Now? Not really. Too many corporations are getting money from Linux and they will fight for their piece of pie.
True. When we're talking about Linux-loving corporations we're talking about corporations like Big Blue. And Big Blue has bigger (or at least more) guns than Microsoft in the case of a full-scale patent war. Add to that companies like Novell or Sony and you get a force that can just walk over Microsoft. Heck, they could simply walk into Mordor if they wanted to.
Also, as has been already pointed out in other posts, Europe isn't so keen about US laws and even less about US corporations (unlike Ireland, which is a subsidiary of Microsoft). With the legal status of software patents still being a touchy subject over here the offensive use of them against Linux (which European governments are keen about) the already powerful European anti software patent lobby would get quite powerful ammunition into their hands. A huge patent lawsuit against Linux might kill off software patents in Europe. Especially as the EU definitely won't like some random US business telling them which operating system they should run.
Microsoft is waving around their patent nukes but the other side also has lots of them. This whole thing looks a lot like mutually assured destruction - everyone involved has the capabilities to render everyone else non-functional.
I think it wouls be a better idea to instead let websites have keywords (or tags, if you're into Dotcom 2.0) that identify the content. Then you could configure your firewall with a blacklist and/or a whitelist so that sites with inappropriate content are filtered. Those keywords could be put into the website with an HTML tag, maybe with />...
Seriously, if people would just use what we have already got the whole "but who protects my children from teh evil interweb pr0n?" discussion would be moot.
Whose laws? In some places, a topless woman on the main street of town would be arrested or even stoned; other places no-one would pay her any attention. Which of those societies gets to impose their laws on the other?
Just to be safe we'll apply all of them. From now on any depiction of a woman without a burkha will be enough to force the site in question to register as a porn site and move to a.xxx domain.
It'll be great.
Yes, I have the moral courage to take a stance. As another respondent already said, I have the courage to take a stand for my morals, which are clearly not identical to yours. I'm sorry, but I really don't see anything particularly wrong with graphic depictions of sex. No, I don't want my six year old viewing hardcore porn; that's one of the reasons why I make sure I'm with her when she's using the Internet, so she doesn't accidentally stray from disney.com or nickjr.co.uk on to a porn site. But then I'm odd like that; I take responsibilty for what my kid is exposed to.
Yup, I'm really sure that France will be forcing all French porn sites onto.xxx. Just like Lithuania, China and Tokelau. US law is not international law and officially the USA are to keep their hands off the DNS. So if the USA really wanted to force all porn sites onto.xxx, they'd either have to assume control of the DNS (which would likely cause alternative DNS networks to gain support, maybe ORSN might even decide to become ICANN-incompatible) or make a local law and force the rest of the world to make similar laws. Given the fact that in places like Europe people are not nearly as puritan as cetain US politiciany would like it's unlikely hat the rest of the world would completely follow suit. And as long as there still are countries which allows any TLD to be used for pornographic contents it's impossible too force the porn industry to change onto any TLD. They just host their stuff in Belize or Eritrea (which will surely appreciate all the money coming into the country and the company-sponsored IT infrastructure) and continue using.com.
8. Information isn't added, it's only changed. However, the amount of information can be increased (for example when a gene gets copied twice) and the additional information can then be changed, which leads to a result that is the same as if information had been added. I won't comment on the whole "micro-evolution vs. macro-evolution" thing.
9. How do new genetic traits appear? Mutation. The gene(s) responsible for udder development get copied incorrectly, leading to an udder that produces milk faster than the parent's does. The milk production speed is a genetic trait, but it was changed by mutation.
Sorry, I'm not a physicist. Maybe there's one in the audience...?
<dummy line>
Interesting; I haven't sen something like that bfore. But then again that applies to most of everything...
Once more we are leaving the area where my knowledge is sufficient.
It's not like he's objective. No one is. In this case he takes his data, probably ignores some that doesn't quite fit and declares logical superiority. Which is about the same thing his opponents do.
I have heard about the "young Grand Canyon" theory and that geologists generally find it to be unlikely. Since those people probably also did some research I guess their theory is (without further validation) just as correct as is Hovind's.
Meterorlogical data for arctic ice, for example, is determined by analysis of the composition of the ice. The age is determined by counting the layers of ice.
Let's take a look at sickle-cell disease. This genetic disease is recessive, meaning that it only breaks out if both copies (alleles) of the gene in question carry the disease information. Usually this disease poses a selective disadvantage, thus there is only a low number of people carrying the information. In malaria regions, though, there is a high amount of people who carry the information in one of the alleles. This is because the information comes with a malaria resistance, even if the sickness doesn't break out. While in the rest of the world selective pressure has led to very few people carrying the gene in malaria regions up to a third of the population carrys the gene, even though it means that some of their offspring have a high chance of getting the disease.
Thus we have a condition under which it is favorable to carry the genetic information for sickle cell disese, even though that means that less of the offspring have a chance of reproduction. Everywhere else this advantage turns into a disadvantage. Note that very few mutations result in additional limbs or similarly drastic changes. A mutation might cause a bird's bill to be 2 mm longer or a human's skin to be slightly darker than that of the parents.
Selective breeding does not simply bring out "optimal genes" that are already there. For example modern crops are not diploid but often even hexaploid (meaning that every gene occurs not twice but more eften, for example six times) - that's not a case of "optimal genes" being exposed, it's a case of some plant having more than two sets of genes for some reason. That plant would then grow bigger than his diploid peers, thus beng selected for further breeding. Other changes like improved pest resistance do not happen because the plant has hidden pest resistance genes that it never used for no apparent reason but because things in the plant mutate: The genes, the information about which gene gets decoded when...
Okay, under close scrutiny natural selection does not create new genetic information, but mutation does. Natural selection amplifies the changing nature of mutation by giving it a direction: If a mutation proves beneficial it survives, if it proves a disadvantage it gets dropped. Thus natural selection does not create new genetic design but it effects it.
You haven't read up on speciation, have you? Speciation does not miraculously happen to a singly individual, it happens to populations. It also does not just happen in the middle of a population; there's always a separating factor. For example a population of birds moves into an area where there are two sources of food: Either insects or nuts. The birds can eat both but aren't particularly good at it. Some of the birds mutate into a direction where they have stronger bills that are suited to cracking nuts while others mutate into a direction where whey're more agile in the air, allowing them to catch insects with less effort.
Now we have two groups that move in distinct directions. The effect you have talked about in item 8 comes to effect: Birds with strong bills prefer other birds with stron
8. It might as well be that the instruction for "build once" gets changed to "build twice". By the way, if the information was copied and both copies would be used that means that now there's more data, which means that there's more data that can change.
9. Your point? I used the examples to point out that genetic mutation does not generally cause degeneration, as the GP's paraphrase implied. The GP never said that "natural mutation" in item 9, he said "genetic mutation". Since the assumption as that all genetic mutations cause degeneration it was necessary to show an examply of any kind of mutation that is not degenerative to refute the statement.
12. "argumentum ad hominem" == "argument against the person". You might want to look it up on the 'Pedia. The GP's paraphrase claimed that since Darwin "opposed the teaching of the bible" he has an "ulterior motive". That is an attack on the person responsible for the theory in an attempt to discredit the theory - a classical argumentum ad hominem.
In the book "The Science of Discworld" by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen the authors talk about the concept of "lies for kids". Essentially a lie for kids is a simplified version of reality intended to convey as much information as necessary, but not too much. For examle, it's necessary for most non-biologists to know about 14C dating, they don't need to be taught about 238U, 235U, 232Th, 87Rb, 147Sm and 40K dating and abou when which method is appropriate. Just like you tell your $NON_TECHIE_RELATIVE that he needs to keep his virus scanner up-to-date to keep his computer safe (not telling him that really new worms might still strike him or that he might be reasonably safe even with outdated virus definitions by hiding beind NAT and so on).
My geology knowledge isn't up to snuff, I can't answer this one.
When trees grow they tend to do so from a point near the surface. As the tree grows so do the roots. Some trees have shallow roots that cover a wide area while some have deep roots that grow downwards, allowing the tree to tap into the ground water. So a tree doesn't have to have started growing when the lowest geological layer it's in was current, it might as well have reached that layer by growing deep roots.
Land rises and sinks. The Colorado's source might have been higher (relative to the rest of the GC area) in the past.
Color me surprised. People who have radically different thoughts on how the world around them works have different thoughts about how the world around them works. Whoa.
My knowledge of geology, American geology and hydrodynamics is nut sufficient to answer this question.
It's not possible to determine the age just by looking at the fossil, but the fossils can bej used in conjunction with other data. For example the fossil might be of an animal that couldn't live in that area under modern conditions. With knowledge about the past movement of the continental plates and past meteorological condtions (which, for example, are derived from arctic ice samples) one can determine how much time must have passed since the area had conditions under which the animal has lived.
But the two heads might pose an advantage under some conditions, making it more probable that the two-headed turle reproduces. After several generations of selection towards two heads it might have becme the standar for that turle population to have two heads. Further mutations would cause further development. The new information created is that the head grows twice. It's not radically different but it is different.
Note that selective breeding is merely the use of genetic mutation to improve the plant/animal at hand. Modern crops are the result of selective breeding towards more grain and better resistance against pests. Modern cows give more milk than in the past due to selective breeding. Rottweilers are bigger than poodles due to selective breeding. If mutation would always cause degeneration modern dogs, cows and crops would be impossible.
It does. If you take something and make enough incremental changes to it you end up with something that is much different. Take, for example, Linux 2.6.1 and 2.6.15. Natural selection is all about incremental changes.
Once more I point out that incremental changes can make huge differences when you make enough of them.
I won't comment on that as it's an obvious argumentum ad hominem.
Like with most one-sided arguments most of his argumentation only works as long as no one actually cares to read up on the subject.
What, brownstone buildings are a sedimentation product? Amazing!
The GP talks about seasons having an effect on the rate at which sediments collect (which makes sense as most rivers have seasonal changes in the amount of water carried) etc. Your analogy is deliberately flawed (because I can't believe that someone who's even considering real discussion would make such an unfitting analogy). It is possible to date something by looking at how much dust there is on it, comparing that to how much dust can be expected to collect per day, whether the air is undisturbed or not and so on. Yes, you can just look at the carving in some buildings and get something that might be an accurate age (the carving could be lying). Earth, however, seems to lack such a carving - so we have to look at what we have and analyze the data until we can guess the age of what we see.
Oh, come on. We all know that nobody would ever use a program he couldn't regularly afford, even if he could get it for free. That would be just ridiculous.Just as the notion that some people use programs that they could afford but wouldn't buy in any case. No, sir. Especially not Microsoft products and especially not in Asia.
And in reply to comments about German laws in general:
In Germany, coffee cups don't have that "caution, hot contents"[.]
Depending on where you drink, they do. Because some coporations are becoming so cheap that you don't even get German coffee cups anymore. You get coffee cups in twelve different languages, one of which happens to be German. And yes, there might even be a "caution, hot" text on it. Heck, McDonalds even renamed the German equivalent of the Happy Meal ("Juniortüte" - "junior bag") to Happy Meal, probably so they wouldn't have to print localized paper bags. The same with manuals: Some corps don't even give you a manual for the device you bought, just one that covers a whole product line so the instructions might or might not apply to your device...
Seriously, next they'll use generic fill-in-artist-and-title CD covers, because that would save them 0.0005 cents per CD. And all music videos will be autogenerated by using that Winamp plugin with the dancing bear from Black and White.
That being said, suggesting that stealing a song is equivilent to stealing gum is flat-out insulting. A pack of gum might cost something like $.75. A single will cost much more than that. Suggesting that downloading is only as serious as shoplifting is really quite insulting to the people who work hard to create enjoyable media.
A single costs much more than 75 cents, but the artist doesn't make much more. Copyright Infringement can hurt the artist, but it would hurt the record company much more. Guess who paid for this law...
Hmm, that actually sounds like a good idea. By writing to the right places it might be possible to reach enough people. You might even go public and use the mass media to disseminate the information (and if you use a website to coordinate everything you can get the media interested by telling them to "look, we already have 50.000 supporters"), which simultaneously makes sure that the message is understood. This would also create media space for people to talk about mass-incriminating and/or corporate sponsored laws in general.
If this really happened it could generate an awful ot of bad PR for both the media lobbies and the governments implementing sponsored laws.
As for X11, I only dislike it on the Mac because I value integration; X11 apps just aren't Mac-like.
As for the WYSIWYG interfaces: I can do TeX by hand, but I'm not really good at it (and I don't like the syntax). Especially when taking notes during a lecture I'm too slow with TeX, forcing me to translate everything to ASCII. A graphical interface would help with that.
Lawyer: Patents! Marketing: FUD! MS Research: Interesting yet utterly useless innovation that will never ever be used anywhere! Bill: Money! Steve: Chair!
Captain Vista By your combined powers I am Captain Vista 2007 Professional World Edition!
On the Mac I use NeoOffice because regular OpenOffice is an X11 app. I don't use MS Office because I don't see why - for me the only difference between MS Office and OpenOffice is that MS Office is bigger and more expensive. Yes, I have already used it.
And yes, I do find OpenOffice hard to use, but that applies to every office suite I've seen (especially MS Office, which is the very definition of clutter). I prefer simple interfaces, but I guess it's not possible to implement that in a progrm that tries to have three hundred different operations right at your fingertips... If there was a WYSIWYG TeX editor I'd probably demote *Office to a pure.doc opener. I just don't want to have to put up with elephantine programs that have sixteen times the functionality I need (and want).
Gentoo users also benefit. More cores = more instances of gcc that can run simultaneously = less time to emerge a package. This generally applies when you compile a lot of stuff.
Hmm. That gave me an idea: Take a couple switches/buttons, solder them together in such a way that you can hook the whole thing up to the RS323 port and write a driver that checks whether a switch/button was triggered and then executed user-definable events. You could not only use the thing to remotely control your XMMS/Winamp, but also put in switches/buttons that automatically kill X/EXPLORER.EXE (make sure that the dangerous switches are under cool protective covers like in fighter aircrafts). If you're ambitioned you could put a USB chip into the thing (as RS232-capable PCs are getting rare).
I used a similar device as a remote control for Winamp when I was still a Win user; if I was capable of writing a driver for the thing I'd also use it under Linux... Does anyone know of a similar device, maybe even one that fits the first paragraph?
16. KDE formats your hard drive every time you press F1.
17. X11 causes your monitor to emit sterilizing X rays.
18. There hasn't been a release of Duke Nukem Forever for Linux.
19. Linux soesn't run an a Zuse Z1.
20. Every time you make a typo on the shell thee men in Chuck Norris masks come and kick you in the crotch.
21. Linux writes itself into the sound card's ROM so you can never listen to music again.
22. OpenOffice is only available in Afrikaans, Gaelic and Klingon.
23. Linux also doesn't run on interocitors, even if they're connected to a volterator!
24. Linus Torvalds is Doctor Doom. Tux is Megatron. Richard Stallman is SHODAN.
25. There's no working implementation of DWIM for Linux.
26. My shoelace is open and Linux did nothing to prevent that.
27. I'm hungry.
28. My cat's breath smells like cat food.
After dealing with these additional 13 thngs, anyone would believe Chef Brian that there's no enough place for two crawfish in this town.
Of course! If he's everywhere that means he's omnipresent. Who else do we know who's omnipresent? Someone who goes under the stage name of "YHWH" and who we have no pictures of.
So obviously James Hansen is God! He uses His omniscience to warn us of the impeding catastrophe! You might ask why He doesn't simply make the US government let him talk. The answer is that the current US government is His doing! He got pissed because His puppy got run over by an SUV and now He wants to punish us by telling us what's going to happen while making sure that the US government will never, ever react!
Whoa.
Slashdot Mirror
Now? Not really. Too many corporations are getting money from Linux and they will fight for their piece of pie.
True. When we're talking about Linux-loving corporations we're talking about corporations like Big Blue. And Big Blue has bigger (or at least more) guns than Microsoft in the case of a full-scale patent war. Add to that companies like Novell or Sony and you get a force that can just walk over Microsoft. Heck, they could simply walk into Mordor if they wanted to.
Also, as has been already pointed out in other posts, Europe isn't so keen about US laws and even less about US corporations (unlike Ireland, which is a subsidiary of Microsoft). With the legal status of software patents still being a touchy subject over here the offensive use of them against Linux (which European governments are keen about) the already powerful European anti software patent lobby would get quite powerful ammunition into their hands. A huge patent lawsuit against Linux might kill off software patents in Europe. Especially as the EU definitely won't like some random US business telling them which operating system they should run.
Microsoft is waving around their patent nukes but the other side also has lots of them. This whole thing looks a lot like mutually assured destruction - everyone involved has the capabilities to render everyone else non-functional.
I did not mean that ORSN might implement alternative TLDs but that they would simply stop inheriting DNS changes made by the ICANN.
They were. Especially when people found out that the names of those blonde haired blue eyed and bikini clad assistants are Sven and Bjørn...
I think it wouls be a better idea to instead let websites have keywords (or tags, if you're into Dotcom 2.0) that identify the content. Then you could configure your firewall with a blacklist and/or a whitelist so that sites with inappropriate content are filtered. Those keywords could be put into the website with an HTML tag, maybe with/>...
Seriously, if people would just use what we have already got the whole "but who protects my children from teh evil interweb pr0n?" discussion would be moot.
I'm still waiting for .tld...
Whose laws? In some places, a topless woman on the main street of town would be arrested or even stoned; other places no-one would pay her any attention. Which of those societies gets to impose their laws on the other?
.xxx domain.
Just to be safe we'll apply all of them. From now on any depiction of a woman without a burkha will be enough to force the site in question to register as a porn site and move to a
It'll be great.
Yes, I have the moral courage to take a stance. As another respondent already said, I have the courage to take a stand for my morals, which are clearly not identical to yours. I'm sorry, but I really don't see anything particularly wrong with graphic depictions of sex. No, I don't want my six year old viewing hardcore porn; that's one of the reasons why I make sure I'm with her when she's using the Internet, so she doesn't accidentally stray from disney.com or nickjr.co.uk on to a porn site. But then I'm odd like that; I take responsibilty for what my kid is exposed to.
Bravo. *applauds*
Yup, I'm really sure that France will be forcing all French porn sites onto .xxx. Just like Lithuania, China and Tokelau. US law is not international law and officially the USA are to keep their hands off the DNS. So if the USA really wanted to force all porn sites onto .xxx, they'd either have to assume control of the DNS (which would likely cause alternative DNS networks to gain support, maybe ORSN might even decide to become ICANN-incompatible) or make a local law and force the rest of the world to make similar laws. Given the fact that in places like Europe people are not nearly as puritan as cetain US politiciany would like it's unlikely hat the rest of the world would completely follow suit. And as long as there still are countries which allows any TLD to be used for pornographic contents it's impossible too force the porn industry to change onto any TLD. They just host their stuff in Belize or Eritrea (which will surely appreciate all the money coming into the country and the company-sponsored IT infrastructure) and continue using .com.
8. Information isn't added, it's only changed. However, the amount of information can be increased (for example when a gene gets copied twice) and the additional information can then be changed, which leads to a result that is the same as if information had been added. I won't comment on the whole "micro-evolution vs. macro-evolution" thing. 9. How do new genetic traits appear? Mutation. The gene(s) responsible for udder development get copied incorrectly, leading to an udder that produces milk faster than the parent's does. The milk production speed is a genetic trait, but it was changed by mutation.
Thus we have a condition under which it is favorable to carry the genetic information for sickle cell disese, even though that means that less of the offspring have a chance of reproduction. Everywhere else this advantage turns into a disadvantage. Note that very few mutations result in additional limbs or similarly drastic changes. A mutation might cause a bird's bill to be 2 mm longer or a human's skin to be slightly darker than that of the parents.
Now we have two groups that move in distinct directions. The effect you have talked about in item 8 comes to effect: Birds with strong bills prefer other birds with stron
8. It might as well be that the instruction for "build once" gets changed to "build twice". By the way, if the information was copied and both copies would be used that means that now there's more data, which means that there's more data that can change.
9. Your point? I used the examples to point out that genetic mutation does not generally cause degeneration, as the GP's paraphrase implied. The GP never said that "natural mutation" in item 9, he said "genetic mutation". Since the assumption as that all genetic mutations cause degeneration it was necessary to show an examply of any kind of mutation that is not degenerative to refute the statement.
12. "argumentum ad hominem" == "argument against the person". You might want to look it up on the 'Pedia. The GP's paraphrase claimed that since Darwin "opposed the teaching of the bible" he has an "ulterior motive". That is an attack on the person responsible for the theory in an attempt to discredit the theory - a classical argumentum ad hominem.
- In the book "The Science of Discworld" by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen the authors talk about the concept of "lies for kids". Essentially a lie for kids is a simplified version of reality intended to convey as much information as necessary, but not too much. For examle, it's necessary for most non-biologists to know about 14C dating, they don't need to be taught about 238U, 235U, 232Th, 87Rb, 147Sm and 40K dating and abou when which method is appropriate. Just like you tell your $NON_TECHIE_RELATIVE that he needs to keep his virus scanner up-to-date to keep his computer safe (not telling him that really new worms might still strike him or that he might be reasonably safe even with outdated virus definitions by hiding beind NAT and so on).
- My geology knowledge isn't up to snuff, I can't answer this one.
- When trees grow they tend to do so from a point near the surface. As the tree grows so do the roots. Some trees have shallow roots that cover a wide area while some have deep roots that grow downwards, allowing the tree to tap into the ground water. So a tree doesn't have to have started growing when the lowest geological layer it's in was current, it might as well have reached that layer by growing deep roots.
- Land rises and sinks. The Colorado's source might have been higher (relative to the rest of the GC area) in the past.
- Color me surprised. People who have radically different thoughts on how the world around them works have different thoughts about how the world around them works. Whoa.
- My knowledge of geology, American geology and hydrodynamics is nut sufficient to answer this question.
- It's not possible to determine the age just by looking at the fossil, but the fossils can bej used in conjunction with other data. For example the fossil might be of an animal that couldn't live in that area under modern conditions. With knowledge about the past movement of the continental plates and past meteorological condtions (which, for example, are derived from arctic ice samples) one can determine how much time must have passed since the area had conditions under which the animal has lived.
- But the two heads might pose an advantage under some conditions, making it more probable that the two-headed turle reproduces. After several generations of selection towards two heads it might have becme the standar for that turle population to have two heads. Further mutations would cause further development. The new information created is that the head grows twice. It's not radically different but it is different.
- Note that selective breeding is merely the use of genetic mutation to improve the plant/animal at hand. Modern crops are the result of selective breeding towards more grain and better resistance against pests. Modern cows give more milk than in the past due to selective breeding. Rottweilers are bigger than poodles due to selective breeding. If mutation would always cause degeneration modern dogs, cows and crops would be impossible.
- It does. If you take something and make enough incremental changes to it you end up with something that is much different. Take, for example, Linux 2.6.1 and 2.6.15. Natural selection is all about incremental changes.
- Once more I point out that incremental changes can make huge differences when you make enough of them.
- I won't comment on that as it's an obvious argumentum ad hominem.
Like with most one-sided arguments most of his argumentation only works as long as no one actually cares to read up on the subject.What, brownstone buildings are a sedimentation product? Amazing!
The GP talks about seasons having an effect on the rate at which sediments collect (which makes sense as most rivers have seasonal changes in the amount of water carried) etc. Your analogy is deliberately flawed (because I can't believe that someone who's even considering real discussion would make such an unfitting analogy). It is possible to date something by looking at how much dust there is on it, comparing that to how much dust can be expected to collect per day, whether the air is undisturbed or not and so on. Yes, you can just look at the carving in some buildings and get something that might be an accurate age (the carving could be lying). Earth, however, seems to lack such a carving - so we have to look at what we have and analyze the data until we can guess the age of what we see.
Oh, come on. We all know that nobody would ever use a program he couldn't regularly afford, even if he could get it for free. That would be just ridiculous.Just as the notion that some people use programs that they could afford but wouldn't buy in any case. No, sir. Especially not Microsoft products and especially not in Asia.
And in reply to comments about German laws in general: In Germany, coffee cups don't have that "caution, hot contents"[.]
Depending on where you drink, they do. Because some coporations are becoming so cheap that you don't even get German coffee cups anymore. You get coffee cups in twelve different languages, one of which happens to be German. And yes, there might even be a "caution, hot" text on it. Heck, McDonalds even renamed the German equivalent of the Happy Meal ("Juniortüte" - "junior bag") to Happy Meal, probably so they wouldn't have to print localized paper bags. The same with manuals: Some corps don't even give you a manual for the device you bought, just one that covers a whole product line so the instructions might or might not apply to your device...
Seriously, next they'll use generic fill-in-artist-and-title CD covers, because that would save them 0.0005 cents per CD. And all music videos will be autogenerated by using that Winamp plugin with the dancing bear from Black and White.
That being said, suggesting that stealing a song is equivilent to stealing gum is flat-out insulting. A pack of gum might cost something like $.75. A single will cost much more than that. Suggesting that downloading is only as serious as shoplifting is really quite insulting to the people who work hard to create enjoyable media.
A single costs much more than 75 cents, but the artist doesn't make much more. Copyright Infringement can hurt the artist, but it would hurt the record company much more. Guess who paid for this law...
Hmm, that actually sounds like a good idea. By writing to the right places it might be possible to reach enough people. You might even go public and use the mass media to disseminate the information (and if you use a website to coordinate everything you can get the media interested by telling them to "look, we already have 50.000 supporters"), which simultaneously makes sure that the message is understood. This would also create media space for people to talk about mass-incriminating and/or corporate sponsored laws in general.
If this really happened it could generate an awful ot of bad PR for both the media lobbies and the governments implementing sponsored laws.
As for X11, I only dislike it on the Mac because I value integration; X11 apps just aren't Mac-like.
As for the WYSIWYG interfaces: I can do TeX by hand, but I'm not really good at it (and I don't like the syntax). Especially when taking notes during a lecture I'm too slow with TeX, forcing me to translate everything to ASCII. A graphical interface would help with that.
Lawyer: Patents!
Marketing: FUD!
MS Research: Interesting yet utterly useless innovation that will never ever be used anywhere!
Bill: Money!
Steve: Chair!
Captain Vista By your combined powers I am Captain Vista 2007 Professional World Edition!
On the Mac I use NeoOffice because regular OpenOffice is an X11 app. I don't use MS Office because I don't see why - for me the only difference between MS Office and OpenOffice is that MS Office is bigger and more expensive. Yes, I have already used it.
.doc opener. I just don't want to have to put up with elephantine programs that have sixteen times the functionality I need (and want).
And yes, I do find OpenOffice hard to use, but that applies to every office suite I've seen (especially MS Office, which is the very definition of clutter). I prefer simple interfaces, but I guess it's not possible to implement that in a progrm that tries to have three hundred different operations right at your fingertips... If there was a WYSIWYG TeX editor I'd probably demote *Office to a pure
I know a bunch of "regular" people who use Gentoo. For some reason Gentoo is becoming one of the distros I see quite often.
Gentoo users also benefit. More cores = more instances of gcc that can run simultaneously = less time to emerge a package. This generally applies when you compile a lot of stuff.
Don' be ridiculous. Humans don't train cats, cats train humans.
Hmm. That gave me an idea: Take a couple switches/buttons, solder them together in such a way that you can hook the whole thing up to the RS323 port and write a driver that checks whether a switch/button was triggered and then executed user-definable events. You could not only use the thing to remotely control your XMMS/Winamp, but also put in switches/buttons that automatically kill X/EXPLORER.EXE (make sure that the dangerous switches are under cool protective covers like in fighter aircrafts). If you're ambitioned you could put a USB chip into the thing (as RS232-capable PCs are getting rare).
I used a similar device as a remote control for Winamp when I was still a Win user; if I was capable of writing a driver for the thing I'd also use it under Linux... Does anyone know of a similar device, maybe even one that fits the first paragraph?
You forgot a few.
16. KDE formats your hard drive every time you press F1.
17. X11 causes your monitor to emit sterilizing X rays.
18. There hasn't been a release of Duke Nukem Forever for Linux.
19. Linux soesn't run an a Zuse Z1.
20. Every time you make a typo on the shell thee men in Chuck Norris masks come and kick you in the crotch.
21. Linux writes itself into the sound card's ROM so you can never listen to music again.
22. OpenOffice is only available in Afrikaans, Gaelic and Klingon.
23. Linux also doesn't run on interocitors, even if they're connected to a volterator!
24. Linus Torvalds is Doctor Doom. Tux is Megatron. Richard Stallman is SHODAN.
25. There's no working implementation of DWIM for Linux.
26. My shoelace is open and Linux did nothing to prevent that.
27. I'm hungry.
28. My cat's breath smells like cat food.
After dealing with these additional 13 thngs, anyone would believe Chef Brian that there's no enough place for two crawfish in this town.
Of course! If he's everywhere that means he's omnipresent. Who else do we know who's omnipresent? Someone who goes under the stage name of "YHWH" and who we have no pictures of.
So obviously James Hansen is God! He uses His omniscience to warn us of the impeding catastrophe! You might ask why He doesn't simply make the US government let him talk. The answer is that the current US government is His doing! He got pissed because His puppy got run over by an SUV and now He wants to punish us by telling us what's going to happen while making sure that the US government will never, ever react!
Whoa.