I know Knopper is already putting extra effort into this, but Linux hardware detection and autoconfiguration is still one of its weakest areas. There are some kinds of devices which get detected and configured fairly reliably, but not nearly enough kinds of hardware fall into this group.
95% of humans in Utah Valley, the place where SCO and Novell are both based, are mormon. Between 2/3 and 3/4 of Utahns are mormon. Given this, it would, ignoring other factors, seem to be more of a conspiracy that SCO members are predominately male than that they are predominately mormon.
Sure, Utah isn't a Mormon state, in the sense of religion-controlled state. But here in Utah Valley, where SCO and Novell are both located, around 95% of the residents are Mormons, and statewide the figure is between 2/3 and 3/4. Neither SCO nor Novell have a religion-based hiring policy, it's just that the vast majority of people in the area are Mormon.
Though a real market in these kind of things seems terribly sick and wrong to me, a "fantasy market" for world politics might be fun for a lot of people who follow global events closely, just as "fantasy sports" attract a lot of people who follow players' stats. Of course, I wouldn't depend on any of the predictions of such a market if I were part of the administration, CIA, DoD, or whatever, but I don't think the market model works too well for this anyway.
Attempts to target individual file swappers? Isn't this what they ought to be doing (though they admittedly ought to be working to make these criminal, not civil, cases)? People who break the law ought to be prosecuted. The problem is when the RIAA etc try to go after computer corporations for making devices which don't guarantee that their users can't use them to break the law, search engines which auto-index pages which happen to link to illegal files, people using the devices they bought and the CDs they bought in ways not normally illegal but not allowed because the device's built in copy protection device didn't anticipate those uses, etc.
The RIAA and MPAA have been thoroughly and justly criticised for trying to punish people who make tools which can be (ab)used to break the law or for using schemes which try to make any illegal use of their products impossible but not only fail miserably but prevent plenty of legal uses. Their insistency on being able to control everything the user can do with bought merchandise has justly been lampooned. However, I have no sympathy for those who think actual copyright violations should be ignored and copyright law should disappear.
It's not like I'm a fan of the US subsidy system either. It's a menace. One firsthand example- I live in a mostly-desert state which has had 5+ years of drought, and yet you find huge green alfalfa fields in the middle of the sagebrush, sustained at the expense of the rest of the economy.
However, there are plenty of benefits of all sorts to be realized from GM foods (assuming that they don't bring in a Monsanto IP crop control as well). Lower water use, reduced or eliminated need for pesticides, increased nutritional value (surely you've heard of golden rice and its potential to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children suffering from vitamin deficency- as well as the general chagrin that such a lifesaving tool is generally under corporate control), easy delivery of vaccines, etc, etc.
The trouble is that until the scaremongered stop believing that GM foods will give them cancer, reduce their sexual performance, and sprout carnivorous quadruped descendants, politicians will respond to the imaginary threat, not the real one of corporate control and abuse.
Oh, and also, as somebody pointed out elsewhere, the European practice of using a ban on GM food as a way to boost the EU's already ludicrous agricultural subsidies is at least as large a factor in the debate as any concern for the environment or peoples' health.
The European paranoia concerning GM foods is entirely unjustified and irrational, much more so than even the American paranoia concerning nuclear power (for a funny satire of which see The Hazards of Solar Energy). The problem with GM foods, however, is the current control of and potential for abuse of GM crops by corporations. However, since it's a lot easier to do scare-mongering by saying that GM crops cause cancer, thyroid problems, premature aging, nearsightedness, tire sidewall blowout, and loss of balance to the Force than by explaining that GM food as currently controlled by Monsanto etc is a huge IP mess, Europeans are convinced of the former.
Star Wars Episode I: Racer was more fun than the movie - while it lasted (which was not very long, especially if you weren't on a good LAN to play multiplayer on). In fact, Racer was the game which finally convinced me to get a video card with 3d acceleration.
Speaking of Settlers of Catan, check out the gnome version: gnocatan. Major improvements (incl GTK/GNOME 2 move) are slated for RSN, and the next release should be great.
If everybody figures they won't install and run 2.6.0 but will give it some time to stabilize, it never will stabilize. Since not enough people tested late development kernels, they started calling the kernels 'pre-stable'. Since not enough people test pre-stable kernels, they just put it out as 'stable version.0'. As more and more people start avoiding stable.[012] kernels, they'll have to start bumping the revision number to compensate.
I'm not against efforts to establish universal benefits in nations in attempts to assist human welfare in those states, and while I suspect that Estonia will find that they would have been better served by a free market as regards Internet access, it is quite possible that providing universal access through the state will turn out to have been a very good decision. However, calling benefits such as this "human rights" is ludicrous and undermines the entire notion of rights, thus eroding not only efforts to establish human rights throughout the world but also the very foundation on which the modern state is built.
The EU is working on a bill of rights equivalent- and included are things like the right to free job placement services, workers' comp, etc. IMHO, this is ludicrous. The conflation of universal human rights with the universal benefits of an advanced semi-socialist society does no favor to either human rights or human welfare.
A standard commentary on this is that the 'little children' is a definite KJV mistranslation, and that the people who came to him were probably adolescent boys who had been paid to bring water to sustain Jericho while the spring there was bitter (salty; the story is recounted in the four verses immediately previous to the passage you quoted, v 19-22; Jericho is below sea level near the Dead Sea and thus it wouldn't be too strange for salt water to end up in their water table). Having been deprived of their livelihood by Elisha when he healed the spring and thus eliminated the need for bringing fresh water into the city, they were outside the city jeering Elisha as he left, waiting until he came in range that they could stone him.
I think the commentary is Talmudic and old enough that it quite possibly in some form predated the compilation of 2 Kings. I could be wrong, my memory isn't fantastic.
It's not mostly about the amount of violence and sex in the game, it's about the message which the game tries to send. The situation is very much the same as with books- Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov depicts a world with plenty of violence and sex but sends a strong message of faith. As plenty of others have pointed out, the Bible is the same way. There are plenty of books with little or no violence or sex which nevertheless broadcast a message of nihilism, selfishness, and immorality.
As far as I can tell, these games don't really send any message at all (unless it's that missionary work, even among demons, is ridiculously easy, just point and zap), much less one of true faith. If you're going to be playing a FPS which is designed not to send any message, you might as well enjoy it and have it be Serious Sam (with the 'hippie gore' option turned on if you prefer lower levels of blood, etc):)
Serious Sam (both the first and second encounters) are the only PC titles I've seen with multiplayer play on one computer (split-screen), and their cooperative mode is fun. I would assume they've got the same cooperative mode in the xbox version.
Actually, I really like Matheson, and would have stumped for him if he were in my district (I live in Provo). I fail to see that Hatch has generally had a record of "trying to force religious tenets and restrictions into laws", though, and there's a world of difference between him and the overly sensationalistic, I-want-to-have-every-environmentalist-hung Hansen (ugh!). You'll note that I said "the careful gerrymandering of our terrible state legislature"- our "gun-toting, even-slightly-moderate-booing, viciously gerrymandering, education-dismantling" state legislature, as I described it in another post.
Maybe I am a "religious crazy bible thumper"- I am a devout Mormon- but I'm definitely not hard-right nor a woman-hater.
I am a mormon as well (active and in good standing, planning on going on a mission soon) - and a supporter of SUWA. Using the resources we've been given doesn't imply using them thoughtlessly- and while there are plenty of nuts and whackos in the broader environmentalist movement, most of the goals sought for by environmentalists are perfectly sincere and reasonable and fully compatible with wise human use of the earth. On the Utah wilderness issue, for instance, the vast majority of all proposed wilderness is entirely unsuited for any development, and there's no reason to have roads criscrossing that land except to try to defeat those who want it protected.
You'll note that I wrote of moral "liberalism", not fiscal liberalism. While I'd rather not argue fiscal points with you now (though I agree with many points of conservative fiscal policy), I'm sure we are in agreement that moral "liberalism" is a genuinely terrible thing, stances against which are the only political stances taken by the church.
The Church does not recommend politicians or parties, nor does it take political stances except on issues like abortion and permission of homosexual marriages. The fact that so much of Utah really thinks "republicans are sponsored by the church; you can't be both a good member of the church and a good Democrat" is responsible for much of Utah's political trouble and guarantees a gun-toting, even-slightly-moderate-booing, viciously gerrymandering, education-dismantling state legislature every time.
BTW, one may ask, why are Utah Mormons and so many other deeply religious groups so often anti-environmentalist? I think it's largely because their politicians have told them they are for the last 25 years. You'd think more people would realize that deep respect for all Creation and thoughtless pollution and destruction of the environment are not consistent with each other, but the association of environmentalism with the Democratic and Green parties and the association of those parties with moral "liberalism" seems to cloud people's judgement.
Yes, he has been fairly peristent in his wrongheadedness about copyrights, and that dates back further than the DMCA. Yes, that wrongheadedness was rewarded by the lobbyists. That doesn't affect his record in other areas, and I would suggest that you refrain from insulting other people, myself included, just because they don't share your single-issue zealotry.
Senator Hatch is, overall, a great guy. The other congressmen from Utah (except for Jim Matheson, a moderate Democrat who managed to barely hold on to his House seat despite the careful gerrymandering of our terrible State Legislature) vote harder-than-hard-line Republican, often seemingly without any thought. Hatch has genuinely tried to investigate the issues and work towards solutions- even though the solutions he engineers get fairly widely booed in Utah since they may deviate from the Party Line. In just about all previous instances when I have disagreed with Sen. Hatch's views, I have nevertheless felt them to be well-reasoned and somewhat justified.
This time around constitutes an exception. Everybody makes stupid mistakes once in a while, and I hope Hatch manages to pull a course correction on this issue pretty soon.
The problem I see is that you get self-proclaimed usability experts such as Eugenia at OSNews who think that their complaints are in the interest of usability when they are in fact just being anal, or coders who think they're doing usability a service by doing all sorts of crazy things (cf Havoc Pennington, who is a fantastic programmer, and his campaign as a self-proclaimed usability expert to see how few options he can get gnome programs to present to the user). These people don't have any idea what usability actually means. Not that I have a grand set of interface guidelines or anything, but usability has a lot more to do with annoyances like the farce which was the RH8 menu mess than with dialogs having "OK/cancel" where they 'should' have "yes/no", or whether dialog buttons are inconsistent across the system as to being truly rectangular or having rounded corners.
In other news, a forest composed mostly of fungus in Siberia has been proclaimed the largest full-scale model of the minds of Slashdot editors. "The largest dissimilarity between the model and what it represents," said the scientist making the press release, "seems to be that the fungus, through its slow evolutionary and adaptive processes, could almost be said to have a memory of past events and of what has and has not succeeded in the past."
DUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUP (initials of proteins coded for by an excerpt of a string of DNA common to all/. editors)
Kids below a certain maturity level (which comes around 13 for many kids) shouldn't be playing games with real violence, as they have a hard time distancing themselves from the action rationally. The ESRB ratings do a fairly good job of making this distinction with the E rating. However, the ESRB ratings are in my opinion mostly useless otherwise. The rating system really should be able to distinguish between games like Serious Sam (which I would quite possibly feel ok about letting a 13-yr-old play) and games like Vice City (which I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable playing myself).
Slashdot Mirror
I know Knopper is already putting extra effort into this, but Linux hardware detection and autoconfiguration is still one of its weakest areas. There are some kinds of devices which get detected and configured fairly reliably, but not nearly enough kinds of hardware fall into this group.
95% of humans in Utah Valley, the place where SCO and Novell are both based, are mormon. Between 2/3 and 3/4 of Utahns are mormon. Given this, it would, ignoring other factors, seem to be more of a conspiracy that SCO members are predominately male than that they are predominately mormon.
Sure, Utah isn't a Mormon state, in the sense of religion-controlled state. But here in Utah Valley, where SCO and Novell are both located, around 95% of the residents are Mormons, and statewide the figure is between 2/3 and 3/4. Neither SCO nor Novell have a religion-based hiring policy, it's just that the vast majority of people in the area are Mormon.
Though a real market in these kind of things seems terribly sick and wrong to me, a "fantasy market" for world politics might be fun for a lot of people who follow global events closely, just as "fantasy sports" attract a lot of people who follow players' stats. Of course, I wouldn't depend on any of the predictions of such a market if I were part of the administration, CIA, DoD, or whatever, but I don't think the market model works too well for this anyway.
Attempts to target individual file swappers? Isn't this what they ought to be doing (though they admittedly ought to be working to make these criminal, not civil, cases)? People who break the law ought to be prosecuted. The problem is when the RIAA etc try to go after computer corporations for making devices which don't guarantee that their users can't use them to break the law, search engines which auto-index pages which happen to link to illegal files, people using the devices they bought and the CDs they bought in ways not normally illegal but not allowed because the device's built in copy protection device didn't anticipate those uses, etc.
The RIAA and MPAA have been thoroughly and justly criticised for trying to punish people who make tools which can be (ab)used to break the law or for using schemes which try to make any illegal use of their products impossible but not only fail miserably but prevent plenty of legal uses. Their insistency on being able to control everything the user can do with bought merchandise has justly been lampooned. However, I have no sympathy for those who think actual copyright violations should be ignored and copyright law should disappear.
It's not like I'm a fan of the US subsidy system either. It's a menace. One firsthand example- I live in a mostly-desert state which has had 5+ years of drought, and yet you find huge green alfalfa fields in the middle of the sagebrush, sustained at the expense of the rest of the economy.
However, there are plenty of benefits of all sorts to be realized from GM foods (assuming that they don't bring in a Monsanto IP crop control as well). Lower water use, reduced or eliminated need for pesticides, increased nutritional value (surely you've heard of golden rice and its potential to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children suffering from vitamin deficency- as well as the general chagrin that such a lifesaving tool is generally under corporate control), easy delivery of vaccines, etc, etc.
The trouble is that until the scaremongered stop believing that GM foods will give them cancer, reduce their sexual performance, and sprout carnivorous quadruped descendants, politicians will respond to the imaginary threat, not the real one of corporate control and abuse.
Oh, and also, as somebody pointed out elsewhere, the European practice of using a ban on GM food as a way to boost the EU's already ludicrous agricultural subsidies is at least as large a factor in the debate as any concern for the environment or peoples' health.
The European paranoia concerning GM foods is entirely unjustified and irrational, much more so than even the American paranoia concerning nuclear power (for a funny satire of which see The Hazards of Solar Energy). The problem with GM foods, however, is the current control of and potential for abuse of GM crops by corporations. However, since it's a lot easier to do scare-mongering by saying that GM crops cause cancer, thyroid problems, premature aging, nearsightedness, tire sidewall blowout, and loss of balance to the Force than by explaining that GM food as currently controlled by Monsanto etc is a huge IP mess, Europeans are convinced of the former.
Star Wars Episode I: Racer was more fun than the movie - while it lasted (which was not very long, especially if you weren't on a good LAN to play multiplayer on). In fact, Racer was the game which finally convinced me to get a video card with 3d acceleration.
Speaking of Settlers of Catan, check out the gnome version: gnocatan. Major improvements (incl GTK/GNOME 2 move) are slated for RSN, and the next release should be great.
If everybody figures they won't install and run 2.6.0 but will give it some time to stabilize, it never will stabilize. Since not enough people tested late development kernels, they started calling the kernels 'pre-stable'. Since not enough people test pre-stable kernels, they just put it out as 'stable version.0'. As more and more people start avoiding stable.[012] kernels, they'll have to start bumping the revision number to compensate.
I'm not against efforts to establish universal benefits in nations in attempts to assist human welfare in those states, and while I suspect that Estonia will find that they would have been better served by a free market as regards Internet access, it is quite possible that providing universal access through the state will turn out to have been a very good decision. However, calling benefits such as this "human rights" is ludicrous and undermines the entire notion of rights, thus eroding not only efforts to establish human rights throughout the world but also the very foundation on which the modern state is built.
The EU is working on a bill of rights equivalent- and included are things like the right to free job placement services, workers' comp, etc. IMHO, this is ludicrous. The conflation of universal human rights with the universal benefits of an advanced semi-socialist society does no favor to either human rights or human welfare.
This post was not offtopic; don't mod what you can't read.
A standard commentary on this is that the 'little children' is a definite KJV mistranslation, and that the people who came to him were probably adolescent boys who had been paid to bring water to sustain Jericho while the spring there was bitter (salty; the story is recounted in the four verses immediately previous to the passage you quoted, v 19-22; Jericho is below sea level near the Dead Sea and thus it wouldn't be too strange for salt water to end up in their water table). Having been deprived of their livelihood by Elisha when he healed the spring and thus eliminated the need for bringing fresh water into the city, they were outside the city jeering Elisha as he left, waiting until he came in range that they could stone him.
I think the commentary is Talmudic and old enough that it quite possibly in some form predated the compilation of 2 Kings. I could be wrong, my memory isn't fantastic.
It's not mostly about the amount of violence and sex in the game, it's about the message which the game tries to send. The situation is very much the same as with books- Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov depicts a world with plenty of violence and sex but sends a strong message of faith. As plenty of others have pointed out, the Bible is the same way. There are plenty of books with little or no violence or sex which nevertheless broadcast a message of nihilism, selfishness, and immorality.
:)
As far as I can tell, these games don't really send any message at all (unless it's that missionary work, even among demons, is ridiculously easy, just point and zap), much less one of true faith. If you're going to be playing a FPS which is designed not to send any message, you might as well enjoy it and have it be Serious Sam (with the 'hippie gore' option turned on if you prefer lower levels of blood, etc)
Serious Sam (both the first and second encounters) are the only PC titles I've seen with multiplayer play on one computer (split-screen), and their cooperative mode is fun. I would assume they've got the same cooperative mode in the xbox version.
Actually, I really like Matheson, and would have stumped for him if he were in my district (I live in Provo). I fail to see that Hatch has generally had a record of "trying to force religious tenets and restrictions into laws", though, and there's a world of difference between him and the overly sensationalistic, I-want-to-have-every-environmentalist-hung Hansen (ugh!). You'll note that I said "the careful gerrymandering of our terrible state legislature"- our "gun-toting, even-slightly-moderate-booing, viciously gerrymandering, education-dismantling" state legislature, as I described it in another post.
Maybe I am a "religious crazy bible thumper"- I am a devout Mormon- but I'm definitely not hard-right nor a woman-hater.
I am a mormon as well (active and in good standing, planning on going on a mission soon) - and a supporter of SUWA. Using the resources we've been given doesn't imply using them thoughtlessly- and while there are plenty of nuts and whackos in the broader environmentalist movement, most of the goals sought for by environmentalists are perfectly sincere and reasonable and fully compatible with wise human use of the earth. On the Utah wilderness issue, for instance, the vast majority of all proposed wilderness is entirely unsuited for any development, and there's no reason to have roads criscrossing that land except to try to defeat those who want it protected.
You'll note that I wrote of moral "liberalism", not fiscal liberalism. While I'd rather not argue fiscal points with you now (though I agree with many points of conservative fiscal policy), I'm sure we are in agreement that moral "liberalism" is a genuinely terrible thing, stances against which are the only political stances taken by the church.
BTW, one may ask, why are Utah Mormons and so many other deeply religious groups so often anti-environmentalist? I think it's largely because their politicians have told them they are for the last 25 years. You'd think more people would realize that deep respect for all Creation and thoughtless pollution and destruction of the environment are not consistent with each other, but the association of environmentalism with the Democratic and Green parties and the association of those parties with moral "liberalism" seems to cloud people's judgement.
Yes, he has been fairly peristent in his wrongheadedness about copyrights, and that dates back further than the DMCA. Yes, that wrongheadedness was rewarded by the lobbyists. That doesn't affect his record in other areas, and I would suggest that you refrain from insulting other people, myself included, just because they don't share your single-issue zealotry.
Senator Hatch is, overall, a great guy. The other congressmen from Utah (except for Jim Matheson, a moderate Democrat who managed to barely hold on to his House seat despite the careful gerrymandering of our terrible State Legislature) vote harder-than-hard-line Republican, often seemingly without any thought. Hatch has genuinely tried to investigate the issues and work towards solutions- even though the solutions he engineers get fairly widely booed in Utah since they may deviate from the Party Line. In just about all previous instances when I have disagreed with Sen. Hatch's views, I have nevertheless felt them to be well-reasoned and somewhat justified.
This time around constitutes an exception. Everybody makes stupid mistakes once in a while, and I hope Hatch manages to pull a course correction on this issue pretty soon.
The problem I see is that you get self-proclaimed usability experts such as Eugenia at OSNews who think that their complaints are in the interest of usability when they are in fact just being anal, or coders who think they're doing usability a service by doing all sorts of crazy things (cf Havoc Pennington, who is a fantastic programmer, and his campaign as a self-proclaimed usability expert to see how few options he can get gnome programs to present to the user). These people don't have any idea what usability actually means. Not that I have a grand set of interface guidelines or anything, but usability has a lot more to do with annoyances like the farce which was the RH8 menu mess than with dialogs having "OK/cancel" where they 'should' have "yes/no", or whether dialog buttons are inconsistent across the system as to being truly rectangular or having rounded corners.
In other news, a forest composed mostly of fungus in Siberia has been proclaimed the largest full-scale model of the minds of Slashdot editors. "The largest dissimilarity between the model and what it represents," said the scientist making the press release, "seems to be that the fungus, through its slow evolutionary and adaptive processes, could almost be said to have a memory of past events and of what has and has not succeeded in the past."
P /. editors)
DUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDUPDU
(initials of proteins coded for by an excerpt of a string of DNA common to all
Kids below a certain maturity level (which comes around 13 for many kids) shouldn't be playing games with real violence, as they have a hard time distancing themselves from the action rationally. The ESRB ratings do a fairly good job of making this distinction with the E rating. However, the ESRB ratings are in my opinion mostly useless otherwise. The rating system really should be able to distinguish between games like Serious Sam (which I would quite possibly feel ok about letting a 13-yr-old play) and games like Vice City (which I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable playing myself).