Uh- they haven't launched, and aren't launching for a good while yet. They just prefer to develop their code in an open fashion rather than "cathedral style." Sure, they could have just developed it in private until they felt it was "close to right"- and have lost many of the benefits of being an open-source project by doing so. Developing it in the open should result in a better codebase developed in less time.
In their original announcement they said they'd be back up with a solution for existing customers to still be able to download their previously purchased games. That should have been enough to satisfy everybody who's complaining about this as some kind of offense to their customers.
What this did was make everybody who's considered purchasing from GOG but has been putting it off (including me) think "Oh CRAP- I wish I'd bought from them while I had the chance, before they ran out of funding." Now there's a chance to do that. I think it was a clever marketing ploy; a lot of people care about the existence of some kind of outlet for non-DRM games but haven't been doing a lot to vote with their dollars, and this gave people a nudge to go ahead and do that.
Claims that overpopulation is why we have poverty, environmental problems, etc and predictions that continued growth will lead to disaster have time and again been shown to be dead wrong, from Malthus to Ehrlich to the present day.
Ultimately the core of the message is selfish- claiming that for some reason your present consumption patterns should be protected by preventing other people from living and that the responsibility for society's problems lies not on our unwise actions but in the fact that other people exist.
Technology allows us to have greater freedom in our consumption patterns and our impact on the environment. Hunter-gatherers largely had little choice how much environmental impact per person they had; with modern technology (genetics, materials science, etc) we can grow enough food to feed a person within a rather small area and with a rather small ecological footprint and house a person much more efficiently than could be done three hundred years ago (think of the resources and pollution involved in heating a modern well-insulated home versus burning wood continually at multiple inefficient fireplaces in each drafty house for the majority of the year)- or we can waste more land and materials, pollute more air and water, and manufacture larger piles of trash per capita than people three hundred years ago could possibly have conceived of mankind being able to do.
If people chose to live in a way which involved wise stewardship of resources- re-engineering cities to be walkable, using clean public transport on those occasions when it is necessary to go further, reducing demand for consumer junk which rapidly gets chucked in landfills, separating different kinds of waste materials and waste water at a household level so recycling, composting, and water treatment could be done more effectively, eating less meat, eating foods in season, etc.- and concentrated more on using and developing new technologies to achieve a more sustainable lifestyle, then the planet could very comfortably sustain at least twenty times the current world population. Urban living could, if done with this goal in mind, have only a tiny ecological impact per person. But if people choose to use technology to allow them to waste more, it could with more technology and automation reach the point where just two people on earth could be battling each other for resources and be beyond the planet's carrying capacity.
Greed, violence, and disrespect for the planet and for others are the problems- not overpopulation. Yes, the planet couldn't sustain tens of billions of people with our present average consumption levels and average environmental impact per person- but that means we need to change our lifestyles and the way we treat the environment, not that we need to prevent others from living.
First, let me echo the sentiment that you shouldn't get a tattoo. Lots of people have cited good reasons not to; my personal take is that scrawling a tattoo on a human body is like scrawling a mustache on the Mona Lisa- c.f. 1 Cor 3:16-17,6:19. It doesn't matter how artfully done the mustache is.
However, as the professor I had for multivariate analysis said, "I wouldn't encourage anyone to get a tattoo, but if they were determined to get one I'd recommend Generalized Stokes'." It's simple (just 9 symbols) and profound: the integral of the exterior derivative of an (n-1)-form over a n-manifold is the integral of the (n-1) form over the manifold's boundary. The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, Green's Theorem, Gauss's Theorem/the Divergence Theorem, and Stokes' Theorem are special cases.
If you actually read the Pope's comments in the article, he didn't attack the idea of transparency. He simply noted that the Information Age has its downsides as well as its benefits- and he did describe benefits as well. The first two drawbacks he mentions are totally noncontroversial- of course the Catholic Church is concerned with inequities and with peace, and anyone should recognize the digital divide and the ways in which radical elements on all sides of disputes-not only those spewing hype but also those working to directly bring about violence- can be empowered by the Internet as legitimate concerns. Of course people who don't believe in the existence of moral absolutes will complain about his standing up for moral absolutes, but I think anyone who holds some kind of moral absolute, regardless of its content, will recognize that learning and living any moral law can be made more complicated by having instant access to the websites of millions of people who hold those values in contempt. That's not to suggest that restricting access is a possible or a good solution, it's just to say that we need to recognize the problem.
Basically this article boils down to "the sex abuse scandal makes for good press copy, so we want everything the Vatican says to be about that; I was kind of angry that I didn't get the headline I wanted so I found a way to tie it in somehow and to try to make the press conference fit my idea of dramatic."
Morality is the only practical framework which can make life in a community work. People claim that law shouldn't deal with morality; if it doesn't then there's nothing left for law to deal with. Every law- even the requirement to drive on one side of the road rather than the other- is motivated by the morals and values of some segment of society-- in this case the judgment of society that if most people drive on the right it is morally wrong for me to choose to drive on the left and that it's worth restricting my freedoms if I choose to use them that way. If most citizens' moral feelings do not help motivate them to assent to and follow a law, then the only way to even attempt to maintain the law is by becoming -- at least in the relevant respects-- a police state.
The only question is that how we choose, as a society, what kind of society we want to be- the question of what segment of society gets their conception of how life in a community should work (i.e. of what is a good society, of what is good, and of morality) enshrined in law. As others have noted, your statement is itself a moral one; the point was best put by G.K. Chesterton back in 1905:
Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." He says, "Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress." This, logically stated, means, "Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it." He says, "Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education." This, clearly expressed, means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children."
To say that your conception of what society should be like should override that of the majority just because it's more permissive is to advocate the overthrow of democracy. I don't intend to defend democracy here; if you really think we should get rid of representative government and instead have Gavin Newsom, Ruth Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer make the decisions about what kind of society we will live in, I don't intend to press the issue. But I think you should be upfront about what you're advocating.
Quite frankly, I think that if you polled the elderly the percentage of them opposing euthanasia would be higher, not lower, than the percentage in the overall population, largely for the reason you identify. It's just that the minority of the elderly who are in favor of it generally have more of a personal stake in the issue than the rest of those who agree with them.
And blindness too, despite Gnome having improved on usability and disabled people assistance.
Here's one thing I think we can agree on: You might think GNOME 2.x was a big improvement over 1.x- if you're BLIND.
The other >99.5% of us who don't need a screen reader haven't seen (sorry about the pun) a lot of improvement. Pango is nice and all if you want your fonts blurred for you or if you only read Sinhalese; I think you're misremembering the situation with respect to i18n/l10n in 1.x- not really that bad.
For those who were around for GNOME 2.0 back in 2000, the 2.30 release stands as evidence of how far GNOME in general and the free desktop in particular have come in the last decade in usability and design.
For those who were around for GNOME 1.2 back in 2000, the 2.30 release stands as evidence that Linux on the desktop and GNOME in particular have made awfully little progress in the last decade. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002, not 2000, and it was horrid; maybe if your first experience with GNOME was 2.0 then you might think 2.30 was a vast improvement- heck, TWM is a vast improvement on GNOME 2.0. 2.0 was extremely bug-ridden, and if you wanted to change anything from its mind-numbingly bad defaults you had to putz around with finding where in gconf's xml you could go to change things.
If you were around for 1.0, the RH 6.1 "October GNOME" release, or 1.2, you know that GNOME made a lot of progress, was centered on the needs of those most likely to use Linux rather than on unsubstantiated usability claims, and was becoming quick, convenient, and powerful. The progress GNOME made between 1998 and 2000, the big improvements in the 2.2 kernel series, and a host of other developments made it seem like Linux really would overtake Windows for desktop use soon. But I really don't find much about modern versions of GNOME that really improves on 1.2 or maybe 1.4; the last 9 years have seen little improvement in the Linux desktop IMO.
No, the concern is because the new binary prefixes are awful. "Kibibytes"? You gotta be kidding me. I am not using that word in public. If they'd come up with some non-ridiculous-sounding names people would fall in line.
Ok, I know what you meant, but "relation between sound and shape of the characters" suggests to me something along the lines of the following: "see, o and u have this rounded shape, so you should round your lips when you make the corresponding sound; b, d, t, d, and k all have these big straight lines sticking out of them like spears sticking out of dead bodies, which suggest the violence of a plosive consonant."
So my use (and the usage of English since its inception, as well as basically every other language known to man) of two different terms for homosexual unions and marriages is "obviously evil"? This is no injustice, it's calling a spade a spade.
The breakdown of the nuclear family and the government legitimization and subsidization of perversion aren't things that won't affect my day-to-day life. They would make society a living hell for everyone who lives in it. And in such a society I, like Åke Green, would be imprisoned for daring to speak up against it.
Really. Try looking in any dictionary made anytime between the invention of dictionaries and 1990; they all mention the fact that it's between a man and a woman (four different historical editions of Webster's and one of Funk and Wagnall's checked here; OED made a draft revision to mention homosexual "marriages" in 2009; the only exceptions I can find are abridged dictionaries which have directly circular definitions, simply taking for granted that the reader knows what's being talked about i.e. "marriage, n. state of being married. marry, v. to join in marriage"). Looking up the translated word in other languages has the same effect. Not that you have to trust the makers of dictionaries; if you want to dig through all of historical usage to find what all but a very recent minority have meant by the word, you'll be forced to the same conclusion. Even among advocates of homosexual behavior, the first references to trying to call a homosexual union a marriage come during or after the 1960s (OED gives as its first historical use for justifying the draft revision a 1975 quote). I'm not dictating what the word means; it has always meant the union of a man and woman as husband and wife.
I'm not saying language should or can be a static entity. But any honest appraisal of the situation will have to come to the conclusion that the intent has been to force the majority to change their linguistic usage by government action esp. judicial fiat. If you want to call a homosexual union "marriage" or "qweoriulsaf" that's your prerogative, though in either case it's unlikely to lead to mutual understanding with those who use the language normally. But when you attempt to force others to use the word this way there's a problem.
I don't bear any hatred towards those who feel homosexual attractions; I similarly don't hate kleptomaniacs and other groups of people who face (often largely due to genetic influences and factors in their upbringing, though one's past choices are never without any effect) abnormally strong urges to do other kinds of wrong actions. Those who successfully resist such urges deserve commendation; sometimes, if the urges aren't fed by acting upon them, they will subside in time, but not always. Those who succumb to the urges don't deserve hatred either (we should move beyond hating other human beings and only hate wrong actions and wrong ideals; the way people are treated in society today shows a horrible tendency to hate the sinner and love the sin). But society should move to protect itself from the effects of such wrong actions regardless of what urges tend to motivate them.
"Incest rights are the civil rights struggle of our generation. When you have two consenting adults living and loving each other and then telling them they cannot get life insurance on each other to cover their mutual home in case of tragety(sic) is bigotry. This "marriage is between a man and a woman who aren't siblings and neither party can be the child of the other" bit is exactly the same as "coloreds don't drink from the white fountain." I don't even happen to be inbred and I can still clearly see this."
"Bestial rights are the civil rights struggle of our generation. When you have two consenting adults of whatever species living and loving each other and then telling them they cannot get life insurance on each other to cover their mutual home in case of tragety is bigotry. This "marriage is between a man and a woman, not a man and a sheep" bit is exactly the same as "coloreds don't drink from the white fountain." I don't even happen to be a furry and I can still clearly see this."
Just because it's "between consenting adults" doesn't mean it isn't hurting society, and just because two people of the same gender want to mess around with each other's gonads on a continuing basis doesn't mean society has to call that a marriage. Find your own word for that kind of abomination; this word is taken. Nobody has a "fundamental right" to dictate to society what their actions and relationship should be called, or to force down peoples' throat a completely new use of a word. It's almost like if kleptomaniacs were to go around demanding that their actions be deemed a "purchase." "Kleptomania is part of who I am; who are you to deny me the dignity of calling this a purchase? Only bigots will say that a purchase necessarily implies that the price of the goods was paid."
Gender matters to marriage. Why are homosexuals so intent on changing language to fit their needs rather than being willing to call these civil unions and get the same benefits?** The reason is the same reason people worked to control language in 1984: to try to control people's thoughts. Until everyone is forced to say that homosexual "marriages" are just as meritorious as real marriages, homosexuals will be pushing for any other opinion to be labeled as "hate speech" and outlawed- they've already have some success at that (c.f. the Åke Green case). And when they manage to bludgeon language to the point where it doesn't reflect any of the distinctions at issue, they'll have made a large step towards achieving their agenda.
You'll note that most of those who fought for real civil rights are ticked off at the homosexual lobby's ridiculous comparison to their struggle, with the result that blacks faced ridicule and violence from gays after they voted overwhelmingly for Prop 8 in California.
**Isn't it already asking quite a bit for them to get the same subsidies and benefits the government grants to marriages? These benefits aren't there because of a bias against people who feel homosexual attraction, they're there (and in many cases have been there for centuries) because strong marriages and the nuclear family are the basis of a healthy society and so society has an interest in subsidizing them; society has, in my opinion, no such interest in subsidizing civil unions. But in any case, the question of the role of civil unions is one it makes sense to debate as a society, while the attempt to redefine marriage in the courts is an attempt to subvert the process of that debate and ultimately also subvert the processes of democracy.
I know this is waaay past the end of this conversation, but I thought I should interject a tongue-in-cheek reference to Ezekiel 18:
21 But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. 22 All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him: in his righteousness that he hath done he shall live. 23 Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord God: and not that he should return from his ways, and live? 24 But when the righteous turneth away from his righteousness, and committeth iniquity, and doeth according to all the abominations that the wicked man doeth, shall he live? All his righteousness that he hath done shall not be mentioned: in his trespass that he hath trespassed, and in his sin that he hath sinned, in them shall he die.
Maybe the fans really have in mind the message - central to Scripture and stated clearly here - that what really matters is not what we have done but what our character is and who we have become.
And that George Lucas has become a childhood-raping conceited megalomaniac.
What part of "ordered his videos through the mail" do you not understand? You bet they were "actively sending the material to State A"- though the content delivery was over the 'net, the material had to be paid for, and these people processed the payment- which included information about the place of residence of those buying- and sent the investigators a password/private download link/whatever else. It's not like the stuff was just up on their server and investigators from FL just browsed onto their website.
Theora is definitely not heavier on hardware than H.264- unless you have dedicated hardware support for H.264 (GPU or Broadcom chip/other specialized DSP). It's a simpler codec and so its (fairly narrow) quality/bitrate disadvantage comes with a decoding speed advantage. There's nothing keeping people from doing hardware-accelerated Theora (should be possible to do on DX9 or higher gpus, simple to do with CUDA or OpenCL, and would be possible on a lot of DSPs if they opened up some documentation) . However, since Theora's decode requirements are significantly lower than H.264's, the only market where hardware-accelerated decoding would AFAIK make much of an impact is smartphones.
I'm not the biggest fan of PayPal, and I know they've made a lot of bad moves in the past. But this seems to me to be just the system at work as it ought to be. Wikileaks has broken all sorts of laws, caused tons of harm to people, and undermined the rule of law. If anyone expects to have any privacy in the modern world then Wikileaks has to be held accountable for its irresponsible actions. Everybody's pager messages from 9/11, copyrighted works, non-newsworthy military secrets only of use to the enemies of the US whose release endangers those serving in the military, etc. I feel safer knowing their assets are frozen, and so should you.
My first Linux install was RH 5.1; it was a bit of a bumpy ride getting X to work, and there were some other issues, so I didn't do much with it- just stuck to Windows. I tried again a year later, and RH 6.x was much better- the 2.2 kernel series made a big difference, GNOME was new and exciting, most things just worked, etc. I did more dual-booting and thought that surely the pace of improvement would make it so after the next release or two I'd always be booting into Linux. But from my point of view the past decade brought very little improvement in making Linux more palatable to use- in some ways it's worse now than it was in 2000.
As someone else mentioned, the purism issues and the hostility towards those developing proprietary software for Linux have been a major detriment. Plenty of old programs that worked well and shipped with earlier distros but had not-quite-free licenses (many of which used Xt or Motif) have just recently started to get decent RMS-approved replacements. In 1999-2000, with Corel making a serious WordPerfect for Linux push, Loki doing ports of most of the biggest games, etc. it looked like a market for consumer Linux software was developing, and I thought that it wouldn't be long before one could find Linux versions of most software on the shelves of box stores. Piracy, hostility towards those developing proprietary software for Linux, ABI churn, Loki going nova, the end of RH's commercial desktop distro (after a couple of less-than-stellar releases), and other factors scared developers away.
Usability is little better than it was then. Having a cadre of self-proclaimed UI experts arguing about button order doesn't help anything, and many of the actions that have been taken in the name of usability have been major steps backward (GNOME 2.0, anybody?). While there are things to be learned from real, long term usability studies, it's counterproductive to make changes based on an assumption that all users are stupid and thus can't be trusted to do anything outside of the most common tasks or on the basis of what someone unacquainted with the software said in their first 5 minutes of trying to familiarize themselves with it.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with Chrome OS. It's possible that a company the size of Google will be able to overcome the worst offenses of the modern Linux desktop scene and create a viable ecosystem for the development of 3rd-party consumer software, taking the good points of how Apple made a similar move in the OS X transition while keeping things more open than Apple has. I don't know that any other company or group is really in a position to bring Linux to desktop relevance.
Yes. What you need is for the force pulling you towards the earth to be equal to the force necessary to pull the satellite into a circular orbit rather than inertial straight line motion: G*m_earth*m_sat/r^2=m_sat*v_sat^2/r. So v_sat is inversely proportional to sqrt(r). Any faster and you'd be spiralling outwards; any slower and you'll spiral inwards.
The kernel can't add implementation for a bus that doesn't exist
and that's why it will alway be a follower rather than a leader.
You're so totally right! What Linux needs is drivers for hardware that doesn't exist. Here's the sales pitch: You may not yet be able to purchase a combination printer/scanner/fax/toaster/singing fish/unicorn horn fabricator with a 42 megahexametapassamaquoddabit UFB (Universal Fairy Bus) 3.0 connection, but when you do, you can be sure it will work just fine with Linux, as we already have a driver for it! Aren't we innovative?
If you think the French Revolution was about "the dignity of human life, rejecting oppression and supporting freedom and free will" then you need to go back to high school history class and try again. How much did the revolutionaries care about the dignity of human life? Enough to guillotine ~40,000 people without trial. How much did the revolutionaries care about freedom of thought and free will? Enough to outlaw public and private worship and religious education, to beat women in the streets for trying to attend Mass, and to outlaw the word "Sunday", the ringing of church bells, and displays of the cross; enough to force priests to give up their vows and to simply kill thousands of them; enough to institute the "Cult of Reason" and then the "Cult of the Supreme Being" as established religions; enough to kill ~400,000 people in the Vendée for refusing to provide 300,000 conscripts to fight for a cause the citizens of the Vendée almost universally opposed (this has been called the first modern genocide). The atrocities were far too numerous for me to list here.
The revolutionaries paid lip service to the so-called Enlightenment values, but people enjoyed more human dignity, less oppression, and more freedom of thought and speech during just about any other period of French history than they did during 1789-1799.
Not that I think the jokes about the French are generally either funny or anything other than counterproductive, but they don't spring from Americans being "ignorant, narrow minded, [or] bigoted." They spring from the fact that France basically has never come to terms with the reality of what happened in WWII (see "Paris se libere!"), the rabid anti-Americanism which de Gaulle exhibited, and the many ways in which France has done things which are not only to its allies' disadvantage but also to its own disadvantage- for no other reason than to try to stick it to the Americans (and sometimes the Brits). I think the Macmillan paraphrase from that article is relevant- "France, he said, had made peace with Germany, had forgiven Germany for the brutality of invasion and the humiliation of four years of occupation, but it could never - never - forgive the British and Americans for the liberation."
You can't really even make much of an attempt to joke about what happened to most of the countries Hitler invaded. But the French pride, arrogance, and rewriting of history have in the past made it easier for people to find jokes about the French to be palatable.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh- they haven't launched, and aren't launching for a good while yet. They just prefer to develop their code in an open fashion rather than "cathedral style." Sure, they could have just developed it in private until they felt it was "close to right"- and have lost many of the benefits of being an open-source project by doing so. Developing it in the open should result in a better codebase developed in less time.
In their original announcement they said they'd be back up with a solution for existing customers to still be able to download their previously purchased games. That should have been enough to satisfy everybody who's complaining about this as some kind of offense to their customers.
What this did was make everybody who's considered purchasing from GOG but has been putting it off (including me) think "Oh CRAP- I wish I'd bought from them while I had the chance, before they ran out of funding." Now there's a chance to do that. I think it was a clever marketing ploy; a lot of people care about the existence of some kind of outlet for non-DRM games but haven't been doing a lot to vote with their dollars, and this gave people a nudge to go ahead and do that.
The donations are now nearly up to $25000- that could be doubled if people vote for Musopen in Pepsi's "Refresh Project."
Claims that overpopulation is why we have poverty, environmental problems, etc and predictions that continued growth will lead to disaster have time and again been shown to be dead wrong, from Malthus to Ehrlich to the present day.
Ultimately the core of the message is selfish- claiming that for some reason your present consumption patterns should be protected by preventing other people from living and that the responsibility for society's problems lies not on our unwise actions but in the fact that other people exist.
Technology allows us to have greater freedom in our consumption patterns and our impact on the environment. Hunter-gatherers largely had little choice how much environmental impact per person they had; with modern technology (genetics, materials science, etc) we can grow enough food to feed a person within a rather small area and with a rather small ecological footprint and house a person much more efficiently than could be done three hundred years ago (think of the resources and pollution involved in heating a modern well-insulated home versus burning wood continually at multiple inefficient fireplaces in each drafty house for the majority of the year)- or we can waste more land and materials, pollute more air and water, and manufacture larger piles of trash per capita than people three hundred years ago could possibly have conceived of mankind being able to do.
If people chose to live in a way which involved wise stewardship of resources- re-engineering cities to be walkable, using clean public transport on those occasions when it is necessary to go further, reducing demand for consumer junk which rapidly gets chucked in landfills, separating different kinds of waste materials and waste water at a household level so recycling, composting, and water treatment could be done more effectively, eating less meat, eating foods in season, etc.- and concentrated more on using and developing new technologies to achieve a more sustainable lifestyle, then the planet could very comfortably sustain at least twenty times the current world population. Urban living could, if done with this goal in mind, have only a tiny ecological impact per person. But if people choose to use technology to allow them to waste more, it could with more technology and automation reach the point where just two people on earth could be battling each other for resources and be beyond the planet's carrying capacity.
Greed, violence, and disrespect for the planet and for others are the problems- not overpopulation. Yes, the planet couldn't sustain tens of billions of people with our present average consumption levels and average environmental impact per person- but that means we need to change our lifestyles and the way we treat the environment, not that we need to prevent others from living.
First, let me echo the sentiment that you shouldn't get a tattoo. Lots of people have cited good reasons not to; my personal take is that scrawling a tattoo on a human body is like scrawling a mustache on the Mona Lisa- c.f. 1 Cor 3:16-17,6:19. It doesn't matter how artfully done the mustache is.
However, as the professor I had for multivariate analysis said, "I wouldn't encourage anyone to get a tattoo, but if they were determined to get one I'd recommend Generalized Stokes'." It's simple (just 9 symbols) and profound: the integral of the exterior derivative of an (n-1)-form over a n-manifold is the integral of the (n-1) form over the manifold's boundary. The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, Green's Theorem, Gauss's Theorem/the Divergence Theorem, and Stokes' Theorem are special cases.
If you actually read the Pope's comments in the article, he didn't attack the idea of transparency. He simply noted that the Information Age has its downsides as well as its benefits- and he did describe benefits as well. The first two drawbacks he mentions are totally noncontroversial- of course the Catholic Church is concerned with inequities and with peace, and anyone should recognize the digital divide and the ways in which radical elements on all sides of disputes-not only those spewing hype but also those working to directly bring about violence- can be empowered by the Internet as legitimate concerns. Of course people who don't believe in the existence of moral absolutes will complain about his standing up for moral absolutes, but I think anyone who holds some kind of moral absolute, regardless of its content, will recognize that learning and living any moral law can be made more complicated by having instant access to the websites of millions of people who hold those values in contempt. That's not to suggest that restricting access is a possible or a good solution, it's just to say that we need to recognize the problem.
Basically this article boils down to "the sex abuse scandal makes for good press copy, so we want everything the Vatican says to be about that; I was kind of angry that I didn't get the headline I wanted so I found a way to tie it in somehow and to try to make the press conference fit my idea of dramatic."
Morality is the only practical framework which can make life in a community work. People claim that law shouldn't deal with morality; if it doesn't then there's nothing left for law to deal with. Every law- even the requirement to drive on one side of the road rather than the other- is motivated by the morals and values of some segment of society-- in this case the judgment of society that if most people drive on the right it is morally wrong for me to choose to drive on the left and that it's worth restricting my freedoms if I choose to use them that way. If most citizens' moral feelings do not help motivate them to assent to and follow a law, then the only way to even attempt to maintain the law is by becoming -- at least in the relevant respects-- a police state.
The only question is that how we choose, as a society, what kind of society we want to be- the question of what segment of society gets their conception of how life in a community should work (i.e. of what is a good society, of what is good, and of morality) enshrined in law. As others have noted, your statement is itself a moral one; the point was best put by G.K. Chesterton back in 1905:
To say that your conception of what society should be like should override that of the majority just because it's more permissive is to advocate the overthrow of democracy. I don't intend to defend democracy here; if you really think we should get rid of representative government and instead have Gavin Newsom, Ruth Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer make the decisions about what kind of society we will live in, I don't intend to press the issue. But I think you should be upfront about what you're advocating.
Quite frankly, I think that if you polled the elderly the percentage of them opposing euthanasia would be higher, not lower, than the percentage in the overall population, largely for the reason you identify. It's just that the minority of the elderly who are in favor of it generally have more of a personal stake in the issue than the rest of those who agree with them.
Here's one thing I think we can agree on: You might think GNOME 2.x was a big improvement over 1.x- if you're BLIND .
The other >99.5% of us who don't need a screen reader haven't seen (sorry about the pun) a lot of improvement. Pango is nice and all if you want your fonts blurred for you or if you only read Sinhalese; I think you're misremembering the situation with respect to i18n/l10n in 1.x- not really that bad.
For those who were around for GNOME 1.2 back in 2000, the 2.30 release stands as evidence that Linux on the desktop and GNOME in particular have made awfully little progress in the last decade. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002, not 2000, and it was horrid; maybe if your first experience with GNOME was 2.0 then you might think 2.30 was a vast improvement- heck, TWM is a vast improvement on GNOME 2.0. 2.0 was extremely bug-ridden, and if you wanted to change anything from its mind-numbingly bad defaults you had to putz around with finding where in gconf's xml you could go to change things.
If you were around for 1.0, the RH 6.1 "October GNOME" release, or 1.2, you know that GNOME made a lot of progress, was centered on the needs of those most likely to use Linux rather than on unsubstantiated usability claims, and was becoming quick, convenient, and powerful. The progress GNOME made between 1998 and 2000, the big improvements in the 2.2 kernel series, and a host of other developments made it seem like Linux really would overtake Windows for desktop use soon. But I really don't find much about modern versions of GNOME that really improves on 1.2 or maybe 1.4; the last 9 years have seen little improvement in the Linux desktop IMO.
No, the concern is because the new binary prefixes are awful. "Kibibytes"? You gotta be kidding me. I am not using that word in public. If they'd come up with some non-ridiculous-sounding names people would fall in line.
Ok, I know what you meant, but "relation between sound and shape of the characters" suggests to me something along the lines of the following: "see, o and u have this rounded shape, so you should round your lips when you make the corresponding sound; b, d, t, d, and k all have these big straight lines sticking out of them like spears sticking out of dead bodies, which suggest the violence of a plosive consonant."
So my use (and the usage of English since its inception, as well as basically every other language known to man) of two different terms for homosexual unions and marriages is "obviously evil"? This is no injustice, it's calling a spade a spade.
The breakdown of the nuclear family and the government legitimization and subsidization of perversion aren't things that won't affect my day-to-day life. They would make society a living hell for everyone who lives in it. And in such a society I, like Åke Green, would be imprisoned for daring to speak up against it.
Really. Try looking in any dictionary made anytime between the invention of dictionaries and 1990; they all mention the fact that it's between a man and a woman (four different historical editions of Webster's and one of Funk and Wagnall's checked here; OED made a draft revision to mention homosexual "marriages" in 2009; the only exceptions I can find are abridged dictionaries which have directly circular definitions, simply taking for granted that the reader knows what's being talked about i.e. "marriage, n. state of being married. marry, v. to join in marriage"). Looking up the translated word in other languages has the same effect. Not that you have to trust the makers of dictionaries; if you want to dig through all of historical usage to find what all but a very recent minority have meant by the word, you'll be forced to the same conclusion. Even among advocates of homosexual behavior, the first references to trying to call a homosexual union a marriage come during or after the 1960s (OED gives as its first historical use for justifying the draft revision a 1975 quote). I'm not dictating what the word means; it has always meant the union of a man and woman as husband and wife.
I'm not saying language should or can be a static entity. But any honest appraisal of the situation will have to come to the conclusion that the intent has been to force the majority to change their linguistic usage by government action esp. judicial fiat. If you want to call a homosexual union "marriage" or "qweoriulsaf" that's your prerogative, though in either case it's unlikely to lead to mutual understanding with those who use the language normally. But when you attempt to force others to use the word this way there's a problem.
I don't bear any hatred towards those who feel homosexual attractions; I similarly don't hate kleptomaniacs and other groups of people who face (often largely due to genetic influences and factors in their upbringing, though one's past choices are never without any effect) abnormally strong urges to do other kinds of wrong actions. Those who successfully resist such urges deserve commendation; sometimes, if the urges aren't fed by acting upon them, they will subside in time, but not always. Those who succumb to the urges don't deserve hatred either (we should move beyond hating other human beings and only hate wrong actions and wrong ideals; the way people are treated in society today shows a horrible tendency to hate the sinner and love the sin). But society should move to protect itself from the effects of such wrong actions regardless of what urges tend to motivate them.
Just because it's "between consenting adults" doesn't mean it isn't hurting society, and just because two people of the same gender want to mess around with each other's gonads on a continuing basis doesn't mean society has to call that a marriage. Find your own word for that kind of abomination; this word is taken. Nobody has a "fundamental right" to dictate to society what their actions and relationship should be called, or to force down peoples' throat a completely new use of a word. It's almost like if kleptomaniacs were to go around demanding that their actions be deemed a "purchase." "Kleptomania is part of who I am; who are you to deny me the dignity of calling this a purchase? Only bigots will say that a purchase necessarily implies that the price of the goods was paid."
Gender matters to marriage. Why are homosexuals so intent on changing language to fit their needs rather than being willing to call these civil unions and get the same benefits?** The reason is the same reason people worked to control language in 1984: to try to control people's thoughts. Until everyone is forced to say that homosexual "marriages" are just as meritorious as real marriages, homosexuals will be pushing for any other opinion to be labeled as "hate speech" and outlawed- they've already have some success at that (c.f. the Åke Green case). And when they manage to bludgeon language to the point where it doesn't reflect any of the distinctions at issue, they'll have made a large step towards achieving their agenda.
You'll note that most of those who fought for real civil rights are ticked off at the homosexual lobby's ridiculous comparison to their struggle, with the result that blacks faced ridicule and violence from gays after they voted overwhelmingly for Prop 8 in California.
**Isn't it already asking quite a bit for them to get the same subsidies and benefits the government grants to marriages? These benefits aren't there because of a bias against people who feel homosexual attraction, they're there (and in many cases have been there for centuries) because strong marriages and the nuclear family are the basis of a healthy society and so society has an interest in subsidizing them; society has, in my opinion, no such interest in subsidizing civil unions. But in any case, the question of the role of civil unions is one it makes sense to debate as a society, while the attempt to redefine marriage in the courts is an attempt to subvert the process of that debate and ultimately also subvert the processes of democracy.
I know this is waaay past the end of this conversation, but I thought I should interject a tongue-in-cheek reference to Ezekiel 18:
Maybe the fans really have in mind the message - central to Scripture and stated clearly here - that what really matters is not what we have done but what our character is and who we have become.
And that George Lucas has become a childhood-raping conceited megalomaniac.
What part of "ordered his videos through the mail" do you not understand? You bet they were "actively sending the material to State A"- though the content delivery was over the 'net, the material had to be paid for, and these people processed the payment- which included information about the place of residence of those buying- and sent the investigators a password/private download link/whatever else. It's not like the stuff was just up on their server and investigators from FL just browsed onto their website.
Theora is definitely not heavier on hardware than H.264- unless you have dedicated hardware support for H.264 (GPU or Broadcom chip/other specialized DSP). It's a simpler codec and so its (fairly narrow) quality/bitrate disadvantage comes with a decoding speed advantage. There's nothing keeping people from doing hardware-accelerated Theora (should be possible to do on DX9 or higher gpus, simple to do with CUDA or OpenCL, and would be possible on a lot of DSPs if they opened up some documentation) . However, since Theora's decode requirements are significantly lower than H.264's, the only market where hardware-accelerated decoding would AFAIK make much of an impact is smartphones.
I'm not the biggest fan of PayPal, and I know they've made a lot of bad moves in the past. But this seems to me to be just the system at work as it ought to be. Wikileaks has broken all sorts of laws, caused tons of harm to people, and undermined the rule of law. If anyone expects to have any privacy in the modern world then Wikileaks has to be held accountable for its irresponsible actions. Everybody's pager messages from 9/11, copyrighted works, non-newsworthy military secrets only of use to the enemies of the US whose release endangers those serving in the military, etc. I feel safer knowing their assets are frozen, and so should you.
My first Linux install was RH 5.1; it was a bit of a bumpy ride getting X to work, and there were some other issues, so I didn't do much with it- just stuck to Windows. I tried again a year later, and RH 6.x was much better- the 2.2 kernel series made a big difference, GNOME was new and exciting, most things just worked, etc. I did more dual-booting and thought that surely the pace of improvement would make it so after the next release or two I'd always be booting into Linux. But from my point of view the past decade brought very little improvement in making Linux more palatable to use- in some ways it's worse now than it was in 2000.
As someone else mentioned, the purism issues and the hostility towards those developing proprietary software for Linux have been a major detriment. Plenty of old programs that worked well and shipped with earlier distros but had not-quite-free licenses (many of which used Xt or Motif) have just recently started to get decent RMS-approved replacements. In 1999-2000, with Corel making a serious WordPerfect for Linux push, Loki doing ports of most of the biggest games, etc. it looked like a market for consumer Linux software was developing, and I thought that it wouldn't be long before one could find Linux versions of most software on the shelves of box stores. Piracy, hostility towards those developing proprietary software for Linux, ABI churn, Loki going nova, the end of RH's commercial desktop distro (after a couple of less-than-stellar releases), and other factors scared developers away.
Usability is little better than it was then. Having a cadre of self-proclaimed UI experts arguing about button order doesn't help anything, and many of the actions that have been taken in the name of usability have been major steps backward (GNOME 2.0, anybody?). While there are things to be learned from real, long term usability studies, it's counterproductive to make changes based on an assumption that all users are stupid and thus can't be trusted to do anything outside of the most common tasks or on the basis of what someone unacquainted with the software said in their first 5 minutes of trying to familiarize themselves with it.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with Chrome OS. It's possible that a company the size of Google will be able to overcome the worst offenses of the modern Linux desktop scene and create a viable ecosystem for the development of 3rd-party consumer software, taking the good points of how Apple made a similar move in the OS X transition while keeping things more open than Apple has. I don't know that any other company or group is really in a position to bring Linux to desktop relevance.
Yes. What you need is for the force pulling you towards the earth to be equal to the force necessary to pull the satellite into a circular orbit rather than inertial straight line motion: G*m_earth*m_sat/r^2=m_sat*v_sat^2/r. So v_sat is inversely proportional to sqrt(r). Any faster and you'd be spiralling outwards; any slower and you'll spiral inwards.
You're so totally right! What Linux needs is drivers for hardware that doesn't exist. Here's the sales pitch: You may not yet be able to purchase a combination printer/scanner/fax/toaster/singing fish/unicorn horn fabricator with a 42 megahexametapassamaquoddabit UFB (Universal Fairy Bus) 3.0 connection, but when you do, you can be sure it will work just fine with Linux, as we already have a driver for it! Aren't we innovative?
Interesting. Did you send bug reports to the sdl list? Is there any chance these problems are fixed with the 1.3/2.0 series?
If you think the French Revolution was about "the dignity of human life, rejecting oppression and supporting freedom and free will" then you need to go back to high school history class and try again. How much did the revolutionaries care about the dignity of human life? Enough to guillotine ~40,000 people without trial. How much did the revolutionaries care about freedom of thought and free will? Enough to outlaw public and private worship and religious education, to beat women in the streets for trying to attend Mass, and to outlaw the word "Sunday", the ringing of church bells, and displays of the cross; enough to force priests to give up their vows and to simply kill thousands of them; enough to institute the "Cult of Reason" and then the "Cult of the Supreme Being" as established religions; enough to kill ~400,000 people in the Vendée for refusing to provide 300,000 conscripts to fight for a cause the citizens of the Vendée almost universally opposed (this has been called the first modern genocide). The atrocities were far too numerous for me to list here.
The revolutionaries paid lip service to the so-called Enlightenment values, but people enjoyed more human dignity, less oppression, and more freedom of thought and speech during just about any other period of French history than they did during 1789-1799.
Not that I think the jokes about the French are generally either funny or anything other than counterproductive, but they don't spring from Americans being "ignorant, narrow minded, [or] bigoted." They spring from the fact that France basically has never come to terms with the reality of what happened in WWII (see "Paris se libere!"), the rabid anti-Americanism which de Gaulle exhibited, and the many ways in which France has done things which are not only to its allies' disadvantage but also to its own disadvantage- for no other reason than to try to stick it to the Americans (and sometimes the Brits). I think the Macmillan paraphrase from that article is relevant- "France, he said, had made peace with Germany, had forgiven Germany for the brutality of invasion and the humiliation of four years of occupation, but it could never - never - forgive the British and Americans for the liberation."
You can't really even make much of an attempt to joke about what happened to most of the countries Hitler invaded. But the French pride, arrogance, and rewriting of history have in the past made it easier for people to find jokes about the French to be palatable.