Oh, dear. We have forgoten our Freud, haven't we. An occasional fantasy is _normal_. We're a species that fantasizes about sex with _everything_. Don't you remember being 16 years old? Goodness, I do, as long ago ago as that was. And even now, as a human, although I certainly don't encourage such fantasies, they do happen occasionally.
Lingering over them and obsessing over them and acting on them, now _that_ would be a problem. But the occasional thought of "oh, dear god, my daughter has, ummmm, blossomed, hasn't she?" That's part of life.
If you don't _look_, you should have several important hormone producing organs checked. Any parent or caregiver of children who hasn't thought about it is probably repressing something even more insidious. The difficulty is when you _act_ on those impulses: partly for genetic, cross-breeding reasons, and partly for our culture's understandable fear of abuse of such powerful relationships, such sexual relationships are taboo. But make no pretense that sex with teenagers, for example, has always been forbidden. Even homosexual rape and sexual mutilation has had its place in some "coming of age" rituals.
If you think I'm kidding, take a good look at the history of clitorectomy and circumcision.
But you keep saying things like "It is nothing to be afraid of at all". That becomes insidious: if you don't fear socialistic economics at all, you can fall prey to an amazing number of economic traps. Five-year micromanagement plans for national economies, in particular, comes to mind. And we've seen that happen at national level. (Soviet economies, in particular, suffered from this.)
Really? I'm staring at the Wikipedia article on Finland, which says: "Finland has a highly industrialized free-market economy with a per capita output equal to that of other western economies such as France, Germany, Belgium or the UK."
Perhaps you should correct that over at Wikipedia to explain that Finland really has a socialist economy. And explain here, citing at least 3 examples, where a socialist economy works better than a free-market economy, especially in the delivery of consumer staples. My experience in Russia was that the "technological planning" of socialist economies and its inevitable centralization destroyed critical local feedback in manufacturing, and led to massive mishandling of over-sized, foolish mandates, coupled with the black market pulling the resources right out of the planned economy.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. In this case, Childs knew what his managers were going to do with the passwords, and he was apparently understandably frightened of the damage they could wreak. The fact that he gave them _fake_ passwords makes it even more sad and foolish on his part: he should have refused to give passwords, rather than play stupid games.
But I do believe that you've confirmed my basic point: the idea that just because your boss told you to do something makes it proper or legal is not correct. The order has to be, as you correctly point out, "lawful". The same applies in civilian life, but with far fuzzier standards. Your manager cannot normally have you court martialed, for example, which is apparently a much nastier process than a civil court.
Oh? So if your commander asks you for the keys to the weapons locker, this completely absolves you of any criminal act he may commit with those weapons because you were "just following orders"? That defense didn't work at Nuremberg, and it doesn't work well in various civil lawsuits where knowledge of the likelihood of a dangerous outcome makes you partly responsible for that outcome.
I'm not saying that this applies to Terry's case, but that there are cases where you do _not_ simply hand over dangerous tools because somone above you in an org chart asks for them. And such events should have serious fallout: they're a sign of a real breakdown, as was apparent here.
You didn't visit Rissia in the 1980's. The black market, as capitalist as it was, and the poor productivity of centralized bureaucracies that disenfranchise and eliminate incentives for local workers, had emptied store shelves. Hours of wait for basic staples to arrive on the shelves was quite common, even in Moscow, and the prices of even modest luxuries such as blue jeans were ridiculously high because there was nothing else to spend income _on_. I wound up deliberately bring new blue jeans and giving them away as gifts for the hospitality I recieved there from broke but friendly engineers. (They didn't cause the import concerns that calculators did.)
You've made a fair point, though a bit late in the thread. (No worries.) And thank you for the spelling correction.
Richard advocates peaceful means of persuasion, not violent overthrow: reason and law, rather than destruction and terrorism. He's using the existing laws and contracts to apply a fascinating legal judo hold to those who'd prefer to keep their software locked up and inaccessible to others. Even though "extremist" can mean extreme political views, it's so associated with extreme and even destructive behaviors that I'm very reluctant to apply it to Richard's reasoned beliefs.
I'm a carpenter. And the particular hammer that is LaTeX is a wonderful, powerful hammer, that is too heavy to lift for many home workmen. That's not a "3 second job", and the constant recompilation to get viewable or printable output is a serious burden.
Stallman is consistent about his beliefs. Don't read 3rd hand re-interpretations: proceed directly to the GPL, and to Stallman's presentations, to understand what he said and what he believes.
Stallman is a visionary, not an "extremenist". Sometimes that means the rest of us need to pay the rent and don't follow his grand visions, but he's consistent and historically very perceptive of the risks of the slippery slopes often presented by people, and their corporations, who don't share that vision. In this case, Silverlight does in fact present some nasty risks to Gnome and free software development. We've seen Microsoft's "embrace and extend" behavior too often to trust them in this case.
Playing petty defiance games with a manager is asking to have him mark you "not a team player" on your next job review. We're not 15 years old anymore, trying to test our parent's boundaries: don't treat your boss that way.
Collect some evidence. An audiometer might help establish actual noise levels, and can be tested with ear plugs in play in off hours. (A cheap $50 meter at Radio Shack should serve, and can have other uses for measuring machine room noise and deciding if you need protective headphones in there: http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2103667).
Get his buy-in. Explain that you find working with music to be much more productive. (Phrase it that way! His policy is not lowering productivity, but changing it now would increase productivity.) Be ready to explain why and to prove it. Offer to do a survey (a fair survey) to see what people prefer. Look at the layout of your office to see if the music lovers can be seated in ways where they will not interfere with phone calls. And be aware that for many people as we get older, our hearing lessens. Not only do we require less background noise to understand speech and voice tones, but loud noises bother us more. (This involves the reflexes in our ears that turn down loud sounds, and there's little you can do to help us older and deafer people with it.) So those earbuds you consider harmless may actually interfere with someone in the next cubicle, and adding music to _their_ cubicle just sets up a war of escalation that everyone may lose.
Just like a tech support call where someone says "my computer won't boot", this Slashdot question can be answered quickly, and wrong, but make you feel good that you've answered the question and can get on with your life. Or the people involved can be asked what their real issues are, and those addressed, and hopefully come out much happier. That's the difference between an outsourced call center with a script that says "Reboot your Windows computer", and an engineer who helps fix the real problem.
And it's not correct. When you're rushed and you need that person to _stay down_ for your own safety or that of others, including of the victim of the beating, you make sure they stay down. I'm remembering a particular incident of my youth that involved disarming a large drunk man of his car keys, and I do mean _disarming_. Several of us had to work together to stop him long enough to get those keys: I still feel that we were preserving his life, at considerable risk to our own, because he was big and he was tough and we all were banged up in the process.
Oh, dear me. I can *see* the little propellers tied to your wrists helping you wave your hands.
In this case, the isotopic ratios are small fractions of the differences between the masses of different actual elements. The profound mass differences and related escape velocities of different gaseous _elements_ far overwhelms the differences in masses between the distinct isotopes: thus, any atomic weight related differences are nearly irrelevant. The possible exceptions are tritium and deuterium, which are respectively 3 and 2 times the mass of hydrogen atoms, but they're unstable enough that they're unlikely to come from ancient sources. Rather, they arise as byproducts of certain types of fission, especially tritium. In their cases, plain hydrogen ions or molecules can be lost to interplanetary or interstellar space relatively easily. Deuterium lasts, tritium has a half-life of 12.5 years, so it's long-gone.
But do _not_ confuse the "density of the nebula" with the mass or the atmosphere of Earth and other planets. I can see where that would be dominated by the overall mass of the nebula from which they formed, but the proximity of the planets to the Sun influences the elimination of atmospheric hydrogen and light chemicals by keeping the planets warmer and allowing them to lose their lighter chemicals to space.
Some Krypton isotopes are stable and thus more likely to reflect ancient conditions than tritium, for example. And refinement via normal, chemical means available on a planetary mass or its crust are unlikely to refine the isotopes, so it's reasonable to make some guesses about the original materials of the atmosphere's creation from the isotopic ratios.
Post a link to the actual article in the 'zine, from your original article on Slashdot. The effective denial of service attack, and the bandwidth cost for this month, should drive it completely out of existence. Problem solved.
More seriously, whining about it on Slashdot is not exactly encouraging people to forget about it. If it's that big a deal, change your name legally, change your favorite login names, and wait 10 years. I see you've already done the "wait 10 years part".
Not according to this fellow, who won an Ig Nobel award for his work with bacteria from panda poop, who need to process quite a lot of cellulose in their diet. Hydrogen is the biofuel these bacteria produce.
True, but I'd expect it to help: almost all muscles operate in pairs, to flex a joint one way or the other. By keeping strong muscles operating in pairs, I'd expect that to produce stress that improves bone strength.
And astronauts: the muscular atrophy they experience at zero gee is quite profound, and is a real risk to extended space station or possible Mars missions.
There's no need to reach back that far historically. Afghanistan's Taliban did _precisely_ this to the Soviet Union when they tried occupying there. And they lost pretty much the same way.
The current release is actually "1.6.0_17" if you look inside the software bundles. Sun has done this before, when they nominally changed 'SunOS' to 'Solaris' but kept parallel but similarly cross-numbered software releases. But no, I'd say that "Windows 2000" and "Windows ME" win the prize, here, since Windows ME was a DOS kernel and Windows 2000 was the NT kernel.
Preferences are fine. But he made factual claims about the encumbrances of a legal contract he's never actually read. That's not a preference, that's reasoning from hearsay. And it's fixable in 5 minutes by actually reading the GPL. (It's a fascinating document, especially compared to other, "freer" licenses.) The GPL often seems founded in paranoia about how intellectual property will be misused, but that paranoia is historically well founded. (I remember BSD and AT&T UNIX licensing problems: they were awkward.)
> Requests for Airfone call record information via Subpoenas, Search Warrants, Court Orders, Summons, and National Security Letters
Do you see that "National Security Letters" part? That's for the Patriot Act, which requires no court order whatsoeve and for which revealing to anyone that you've received such a notice is illegal. There is, so far, no required judicial oversight for such orders: it's an amazing loophole for unscrupulous federal agencies, including those which have no business in domestic investigations such as the NSA, to use. And since companies such as AT&T have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to cooperate with law enforcement in secret, warrant-free wiretaps with their whistleblower exposed secret fiber-optic taps on core network trunks, rest assured that you have _no_ way of assuring that these monitoring tools haven't been misued.
It's nice to see the pricelist, though, so we have an idea of just how cheap and easy and wholesale such orders are.
Then go read the license, at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html, before making historically false statements. I've worked with all the licenses you name, and the Apache license, and various closed source licenses. The GPL wins hands down for insisting that open source work remain open source even after local fragmenting, in order to block the very "embrace and extend" that was done to BSD in the 1980's and that was attempted by Microsoft with Kerberos and Java.
If you only "know what it is about" and have never read it, you're in the same position as the USA after Colin Powell lied publicly to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and you risk similarly wasting massive resources based on statements by a well-meaning but misled leader.
Or, they don't care. Changes in major release number often mean incompatible features. I'd have given a lot, for example, for OpenSSL to use a sane numbering system and release "0.97" as "9.7", and "0.98" as "9.8". Or the idiots over at CPAN who release version 1.1, 1.2, 1.21, 2.2105, then 1.3.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, dear. We have forgoten our Freud, haven't we. An occasional fantasy is _normal_. We're a species that fantasizes about sex with _everything_. Don't you remember being 16 years old? Goodness, I do, as long ago ago as that was. And even now, as a human, although I certainly don't encourage such fantasies, they do happen occasionally.
Lingering over them and obsessing over them and acting on them, now _that_ would be a problem. But the occasional thought of "oh, dear god, my daughter has, ummmm, blossomed, hasn't she?" That's part of life.
If you don't _look_, you should have several important hormone producing organs checked. Any parent or caregiver of children who hasn't thought about it is probably repressing something even more insidious. The difficulty is when you _act_ on those impulses: partly for genetic, cross-breeding reasons, and partly for our culture's understandable fear of abuse of such powerful relationships, such sexual relationships are taboo. But make no pretense that sex with teenagers, for example, has always been forbidden. Even homosexual rape and sexual mutilation has had its place in some "coming of age" rituals.
If you think I'm kidding, take a good look at the history of clitorectomy and circumcision.
But you keep saying things like "It is nothing to be afraid of at all". That becomes insidious: if you don't fear socialistic economics at all, you can fall prey to an amazing number of economic traps. Five-year micromanagement plans for national economies, in particular, comes to mind. And we've seen that happen at national level. (Soviet economies, in particular, suffered from this.)
Really? I'm staring at the Wikipedia article on Finland, which says: "Finland has a highly industrialized free-market economy with a per capita output equal to that of other western economies such as France, Germany, Belgium or the UK."
Perhaps you should correct that over at Wikipedia to explain that Finland really has a socialist economy. And explain here, citing at least 3 examples, where a socialist economy works better than a free-market economy, especially in the delivery of consumer staples. My experience in Russia was that the "technological planning" of socialist economies and its inevitable centralization destroyed critical local feedback in manufacturing, and led to massive mishandling of over-sized, foolish mandates, coupled with the black market pulling the resources right out of the planned economy.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. In this case, Childs knew what his managers were going to do with the passwords, and he was apparently understandably frightened of the damage they could wreak. The fact that he gave them _fake_ passwords makes it even more sad and foolish on his part: he should have refused to give passwords, rather than play stupid games.
But I do believe that you've confirmed my basic point: the idea that just because your boss told you to do something makes it proper or legal is not correct. The order has to be, as you correctly point out, "lawful". The same applies in civilian life, but with far fuzzier standards. Your manager cannot normally have you court martialed, for example, which is apparently a much nastier process than a civil court.
Oh? So if your commander asks you for the keys to the weapons locker, this completely absolves you of any criminal act he may commit with those weapons because you were "just following orders"? That defense didn't work at Nuremberg, and it doesn't work well in various civil lawsuits where knowledge of the likelihood of a dangerous outcome makes you partly responsible for that outcome.
I'm not saying that this applies to Terry's case, but that there are cases where you do _not_ simply hand over dangerous tools because somone above you in an org chart asks for them. And such events should have serious fallout: they're a sign of a real breakdown, as was apparent here.
You didn't visit Rissia in the 1980's. The black market, as capitalist as it was, and the poor productivity of centralized bureaucracies that disenfranchise and eliminate incentives for local workers, had emptied store shelves. Hours of wait for basic staples to arrive on the shelves was quite common, even in Moscow, and the prices of even modest luxuries such as blue jeans were ridiculously high because there was nothing else to spend income _on_. I wound up deliberately bring new blue jeans and giving them away as gifts for the hospitality I recieved there from broke but friendly engineers. (They didn't cause the import concerns that calculators did.)
You've made a fair point, though a bit late in the thread. (No worries.) And thank you for the spelling correction.
Richard advocates peaceful means of persuasion, not violent overthrow: reason and law, rather than destruction and terrorism. He's using the existing laws and contracts to apply a fascinating legal judo hold to those who'd prefer to keep their software locked up and inaccessible to others. Even though "extremist" can mean extreme political views, it's so associated with extreme and even destructive behaviors that I'm very reluctant to apply it to Richard's reasoned beliefs.
I'm a carpenter. And the particular hammer that is LaTeX is a wonderful, powerful hammer, that is too heavy to lift for many home workmen. That's not a "3 second job", and the constant recompilation to get viewable or printable output is a serious burden.
Do you mean master/slave, or two-way replication? There _is_ a difference.
Stallman is consistent about his beliefs. Don't read 3rd hand re-interpretations: proceed directly to the GPL, and to Stallman's presentations, to understand what he said and what he believes.
Stallman is a visionary, not an "extremenist". Sometimes that means the rest of us need to pay the rent and don't follow his grand visions, but he's consistent and historically very perceptive of the risks of the slippery slopes often presented by people, and their corporations, who don't share that vision. In this case, Silverlight does in fact present some nasty risks to Gnome and free software development. We've seen Microsoft's "embrace and extend" behavior too often to trust them in this case.
Playing petty defiance games with a manager is asking to have him mark you "not a team player" on your next job review. We're not 15 years old anymore, trying to test our parent's boundaries: don't treat your boss that way.
Collect some evidence. An audiometer might help establish actual noise levels, and can be tested with ear plugs in play in off hours. (A cheap $50 meter at Radio Shack should serve, and can have other uses for measuring machine room noise and deciding if you need protective headphones in there: http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2103667).
Get his buy-in. Explain that you find working with music to be much more productive. (Phrase it that way! His policy is not lowering productivity, but changing it now would increase productivity.) Be ready to explain why and to prove it. Offer to do a survey (a fair survey) to see what people prefer. Look at the layout of your office to see if the music lovers can be seated in ways where they will not interfere with phone calls. And be aware that for many people as we get older, our hearing lessens. Not only do we require less background noise to understand speech and voice tones, but loud noises bother us more. (This involves the reflexes in our ears that turn down loud sounds, and there's little you can do to help us older and deafer people with it.) So those earbuds you consider harmless may actually interfere with someone in the next cubicle, and adding music to _their_ cubicle just sets up a war of escalation that everyone may lose.
Just like a tech support call where someone says "my computer won't boot", this Slashdot question can be answered quickly, and wrong, but make you feel good that you've answered the question and can get on with your life. Or the people involved can be asked what their real issues are, and those addressed, and hopefully come out much happier. That's the difference between an outsourced call center with a script that says "Reboot your Windows computer", and an engineer who helps fix the real problem.
And it's not correct. When you're rushed and you need that person to _stay down_ for your own safety or that of others, including of the victim of the beating, you make sure they stay down. I'm remembering a particular incident of my youth that involved disarming a large drunk man of his car keys, and I do mean _disarming_. Several of us had to work together to stop him long enough to get those keys: I still feel that we were preserving his life, at considerable risk to our own, because he was big and he was tough and we all were banged up in the process.
Oh, dear me. I can *see* the little propellers tied to your wrists helping you wave your hands.
In this case, the isotopic ratios are small fractions of the differences between the masses of different actual elements. The profound mass differences and related escape velocities of different gaseous _elements_ far overwhelms the differences in masses between the distinct isotopes: thus, any atomic weight related differences are nearly irrelevant. The possible exceptions are tritium and deuterium, which are respectively 3 and 2 times the mass of hydrogen atoms, but they're unstable enough that they're unlikely to come from ancient sources. Rather, they arise as byproducts of certain types of fission, especially tritium. In their cases, plain hydrogen ions or molecules can be lost to interplanetary or interstellar space relatively easily. Deuterium lasts, tritium has a half-life of 12.5 years, so it's long-gone.
But do _not_ confuse the "density of the nebula" with the mass or the atmosphere of Earth and other planets. I can see where that would be dominated by the overall mass of the nebula from which they formed, but the proximity of the planets to the Sun influences the elimination of atmospheric hydrogen and light chemicals by keeping the planets warmer and allowing them to lose their lighter chemicals to space.
Some Krypton isotopes are stable and thus more likely to reflect ancient conditions than tritium, for example. And refinement via normal, chemical means available on a planetary mass or its crust are unlikely to refine the isotopes, so it's reasonable to make some guesses about the original materials of the atmosphere's creation from the isotopic ratios.
Post a link to the actual article in the 'zine, from your original article on Slashdot. The effective denial of service attack, and the bandwidth cost for this month, should drive it completely out of existence. Problem solved.
More seriously, whining about it on Slashdot is not exactly encouraging people to forget about it. If it's that big a deal, change your name legally, change your favorite login names, and wait 10 years. I see you've already done the "wait 10 years part".
A better way would be to stop issuing software patents.
Not according to this fellow, who won an Ig Nobel award for his work with bacteria from panda poop, who need to process quite a lot of cellulose in their diet. Hydrogen is the biofuel these bacteria produce.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20091124p2a00m0na009000c.html
True, but I'd expect it to help: almost all muscles operate in pairs, to flex a joint one way or the other. By keeping strong muscles operating in pairs, I'd expect that to produce stress that improves bone strength.
And astronauts: the muscular atrophy they experience at zero gee is quite profound, and is a real risk to extended space station or possible Mars missions.
There's no need to reach back that far historically. Afghanistan's Taliban did _precisely_ this to the Soviet Union when they tried occupying there. And they lost pretty much the same way.
The current release is actually "1.6.0_17" if you look inside the software bundles. Sun has done this before, when they nominally changed 'SunOS' to 'Solaris' but kept parallel but similarly cross-numbered software releases. But no, I'd say that "Windows 2000" and "Windows ME" win the prize, here, since Windows ME was a DOS kernel and Windows 2000 was the NT kernel.
Preferences are fine. But he made factual claims about the encumbrances of a legal contract he's never actually read. That's not a preference, that's reasoning from hearsay. And it's fixable in 5 minutes by actually reading the GPL. (It's a fascinating document, especially compared to other, "freer" licenses.) The GPL often seems founded in paranoia about how intellectual property will be misused, but that paranoia is historically well founded. (I remember BSD and AT&T UNIX licensing problems: they were awkward.)
Now go re-read them, especially this clause:
> Requests for Airfone call record information via Subpoenas, Search Warrants,
Court Orders, Summons, and National Security Letters
Do you see that "National Security Letters" part? That's for the Patriot Act, which requires no court order whatsoeve and for which revealing to anyone that you've received such a notice is illegal. There is, so far, no required judicial oversight for such orders: it's an amazing loophole for unscrupulous federal agencies, including those which have no business in domestic investigations such as the NSA, to use. And since companies such as AT&T have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to cooperate with law enforcement in secret, warrant-free wiretaps with their whistleblower exposed secret fiber-optic taps on core network trunks, rest assured that you have _no_ way of assuring that these monitoring tools haven't been misued.
It's nice to see the pricelist, though, so we have an idea of just how cheap and easy and wholesale such orders are.
Then go read the license, at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html, before making historically false statements. I've worked with all the licenses you name, and the Apache license, and various closed source licenses. The GPL wins hands down for insisting that open source work remain open source even after local fragmenting, in order to block the very "embrace and extend" that was done to BSD in the 1980's and that was attempted by Microsoft with Kerberos and Java.
If you only "know what it is about" and have never read it, you're in the same position as the USA after Colin Powell lied publicly to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and you risk similarly wasting massive resources based on statements by a well-meaning but misled leader.
Or, they don't care. Changes in major release number often mean incompatible features. I'd have given a lot, for example, for OpenSSL to use a sane numbering system and release "0.97" as "9.7", and "0.98" as "9.8". Or the idiots over at CPAN who release version 1.1, 1.2, 1.21, 2.2105, then 1.3.