I think it just makes good sense to tax Internet sales. The mail-order tax loophole has always been a bit of a problem, but the Internet blew it wide open, and e-commerce is hurting states' revenues badly. (In my state, budget shortages are taken out on the education budget, and I feel it is very safe to say that Internet sales have had a noticeable though indirect negative effect on the quality of public education here.)
While it's true that the lack of sales tax has been responsible for much of the growth of mail-order and internet shops, Internet shops generally can offer things at lower prices than the local brick-and-mortar due to cost-cutting through automation and larger volumes of merchandise. In addition, while some people may find that their local shops are once again competitive for some of their in-stock items, Internet shops are able to offer a much wider variety of stock. Closing the loophole wouldn't, in and of itself, kill (or even seriously maim) e-commerce. Anybody who tells you so is just whining about the possibility of being required to actually be honest about their taxes.
The thing to worry about is the implementation. If the states can put together an implementation which can be relied on and trusted by all three sides (net shop, state gov't, consumer) and is practically faultproof, good for them. However, if they try to require a system and sysadmins can't trust it/have to make concessions to be able to run it, it makes buisnesses and consumers very nervous about privacy, or it has a noticeable incidence of error, that could kill e-commerce (and/or backfire on the states and result in an astronomical number of "under-the-table" purchases).
Ah, you meant that, had they held that the common man was too uninformed and/or did not have sound enough judgement to elect a president, they would have actively and specifically denied the ability of the Legislatures to make the vote popular, but that they passively allowed the Legislatures to choose popular vote. The thought may not have even crossed their minds that the Legislature could have chosen in this manner. My original comment was in response to the position, which I was mistaken in ascribing to you, that they actively permitted popular vote as a method, in other words, that they specifically allowed for the possibility.
Analogy: whitelist vs blacklist popup blocking. When someone says that they permitted site n to use popups, I think they are talking about placing them on a whitelist; you are thinking they refrained from placing them on a blacklist.
Sorry about the misunderstanding. I still think, however, that their failure to 'blacklist' choosing by popular vote hardly implicates them in thinking that such was a possible, and much less that they thought it was a reasonable, method of choosing.
The Founders did not provide for a popular vote for the office of President. The President was to be elected by electors, who are chosen as follows:
Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.
By no means was this to be a popular election or anything close to it. This is a lot closer to the original method of selecting members of the Senate than it is to the method of selecting members of the House. In fact, it seems to say that the Founders felt that not only the common people but also state legislatures were unqualified to choose a president. The members of the Electoral College were originally not supposed to cast their votes according to the popular vote or even the vote of state legislatures; they were to select the president based on their own best judgement.
This is false. The Mozilla prefetching is only for pages which explicitly request to be prefetched by a or type construction- a slideshow, for instance, might use Moz's link prefetching (since the probability that someone will proceed to the next slide is rather high), but most sites won't.
Of course, they ideally ought to implement blacklist blocking for prefetching so people could exclude sites which use it in ways which affect network traffic adversely enough to be a worry, but my guess is that people won't start abusing it until IE does it as well.
I had the same feeling of shock when I first heard about it a week ago- until I read the FAQ. Remember- any large project like this is unlikely to make highly visible stupid decisions. You linked to the FAQ; please read it.
As I said in another comment: As to the distinction between legal and illegal drugs, I don't mean to put everything legal on one side of the line and everything illegal on the other. The line I meant to draw is between taking drugs (such as prescription drugs when you have an illness) to correct for a real problem in the operation of your body to attempt to restore it to normal operation and drugs (ofttimes but not always illegal) which are taken to mess with the biological system in all sorts of ways without regard for the healthy and normal operation of the body.
I am aware that there is some degree of non-chosen same-sex attraction, but common sense tells us that this is unnatural, since the biological mechanisms behind sexual attraction are there for the purpose of encouraging reproduction. (There are, of course, other reasons, such as statistical studies of factors of mental health, for classifying same-sex attraction as unhealthy.) I'm not saying that people who feel some same-sex attraction are evil, I'm saying that they are ill. However, those who pride themselves on disease instead of attempting to free themselves of it are fairly obviously unstable in some way.
I do not deny that there may be a fair number of people who are openly homosexual but otherwise largely moral. The fact that plenty of people in mental hospitals across the world are nonviolent doesn't mean it's time to give each of them a machete and release them; the same principle applies to the class of mentally ill under discussion.
What is your explanation of social aggregation in nature? Herds, packs, etc? Such societies often have complex rules. Check out studies done on meerkats or gorillas, for example.
Furthermore, the appelation of 'social' was not meant to restrict the range of these ill effects to complex, large scale human societies. One could even say that any time two or more organisms interact there is a society.
Well, for one, the observed tendency is for many (though definitely not all) negative effects of promiscuity, pornography, and homosexuality to be social negative effects. If the harmful effects of these were relatively isolated to the people who involved themselves in them, I would feel sorry that people choose to mess their own lives up but not be concerned in some of the ways I am. (It's the same way with a lot of mind-altering substances- they help produce unstable personalities who are dangerous to others.) Remember, nobody lives in a vacuum/no man is an island; what you do affects other people profoundly.
A few months ago, some pervert broke into a private home 50 miles north of mine in the middle of the night and kidnapped a preteen girl. What scant evidence there is suggests that he did this to sexually abuse her body (which has not yet been found). It is extremely likely that this person had been feeding a psychological abnormality with pornography until this mental disease had taken over. This is a good example of one (somewhat rare) type of effect of 'expressing yourself' and 'freeing your repressed urges' by turning to pornography.
As to the distinction between legal and illegal drugs, I don't mean to put everything legal on one side of the line and everything illegal on the other. The line I meant to draw is between taking drugs (such as prescription drugs when you have an illness) to correct for a real problem in the operation of your body to attempt to restore it to normal operation and drugs (ofttimes but not always illegal) which are taken to mess with the biological system in all sorts of ways without regard for the healthy and normal operation of the body.
Did I say anything about religion or religious books? Did I even say that these things are immoral? No. I said that they are unnatural, unhealthy, and encourage immoral behavior.
I know I really shouldn't be feeding the trolls, but what the heck.
I haven't heard of any such studies, and studies like that tend to get published and get attention only when they have results that the researcher and the media think are really interesting- studies showing the opposite would end up in file drawers with a lot of dust on them. Still, if studies show that lab rats tend to ingest cocaine if it is in their immediate environment, does that show that ingesting cocaine is healthy and natural?
Let's face it, sexual tendencies and related feelings in humans aren't there because it is evolutionarily useful to look at pr0n or have homosexual relations, just as the receptor sites in neurons aren't shaped the way they are in order to bind to LSD.
I firmly believe that promiscuity and homosexuality both constitute being 'truly sick'. You can talk all you want about how urges were 'repressed' and people need to 'express themselves,' but (contrary to popular opinion) psychology does NOT vindicate things like this in the least, and it is NOT psychologically healthy to do so. Pornography, promiscuity, and homosexuality really are like illegal drugs- you tamper with the way your body is ordered in an attempt to produce more pleasure and get all sorts of negative effects. If the Net is providing an 'outlet' for this kind of thing, that would be one of its worst effects, not one of its positive ones.
Modern society is learning the hard way that you can't encourage perversion and expect people to act morally. When we all grasp this basic truth, the world will be a lot better off.
I'm bound to be flamed to death for this. Sometimes the truth is difficult, unpopular, and publicly termed 'intolerant.' It needs to be told nonetheless.
Anything they may be using shareware for is a good candidate. For example, 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) for compressed file operations. I have yet to find a good opensource replacement for download accelerators, which are often shareware.
Don't forget to include some opensource games such as BZFlag and VegaStrike, both on SourceForge.
BTW, Freeciv is great, but its interface on Win32 frankly stinks. It's not likely to win converts.
If I were to run Bash and GCC on Solaris, would anybody tell me I needed to call my system GNU/Solaris? I doubt it- in fact, that probably wouldn't happen even if I used tons of GNU utilities and libraries.
Somebody will say, "That's different- the fact that with Linux you're using GNU libc is what merits calling it GNU/Linux." I see more sense in this argument- after all, the C library is a more integral part of the system than Gnome or Bash. However, I don't see anybody telling me I ought to call my Linux system McGrath-Drepper/Linux.
Just call it linux. Give the FSF credit in less obtrusive ways.
Well, duh. The point is that the book being reviewed, the review itself, and the Slashdot discussion all focus largely (though not entirely) on evolution's percieved enormous impacts on philosophy and theology.
The theory of evolution is almost entirely irrelevant to the fields of philosophy and theology. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, "The Darwinian theory has no more to do with philosophy than has any other hypothesis of natural science."
Philosophy consists of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, and philosophy of language. It is difficult to see any applicability of the theory of evolution in any of these fields. The philosophical argument advanced in the review about the incompatibility of metaphysical idealism with evolution is rather strange. Adherents of the forms of Idealism attacked therein are likely to say that the argument suffers from equivocation. "Species as eternal Forms," I can hear such Idealists saying, "are not sets of animals which can interbreed and have fertile offspring."
The continual Slashdot derision of Creationism is based on a straw man and/or bandwagon argument and the fallacy of the excluded middle. "Creationists all believe the Universe is less than ten thousand years old and was created in exactly the manner described in Genesis; since this view is disproven, God did not create the Universe!" is the line generally taken here, and there should be no need for an explanation of why this is fallacious. Nor is there any serious threat from the people who say "My Google-based Rules/Sucks-o-meter says God did not create the Universe" or "Contemporary Europeans don't believe God created the Universe."
No adherent of any metaphysical or theological/anti-theological position need feel that the above is an argument against that position. I have here argued only against misapplying what I think is a solid scientific theory.
These fonts are still available from the Corefonts project. This is perfectly legal and in accordance with the EULA; see the copy of Microsoft's FAQ. The project also includes "a source rpm that can be used to easily create a binary rpm package that, when installed, gives access to Microsoft's TrueType core fonts for the Web."
One very useful tool for generating.swf is the ming library, which can be used in conjunction with AutoTrace and ImageMagick to convert just about anything to.swf.
It seems to me that several of the most successful open source projects have used multiple licensing. Why not use a dual license? The non-LGPL license would need to be somewhat more restrictive than the X11 license (since there were specific reasons why they wanted to have some copylefting), and I don't know what would fit the bill, but it seems that such a combination would fit the Wine project's needs quite well.
Apparently it was filtered off my homepage by the user homepage script by mistake. Thanks for the notice regardless of the accusation. I've been reading./ fairly carefully since '98, but stories seem to get filtered out for odd reasons or through some mistake occasionally.
For those who expect to find stuff that matters at./, try this: The founder of theKompany said in an interview with linuxandmain that theKompany will no longer use the GPL for any further projects. This might also mean that future versions of their current projects will be relicensed.
If you're going to get more than just one module, then Slackware's ZipSlack mini-distro (distributed starting with version 7) should do quite well on a 386, and it can be migrated from its original UMSDOS filesystem to a ext2 filesystem. Slackware 8's ZipSlack still works on anything with more than 4 MB RAM, and can even work with 4MB if you download an additional file. I would definitely recommend this over Slackware 3.x, unless you want to run a 2.0.x kernel.
And the eternal question is... what? Is it the meaning of life? If so, that question has been answered quite fully by philosophy, see the works of Soren Kierkegaard (religious, optimistic existentialist). If you don't like his approach (you can't object to it on logical terms, it holds up as well as arithmetic does on logical terms, see Godel's proof), then there are a million other answers to that question, some of them a bit odd, but what fits the bill...
I for one am more concerned about the world's ignorance than I am about our health. Ignorance and the resulting meaningless are the world's biggest problems today. What are 6 billion meaningless but healthy lives? Bacteria. Is SETI a step towards "knowing"? How about distributed voodoo?
"Know thyself" is the ancient proverb, and it persists today. The only knowledge which can truly give us purpose and provide more than an empty motivation is knowledge of existence, knowledge of ourselves- not in the statistical sense but in the philosophical. Finding aliens won't give us that.
However, you can't have a distributed Socrates. Statistical/scientific knowledge is still worth having, for better understanding our world and universe can help us better understand ourselves. For distributed tools, we need to be realistic and work for what we can learn. I suggest the genome and protein folding because they are areas which are currently promising for statistical/scientific knowledge, not because of a cure for cancer.
I find "purpose" not in looking at a one in ten quadrillion squared chance of getting a random transmission from other lifeforms, but in helping knowledge-especially the kind of knowledge which you alluded to but/.ers seem to reject continuously, a knowledge which provides a purpose to life beyond the purposes found in a bacterium. I know that ideas like Kierkegaard's have reworked every part of my daily outlook, my goals, my attitudes, my comforts, my concerns, etc; looking for sentient life forms elsewhere in the universe isn't going to give us that kind of help. In my opinion, each and every Gideon bible in a hotel room provides just as much towards enlightenment as any alien group could possibly give, even if you're an atheist.
Enlightenment is not dependent on my knowledge of some group of aliens. It is dependent on my knowledge of me, how I should act, how I should think, etc.
Flame me all you want for being philosophical and religious. Flame me all you want for saying that there's something more to life than science fiction. Mod me down to death for not being a bacterium or for going against the/. "grain". I just hope that sometime, somewhere, you will understand the teachings which give meaning, without waiting for some future generation to do it for you (partially because the tools for finding that knowledge have been with man for three thousand years and aren't going to be replaced by new ones).
Slashdot Mirror
I think it just makes good sense to tax Internet sales. The mail-order tax loophole has always been a bit of a problem, but the Internet blew it wide open, and e-commerce is hurting states' revenues badly. (In my state, budget shortages are taken out on the education budget, and I feel it is very safe to say that Internet sales have had a noticeable though indirect negative effect on the quality of public education here.)
While it's true that the lack of sales tax has been responsible for much of the growth of mail-order and internet shops, Internet shops generally can offer things at lower prices than the local brick-and-mortar due to cost-cutting through automation and larger volumes of merchandise. In addition, while some people may find that their local shops are once again competitive for some of their in-stock items, Internet shops are able to offer a much wider variety of stock. Closing the loophole wouldn't, in and of itself, kill (or even seriously maim) e-commerce. Anybody who tells you so is just whining about the possibility of being required to actually be honest about their taxes.
The thing to worry about is the implementation. If the states can put together an implementation which can be relied on and trusted by all three sides (net shop, state gov't, consumer) and is practically faultproof, good for them. However, if they try to require a system and sysadmins can't trust it/have to make concessions to be able to run it, it makes buisnesses and consumers very nervous about privacy, or it has a noticeable incidence of error, that could kill e-commerce (and/or backfire on the states and result in an astronomical number of "under-the-table" purchases).
Ah, you meant that, had they held that the common man was too uninformed and/or did not have sound enough judgement to elect a president, they would have actively and specifically denied the ability of the Legislatures to make the vote popular, but that they passively allowed the Legislatures to choose popular vote. The thought may not have even crossed their minds that the Legislature could have chosen in this manner. My original comment was in response to the position, which I was mistaken in ascribing to you, that they actively permitted popular vote as a method, in other words, that they specifically allowed for the possibility.
Analogy: whitelist vs blacklist popup blocking. When someone says that they permitted site n to use popups, I think they are talking about placing them on a whitelist; you are thinking they refrained from placing them on a blacklist.
Sorry about the misunderstanding. I still think, however, that their failure to 'blacklist' choosing by popular vote hardly implicates them in thinking that such was a possible, and much less that they thought it was a reasonable, method of choosing.
By no means was this to be a popular election or anything close to it. This is a lot closer to the original method of selecting members of the Senate than it is to the method of selecting members of the House. In fact, it seems to say that the Founders felt that not only the common people but also state legislatures were unqualified to choose a president. The members of the Electoral College were originally not supposed to cast their votes according to the popular vote or even the vote of state legislatures; they were to select the president based on their own best judgement.
Serial ATA support is in Linux 2.5.35 and up, as noted here.
Ack. Slashdot stripped the tags (even though I told it to format as Plain Old Text). That would be a "link rel=prefetch" or "link next=" construction.
This is false. The Mozilla prefetching is only for pages which explicitly request to be prefetched by a or type construction- a slideshow, for instance, might use Moz's link prefetching (since the probability that someone will proceed to the next slide is rather high), but most sites won't.
Of course, they ideally ought to implement blacklist blocking for prefetching so people could exclude sites which use it in ways which affect network traffic adversely enough to be a worry, but my guess is that people won't start abusing it until IE does it as well.
I had the same feeling of shock when I first heard about it a week ago- until I read the FAQ. Remember- any large project like this is unlikely to make highly visible stupid decisions. You linked to the FAQ; please read it.
As I said in another comment:
As to the distinction between legal and illegal drugs, I don't mean to put everything legal on one side of the line and everything illegal on the other. The line I meant to draw is between taking drugs (such as prescription drugs when you have an illness) to correct for a real problem in the operation of your body to attempt to restore it to normal operation and drugs (ofttimes but not always illegal) which are taken to mess with the biological system in all sorts of ways without regard for the healthy and normal operation of the body.
I am aware that there is some degree of non-chosen same-sex attraction, but common sense tells us that this is unnatural, since the biological mechanisms behind sexual attraction are there for the purpose of encouraging reproduction. (There are, of course, other reasons, such as statistical studies of factors of mental health, for classifying same-sex attraction as unhealthy.) I'm not saying that people who feel some same-sex attraction are evil, I'm saying that they are ill. However, those who pride themselves on disease instead of attempting to free themselves of it are fairly obviously unstable in some way.
I do not deny that there may be a fair number of people who are openly homosexual but otherwise largely moral. The fact that plenty of people in mental hospitals across the world are nonviolent doesn't mean it's time to give each of them a machete and release them; the same principle applies to the class of mentally ill under discussion.
What is your explanation of social aggregation in nature? Herds, packs, etc? Such societies often have complex rules. Check out studies done on meerkats or gorillas, for example.
Furthermore, the appelation of 'social' was not meant to restrict the range of these ill effects to complex, large scale human societies. One could even say that any time two or more organisms interact there is a society.
Well, for one, the observed tendency is for many (though definitely not all) negative effects of promiscuity, pornography, and homosexuality to be social negative effects. If the harmful effects of these were relatively isolated to the people who involved themselves in them, I would feel sorry that people choose to mess their own lives up but not be concerned in some of the ways I am. (It's the same way with a lot of mind-altering substances- they help produce unstable personalities who are dangerous to others.) Remember, nobody lives in a vacuum/no man is an island; what you do affects other people profoundly.
A few months ago, some pervert broke into a private home 50 miles north of mine in the middle of the night and kidnapped a preteen girl. What scant evidence there is suggests that he did this to sexually abuse her body (which has not yet been found). It is extremely likely that this person had been feeding a psychological abnormality with pornography until this mental disease had taken over. This is a good example of one (somewhat rare) type of effect of 'expressing yourself' and 'freeing your repressed urges' by turning to pornography.
As to the distinction between legal and illegal drugs, I don't mean to put everything legal on one side of the line and everything illegal on the other. The line I meant to draw is between taking drugs (such as prescription drugs when you have an illness) to correct for a real problem in the operation of your body to attempt to restore it to normal operation and drugs (ofttimes but not always illegal) which are taken to mess with the biological system in all sorts of ways without regard for the healthy and normal operation of the body.
Did I say anything about religion or religious books? Did I even say that these things are immoral? No. I said that they are unnatural, unhealthy, and encourage immoral behavior.
I know I really shouldn't be feeding the trolls, but what the heck.
I haven't heard of any such studies, and studies like that tend to get published and get attention only when they have results that the researcher and the media think are really interesting- studies showing the opposite would end up in file drawers with a lot of dust on them. Still, if studies show that lab rats tend to ingest cocaine if it is in their immediate environment, does that show that ingesting cocaine is healthy and natural?
Let's face it, sexual tendencies and related feelings in humans aren't there because it is evolutionarily useful to look at pr0n or have homosexual relations, just as the receptor sites in neurons aren't shaped the way they are in order to bind to LSD.
I firmly believe that promiscuity and homosexuality both constitute being 'truly sick'. You can talk all you want about how urges were 'repressed' and people need to 'express themselves,' but (contrary to popular opinion) psychology does NOT vindicate things like this in the least, and it is NOT psychologically healthy to do so. Pornography, promiscuity, and homosexuality really are like illegal drugs- you tamper with the way your body is ordered in an attempt to produce more pleasure and get all sorts of negative effects. If the Net is providing an 'outlet' for this kind of thing, that would be one of its worst effects, not one of its positive ones.
Modern society is learning the hard way that you can't encourage perversion and expect people to act morally. When we all grasp this basic truth, the world will be a lot better off.
I'm bound to be flamed to death for this. Sometimes the truth is difficult, unpopular, and publicly termed 'intolerant.' It needs to be told nonetheless.
Anything they may be using shareware for is a good candidate. For example, 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) for compressed file operations. I have yet to find a good opensource replacement for download accelerators, which are often shareware.
Don't forget to include some opensource games such as BZFlag and VegaStrike, both on SourceForge.
BTW, Freeciv is great, but its interface on Win32 frankly stinks. It's not likely to win converts.
If I were to run Bash and GCC on Solaris, would anybody tell me I needed to call my system GNU/Solaris? I doubt it- in fact, that probably wouldn't happen even if I used tons of GNU utilities and libraries.
Somebody will say, "That's different- the fact that with Linux you're using GNU libc is what merits calling it GNU/Linux." I see more sense in this argument- after all, the C library is a more integral part of the system than Gnome or Bash. However, I don't see anybody telling me I ought to call my Linux system McGrath-Drepper/Linux.
Just call it linux. Give the FSF credit in less obtrusive ways.
Well, duh. The point is that the book being reviewed, the review itself, and the Slashdot discussion all focus largely (though not entirely) on evolution's percieved enormous impacts on philosophy and theology.
The theory of evolution is almost entirely irrelevant to the fields of philosophy and theology. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, "The Darwinian theory has no more to do with philosophy than has any other hypothesis of natural science."
Philosophy consists of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, and philosophy of language. It is difficult to see any applicability of the theory of evolution in any of these fields. The philosophical argument advanced in the review about the incompatibility of metaphysical idealism with evolution is rather strange. Adherents of the forms of Idealism attacked therein are likely to say that the argument suffers from equivocation. "Species as eternal Forms," I can hear such Idealists saying, "are not sets of animals which can interbreed and have fertile offspring."
The continual Slashdot derision of Creationism is based on a straw man and/or bandwagon argument and the fallacy of the excluded middle. "Creationists all believe the Universe is less than ten thousand years old and was created in exactly the manner described in Genesis; since this view is disproven, God did not create the Universe!" is the line generally taken here, and there should be no need for an explanation of why this is fallacious. Nor is there any serious threat from the people who say "My Google-based Rules/Sucks-o-meter says God did not create the Universe" or "Contemporary Europeans don't believe God created the Universe."
No adherent of any metaphysical or theological/anti-theological position need feel that the above is an argument against that position. I have here argued only against misapplying what I think is a solid scientific theory.
These fonts are still available from the Corefonts project. This is perfectly legal and in accordance with the EULA; see the copy of Microsoft's FAQ. The project also includes "a source rpm that can be used to easily create a binary rpm package that, when installed, gives access to Microsoft's TrueType core fonts for the Web."
One very useful tool for generating .swf is the ming library, which can be used in conjunction with AutoTrace and ImageMagick to convert just about anything to .swf.
It seems to me that several of the most successful open source projects have used multiple licensing. Why not use a dual license? The non-LGPL license would need to be somewhat more restrictive than the X11 license (since there were specific reasons why they wanted to have some copylefting), and I don't know what would fit the bill, but it seems that such a combination would fit the Wine project's needs quite well.
Apparently it was filtered off my homepage by the user homepage script by mistake. Thanks for the notice regardless of the accusation. I've been reading ./ fairly carefully since '98, but stories seem to get filtered out for odd reasons or through some mistake occasionally.
For those who expect to find stuff that matters at ./, try this: The founder of theKompany said in an interview with linuxandmain that theKompany will no longer use the GPL for any further projects. This might also mean that future versions of their current projects will be relicensed.
Oops... ZipSlack was first in 3.4, not 7.0. My bad. (And I assumed that chips smaller than 4 MiB are out of the question.)
If you're going to get more than just one module, then Slackware's ZipSlack mini-distro (distributed starting with version 7) should do quite well on a 386, and it can be migrated from its original UMSDOS filesystem to a ext2 filesystem. Slackware 8's ZipSlack still works on anything with more than 4 MB RAM, and can even work with 4MB if you download an additional file. I would definitely recommend this over Slackware 3.x, unless you want to run a 2.0.x kernel.
And the eternal question is... what? Is it the meaning of life? If so, that question has been answered quite fully by philosophy, see the works of Soren Kierkegaard (religious, optimistic existentialist). If you don't like his approach (you can't object to it on logical terms, it holds up as well as arithmetic does on logical terms, see Godel's proof), then there are a million other answers to that question, some of them a bit odd, but what fits the bill...
/.ers seem to reject continuously, a knowledge which provides a purpose to life beyond the purposes found in a bacterium. I know that ideas like Kierkegaard's have reworked every part of my daily outlook, my goals, my attitudes, my comforts, my concerns, etc; looking for sentient life forms elsewhere in the universe isn't going to give us that kind of help. In my opinion, each and every Gideon bible in a hotel room provides just as much towards enlightenment as any alien group could possibly give, even if you're an atheist.
/. "grain". I just hope that sometime, somewhere, you will understand the teachings which give meaning, without waiting for some future generation to do it for you (partially because the tools for finding that knowledge have been with man for three thousand years and aren't going to be replaced by new ones).
I for one am more concerned about the world's ignorance than I am about our health. Ignorance and the resulting meaningless are the world's biggest problems today. What are 6 billion meaningless but healthy lives? Bacteria. Is SETI a step towards "knowing"? How about distributed voodoo?
"Know thyself" is the ancient proverb, and it persists today. The only knowledge which can truly give us purpose and provide more than an empty motivation is knowledge of existence, knowledge of ourselves- not in the statistical sense but in the philosophical. Finding aliens won't give us that.
However, you can't have a distributed Socrates. Statistical/scientific knowledge is still worth having, for better understanding our world and universe can help us better understand ourselves. For distributed tools, we need to be realistic and work for what we can learn. I suggest the genome and protein folding because they are areas which are currently promising for statistical/scientific knowledge, not because of a cure for cancer.
I find "purpose" not in looking at a one in ten quadrillion squared chance of getting a random transmission from other lifeforms, but in helping knowledge-especially the kind of knowledge which you alluded to but
Enlightenment is not dependent on my knowledge of some group of aliens. It is dependent on my knowledge of me, how I should act, how I should think, etc.
Flame me all you want for being philosophical and religious. Flame me all you want for saying that there's something more to life than science fiction. Mod me down to death for not being a bacterium or for going against the