You don't get how expensive orchestras can be to run. Even if you sold out the hall, you might not make enough money to pay the salaries of the musicians and the salaries of the coat-check army and other concert hall caretakers, and pay the copyright fees of repertoire that isn't yet in the public domain, and so on and so forth. Even with a full house on most nights, orchestras need funding from elsewhere to stay afloat. That's either private patronage or state arts funding.
It wasn't internet sales. By the time internet shopping came along, RadioShack had long since lost business to mail-order catalogs. When I became interested in amateur radio in the mid-1990s, few Radio Shacks still had a decent range of components for building your own circuit boards, as hams had increasingly turned to big catalogs that offered a larger selection.
I don't complain so much about your list above as your disingenuous posting style. Your point is valid that, if people don't like a Free Software option, they should try to contribute their own effort instead of complaining of what other devs are doing. But you know perfectly well that there are not "plenty of distros" that are successfully resisting systemd, you know perfectly well that most items in the list you posted are dodgy ports that have no longterm prospectives, and by posting such rubbish you only undermine the other points you are making.
Care to name those "plenty of distros"? Gentoo and Slackware are the only two longtime distros that have resisted systemd, and beyond those, one can only name little-known flavours of Debian or Arch that are already facing problems trying to maintain a systemd-free port, and don't seem promising in the long term?
Pokemon Int'l shouldn't. They should enjoy the free publicity
The entire point of setting up Pokemon Company International was to monetize use of Pokemon imagery. The business model is a lot like Angry Birds: sure, there's a video game involved, but the big profits come from toys and apparel. Someone setting up a party with Pokemon imagery is exactly where PCI aims to generate profit. You don't want "free publicity" from a guy like that, you want payment of licensing fees.
Construction, for example, if a much more fundamental skill, yet shop classes have mostly gone away. Being able to repair a dry wall, fix a broken cabinet or replace the compressor on an old fridge are much more important in your day to day life than being able to code a text editing tool.
I am not so sure about that. Those who rent (owning one's own home is not the norm in many countries, and even some parts of the US) might not be allowed to make such repairs even if they knew how to. And for many other repairs, it may well be that calling in a professional will prove cheaper than buying the tools and investing the time to do it on one's own. Professionals can take advantage of economy of scale, but ordinary people who have to deal with only one breakdown a year or less can't.
You just prove my point, my man. The issue isn't whether you are comfortable with your body odour, it's about how the people around you feel. Even when millions of people have limited access to water, they still think about other people.
Until you require your citizens to bathe at least once a week
Look, I would be the first person to criticize Indian standards of hygiene and make one of those "Fix your problems X before doing Y, India" posts: after traveling around India for half a year, and just before I was supposed to fly out, I ended up spending nearly a month in a Delhi hospital after either drinking bad water or eating food that wasn't prepared in a sanitary fashion. The country has a big problem with ensuring treated water, disposing of sewage, and washing hands well when serving food.
But where foreigners have no right to criticize Indians is bathing. Indians bathe regularly, and I've been impressed to see even the poorest of the poor using any public source of water they could to thoroughly scrub every morning. Indians know how much sweat and odor a tropical or sub-tropical climate could produce. It is often Westerners who are considered the unwashed there.
You know, even if you oppose religion (or, conversely, atheism), considering it appropriate that people hide their particular beliefs when they are expressly asked about them seems to me a denial of the entire Western tradition. You cannot use the Socratic method to encourage critical thinking if you cannot draw out people's suppositions and then reveal weaknesses in them.
The 8-bit computers of the early to mid 80s are way simpler to understand and hack on for a kid than an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
If desired, a Raspberry Pi can be set up to dump the user right into an interpreted language. A child today can have the same experience as the early-mid 1980s plus a myriad of other ways to tinker, ranging from a variety of scripted languages to compiled code and even poking hardware values (all of which are well-documented on the Pi).
And while a compiler or whatever might have seemed baffling to you as a child back then, that is probably only because in a pre-internet era there was so little information available from which to learn. Kids today can easily get a click-by-click introduction to setting dev stuff up. Sure, they will initially be copying-and-pasting and cargo-culting functionality, but they can still quickly move forward.
Oh, yes, and I know there was Applescript and Hypercard too, but those are still more abstracted from the machine than other things that a budding dev would like to do.
Oh, come on, it's easier for young people today to get into the guts of computing than ever before. I remember as a child, the most I could do with my parent's Mac was play with Resedit or create little Forth programs that could hardly interface with the OS. All the cool stuff (C compilers, documentation) was extremely expensive. It was only in the 1990s that, thanks to the convergence of Free Software and x86, a person could get a serious dev environment for cheap. Kids these days can get a Raspberry Pi for cheap, install Linux, and immediately have access to all kinds of ways to tinker -- even quasi-professional documentation like O'Reilly books is free today thanks to torrents.
No, not a syllogism, and if you know a term of logic like that, then you should probably also already be aware that argument from etymology is a fallacy. While the word "personal" is historically derived from the word "person", it has developed a new set of connotations, such as "something to be kept to oneself or disclosed only to confidants".
Having read the original book (and would highly recommend it), I still expect to be disappointed by the film adaptation. The science in the film may be solid, and we can indeed be grateful for that, but there are other aspects of adapting a novel where Hollywood can make the result feel compromised. Think of all the tired old tropes they could throw in there, like slow-motion shots of characters at poignant times, an intrusive film score that tries to jerk the audience emotionally in a particular direction, or the acting itself where it's hard to suspend disbelief when it's Matt Damon up there and he's not known for smoothly entering into roles and going unrecognized as Matt Damon.
This is a fabrication and I refer you to the Jewish historian Bernard Lewis' account of the Jewish experience post-Spain.
Not a fabrication at all, and again, I wonder if you even try to read sources before you claim that someone else's statement is a fabrication. Read about the mellah, and that article even cites indirectly a publication by Bernard Lewis where he points out that Jewish life was not as rosy as some Muslims claim..
If by "decline" you mean "rose to greater wealth than in their home nations".
Again you are deliberately misquoting people here. I specifically said "demographic decline, and I was mainly speaking about Christians. The weath to which these minorities may have had access as they became a shrinking percentage of the population is irrelevant here.
...actively participated in government right up to national government level.
It doesn't matter how high they soared in administration. If they were forbidden from becoming head of state, then they still faced discrimination.
...provided independence including the legal right to govern their communities based on their own religious or cultural laws...
That's not enough for freedom of religion. They were denied the right to invite Muslims to their faith, and therefore they were treated well.
[citation needed]. Also, this and this kinda ruins your "Muslims hate Jews" narrative.
Did you even read the Wikipedia article you linked to? It only proves the OP's point: "Like all non-Muslims, Jews... faced other restrictions in clothing, horse riding, army service etc." (I found this informative, I thought that the horse-riding restriction was only imposed on refugee Jews in the Maghreb.)
And you completely skipped over the OP's mention that Christians were forbidden from ringing bells and the conversion of churches into mosques by force. That is awfully disingenous. If you sincerely want to defend Islam against critiques that may be unfair, then you still have to acknowledge and rebut all attacks. Remaining silent as you did here really only weakens your own cause.
When Muslims acted as a political bloc, the overwhelming majority of political interactions were positive.
Just because there wasn't outright slaughter does not make for positive interaction. Freedom of religion inherently involves being allowed to build new places of worship for one's religion or renovate older ones. It involves being allowed to invite others to one's faith and to display symbols of one's faith (like a cross on churches). These things were missing in Muslim-ruled states for most of the history of Islam.
Even those Jews from Spain were treated unfairly. They may have been accepted in Muslim countries, and they were certainly fleeing a horrid Reconquista, but in their new homelands they faced a new set of challenges such as being forced to live in districts set aside for them instead among the general population, being forbidden from riding a horse, and so on.
An honest and comprehensive reading of history simply does not support the proposition that Muslims are a sleeping mass of West-hating, xenophobic barbarians, waiting for the right moment to cleanse the world of infidels.
If you want to be taken seriously here, you need to stop deliberately misinterpeting those to whom you respond. I never said that Muslims are xenophobic or barbaric. And I would suspect that for the majority of Muslims in states with historically Christian and/or Jewish minorities, they tried to explain the discriminatory strictures placed on religious minorities away. Even today you can hear, "Oh, it's just to keep the peace", or "They can believe what they want as long as they don't seek to convert Muslims", or "They just need to pay this large tax because we won't let them serve in the army". I don't believe that most Muslims think very actively about eradicating the infidel. However, the end result for non-Muslim religions in the "Muslim world" was still the same: demographic decline, political disempowerment, and a whole host of laws that applied to them and not to Muslims.
Our religion has a 1,400 year history of living side by side with Christians, Jews, fire worshippers, and atheists, even within the borders of Muslim nations, without incident.
Oh, there has been plenty of incident. To mention one thing that has been on my mind with the war in Syria of late, one thing that struck me traveling there before the war is that even under the "anti-fundamentalist" Assad regime, Christians were forbidden by law from putting crosses on their places of worship or inviting Muslims to their faith, while among Muslims it was completely allowed to engage in da'wah among the Christian population. As I would later discover, this discrimination in law holds for most Muslim states.
I wouldn't disagree that most of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world are peaceful in individual interaction, and I'm certainly grateful for the immense hospitality I have received across the Muslim world from the Maghreb to southeast Asia. But when this population acts as a political bloc, I don't believe that the outcome is as pleasant for non-Muslim minorities as you claim.
The ALA has been speaking out against the section 215 of the PATRIOT act (the one used to justify mass metadata collection) since day 1 because it could be used to snoop on people's library records.
While the ALA is the largest professional body for librarians in the United States, it doesn't speak for all librarians. There have been many ordinary librarians and library boards across the country who have opposed the ALA's privacy efforts in the last 15 years (or even further back), identifying it with a partisan political cause that they don't share.
In place of "people in the developing world", I actually meant to write "in the developed world", but in fact, it makes no difference. Android phones (even if they have to be bought on credit) are increasingly common even in the Third World that a decade or two ago would have seemed the antithesis of technological.
Where have I heard this idea before? Oh yeah... it's called The Unix Philosophy.
Indeed. I've been using Linux since the turn of the millennium, but in the last couple of years I've been trying to gain a more proficient command of Unix standard utils and piping commands with tutorials like O'Reilly's Classic Shell Scripting. I feel like a computing god, and friends and relatives are baffled at how I can so quickly solve computing needs that, they believed, would have to take minutes or hours of laborious pointing and clicking.
And that's why I find the premise of this article so odd. The average public does not seem to me on the cusp of a programming revolution. I might as well link here to Philip Guo's essay The Two Cultures of Computing, a.k.a. "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down on UNIX After They've Seen Spotify?". The interfaces ordinary people use so hide hackability that they generally forget it even exists.* Plus, with people in the developing world starting to do more and more of their computing on their phone, a device without a real keyboard, they are hardly able to do all the typing that coding requires.
(Perversely, this might be something that millions of people should be thankful for: that ignorance is why they still have jobs. So much time-consuming work could be done in a much shorter time were the Unix philosophy applied. If scripting were something that managers keen on every possible costsaving measure were strongly aware of, even more jobs would be automated away.)
These quack papers on ancient Indian aviation were written by some retired pilot not Indian *scientists*.
I work in a field in which Hindutva fundamentalists are a prominent presence. Papers making the same claims of early Indian aviation and advanced weaponry, published by actual faculty at Indian universities, are a common sight.
It's a good thing this sort of quackery is limited to India and Russia. I'd be pretty embarrassed if we had some of our people claiming that the world was only a few thousand years old, that climate change doesn't exist, and that we didn't evolve over time but were all designed by a supernatural entity.
These two situations are not comparable. Yes, the United States has Creationists and such, but they tend to move in their own circles, and even in academia they are found at private Christian universities. In India and Russia however, one tends to see a lot of quackery coming from state-run universities. This is probably facilitated by stronger job security (against much lower salaries) for certain faculty, combined with lower barriers to publication.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't get how expensive orchestras can be to run. Even if you sold out the hall, you might not make enough money to pay the salaries of the musicians and the salaries of the coat-check army and other concert hall caretakers, and pay the copyright fees of repertoire that isn't yet in the public domain, and so on and so forth. Even with a full house on most nights, orchestras need funding from elsewhere to stay afloat. That's either private patronage or state arts funding.
It wasn't internet sales. By the time internet shopping came along, RadioShack had long since lost business to mail-order catalogs. When I became interested in amateur radio in the mid-1990s, few Radio Shacks still had a decent range of components for building your own circuit boards, as hams had increasingly turned to big catalogs that offered a larger selection.
I don't complain so much about your list above as your disingenuous posting style. Your point is valid that, if people don't like a Free Software option, they should try to contribute their own effort instead of complaining of what other devs are doing. But you know perfectly well that there are not "plenty of distros" that are successfully resisting systemd, you know perfectly well that most items in the list you posted are dodgy ports that have no longterm prospectives, and by posting such rubbish you only undermine the other points you are making.
Care to name those "plenty of distros"? Gentoo and Slackware are the only two longtime distros that have resisted systemd, and beyond those, one can only name little-known flavours of Debian or Arch that are already facing problems trying to maintain a systemd-free port, and don't seem promising in the long term?
The entire point of setting up Pokemon Company International was to monetize use of Pokemon imagery. The business model is a lot like Angry Birds: sure, there's a video game involved, but the big profits come from toys and apparel. Someone setting up a party with Pokemon imagery is exactly where PCI aims to generate profit. You don't want "free publicity" from a guy like that, you want payment of licensing fees.
You can always ask friends or neighbours. Someone who has had a handyman over and is very pleased with his work, is likely to recommend him to others.
I am not so sure about that. Those who rent (owning one's own home is not the norm in many countries, and even some parts of the US) might not be allowed to make such repairs even if they knew how to. And for many other repairs, it may well be that calling in a professional will prove cheaper than buying the tools and investing the time to do it on one's own. Professionals can take advantage of economy of scale, but ordinary people who have to deal with only one breakdown a year or less can't.
You just prove my point, my man. The issue isn't whether you are comfortable with your body odour, it's about how the people around you feel. Even when millions of people have limited access to water, they still think about other people.
Look, I would be the first person to criticize Indian standards of hygiene and make one of those "Fix your problems X before doing Y, India" posts: after traveling around India for half a year, and just before I was supposed to fly out, I ended up spending nearly a month in a Delhi hospital after either drinking bad water or eating food that wasn't prepared in a sanitary fashion. The country has a big problem with ensuring treated water, disposing of sewage, and washing hands well when serving food.
But where foreigners have no right to criticize Indians is bathing. Indians bathe regularly, and I've been impressed to see even the poorest of the poor using any public source of water they could to thoroughly scrub every morning. Indians know how much sweat and odor a tropical or sub-tropical climate could produce. It is often Westerners who are considered the unwashed there.
You know, even if you oppose religion (or, conversely, atheism), considering it appropriate that people hide their particular beliefs when they are expressly asked about them seems to me a denial of the entire Western tradition. You cannot use the Socratic method to encourage critical thinking if you cannot draw out people's suppositions and then reveal weaknesses in them.
If desired, a Raspberry Pi can be set up to dump the user right into an interpreted language. A child today can have the same experience as the early-mid 1980s plus a myriad of other ways to tinker, ranging from a variety of scripted languages to compiled code and even poking hardware values (all of which are well-documented on the Pi).
And while a compiler or whatever might have seemed baffling to you as a child back then, that is probably only because in a pre-internet era there was so little information available from which to learn. Kids today can easily get a click-by-click introduction to setting dev stuff up. Sure, they will initially be copying-and-pasting and cargo-culting functionality, but they can still quickly move forward.
Oh, yes, and I know there was Applescript and Hypercard too, but those are still more abstracted from the machine than other things that a budding dev would like to do.
Oh, come on, it's easier for young people today to get into the guts of computing than ever before. I remember as a child, the most I could do with my parent's Mac was play with Resedit or create little Forth programs that could hardly interface with the OS. All the cool stuff (C compilers, documentation) was extremely expensive. It was only in the 1990s that, thanks to the convergence of Free Software and x86, a person could get a serious dev environment for cheap. Kids these days can get a Raspberry Pi for cheap, install Linux, and immediately have access to all kinds of ways to tinker -- even quasi-professional documentation like O'Reilly books is free today thanks to torrents.
No, not a syllogism, and if you know a term of logic like that, then you should probably also already be aware that argument from etymology is a fallacy. While the word "personal" is historically derived from the word "person", it has developed a new set of connotations, such as "something to be kept to oneself or disclosed only to confidants".
Having read the original book (and would highly recommend it), I still expect to be disappointed by the film adaptation. The science in the film may be solid, and we can indeed be grateful for that, but there are other aspects of adapting a novel where Hollywood can make the result feel compromised. Think of all the tired old tropes they could throw in there, like slow-motion shots of characters at poignant times, an intrusive film score that tries to jerk the audience emotionally in a particular direction, or the acting itself where it's hard to suspend disbelief when it's Matt Damon up there and he's not known for smoothly entering into roles and going unrecognized as Matt Damon.
"therefore they were not treated well", rather.
Not a fabrication at all, and again, I wonder if you even try to read sources before you claim that someone else's statement is a fabrication. Read about the mellah, and that article even cites indirectly a publication by Bernard Lewis where he points out that Jewish life was not as rosy as some Muslims claim..
Again you are deliberately misquoting people here. I specifically said "demographic decline, and I was mainly speaking about Christians. The weath to which these minorities may have had access as they became a shrinking percentage of the population is irrelevant here.
It doesn't matter how high they soared in administration. If they were forbidden from becoming head of state, then they still faced discrimination.
That's not enough for freedom of religion. They were denied the right to invite Muslims to their faith, and therefore they were treated well.
Did you even read the Wikipedia article you linked to? It only proves the OP's point: "Like all non-Muslims, Jews ... faced other restrictions in clothing, horse riding, army service etc." (I found this informative, I thought that the horse-riding restriction was only imposed on refugee Jews in the Maghreb.)
And you completely skipped over the OP's mention that Christians were forbidden from ringing bells and the conversion of churches into mosques by force. That is awfully disingenous. If you sincerely want to defend Islam against critiques that may be unfair, then you still have to acknowledge and rebut all attacks. Remaining silent as you did here really only weakens your own cause.
Just because there wasn't outright slaughter does not make for positive interaction. Freedom of religion inherently involves being allowed to build new places of worship for one's religion or renovate older ones. It involves being allowed to invite others to one's faith and to display symbols of one's faith (like a cross on churches). These things were missing in Muslim-ruled states for most of the history of Islam.
Even those Jews from Spain were treated unfairly. They may have been accepted in Muslim countries, and they were certainly fleeing a horrid Reconquista, but in their new homelands they faced a new set of challenges such as being forced to live in districts set aside for them instead among the general population, being forbidden from riding a horse, and so on.
If you want to be taken seriously here, you need to stop deliberately misinterpeting those to whom you respond. I never said that Muslims are xenophobic or barbaric. And I would suspect that for the majority of Muslims in states with historically Christian and/or Jewish minorities, they tried to explain the discriminatory strictures placed on religious minorities away. Even today you can hear, "Oh, it's just to keep the peace", or "They can believe what they want as long as they don't seek to convert Muslims", or "They just need to pay this large tax because we won't let them serve in the army". I don't believe that most Muslims think very actively about eradicating the infidel. However, the end result for non-Muslim religions in the "Muslim world" was still the same: demographic decline, political disempowerment, and a whole host of laws that applied to them and not to Muslims.
Oh, there has been plenty of incident. To mention one thing that has been on my mind with the war in Syria of late, one thing that struck me traveling there before the war is that even under the "anti-fundamentalist" Assad regime, Christians were forbidden by law from putting crosses on their places of worship or inviting Muslims to their faith, while among Muslims it was completely allowed to engage in da'wah among the Christian population. As I would later discover, this discrimination in law holds for most Muslim states.
I wouldn't disagree that most of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world are peaceful in individual interaction, and I'm certainly grateful for the immense hospitality I have received across the Muslim world from the Maghreb to southeast Asia. But when this population acts as a political bloc, I don't believe that the outcome is as pleasant for non-Muslim minorities as you claim.
While the ALA is the largest professional body for librarians in the United States, it doesn't speak for all librarians. There have been many ordinary librarians and library boards across the country who have opposed the ALA's privacy efforts in the last 15 years (or even further back), identifying it with a partisan political cause that they don't share.
In place of "people in the developing world", I actually meant to write "in the developed world", but in fact, it makes no difference. Android phones (even if they have to be bought on credit) are increasingly common even in the Third World that a decade or two ago would have seemed the antithesis of technological.
Indeed. I've been using Linux since the turn of the millennium, but in the last couple of years I've been trying to gain a more proficient command of Unix standard utils and piping commands with tutorials like O'Reilly's Classic Shell Scripting . I feel like a computing god, and friends and relatives are baffled at how I can so quickly solve computing needs that, they believed, would have to take minutes or hours of laborious pointing and clicking.
And that's why I find the premise of this article so odd. The average public does not seem to me on the cusp of a programming revolution. I might as well link here to Philip Guo's essay The Two Cultures of Computing, a.k.a. "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down on UNIX After They've Seen Spotify?". The interfaces ordinary people use so hide hackability that they generally forget it even exists.* Plus, with people in the developing world starting to do more and more of their computing on their phone, a device without a real keyboard, they are hardly able to do all the typing that coding requires.
(Perversely, this might be something that millions of people should be thankful for: that ignorance is why they still have jobs. So much time-consuming work could be done in a much shorter time were the Unix philosophy applied. If scripting were something that managers keen on every possible costsaving measure were strongly aware of, even more jobs would be automated away.)
I work in a field in which Hindutva fundamentalists are a prominent presence. Papers making the same claims of early Indian aviation and advanced weaponry, published by actual faculty at Indian universities, are a common sight.
These two situations are not comparable. Yes, the United States has Creationists and such, but they tend to move in their own circles, and even in academia they are found at private Christian universities. In India and Russia however, one tends to see a lot of quackery coming from state-run universities. This is probably facilitated by stronger job security (against much lower salaries) for certain faculty, combined with lower barriers to publication.