Suggesting Islam was progressive and open to different opinions before the rise of Wahhabism is dishonest. Even during Islam's golden age, the main schools of Islamic jurisprudence ascribed fewer rights to non-Muslims. Pushing Christians and Jews down into second-class citizens happened in the generations following Muhammad; it wasn't something done much later by decadent rulers that fell from some higher ideal.
One perhaps cannot blame Islam as a whole -- you still have way out there sects like the Ismailis who call themselves Muslims even as they reject most of the teachings generally considered to form Islam -- but one can certainly blame 90-something percent of it, and thus for the sake of economy of words, it's reasonable to speak of how Islam itself is the problem.
I recall reading somewhere that radios imported from China could be bought in North Korea, but you were legally obliged to have the radio modified so that it could receive only the government broadcasts. A similar law existed in much of the former Communist Bloc.
IgnoramusMaximus's post suggested that 3G support was limited to Europe, but in fact the N900 has been rolled out all over the world (India, the Gulf Arab states, Japan, Hong Kong...) and 3G works fine. Just because a phone doesn't work ideally in North America doesn't mean that it fails to work in "most of the world".
We aren't, QA. We're hedging our bets. Have you considered that unless you want immortality to be restricted to people with the wealth of Bill Gates, we'll pretty much have to develop a means to get off this rock pretty much the day we develop clinical immortality?
Woven into the plot of Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars is a pretty good argument that, even with multiple space elevators running nonstop, it might not be feasible to move enough people off the Earth to offset increased longetivity and high birthrates.
The problem with many science celebrities is that they gloss over the actual work that makes for science: experimentation and heavy mathematics. Too many physics celebrities make cosmology sound like some vacuous daydreaming. If you want to sincerely speak of science to the public, you've got to give how it really is -- not showing the actual calculations, but speaking of the arduous effort and self-examination that leads to discoveries.
Debian (and I suppose Ubuntu too) makes use of a lot of Bash scripts behind the scenes. Grub is still the boot loader of choice. A lot of installation CDs use parted to set up the hard drive. Just some examples off the top of my head.
Because of their devotion to the monkey god Hanuman, Hindus are unwilling to wipe out the monkey population.It's similar to the continuing presence of cows on busy city streets.
Contestants at eating competitions typically vomit up the food afterwards. They often have too -- the total sulfides in the massive amount of hot dogs eaten at the Coney Island contest would be deleterious to one's health. They thus don't get fat because the food doesn't stay in their body long.
Another YAYdiots to the Mozilla Developers, for scrapping one of the best features in FF: Clearing the History window on exit. So sad you need an extra extension now what, as this story demonstrates again, should be an integral and visible part of any browser.
Firefox's built-in Private Browsing already does this.
This is at odds with what we all thought Android promised us: a real OS for our tiny computers that would let us treat the carrier like any other ISP.
That's what you get with the Nokia N900. It's a fully-featured installation of Debian Linux, but few on Slashdot got excited about it because it wasn't sexy and polished like the iPhone. These days, freedom, openness and hackability definitely takes a backseat to style on this erstwhile "news for nerds" site.
Exactly! Because Oxygen, Food, Shelter, DVD's, BluRay's and CD's are required to live.
Most developed countries do consider the arts necessary for quality of life, which is why they massively fund things like films and music. Nearly every CD and DVD I own acknowledges state arts funding. And if the public paid for it, the public ought to be able to access it as they wish, without struggling with DRM.
I can think of a number of artists who don't listen to recordings of classical music at all, preferring instead to go directly to the score. Pierre Boulez, for example, satisfies his desire for some Beethoven or Stravinsky by picking up the score. Recordings are crutches.
Last time I checked, Slashdot was "news for nerds", not a site for the general public. I'm sick of the recent trend here to knock things that don't appeal to the general public, even if they might hold great interest for nerds.
No, I'm talking about the sort of MIDI output you get from e.g. Sibelius or Lilypond. I think the issue is that a great deal of modern piano repertoire is so grand and complex that merely human players are not capable of playing it as the composer wrote it. Sure, a human performance may hold interest in that you can watch a musician struggle with the piece (and fail), and Ferneyhough has made a career of writing music where the human performer is forced to choose what parts he'll leave out in order to concentrate on the remainder, and so every performer fails differently. But when it comes to hearing a New Complexity or Ligeti piano work performed the way it was written, there's no substitute for MIDI generated from the score.
I've met a fair few classical music fans who prefer MIDI versions of various piano repertoire to human performances. Some of them are musicians themselves.
I wouldn't draw that conclusive. The N800 too disappeared from Nokia's publicity almost as completely, and it was still succeeded by an open device based on Free Software. Nokia has been upfront that the Maemo-era devices were just a minor part of its catalogue and only stepping stones to a more widely available, more seriously marketed future product.
MeeGo actually inherits more from Moblin (an Intel-led project) than Maemo. There will be a "Maemo compatibility layer" that Nokia will use until it completely shifts development to pure MeeGo, but what we will get from the next Nokia premium smartphone is not simply a renamed Maemo.
Please don't link to the "Skeptics Annotated Bible". I remember years ago when it was first announced, and I wrote in to mention that one portion was based on a misunderstanding of the Greek (Namely, Jesus addressing his mother as "woman", which SAB called rude and disobedient, even though gyne was the usual form of address to a female just like "Ma'am" in English). The maintainer replied that he didn't give a shit about the Greek and would base his entire critique of this ancient, historically complex document on his own personal interpretation of one English translation.
There are formidable objections to the Abrahamic religions written by actual scholars who work to understand these texts in context before they seek to rebut Christianity.
Don't give up on Nokia just yet. The MeeGo platform that will appear on their next most powerful smartphones is a fully functional Linux distribution that is certainly superior to Android for hackability.
But is it as delicious to use as the iPhone? I think I'd rather live in someone else's well-maintained garden than a bitumen courtyard of my own. I'm not really interested in tinkering with my device - I just want it to work.
Goodness. I'm not that much of an old-timer (I got my first, five-digit Slashdot UID in 2001), but is anyone else disturbed by how far Slashdot has evolved from "news for nerds, stuff that matters" and the joy of hacking ugly hardware until it's highly powerful?
I've been struck by the negative opinions of the discipline of philosophy on Slashdot over the last few years. Lots of people saying "No empirical testing? Then it's crap!", without apparently realizing that vital questions they have to face in everyday life, such as ethics, are part of philosophy. It's not just all fanciful proofs of God or poststructural interpretations of classic literature.
Marriage licenses in certain states also require testing for various common STDs, and have done much to reduce the prevalence of syphillis in the US. It's not all racism; there are public health motivations too.
Except for philately (marketing to collectors is a somewhat lucrative way to raise money for postal services), are not stamps with nice designs on the way out? Go to the post office in many countries today, and what you'll get on your letter is a simple sticker printed by a computer with a bar code or other machine-readable images. The recipient of your letter in another country no longer gets an exotic representation of some facet of your country's culture.
As for the gentically descended part another nice piece of FYROM propaganda
None of the population movements during the Age of Migrations was large enough to wipe out the original inhabitants, this is well-documented in studies of the early Middle Ages and backed up by genetic studies, and has nothing to do with the FYROM specifically. The various Slav-speaking peoples are all quite different, and genetically they continue the populations living there before Slavs arrived. Many FYROM Macedonians are descended from whoever was there before the 5th century AD, just as many Muscovites have more in common genetically with the autochtonous Finno-Ugrian peoples of European Russia like the Mordvins than other Slavic-speaking peoples.
Slashdot Mirror
Suggesting Islam was progressive and open to different opinions before the rise of Wahhabism is dishonest. Even during Islam's golden age, the main schools of Islamic jurisprudence ascribed fewer rights to non-Muslims. Pushing Christians and Jews down into second-class citizens happened in the generations following Muhammad; it wasn't something done much later by decadent rulers that fell from some higher ideal.
One perhaps cannot blame Islam as a whole -- you still have way out there sects like the Ismailis who call themselves Muslims even as they reject most of the teachings generally considered to form Islam -- but one can certainly blame 90-something percent of it, and thus for the sake of economy of words, it's reasonable to speak of how Islam itself is the problem.
I recall reading somewhere that radios imported from China could be bought in North Korea, but you were legally obliged to have the radio modified so that it could receive only the government broadcasts. A similar law existed in much of the former Communist Bloc.
IgnoramusMaximus's post suggested that 3G support was limited to Europe, but in fact the N900 has been rolled out all over the world (India, the Gulf Arab states, Japan, Hong Kong...) and 3G works fine. Just because a phone doesn't work ideally in North America doesn't mean that it fails to work in "most of the world".
Woven into the plot of Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars is a pretty good argument that, even with multiple space elevators running nonstop, it might not be feasible to move enough people off the Earth to offset increased longetivity and high birthrates.
The problem with many science celebrities is that they gloss over the actual work that makes for science: experimentation and heavy mathematics. Too many physics celebrities make cosmology sound like some vacuous daydreaming. If you want to sincerely speak of science to the public, you've got to give how it really is -- not showing the actual calculations, but speaking of the arduous effort and self-examination that leads to discoveries.
Debian (and I suppose Ubuntu too) makes use of a lot of Bash scripts behind the scenes. Grub is still the boot loader of choice. A lot of installation CDs use parted to set up the hard drive. Just some examples off the top of my head.
Because of their devotion to the monkey god Hanuman, Hindus are unwilling to wipe out the monkey population.It's similar to the continuing presence of cows on busy city streets.
Contestants at eating competitions typically vomit up the food afterwards. They often have too -- the total sulfides in the massive amount of hot dogs eaten at the Coney Island contest would be deleterious to one's health. They thus don't get fat because the food doesn't stay in their body long.
Firefox's built-in Private Browsing already does this.
That's what you get with the Nokia N900. It's a fully-featured installation of Debian Linux, but few on Slashdot got excited about it because it wasn't sexy and polished like the iPhone. These days, freedom, openness and hackability definitely takes a backseat to style on this erstwhile "news for nerds" site.
Most developed countries do consider the arts necessary for quality of life, which is why they massively fund things like films and music. Nearly every CD and DVD I own acknowledges state arts funding. And if the public paid for it, the public ought to be able to access it as they wish, without struggling with DRM.
I can think of a number of artists who don't listen to recordings of classical music at all, preferring instead to go directly to the score. Pierre Boulez, for example, satisfies his desire for some Beethoven or Stravinsky by picking up the score. Recordings are crutches.
Last time I checked, Slashdot was "news for nerds", not a site for the general public. I'm sick of the recent trend here to knock things that don't appeal to the general public, even if they might hold great interest for nerds.
No, I'm talking about the sort of MIDI output you get from e.g. Sibelius or Lilypond. I think the issue is that a great deal of modern piano repertoire is so grand and complex that merely human players are not capable of playing it as the composer wrote it. Sure, a human performance may hold interest in that you can watch a musician struggle with the piece (and fail), and Ferneyhough has made a career of writing music where the human performer is forced to choose what parts he'll leave out in order to concentrate on the remainder, and so every performer fails differently. But when it comes to hearing a New Complexity or Ligeti piano work performed the way it was written, there's no substitute for MIDI generated from the score.
I've met a fair few classical music fans who prefer MIDI versions of various piano repertoire to human performances. Some of them are musicians themselves.
I wouldn't draw that conclusive. The N800 too disappeared from Nokia's publicity almost as completely, and it was still succeeded by an open device based on Free Software. Nokia has been upfront that the Maemo-era devices were just a minor part of its catalogue and only stepping stones to a more widely available, more seriously marketed future product.
MeeGo actually inherits more from Moblin (an Intel-led project) than Maemo. There will be a "Maemo compatibility layer" that Nokia will use until it completely shifts development to pure MeeGo, but what we will get from the next Nokia premium smartphone is not simply a renamed Maemo.
Please don't link to the "Skeptics Annotated Bible". I remember years ago when it was first announced, and I wrote in to mention that one portion was based on a misunderstanding of the Greek (Namely, Jesus addressing his mother as "woman", which SAB called rude and disobedient, even though gyne was the usual form of address to a female just like "Ma'am" in English). The maintainer replied that he didn't give a shit about the Greek and would base his entire critique of this ancient, historically complex document on his own personal interpretation of one English translation.
There are formidable objections to the Abrahamic religions written by actual scholars who work to understand these texts in context before they seek to rebut Christianity.
Don't give up on Nokia just yet. The MeeGo platform that will appear on their next most powerful smartphones is a fully functional Linux distribution that is certainly superior to Android for hackability.
Goodness. I'm not that much of an old-timer (I got my first, five-digit Slashdot UID in 2001), but is anyone else disturbed by how far Slashdot has evolved from "news for nerds, stuff that matters" and the joy of hacking ugly hardware until it's highly powerful?
Should we toss quantum physics out too just because Schroedinger used a fanciful example of a cat?
I've been struck by the negative opinions of the discipline of philosophy on Slashdot over the last few years. Lots of people saying "No empirical testing? Then it's crap!", without apparently realizing that vital questions they have to face in everyday life, such as ethics, are part of philosophy. It's not just all fanciful proofs of God or poststructural interpretations of classic literature.
Marriage licenses in certain states also require testing for various common STDs, and have done much to reduce the prevalence of syphillis in the US. It's not all racism; there are public health motivations too.
Except for philately (marketing to collectors is a somewhat lucrative way to raise money for postal services), are not stamps with nice designs on the way out? Go to the post office in many countries today, and what you'll get on your letter is a simple sticker printed by a computer with a bar code or other machine-readable images. The recipient of your letter in another country no longer gets an exotic representation of some facet of your country's culture.
None of the population movements during the Age of Migrations was large enough to wipe out the original inhabitants, this is well-documented in studies of the early Middle Ages and backed up by genetic studies, and has nothing to do with the FYROM specifically. The various Slav-speaking peoples are all quite different, and genetically they continue the populations living there before Slavs arrived. Many FYROM Macedonians are descended from whoever was there before the 5th century AD, just as many Muscovites have more in common genetically with the autochtonous Finno-Ugrian peoples of European Russia like the Mordvins than other Slavic-speaking peoples.