If it's not caused by man, then there's not much we could do to stop it anyway.
Don't mistake our skepticism to mean that we think nothing is wrong. Just because we aren't chicken littles doesn't mean we're ostriches with our heads in the sand instead. Just because we don't want to ban the internal combustion engine means that we approve of inefficient transportation.
To take the example of the recent blizzard, storms have happened since the beginning of the earth. It *may* have been caused by global warming, but it overwhelming odds are that the recent blizzard was caused by the same thing that caused all blizzards in the past.
About a decade ago when global warming started entering the public consciousness, I kept seeing weather reports saying that a record had been broken. I seem to recall a record breaking high or low temperature about once or twice a year. Surely that's evidence of global warming? A lot of people around me were saying it was. But simple statistics shows that it's hardly unusual. The average temperature in a location fluctuates. Since accurate temperatures were not recorded until recently, the probability is rather high that any particular day might break a recorded temperature. 365 days in a year, with temperature records for 100 years. Think about it. For example, a temperature of 98 on June 1st might break a record, but a temperature of 98 on June 2nd might wouldn't.
Basically what I'm saying is that I do not trust anecdotes. Neither do I trust sensationalist reporting. Heck, I can't even trust climatology models when the climatologists are still out looking for data to improve the models!
The average world wide temperature fluctuates. We have had ice ages in the past. We have had warm periods in the past. I'm not talking about ten thousand years ago, but only a few hundred. The temperature is changing, I have no doubt. What I do doubt is that mankind is causing it.
We shouldn't be polluting. We shouldn't be clearcutting rain forests. But we shouldn't be panicking.
But we can not get away from the fact that business wants it [powerpoint].
Good news. OpenOffice Impress gives it to you. It does everyone PowerPoint does, and it does it today. When I have to create a presentation at work, I just use the company PowerPoint template, make my presentation, then send it off the people who need it, who then open it up in PowerPoint. All without using PowerPoint!
But the one area that Open Source is very wanting is easy Application Install packages.
Maybe it needs it, maybe it doesn't. But corporate IT departments do not have a need for it. The users aren't going to have the permission to install any software anyway. The IT guys will do this, and if they're worth their salary, they will have zero problems installing stuff.
Translation: I want a hot cup of Earl Grey tea, and it had better be a cappucino! If you want a plain window manager, then use a plain window manager. If you want a desktop, then use a desktop.
And this was the way some proprietary software was going for a while. In the beginning, it was unclear how copyright applied to software, so the proprietarists came up with licensing instead. Like humans coming down out of the trees, this is generally been regarded as a bad move. But once it became clear that copyright applied to software, some proprietarists thought it silly to saddle their users with contracts, or to spend years in court arguing that "read-to-agree" schemes constituted contractual assent. They didn't want to control their users, they just wanted to make sure their software wasn't redistributed. Standard copyright law (plus an attached disclaimer of warranty) was all they needed.
I think Borland was the first major software vendor to use a copyright-based proprietary license (the famous "book" license). Some other companies followed suit, Apple included. Unfortunately, the old unilateral-contract-based schemes required hordes of lawyers, and lawyers love nothing better than to control other people.
Apple's proprietary software is still proprietary. But it's in a completely different class then Microsoft software. Nothing is being crammed down anyone's throat. While I still prefer Free Software, I have no problems buying and using proprietary software if the license terms are based on copyright rather than on some lawyer's delusion of how the world should work.
If you're seeing significant performance with real-world applications using a a "hyper-threaded" CPU, that's a sign that the operating system's dispatcher is broken. And, of course, hyper-threading dumps more work on the scheduler. There's more stuff to worry about in CPU dispatching now.
That was my suspicion. Hyperthreading can't be much more efficient than threading via the OS, unless the software is specifically compiled for it, or you use a scheduler specific to hyperthreading. Scheduling work STILL has to be performed, and hyperthreading STILL isn't parallel processing. So where are these performance improvements people are seeing coming from?
I'm not using Linux, but FreeBSD. When I got my new HT P4, I considered turning it on. Then I read the hardware notes. Since FreeBSD does not use a scheduler specific for hyperthreading, it can't take full advantage of it. In some cases it might even result in sub-optimal performance. Just like logic would lead you to think.
The OS cannot treat hyperthreading the same as SMP, because they are two different beasts.
3) Nonskilled people can bring up Access and do some simple database stuff very easily.
Visiting my friend over the holidays, he had recently picked up "Access in 24 Hours" (or some similar title). He had spent a week on the book, and still couldn't figure out how to use Access.
While Access may seem like a walk in the park compared to mSQL or Postgres, it's very unaccessible [sic] to those unitiated into the mysteries of databases.
I've been with my company for five years. For the first two and a half years we ran on a Solaris network. We had one network failure the whole time. It was because a harddrive failed. It was replaced within half an hour. Then we got bought out, and the last two and a half years were with a Windows network. Network outages are a weekly event.
I'm trying to think what they should be promoting. What's their biggest positive differentiators? It's hard to think of many. I'm not trolling, I'm being serious. Here's the short list I came up with:
1) It's ubiquitous. If your company is in Black Hole, Montana, it might be hard finding a certified Solaris administrator, but you'll probably find several resumes from MCSE's already on your desk.
2) Everything has a GUI. Not just the presence of a GUI, but the pervasiveness of it is important. Anything with monospaced fonts and a blinking cursor gives you the creeps. The fact that you have a graphical login and full desktop with solitaire on your webserver lets you sleep more comfortably at night.
That's all that I came up with. Microsoft's individual products might have some minor feature here or there that they're competitors don't, but they're inconsequential, because most people just don't have a need for them.
I'm not saying that these two merits are sufficient to make a clueful manager choose Microsoft over Sun or Redhat, I'm just saying that those are the only two positive differentiators I can think of.
I certainly don't have a problem with a globalized economy. That's not the issue. The issue is that local experienced workers are being replaced by remote inexperienced workers. It's the same dot.bomb stupidity where seasoned software engineers with more than a decade of experience were replaced by junior college dropouts who managed to have taken a summer class in Java.
The current fad is to ship off the core innovative work to people with absolutely no stake in company. It would be like Ford and GM outsourcing their automotive design work to Mexico instead of just the manufacturing. Software engineering is not manufacturing, it's engineering.
The problem is that companies really don't understand what software is. They think it's a manufactured product, so their Harvard MBA playbook says to ship off manufacturing elsewhere.
One of our domestic software managers is spending a two year stint in India setting up our offshored operation. He's still getting his US salary of $100K+. He's got a mansion, five servants, and a chauffeur. This is a low level manager, not an executive.
As long as the wages are low and the quality of code is at least acceptable..., India will continue to get the jobs.
But how long are wages going to stay low? And how long until all the good and experienced Indian programmers are employed, leaving the bad and inexperienced available for hire?
My company was late in the "offshoring" fad. All of the experienced developers were unavailable, so we ended up with 90% of our Indian workforce coming from straight out of college with no experience. And then there's our US worker who originally came from India. He got laid off through offshoring, so he decided to apply for his replacement position in India. He came back with the news that we were paying paltry wages there. It turns out that the wages for developers in India are starting to skyrocket with the increased demand. Basic economics our managers overlooked.
The offshoring craze is just that, a craze. Corporations are like teenagers. They do what they do because all the other corporations are doing it. They're going to learn the hard way that local experienced workers are more valuable than remote inexperienced workers. But I fear by that time that they will have created their own replacements.
Bingo! Parents who would rather cut off their own hands than see Junior watching porn, think nothing of buying him a super violent video game. Or the same parents who carefully check a movie's rating or even preview the movie before letting Junior watch it, don't even bother to notice ratings on a video game.
Wonderful. That means there'll be thousands more sites I'll never have to bother with. If life's already oo short of flash heavy sites, it's definitely too short of full page delaying advertisements.
Hmmm, but what if Slashdot decided it would be a good idea? Would I be willing to pay to stop it? No, but I would be willing to pay someone to stuff a hardbound copy of Emily Post down CmdrTaco's throat...
Windows does indeed have power users. But they're a different breed from Linux and BSD power users. You see, "power user" is a relative term.
Power users in Windows are those who know enough to use the control panel dialogs without a manual. I don't think I'm exaggerating much. A friend of mine is considered a "power user", but he is rather clueless on the topic of computers themselves. But he is still smart enough to know that it's pointless to sit on hold for an hour with Dell support monkeys. I guess that makes him an exception.
I had this problem since my college days. One day I showed up to my job late once too often. The boss gave me an ultimatum. Get a better alarm clock or find another job.
The solution was simple, really. Get a normal alarm clock. But put it on the far side of the room. This makes you actually get up out of bed and walk over to turn it off. For best results, put it on the top shelf of a closet, and make sure it has a very annoying beep.
Isn't blindly regurgitating misunderstood conclusions just as bad? Several years ago I got into a discussion with a lady who claimed that the polar ice caps were CURRENTLY melting, causing a CURRENT increase in sea level. I was stunned. Surely such a situation would have been on the front pages of every newspaper in the world for years at a stretch!
Then she offered her personal evidence. Her ocean-side property was sinking into the ocean at a rate of one centimeter a year. She had a measuring stick in the ground to prove it. It never occurred to her that sand erosion causes beaches to sink. Or that living on the wrong side of a subduction fault might have anything at all to do with it.
I have no doubts that the climate is changing. The climate has been fluctating hotter and colder for the past billion years, so why should it be any different now. And I have no doubt that the activities of mankind can affect the environment. All you need to do to prove that is to light a match to a dry forest. But I have yet to see any substantial evidence to conclusively demonstrate that mankind's activities can create permanent changes to the climate.
That doesn't mean I want to destroy the environment, or dump mercury in the rivers. It only means that before we start creating a totalitarian police state to deal with the emergency, we ought to have a real open scientific inquiry to see if there's actually an emergency. When everyone I know who's gung ho on the issue backs it up with cheap-ass political leaflets from their local grocery co-op, or clipping from newspapers that can't even manage to get yesterday's game scores printed correctly, I'm going to remain a little bit skeptical.
Let's start with a test. Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
Hell yes!
I moved to the San Fransisco bay area slightly over five years ago. To this day I am extremely cautious about expressing most of my political and religious opinions. I learned that the hard way the first week I was here. It's not that this area is liberal or anything like that, it's because most people here are so damned intolerant of anything that even remotely associated with conservatives, Republicans (even liberal Republicans) or Christians (even liberal Democrat Christians).
I had a friend who no longer talks with me because she found out I'm a libertarian. In my forty years of life, this was a first to me, that someone would base their friendships on political affiliations. It boggles my mind.
I go to parties and someone says "we should round up everyone who voted for Bush and have them all shot." Several others nod their heads in agreement. Others may disagree with the penalty, but agree with the general sentiment. No one disagrees with the underlying premise that voting for Bush was akin to committing a crime. At a group of friends, two got into a spat over something as inconsequential as what temperature to set the thermostat. One left in a huff, and the other said "What a control freak! I bet she's a Republican!"
Do I dare let on that I'm not a member of the Democrat or Green parties? Will I be consigned to social ostracism if people find out I don't consider Bush to be Evil Incarnate?
A friend came over and expressed surprise at seeing my Bible out on the table. Why should he be surprised? It's the best selling book in all of history. It sold more copies last year than did The Lord of the Rings. Why should it be surprising that I own a Bible?
Yesterday while sitting around with some friends and drinking coffee, one of them sees a newspaper article about Mel Gibson and his new movie about Christ. "Oooh, I hate him," a friend said. "He's so... so... so damned conservative!" That was the worst epithet he could think of. "Conservative." Then he launched into a tirade about how Christians are homophobes.
Do I dare let on that I'm a Christian? If I were a poor hispanic who couldn't speak English, I could get away with being a Catholic. But I'm a middle class caucasian. Will people automatically assume all sorts of wrong things about me if they know I'm part of that 80% of people in the US who believe in God?
When you see a machine of wildly spinning metal gears, you know better than to stick your hand in. You know you'll like a finger or two. Likewise, when one sees a major metropolitan region where people go about spouting hatred for anyone of differing beliefs, you know better than to offer your opinion. It's just not safe.
It's not just poorly-supported fringe opinions or racist comments that are frowned upon in modern universities. It's ANYTHING that doesn't toe the line with the established orthodoxy. Supported non-racist opinions that are not orthodox WILL be denounced as unsupported or racist.
Two good examples. First, casually mention anything that counters the current tenets of environmentalism. Dispute the data supported global warming. Or suggest that it isn't caused by human activity. Or that electric cars cause as much pollution as gasoline cars. But first make sure you're wearing asbestos underwear! The creed of environmentalism CANNOT be questioned. It's heretical to do so. It's not because anything else is a "poorly-supported fringe opinion", because there are plenty of scientists and climatologists that offer support to contrarian views. It's merely a difference in interpreting the data, or using different models. Much of environmentalism still rests on untested and inviolate premises. Question these and your career as a university researcher is finished.
Second example. Mention that you hold a conservative view on an issue. Any issue. It doesn't matter if you are liberal on every other issue. Just this one will get your branded as a racist or reactionary. I'm not talking about extremist conservatism. Mainstream conservatism is equally despised. Suggest that capital gains taxes should be lowered, as an example, and see how fast you're ostracized.Go to Berkeley and argue against rent control if you really want to see how intolerant the capital of tolerance really is. Sidenote: I'm not claiming that modern universities are "liberal" though. They're something else entirely.
So go change your Qt theme if you don't like whatever default it uses on your system. If the default is Keramik, then change it to Highcolor, Plastic or Qinx. Duh!
Slashdot Mirror
If it's not caused by man, then there's not much we could do to stop it anyway.
Don't mistake our skepticism to mean that we think nothing is wrong. Just because we aren't chicken littles doesn't mean we're ostriches with our heads in the sand instead. Just because we don't want to ban the internal combustion engine means that we approve of inefficient transportation.
To take the example of the recent blizzard, storms have happened since the beginning of the earth. It *may* have been caused by global warming, but it overwhelming odds are that the recent blizzard was caused by the same thing that caused all blizzards in the past.
About a decade ago when global warming started entering the public consciousness, I kept seeing weather reports saying that a record had been broken. I seem to recall a record breaking high or low temperature about once or twice a year. Surely that's evidence of global warming? A lot of people around me were saying it was. But simple statistics shows that it's hardly unusual. The average temperature in a location fluctuates. Since accurate temperatures were not recorded until recently, the probability is rather high that any particular day might break a recorded temperature. 365 days in a year, with temperature records for 100 years. Think about it. For example, a temperature of 98 on June 1st might break a record, but a temperature of 98 on June 2nd might wouldn't.
Basically what I'm saying is that I do not trust anecdotes. Neither do I trust sensationalist reporting. Heck, I can't even trust climatology models when the climatologists are still out looking for data to improve the models!
The average world wide temperature fluctuates. We have had ice ages in the past. We have had warm periods in the past. I'm not talking about ten thousand years ago, but only a few hundred. The temperature is changing, I have no doubt. What I do doubt is that mankind is causing it.
We shouldn't be polluting. We shouldn't be clearcutting rain forests. But we shouldn't be panicking.
But we can not get away from the fact that business wants it [powerpoint].
Good news. OpenOffice Impress gives it to you. It does everyone PowerPoint does, and it does it today. When I have to create a presentation at work, I just use the company PowerPoint template, make my presentation, then send it off the people who need it, who then open it up in PowerPoint. All without using PowerPoint!
But the one area that Open Source is very wanting is easy Application Install packages.
Maybe it needs it, maybe it doesn't. But corporate IT departments do not have a need for it. The users aren't going to have the permission to install any software anyway. The IT guys will do this, and if they're worth their salary, they will have zero problems installing stuff.
Translation: I want a hot cup of Earl Grey tea, and it had better be a cappucino! If you want a plain window manager, then use a plain window manager. If you want a desktop, then use a desktop.
And this was the way some proprietary software was going for a while. In the beginning, it was unclear how copyright applied to software, so the proprietarists came up with licensing instead. Like humans coming down out of the trees, this is generally been regarded as a bad move. But once it became clear that copyright applied to software, some proprietarists thought it silly to saddle their users with contracts, or to spend years in court arguing that "read-to-agree" schemes constituted contractual assent. They didn't want to control their users, they just wanted to make sure their software wasn't redistributed. Standard copyright law (plus an attached disclaimer of warranty) was all they needed.
I think Borland was the first major software vendor to use a copyright-based proprietary license (the famous "book" license). Some other companies followed suit, Apple included. Unfortunately, the old unilateral-contract-based schemes required hordes of lawyers, and lawyers love nothing better than to control other people.
Apple's proprietary software is still proprietary. But it's in a completely different class then Microsoft software. Nothing is being crammed down anyone's throat. While I still prefer Free Software, I have no problems buying and using proprietary software if the license terms are based on copyright rather than on some lawyer's delusion of how the world should work.
If you're seeing significant performance with real-world applications using a a "hyper-threaded" CPU, that's a sign that the operating system's dispatcher is broken. And, of course, hyper-threading dumps more work on the scheduler. There's more stuff to worry about in CPU dispatching now.
That was my suspicion. Hyperthreading can't be much more efficient than threading via the OS, unless the software is specifically compiled for it, or you use a scheduler specific to hyperthreading. Scheduling work STILL has to be performed, and hyperthreading STILL isn't parallel processing. So where are these performance improvements people are seeing coming from?
I'm not using Linux, but FreeBSD. When I got my new HT P4, I considered turning it on. Then I read the hardware notes. Since FreeBSD does not use a scheduler specific for hyperthreading, it can't take full advantage of it. In some cases it might even result in sub-optimal performance. Just like logic would lead you to think.
The OS cannot treat hyperthreading the same as SMP, because they are two different beasts.
3) Nonskilled people can bring up Access and do some simple database stuff very easily.
Visiting my friend over the holidays, he had recently picked up "Access in 24 Hours" (or some similar title). He had spent a week on the book, and still couldn't figure out how to use Access.
While Access may seem like a walk in the park compared to mSQL or Postgres, it's very unaccessible [sic] to those unitiated into the mysteries of databases.
I've been with my company for five years. For the first two and a half years we ran on a Solaris network. We had one network failure the whole time. It was because a harddrive failed. It was replaced within half an hour. Then we got bought out, and the last two and a half years were with a Windows network. Network outages are a weekly event.
I'm trying to think what they should be promoting. What's their biggest positive differentiators? It's hard to think of many. I'm not trolling, I'm being serious. Here's the short list I came up with:
1) It's ubiquitous. If your company is in Black Hole, Montana, it might be hard finding a certified Solaris administrator, but you'll probably find several resumes from MCSE's already on your desk.
2) Everything has a GUI. Not just the presence of a GUI, but the pervasiveness of it is important. Anything with monospaced fonts and a blinking cursor gives you the creeps. The fact that you have a graphical login and full desktop with solitaire on your webserver lets you sleep more comfortably at night.
That's all that I came up with. Microsoft's individual products might have some minor feature here or there that they're competitors don't, but they're inconsequential, because most people just don't have a need for them.
I'm not saying that these two merits are sufficient to make a clueful manager choose Microsoft over Sun or Redhat, I'm just saying that those are the only two positive differentiators I can think of.
I certainly don't have a problem with a globalized economy. That's not the issue. The issue is that local experienced workers are being replaced by remote inexperienced workers. It's the same dot.bomb stupidity where seasoned software engineers with more than a decade of experience were replaced by junior college dropouts who managed to have taken a summer class in Java.
The current fad is to ship off the core innovative work to people with absolutely no stake in company. It would be like Ford and GM outsourcing their automotive design work to Mexico instead of just the manufacturing. Software engineering is not manufacturing, it's engineering.
The problem is that companies really don't understand what software is. They think it's a manufactured product, so their Harvard MBA playbook says to ship off manufacturing elsewhere.
One of our domestic software managers is spending a two year stint in India setting up our offshored operation. He's still getting his US salary of $100K+. He's got a mansion, five servants, and a chauffeur. This is a low level manager, not an executive.
As long as the wages are low and the quality of code is at least acceptable..., India will continue to get the jobs.
But how long are wages going to stay low? And how long until all the good and experienced Indian programmers are employed, leaving the bad and inexperienced available for hire?
My company was late in the "offshoring" fad. All of the experienced developers were unavailable, so we ended up with 90% of our Indian workforce coming from straight out of college with no experience. And then there's our US worker who originally came from India. He got laid off through offshoring, so he decided to apply for his replacement position in India. He came back with the news that we were paying paltry wages there. It turns out that the wages for developers in India are starting to skyrocket with the increased demand. Basic economics our managers overlooked.
The offshoring craze is just that, a craze. Corporations are like teenagers. They do what they do because all the other corporations are doing it. They're going to learn the hard way that local experienced workers are more valuable than remote inexperienced workers. But I fear by that time that they will have created their own replacements.
Bingo! Parents who would rather cut off their own hands than see Junior watching porn, think nothing of buying him a super violent video game. Or the same parents who carefully check a movie's rating or even preview the movie before letting Junior watch it, don't even bother to notice ratings on a video game.
Why switch to yet another Linux distro, when I find that FreeBSD already supports all of my current hardware just fine?
Wonderful. That means there'll be thousands more sites I'll never have to bother with. If life's already oo short of flash heavy sites, it's definitely too short of full page delaying advertisements.
Hmmm, but what if Slashdot decided it would be a good idea? Would I be willing to pay to stop it? No, but I would be willing to pay someone to stuff a hardbound copy of Emily Post down CmdrTaco's throat...
Windows does indeed have power users. But they're a different breed from Linux and BSD power users. You see, "power user" is a relative term.
Power users in Windows are those who know enough to use the control panel dialogs without a manual. I don't think I'm exaggerating much. A friend of mine is considered a "power user", but he is rather clueless on the topic of computers themselves. But he is still smart enough to know that it's pointless to sit on hold for an hour with Dell support monkeys. I guess that makes him an exception.
Or a mirror of the service pack here
I had this problem since my college days. One day I showed up to my job late once too often. The boss gave me an ultimatum. Get a better alarm clock or find another job.
The solution was simple, really. Get a normal alarm clock. But put it on the far side of the room. This makes you actually get up out of bed and walk over to turn it off. For best results, put it on the top shelf of a closet, and make sure it has a very annoying beep.
They only reason they can't ban my speech is because they have no legal power to do so. Thus they resort to shouting undesirables down.
Isn't blindly regurgitating misunderstood conclusions just as bad? Several years ago I got into a discussion with a lady who claimed that the polar ice caps were CURRENTLY melting, causing a CURRENT increase in sea level. I was stunned. Surely such a situation would have been on the front pages of every newspaper in the world for years at a stretch!
Then she offered her personal evidence. Her ocean-side property was sinking into the ocean at a rate of one centimeter a year. She had a measuring stick in the ground to prove it. It never occurred to her that sand erosion causes beaches to sink. Or that living on the wrong side of a subduction fault might have anything at all to do with it.
I have no doubts that the climate is changing. The climate has been fluctating hotter and colder for the past billion years, so why should it be any different now. And I have no doubt that the activities of mankind can affect the environment. All you need to do to prove that is to light a match to a dry forest. But I have yet to see any substantial evidence to conclusively demonstrate that mankind's activities can create permanent changes to the climate.
That doesn't mean I want to destroy the environment, or dump mercury in the rivers. It only means that before we start creating a totalitarian police state to deal with the emergency, we ought to have a real open scientific inquiry to see if there's actually an emergency. When everyone I know who's gung ho on the issue backs it up with cheap-ass political leaflets from their local grocery co-op, or clipping from newspapers that can't even manage to get yesterday's game scores printed correctly, I'm going to remain a little bit skeptical.
I didn't blame the "liberal" side. If you reread my post again, you'll see that explicitly.
In my experience of forty years, mainstream conservatives and liberals do not "censor" opinions. Only the extremes fringes do.
Let's start with a test. Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
Hell yes!
I moved to the San Fransisco bay area slightly over five years ago. To this day I am extremely cautious about expressing most of my political and religious opinions. I learned that the hard way the first week I was here. It's not that this area is liberal or anything like that, it's because most people here are so damned intolerant of anything that even remotely associated with conservatives, Republicans (even liberal Republicans) or Christians (even liberal Democrat Christians).
I had a friend who no longer talks with me because she found out I'm a libertarian. In my forty years of life, this was a first to me, that someone would base their friendships on political affiliations. It boggles my mind.
I go to parties and someone says "we should round up everyone who voted for Bush and have them all shot." Several others nod their heads in agreement. Others may disagree with the penalty, but agree with the general sentiment. No one disagrees with the underlying premise that voting for Bush was akin to committing a crime. At a group of friends, two got into a spat over something as inconsequential as what temperature to set the thermostat. One left in a huff, and the other said "What a control freak! I bet she's a Republican!"
Do I dare let on that I'm not a member of the Democrat or Green parties? Will I be consigned to social ostracism if people find out I don't consider Bush to be Evil Incarnate?
A friend came over and expressed surprise at seeing my Bible out on the table. Why should he be surprised? It's the best selling book in all of history. It sold more copies last year than did The Lord of the Rings. Why should it be surprising that I own a Bible?
Yesterday while sitting around with some friends and drinking coffee, one of them sees a newspaper article about Mel Gibson and his new movie about Christ. "Oooh, I hate him," a friend said. "He's so... so... so damned conservative!" That was the worst epithet he could think of. "Conservative." Then he launched into a tirade about how Christians are homophobes.
Do I dare let on that I'm a Christian? If I were a poor hispanic who couldn't speak English, I could get away with being a Catholic. But I'm a middle class caucasian. Will people automatically assume all sorts of wrong things about me if they know I'm part of that 80% of people in the US who believe in God?
When you see a machine of wildly spinning metal gears, you know better than to stick your hand in. You know you'll like a finger or two. Likewise, when one sees a major metropolitan region where people go about spouting hatred for anyone of differing beliefs, you know better than to offer your opinion. It's just not safe.
It's not just poorly-supported fringe opinions or racist comments that are frowned upon in modern universities. It's ANYTHING that doesn't toe the line with the established orthodoxy. Supported non-racist opinions that are not orthodox WILL be denounced as unsupported or racist.
Two good examples. First, casually mention anything that counters the current tenets of environmentalism. Dispute the data supported global warming. Or suggest that it isn't caused by human activity. Or that electric cars cause as much pollution as gasoline cars. But first make sure you're wearing asbestos underwear! The creed of environmentalism CANNOT be questioned. It's heretical to do so. It's not because anything else is a "poorly-supported fringe opinion", because there are plenty of scientists and climatologists that offer support to contrarian views. It's merely a difference in interpreting the data, or using different models. Much of environmentalism still rests on untested and inviolate premises. Question these and your career as a university researcher is finished.
Second example. Mention that you hold a conservative view on an issue. Any issue. It doesn't matter if you are liberal on every other issue. Just this one will get your branded as a racist or reactionary. I'm not talking about extremist conservatism. Mainstream conservatism is equally despised. Suggest that capital gains taxes should be lowered, as an example, and see how fast you're ostracized.Go to Berkeley and argue against rent control if you really want to see how intolerant the capital of tolerance really is. Sidenote: I'm not claiming that modern universities are "liberal" though. They're something else entirely.
Qt is free as in "it uses the Free Software Foundation's preferred license for free libraries." It's every bit as Free as GNU's readline library.
I can call the Linux API from closed source apps with no license fee.
Only because Linus Torvalds placed an exception to the GPL in the license. Go read it.
So go change your Qt theme if you don't like whatever default it uses on your system. If the default is Keramik, then change it to Highcolor, Plastic or Qinx. Duh!