. Also the website where I took the quote from was a typical Islam-bashing-site which showed up after a random search for "islam violence". I apologize for dishonest intellectual conduct.
What I like to propose, though, is that the people who go on a crusade, a jihad or some related adventure don't do this after studying their holy book thoroughly. I'd consider it more likely that these people are simply doing what everyone around them is doing or what is told by some Ayatollah or Immam. Also, I suspect that the root cause for these more aggressive forms of fundamentalism is of a demographic rather than a philosophical nature.
Minus the sarcasm, I agree with what you say: yes, it is time to rebel against big relegion. It has always been time to rebel against big religion. The best way to do this is by acknowledging that for any (big) religion it's much more important for this religion to promote itself than it is to promote religious values such as being friendly to your neigbour. What makes successful big religions so big and successful is that they value spreading the religion above all other values.
I started out the same way as you, but was also forced to look into what is actually taught by the Koran. In fact, the prophet taught and practiced the spreading of Islam by sword. Some excerpts from
Fight non-believers 9.123: O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil).
Kill non-believers 4.89: They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.
Killing Idolaters 9.5: So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
Smite the neck and cut fingertips of unbelievers 8.12: When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.
Threat of punishment for not going to war 9.38: O you who believe! What (excuse) have you that when it is said to you: Go forth in Allah's way, you should incline heavily to earth; are you contented with this world's life instead of the hereafter? But the provision of this world's life compared with the hereafter is but little.
9.39: If you do not go forth, He will chastise you with a painful chastisement and bring in your place a people other than you, and you will do Him no harm; and Allah has power over all things.
48.16: Say to those of the dwellers of the desert who were left behind: You shall soon be invited (to fight) against a people possessing mighty prowess; you will fight against them until they submit; then if you obey, Allah will grant you a good reward; and if you turn back as you turned back before, He will punish you with a painful punishment.
Google Talk uses your Gmail contact list. If you delete one of your contacts from Google Talk, it is consequently removed from your Gmail address book. At least, that was still the behaviour when I last used the official Google Talk client.
I'm not sure wether this is a nuisance or convenience to other users, but for me, it's mostly a convenience.
And the main reason people have nothing is because they have lost it or proven themselves incapable of acquiring it through actions of their own. You get what you deserve and all in a world where it's possible for an immigrant to this country to become one of its richest men.
Why should I be helping people who refuse to help themselves? That's just going to promote laziness and dependence on me.
Your strong statement makes me curious to the fight you had to put up to aquire your favorable position in life. What exactly did you do to become someone who can afford spending time on Slashdot? Did you happen to work a factory 12 hours each day to be able to afford classes at a private school? That would make you a lucky kid compared to some who work the factory each day to be able to afford some food for themselves and their family.
Sillyness aside, is your statement provoking that everyone in your country (I'm assuming the US) has an equal change at aquiring wealth or are you one of the belief that everyone in the world has an equal change to do well? Or, am I simply missing your point alltogether?
I've been beating myself over the exact same question... It seems as if a surprising number of participants in this thread don't know what the GPL is and how it works.
There seems to exist some confusion here about dual licencing. Once a project has been released under the GPL, you can't just unrelease it. All the provisions of the GPL keep applying to the software which has already been released.
If MySQL AB were to really only release MySQL under commercial licences in some alternate universe in the future, there would still be an open source developer community which can do with the the GPL'ed versions of MySQL whatever they damn well please.
I'm not sure about other developers, but one of the foremost reasons that I use GPL'ed software as the basis for my own projects is continuity. This continuity in the availability of MySQL's source can never be undone by MySQL AB, since they've already done the right thing with each version of MySQL that they released under the GPL.
Noone is complaining when a project is released under just a GPL licence. Why not? Because the viral licence has some properties that many people like.
But, sometimes there are businesses that want to use a project in their own product which is released under a more restrictive licence. This is what the commercial licences are for. Note that is actually very sound from a business perspective, because they're basically saying:
If you are a believer in open source, use our stuff as open source and, if you release your stuff, release it as open source.
But, if you want to release your product under a more restrictive licence, just pay us some money.
Such a form of dual licencing actually adds such liberties as which are often sought when a company bases their product on a more liberal, BSD-like licence instead of a viral licence such as the GPL. And they achieve this without making themselves vulnerable to the takers who don't give back often warned for by BSD opponents.
Also, I read a rant on this page about this being as much as a problem as QT. Which problem? Even the Windows version of QT4 has now been released under the GPL. If anyone still believes that QT has licencing problems, he's either a GPL opponent, a BSD proponent or very ill informed.
There's actually a few public Jabber services already that have installed Jabber's MSN transport. If Google engineers are as good as they seem, they'll have no trouble at all to let you talk to your MSN friends.
I've looked it up and it seems that I was too ignorant about WebDAV concepts to say anything useful about its capabilities. Most of my vague ramblings were based on the following quote from the SVN book. I was basically just dreaming of a situation where you could mount a WebDAV URL and get to past revisions of files easily without having to explain as much to users as when using TurtoiseSVN, for example. I guess my users aren't the only people who need some explaining done to them;-)
With an ordinary web browser? In one word: nope. At least, not with mod_dav_svn as your only tool.
Your web browser only speaks ordinary HTTP. That means it only knows how to GET public URLs, which represent the latest versions of files and directories. According to the WebDAV/DeltaV spec, each server defines a private URL syntax for older versions of resources, and that syntax is opaque to clients. To find an older version of a file, a client must follow a specific procedure to "discover" the proper URL; the procedure involves issuing a series of WebDAV PROPFIND requests and understanding DeltaV concepts. This is something your web browser simply can't do.
So to answer the question, one obvious way to see older revisions of files and directories is by passing the --revision argument to the svn list and svn cat commands. To browse old revisions with your web browser, however, you can use third-party software. A good example of this is ViewCVS (http://viewcvs.sourceforge.net/). ViewCVS was originally written to display CVS repositories through the web, and the latest bleeding-edge versions (at the time of writing) are able to understand Subversion repositories as well.
Sorry if I was dense. Indeed I seem to have replied to something that was actually never said.
I am in no way convinced of WebDAV's inferiority. I am, in fact, anxious to see the anticipated support for more advanced WebDAV functionality in Subversion, even though many of these features wouldn't be that useful in current WebDAV clients;-) I would really love a WebDAV server/client combination that supports versioning in a way that I can actually explain to my less technical users:-D But, the way in which SVN now solves this problem transparently (I believe it was through committing on each write) also seems very nice. It just makes me wonder how they grant users access to past revisions.
Also, I'm not too familiar with Windows, but on all my GNOME and KDE desktops I've been able to save files to WebDAV, FTP, SFTP and what-not servers for quite some time. So it's not that clear to me what the anonymous grandparent is talking about.
Wikipedia contains more information on why there are no machinal computers in the Dune universe. There was the Butlerian Jihad in the Dune universe, which was a crusade for the destruction of computers, robots, and anything that tries to replace the human mind with a machine (artificial intelligence).
This battle for supremacy of humans and sentient machines is described in Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, one of the prequels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.
I'm sure you already know this, but you could easily merge most of the above into one block by using a comma to seperate each selector as in the following example.
I use rdiff-backup for actual incremental backups. rdiff-backup is based on librsync and works amazingly well. There are a few spites such as a lack of checksums and non-numerical user ID's which can be dangerous when restoring a full system, but overall it is very impressive.
If you're solely using (external) HD's for your backups, you'll like DAR (Disk ARchive) even better than rsync/rdiff-backup.
Although many tools like xsltproc can, in fact, handle good ol' broken HTML, using XHTML makes server side processing easier. I've built a light-weight CMS a few times by simply having a bunch of simple XHTML files which are processed into more fancy XHTML by some XSLT stylesheets that are invoked through make/xsltproc. These stylesheets can read some metadata from a sitemap.xml file and then it's just a matter of publishing the fancy XHTML (with ever-changing cruft like logo's and complex menu structures) using weex.
Also, mixing namespaces can be a very powerfull tool within a CMS. After all, most published websites of more than 5 pages are the result of a process that is more often than not quite complex. Everything that makes complex processing easier, is a win to me.
It's very telling that you felt the need to add the following statement to your post - in the form of a disclaimer, no less:
Disclaimer: Let me add that if a pedophile would hurt any kid I know, I'd be quick enough to rip his balls off. This same reaction applies to rapists.
I don't mean telling about you personally, but just the general climate in which we live, where people automatically feel the need to insert some kind of statement threatening graphic violence against paedophiles, just to make it absolutely damn clear that they don't support that kind of stuff, or anything.
I agree with your assertion. Before posting my comment, I was in doubt wether or not to include a disclaimer because such a threat seemed rather random and non-sensical in the given context. Yet, I included it, simply because I felt it necessary to cover my ass. I agree with you in that this very telling.
A taboo that inflicts such strong feelings deserves at least some scrutiny.
I'd say that it's not coerced (child) porn that's bad. I think it is the act of coercing someone into activities to create this kind of entertainment that's not very nice.
In fact, in a way, I think it's a shame that a lot of child (or otherwise illigal) porn is removed upon discovery, because I'd much rather see pedophiles masturbating with some of their favorite pictures instead of masturbating with one of their favorite victims. Of course this scenario is not very realistic because victims and their family wouldn't much like it if authorities didn't try their best to clear all real-world traces of such traumatic experiences.
Perhaps, one could use realistic modeling techniques to fullfill one's "need" for pornographic materials that would normally harm some of the actors. Many wannabe rapists are already well satisfied by all the enacted rape fantasies that flood the internet.
Disclaimer: Let me add that if a pedophile would hurt any kid I know, I'd be quick enough to rip his balls off. This same reaction applies to rapists.
I'm quite curious what others think of this subject, so please do reply and shoot at these random, shabby idea's.
I had to try this out to make sure, because I switched from my custom IMAP/LDAP solution a while ago to use Gmail exclusively: To permanently remove all deleted messages in the selected folder, use "Actions / Expunge" and to permanently remove all deleted messages in all folders, use "Actions / Empty Trash".
Actually, I do care what Stallman has to say, because I usually consider his statments as quite insightful, very much unlike your pointless blabbering.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for setting me straight. I appreciate.
It has to be said, though, that I also quoted without regard for context to underline my statement about Islam and its prophet. I have to admit that I was to lazy to properly research this issue in the readily available full translations of the Koran. For this I'm sorry.
Your comment is very true. Nor have I read the bible, or any other holy book for that matter. You're very right to point out that I quoted out of context. Also the website where I took the quote from was a typical Islam-bashing-site which showed up after a random search for "islam violence". I apologize for dishonest intellectual conduct.
What I like to propose, though, is that the people who go on a crusade, a jihad or some related adventure don't do this after studying their holy book thoroughly. I'd consider it more likely that these people are simply doing what everyone around them is doing or what is told by some Ayatollah or Immam. Also, I suspect that the root cause for these more aggressive forms of fundamentalism is of a demographic rather than a philosophical nature.
Minus the sarcasm, I agree with what you say: yes, it is time to rebel against big relegion. It has always been time to rebel against big religion. The best way to do this is by acknowledging that for any (big) religion it's much more important for this religion to promote itself than it is to promote religious values such as being friendly to your neigbour. What makes successful big religions so big and successful is that they value spreading the religion above all other values.
On the subject of why authoritarianism is always a bad idea, I highly recommend the book The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power by Joel Kramer and Diane Alstad.
I agree with you. I'd like to add that in no way I wanted to imply that I do like Christianity. I dislike authoritarianism in all its many forms.
I started out the same way as you, but was also forced to look into what is actually taught by the Koran. In fact, the prophet taught and practiced the spreading of Islam by sword. Some excerpts from
Fight non-believers
9.123: O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil).
Kill non-believers
4.89: They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.
Killing Idolaters
9.5: So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
Smite the neck and cut fingertips of unbelievers
8.12: When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.
Threat of punishment for not going to war
9.38: O you who believe! What (excuse) have you that when it is said to you: Go forth in Allah's way, you should incline heavily to earth; are you contented with this world's life instead of the hereafter? But the provision of this world's life compared with the hereafter is but little.
9.39: If you do not go forth, He will chastise you with a painful chastisement and bring in your place a people other than you, and you will do Him no harm; and Allah has power over all things.
48.16: Say to those of the dwellers of the desert who were left behind: You shall soon be invited (to fight) against a people possessing mighty prowess; you will fight against them until they submit; then if you obey, Allah will grant you a good reward; and if you turn back as you turned back before, He will punish you with a painful punishment.
There's much more.
I know some muslims and I like all of them. I doubt if any of these self-proclaimed muslims have actually read the Koran though.
Meebo has already been offering AJAX access to AIM/ICQ, Yahoo IM, Jabber, GTalk and MSN networks for some time now. You should go check it out now.
The great thing about evolution is that it doesn't stop existing when you stop believing in it.
Google Talk uses your Gmail contact list. If you delete one of your contacts from Google Talk, it is consequently removed from your Gmail address book. At least, that was still the behaviour when I last used the official Google Talk client.
I'm not sure wether this is a nuisance or convenience to other users, but for me, it's mostly a convenience.
Your strong statement makes me curious to the fight you had to put up to aquire your favorable position in life. What exactly did you do to become someone who can afford spending time on Slashdot? Did you happen to work a factory 12 hours each day to be able to afford classes at a private school? That would make you a lucky kid compared to some who work the factory each day to be able to afford some food for themselves and their family.
Sillyness aside, is your statement provoking that everyone in your country (I'm assuming the US) has an equal change at aquiring wealth or are you one of the belief that everyone in the world has an equal change to do well? Or, am I simply missing your point alltogether?
I've been beating myself over the exact same question... It seems as if a surprising number of participants in this thread don't know what the GPL is and how it works.
There seems to exist some confusion here about dual licencing. Once a project has been released under the GPL, you can't just unrelease it. All the provisions of the GPL keep applying to the software which has already been released.
If MySQL AB were to really only release MySQL under commercial licences in some alternate universe in the future, there would still be an open source developer community which can do with the the GPL'ed versions of MySQL whatever they damn well please.
I'm not sure about other developers, but one of the foremost reasons that I use GPL'ed software as the basis for my own projects is continuity. This continuity in the availability of MySQL's source can never be undone by MySQL AB, since they've already done the right thing with each version of MySQL that they released under the GPL.
Noone is complaining when a project is released under just a GPL licence. Why not? Because the viral licence has some properties that many people like.
But, sometimes there are businesses that want to use a project in their own product which is released under a more restrictive licence. This is what the commercial licences are for. Note that is actually very sound from a business perspective, because they're basically saying:
Such a form of dual licencing actually adds such liberties as which are often sought when a company bases their product on a more liberal, BSD-like licence instead of a viral licence such as the GPL. And they achieve this without making themselves vulnerable to the takers who don't give back often warned for by BSD opponents.
Also, I read a rant on this page about this being as much as a problem as QT. Which problem? Even the Windows version of QT4 has now been released under the GPL. If anyone still believes that QT has licencing problems, he's either a GPL opponent, a BSD proponent or very ill informed.
There's actually a few public Jabber services already that have installed Jabber's MSN transport. If Google engineers are as good as they seem, they'll have no trouble at all to let you talk to your MSN friends.
I've looked it up and it seems that I was too ignorant about WebDAV concepts to say anything useful about its capabilities. Most of my vague ramblings were based on the following quote from the SVN book. I was basically just dreaming of a situation where you could mount a WebDAV URL and get to past revisions of files easily without having to explain as much to users as when using TurtoiseSVN, for example. I guess my users aren't the only people who need some explaining done to them ;-)
From the SVN book:
Sorry if I was dense. Indeed I seem to have replied to something that was actually never said.
I am in no way convinced of WebDAV's inferiority. I am, in fact, anxious to see the anticipated support for more advanced WebDAV functionality in Subversion, even though many of these features wouldn't be that useful in current WebDAV clients ;-) I would really love a WebDAV server/client combination that supports versioning in a way that I can actually explain to my less technical users :-D But, the way in which SVN now solves this problem transparently (I believe it was through committing on each write) also seems very nice. It just makes me wonder how they grant users access to past revisions.
Also, I'm not too familiar with Windows, but on all my GNOME and KDE desktops I've been able to save files to WebDAV, FTP, SFTP and what-not servers for quite some time. So it's not that clear to me what the anonymous grandparent is talking about.
Wikipedia contains more information on why there are no machinal computers in the Dune universe. There was the Butlerian Jihad in the Dune universe, which was a crusade for the destruction of computers, robots, and anything that tries to replace the human mind with a machine (artificial intelligence).
This battle for supremacy of humans and sentient machines is described in Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, one of the prequels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.
Agreed, but my code was mostly crapped up because I put pre tags around it, which is ignored by Slashcode.
I'm sure you already know this, but you could easily merge most of the above into one block by using a comma to seperate each selector as in the following example.
A:link[HREF*="ad."] IMG, A:link[HREF*="ads."] IMG, A:link[HREF*="/ad"] IMG, A:link[HREF*="/A="] IMG { display: none ! important }I use rdiff-backup for actual incremental backups. rdiff-backup is based on librsync and works amazingly well. There are a few spites such as a lack of checksums and non-numerical user ID's which can be dangerous when restoring a full system, but overall it is very impressive.
If you're solely using (external) HD's for your backups, you'll like DAR (Disk ARchive) even better than rsync/rdiff-backup.
Although many tools like xsltproc can, in fact, handle good ol' broken HTML, using XHTML makes server side processing easier. I've built a light-weight CMS a few times by simply having a bunch of simple XHTML files which are processed into more fancy XHTML by some XSLT stylesheets that are invoked through make/xsltproc. These stylesheets can read some metadata from a sitemap.xml file and then it's just a matter of publishing the fancy XHTML (with ever-changing cruft like logo's and complex menu structures) using weex.
Also, mixing namespaces can be a very powerfull tool within a CMS. After all, most published websites of more than 5 pages are the result of a process that is more often than not quite complex. Everything that makes complex processing easier, is a win to me.
I agree with your assertion. Before posting my comment, I was in doubt wether or not to include a disclaimer because such a threat seemed rather random and non-sensical in the given context. Yet, I included it, simply because I felt it necessary to cover my ass. I agree with you in that this very telling.
A taboo that inflicts such strong feelings deserves at least some scrutiny.
I'd say that it's not coerced (child) porn that's bad. I think it is the act of coercing someone into activities to create this kind of entertainment that's not very nice.
In fact, in a way, I think it's a shame that a lot of child (or otherwise illigal) porn is removed upon discovery, because I'd much rather see pedophiles masturbating with some of their favorite pictures instead of masturbating with one of their favorite victims. Of course this scenario is not very realistic because victims and their family wouldn't much like it if authorities didn't try their best to clear all real-world traces of such traumatic experiences.
Perhaps, one could use realistic modeling techniques to fullfill one's "need" for pornographic materials that would normally harm some of the actors. Many wannabe rapists are already well satisfied by all the enacted rape fantasies that flood the internet.
Disclaimer: Let me add that if a pedophile would hurt any kid I know, I'd be quick enough to rip his balls off. This same reaction applies to rapists.
I'm quite curious what others think of this subject, so please do reply and shoot at these random, shabby idea's.
I had to try this out to make sure, because I switched from my custom IMAP/LDAP solution a while ago to use Gmail exclusively: To permanently remove all deleted messages in the selected folder, use "Actions / Expunge" and to permanently remove all deleted messages in all folders, use "Actions / Empty Trash".
Actually, I do care what Stallman has to say, because I usually consider his statments as quite insightful, very much unlike your pointless blabbering.