I pastor a small Baptist church. Yes I believe God created the universe. But aside from the fact that I have no problem accepting the conclusions of scientists ("evolution is how God did it"), I am strenuously opposed to this law. (See http://livethetrinity.net/ for several posts.)
Basically what "alternative explanations" can there possibly be that are non-religious? This is the question that law supporters refuse to address. Sure teach ID or creationism or "God did through evolution" or... *but not in a public school classroom*. Why do Christians want to coopt the power of the State in order to advance (a probably warped notion of) Christian mission?
I object to the law also because it is so dishonest. Supporters know exactly what it is supposed to achieve, and all this "academic freedom" and "critical inquiry" rhetoric is a smokescreen.
Dan Simmons in his monumental _Hyperion_ series, specifically book #3 _The Rise of Endymion_ writes about how the Pax authorities on Mare Infinitus are able to lift Raul Endymion's fingerprints from a coffee cup that has been washed multiple times "using the latest forensic techniques". (They did not realize of course whose fingerprints they were - at the time he was some unidentified fellow who showed up and got into trouble with the local authorities.)
I remember thinking "you gotta be kidding - no way you can do that". And here we are talking about... lifting fingerprints from something that has been washed multiple times. Once again what science-fiction imagines in the far distant future is being developed even as we turn the page.
Having lived for 5 years in the UK I saw first hand (and to a degree experienced) bullying. I do not know if Americans realize how serious a problem it is in the UK. The kind of cruelty and abuse one reads/sees in "Harry Potter" might seem foreign and unlikely, but let me tell you that is nothing, just a sample, of what "bullying" can mean in British schools. Serious physical and long term psychological damage. There have been known cases of suicide - the only way some poor kid could escape the daily abuse. For the record my experience was mild compared to some. And yes once I started threatening bullies with "I'm taking karate, you can hurt me today, I'll get you next month" it got better. Frightening but true.
My first point is simply that I am glad British school might be doing something about bullying. Although we can debate whether the solution is entirely legal or appropriate. But the problem is very real.
Now to cyberbullying...
My daughter was the very first victim of cyberbullying at her rather elite private school here in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Yes a personal detail.) Pretty bad, although could have been worse. Her teachers cared and tried to take action against the students involved. The administration did squat and hung us out to dry. She handled it well, but over the course of that year (because her parents took it very seriously) she was ostracized, and quickly students and administrators alike got into a "blame the victim" pattern. Her grades plummeted. Often talked about killing herself, yadda yadda yadda. Friendships (such as between us and other parents) ended over this because they would not hold their children accountable. (In a new school now, thriving, grades shot up to A's and 100's. Go figure.)
Again - my point is simply "cyberbullying is also a serious and real problem that causes real observable damage".
Whether such policies are legal, enforceable, and so on - that is quite debatable. The website provider (a kind of Facebook for kids) actually took the site down when we complained (we think). Good for them. Violation of policy. The school took the "well, not our network/computers, therefore we can't do anything" line. (Photos of my child were clearly taken at school. Uh...) Technically might be correct. I don't know. My final point is, "Even if schools cannot legally police and enforce every last dang website or IM or whatever... *something* needs to be done by *someone*". The problem is bloody real and so is the damage this kind of filth.
I appreciate and sympathize with concerns about privacy and excessive government intrusion and all that. I really do. But what then shall we do? Unless we want to deny the seriousness of this problem?
I tried a few basic phrases where I know (from graduate school) what the Akkadian should be. "If a man kills..." (shumma awilum idak, if I recall) from Hammurapi's Code. "For the gods" (ana ilani). "An adoption tablet" (tuppi maruti, all over the place especially in Nuzi tablets). Only a few words were represented correctly, and surely through the simplistic "this English word matches" method. I was shocked that even "kills" and "gods" were not rendered correctly. The script on the site tells me that terribly outdated sources were used.
Tried the same for a few very simple Egyptian phrases. "The city is in joy" (all over the place in Gardiner, 3rd ed) (result not too bad on this one). "The priest hears the god". What? No flag (n-ch-r, sign for deity)? Few years ago I researched how to write out "God is Love" and "God loves you" (for Vacation Bible School, the theme was archeology-past), and I scoured Gardiner to make sure I got the grammar just right. Oh heck not even close - only correct part was mr for love, but should be mrwt for the noun.
Don't get me on the Sumerian tests. Really disgustingly simple stuff from temple dedicatory inscriptions (I had just one semester of Sumerian). Well... got dingir for "god" but that's about it.
Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results.
Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results.
I pastor a small church for internationals here in Louisiana (about 1/2 of them Chinese, rest other Asian, various African, some Americans who dig us). Internationals regularly comment on how hard Americans work, in fact they say back in the homeland they had the impression Americans were lazy (not like good hardworking Chinese!) then they get here and discover... their professor/supervisor arrives at 7.00-7.30am, works all day, often works on the weekend. They wonder how the heck we manage without a daily nap. They wonder why we don't have some of the holidays they have (like 8 days off for Chinese New Year). So in one sense Americans work too hard, don't enjoy life enough (enjoy the things they work so hard to buy, enjoy time with family, and so on), get burned out and miserable. I would agree.
On the other hand one can make the reasonable observation that in another sense Americans don't always work as well as they should. We have a lot of wasted/slack time. Perhaps if we rested (sabbathed?) more we would better apply ourselves when we truly are at work. (Work when you are working, and play when you are playing.) There are notable exceptions of course, many Americans apply themselves most diligently and work hard when they are working.
Quick anecdote to support. During 3 week trip to south India, our team helped paint a new school being built. The locals were amazed that we when we were working, we just worked worked worked, paint paint paint, with hardly a break (in tropical weather, it was hot/humid down there by the equator), sweating like crazy. They said, "An Indian worker will paint for a few minutes, enjoy a cigarette, chat with his buddy, paint again for a while, rinse and repeat". Not that Indians (at least in that state) are lazy or Americans are better - we simply have different cultural emphases on WORK-don't-socialize versus work-but-also-ENJOY-OTHER-PEOPLE.
By the way, most internationals work extremely hard, especially when the work is academic/working on a degree. The point is not "they are lazy" but "they notice how hard working Americans are most of the time".
So my general answer is Yes, Americans need both to slack and work harder.
Darth_Keryx: Granted I appreciate the need and motive to archive such (electronic) correspondance. But how shall that correspondance be stored?
For years a project within the Library of Congress has been saving important sound recordings. Their medium of choice? Cutting records. Okay they don't fit in your iPod and the sound quality is like mp3 with 2bps sampling... but - and here is my point - they can easily and always be accessed even if technology gets hosed and protocols are rendered obsolete. (My dissertation, in fact, is partly obsolete because of the DOS application used to insert all the Hebrew and Greek.)
What if there is a nuclear war... natural disaster that sends us back a few eons... alien attack... you get the idea... will we be able to read this stuff? if it is only stored electronically?
Why is it that in sci-fi movies and shows when people can read the writings of a long dead civilization it is because those buggers used things like books? Why is it that we can still read cuneiform documents on baked clay tablets from Mesopotamia thousands of years ago? I'm all for electronic storage and searches and such - groovy man. But if that is the only way we store this stuff... then one day we might not live to regret it.
Although there is certainly a comic aspect of this possibility - there are many of us who have had to handle email correspondence for family members who have died.
My dad died very unexpectedly in December 2000. He had been involved in a whole series of business negotations for various tech support contracts. Suddenly - where is this guy?!? I set up Outlook Express to produce a set, automatic reply to all incoming emails, something to the effect of, "This is R_ W_, D_ W_'s son. I am sorry to inform you that... Please contact L_ Corporation at xxx.yyy.zzzz if you need further assistance."
I think of all the people I email, and not just for fun, but to get stuff done. Committees, colleagues, publisher(s). What would my wife do if suddenly she had to handle all this?
Darth: For what it is worth, my room mate when I was working on Ph.D. at Cornell did his doctoral research on the feasability of using magnetically controlled plasma waves to create the equivalent of much smaller particle accelerators - use the troughs in the plasma waves, move the waves, and *poof* you are moving particles around.
Makes one wonder if his thesis will be invoked at some point in this new endeavor.
Meanwhile I was working on chronological developments in Biblical Hebrews and their applicability to dating disputed texts in the Pentateuch. Reeeeeeeal useful stuff.
Re:Some classic Christian D&D FUD
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Much of the "Christian" anti-D&D FUD was and is just that. Ignorant nonsense.
But one must ask, "Why pretend to be evil people doing terrible things?" which some fellow D&D players prefered. "We burnt the village and raped..." One can call it fantasy, but why fantasize such things?
I had a small number of "guidelines" for my campaigns one of which was very simple. NO EVIL CHARACTERS. PERIOD.
If one defends the harmlessness of D&D by harping about Ph.D. theses and good over evil then why play evil characters doing evil things? Logically if it is so harmless and perhaps even good then shucks why not put your alignment choices where your rhetoric is?
For what it is worth I am a Baptist minister. The son of another minister asked if I could help teach D&D to him and some of his buddies. The parents (strongly involved in the church) know full well their sons have purchased D&D books and want me to teach them how to play.
I agreed at first, but after trying to decipher the 3rd edition rule books informed them that I might not be much help. What the heck is a DC?!?
One final comment. I stopped playing not because I started to question the "morality" of playing D&D. I started to question the wisdom of spending so much time playing D&D when I had other things to get cracking on such as a graduate degree... then a wife... then children... then a coupla jobs...
D&D is not evil. But it might not be the best use of my time and energy.
Er, we use Caldera OpenLinux to run a Linux server that handles a simple calendar program (in Perl) for the church where I serve. In addition to our main network server, which uses Windows NT 4.0, yesterday we installed this Linux box so that members can receive emailed reminders for certain events and activities.
The box itself is AMD K6 and at least 5-6 years old. The IT whiz who set this up - this is one of those "donate old equipment fer a good cause else it gets thrown away" situations - wanted to use RH 9. Too slow and he could not get the kernel trimmed down the way he wanted. Tried RH 8. Same deal. Finally he tried Caldera OpenLinux, was able to cut out various chunks of the kernel, recompile, and it works quite well. GUI is KDE 2 if anybody is interested. Blast from the past! And quite lovely.
Don't get me wrong. SCO is on my "when the revolution comes" list. May their homes be left desolate. May their fields be salted. And other delicious ancient curses from Egyptian and Akkadian literature. Our IT whiz agrees. [Oh, and he could not update online a few broken packages he found because those packages are on the SCO website(s)... he'll have to haul in a CD the old fashioned way.]
PS. While at my daughter's taekwondo school in the "parents wait here" section, chatted with an IBM employee who handles database apps for major corporate client. He pronounced SCO as [skoo] {where oo = long o vowel} rather than [es-sii-oo].
I am stunned that Ogg Vorbis is not making more of a dent in the music format competition. Hmmm... same quality as mp3, some argue more, although I am not so certain of that... no worries about proprietary format... suddenly open source apps become even more attractive although yes I am aware that yum or apt for xmms-mp3, just to pick one example, is disgustingly easy.
There are almost no Ogg Vorbis boom boxes... portable players... or music buying sites.
MS is your local economy if and only if you're an American.(1) I think Phipps is English - http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/bios/bios-phipps.html(2)
1) Quite so, and I think I acknowledged that.
2) Hence the (?) after his name, but thanks for the info! [I lived in UK for 5 years as a teenager, when my dad was transfered during his career with Digital.]
Here's another thing. If Phipps of Sun wants to raise the issue of "shucks, why should MS, an American company, benefit from software fees from the Chinese and other non-American nations?", then one has to ask the painfully obvious question: "whose economy benefits from China working with Sun Microsystems?"
"If you spend a dollar with a local company working on Linux, that dollar stays in your economy," said Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems.
"When you spend a dollar with a multi-national corporation as a license fee for a piece of software, that dollar leaves your country."
"It's about keeping the money in your local economy, developing skills and developing the local economy to be strong in its own right in a global context."
At first I wondered, "Wait a sec. Microsoft is an American company, right? So if other nations pay fees to M$, then the 'local economy' is... the American economy. 'We' are the economy that this benefits!"
Obviously Phipps wants China and other nations to recognize that if they develop open source software (presumably Linux based) then whatever money the government spends on software supports their own people.
One has to ask. "Where does Phipps live and work?"
Do not misunderstand me. I love Linux. I want it to grow and expand and compete effectively with Microsoft. Especially because I want poorer nations to have a solid alternative that works - and works well. Even discounted M$ software imposes a burden on Third World nations.
My only point is that is struck me as odd that an American(?) like Phipps working for Sun Microsystems would invoke the "we want them to invest in their own nations' economies" argument.
I assume many others noticed the following odd retort from Darl:
{quote} Another gripe Torvalds has with McBride is that the Linux community has pleaded all along, 'tell us what the code is, and if it doesn't belong there, we'll remove it.'
McBride says SCO has shown plenty. "They're disingenuous on that or they would be ripping out the million lines of code we've already pointed to," he said, adding that the violations are too far-reaching to simply rip out anyway. One million lines amounts to roughly 20 percent of the entire Linux kernel. McBride says SCO revealed the offending code last August at its Las Vegas SCOForum. "Truly, and then they just ignored it," he said.{end}
I beg your pardon, Darl, but...
1) "million lines of code"?!? How many lines of code were even present when the alleged borrowing occurred?
2) "we've already pointed to"?!? That's rich. This is precisely the heart of the issue: which are the offending lines of code, Darl?!? Show them! SCO consistently refuses, although the article suggests that 60 pages of... something... was provided IBM. You cannot blame Linux programmers for not fixing lines that you refuse to point out!
Wright's First Observation states: "Whenever someone is in error, they will, at some point, in word or deed, not merely refute but contradict themselves. They will do this not because it is logically necessary but because this is how human beings have been observed to behave." This Observation is subject to Wright's First and Second Laws.
McBride's arguments are not merely wrong - they are internally incoherent and self-contradictory.
Besides all the "false and misleading advertising" points which are correct, another issue is when someone is trying to make sure their hardware will work with their favorite OS. Such as some versions of Linux.
My Athlon box has an ATI 9200. When I first installed Red Hat Linux 9.0 I discovered that RH 9.0 can handle many ATI cards including older slower cards - but not the 9200. Grrr!
Fortunately I now have Fedora Core 1.0 which rocks and works fine with my graphics card. But - what if I was expecting the card with this new laptop to work with a certain OS and discovered that it would not because that is not really the correct GPU!
Slashdot Mirror
That's right. In Louisiana there are... uh... there is one. Exactly one.
Basically what "alternative explanations" can there possibly be that are non-religious? This is the question that law supporters refuse to address. Sure teach ID or creationism or "God did through evolution" or... *but not in a public school classroom*. Why do Christians want to coopt the power of the State in order to advance (a probably warped notion of) Christian mission?
I object to the law also because it is so dishonest. Supporters know exactly what it is supposed to achieve, and all this "academic freedom" and "critical inquiry" rhetoric is a smokescreen.
Dan Simmons in his monumental _Hyperion_ series, specifically book #3 _The Rise of Endymion_ writes about how the Pax authorities on Mare Infinitus are able to lift Raul Endymion's fingerprints from a coffee cup that has been washed multiple times "using the latest forensic techniques". (They did not realize of course whose fingerprints they were - at the time he was some unidentified fellow who showed up and got into trouble with the local authorities.) I remember thinking "you gotta be kidding - no way you can do that". And here we are talking about... lifting fingerprints from something that has been washed multiple times. Once again what science-fiction imagines in the far distant future is being developed even as we turn the page.
My first point is simply that I am glad British school might be doing something about bullying. Although we can debate whether the solution is entirely legal or appropriate. But the problem is very real.
Now to cyberbullying...
My daughter was the very first victim of cyberbullying at her rather elite private school here in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Yes a personal detail.) Pretty bad, although could have been worse. Her teachers cared and tried to take action against the students involved. The administration did squat and hung us out to dry. She handled it well, but over the course of that year (because her parents took it very seriously) she was ostracized, and quickly students and administrators alike got into a "blame the victim" pattern. Her grades plummeted. Often talked about killing herself, yadda yadda yadda. Friendships (such as between us and other parents) ended over this because they would not hold their children accountable. (In a new school now, thriving, grades shot up to A's and 100's. Go figure.)
Again - my point is simply "cyberbullying is also a serious and real problem that causes real observable damage".
Whether such policies are legal, enforceable, and so on - that is quite debatable. The website provider (a kind of Facebook for kids) actually took the site down when we complained (we think). Good for them. Violation of policy. The school took the "well, not our network/computers, therefore we can't do anything" line. (Photos of my child were clearly taken at school. Uh...) Technically might be correct. I don't know. My final point is, "Even if schools cannot legally police and enforce every last dang website or IM or whatever... *something* needs to be done by *someone*". The problem is bloody real and so is the damage this kind of filth.
I appreciate and sympathize with concerns about privacy and excessive government intrusion and all that. I really do. But what then shall we do? Unless we want to deny the seriousness of this problem?
I tried a few basic phrases where I know (from graduate school) what the Akkadian should be. "If a man kills..." (shumma awilum idak, if I recall) from Hammurapi's Code. "For the gods" (ana ilani). "An adoption tablet" (tuppi maruti, all over the place especially in Nuzi tablets). Only a few words were represented correctly, and surely through the simplistic "this English word matches" method. I was shocked that even "kills" and "gods" were not rendered correctly. The script on the site tells me that terribly outdated sources were used. Tried the same for a few very simple Egyptian phrases. "The city is in joy" (all over the place in Gardiner, 3rd ed) (result not too bad on this one). "The priest hears the god". What? No flag (n-ch-r, sign for deity)? Few years ago I researched how to write out "God is Love" and "God loves you" (for Vacation Bible School, the theme was archeology-past), and I scoured Gardiner to make sure I got the grammar just right. Oh heck not even close - only correct part was mr for love, but should be mrwt for the noun. Don't get me on the Sumerian tests. Really disgustingly simple stuff from temple dedicatory inscriptions (I had just one semester of Sumerian). Well... got dingir for "god" but that's about it. Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results. Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results.
On the other hand one can make the reasonable observation that in another sense Americans don't always work as well as they should. We have a lot of wasted/slack time. Perhaps if we rested (sabbathed?) more we would better apply ourselves when we truly are at work. (Work when you are working, and play when you are playing.) There are notable exceptions of course, many Americans apply themselves most diligently and work hard when they are working.
Quick anecdote to support. During 3 week trip to south India, our team helped paint a new school being built. The locals were amazed that we when we were working, we just worked worked worked, paint paint paint, with hardly a break (in tropical weather, it was hot/humid down there by the equator), sweating like crazy. They said, "An Indian worker will paint for a few minutes, enjoy a cigarette, chat with his buddy, paint again for a while, rinse and repeat". Not that Indians (at least in that state) are lazy or Americans are better - we simply have different cultural emphases on WORK-don't-socialize versus work-but-also-ENJOY-OTHER-PEOPLE.
By the way, most internationals work extremely hard, especially when the work is academic/working on a degree. The point is not "they are lazy" but "they notice how hard working Americans are most of the time".
So my general answer is Yes, Americans need both to slack and work harder.
For years a project within the Library of Congress has been saving important sound recordings. Their medium of choice? Cutting records. Okay they don't fit in your iPod and the sound quality is like mp3 with 2bps sampling... but - and here is my point - they can easily and always be accessed even if technology gets hosed and protocols are rendered obsolete. (My dissertation, in fact, is partly obsolete because of the DOS application used to insert all the Hebrew and Greek.)
What if there is a nuclear war... natural disaster that sends us back a few eons... alien attack... you get the idea... will we be able to read this stuff? if it is only stored electronically?
Why is it that in sci-fi movies and shows when people can read the writings of a long dead civilization it is because those buggers used things like books? Why is it that we can still read cuneiform documents on baked clay tablets from Mesopotamia thousands of years ago? I'm all for electronic storage and searches and such - groovy man. But if that is the only way we store this stuff... then one day we might not live to regret it.
My dad died very unexpectedly in December 2000. He had been involved in a whole series of business negotations for various tech support contracts. Suddenly - where is this guy?!? I set up Outlook Express to produce a set, automatic reply to all incoming emails, something to the effect of, "This is R_ W_, D_ W_'s son. I am sorry to inform you that... Please contact L_ Corporation at xxx.yyy.zzzz if you need further assistance."
I think of all the people I email, and not just for fun, but to get stuff done. Committees, colleagues, publisher(s). What would my wife do if suddenly she had to handle all this?
It's actually a serious issue.
Makes one wonder if his thesis will be invoked at some point in this new endeavor.
Meanwhile I was working on chronological developments in Biblical Hebrews and their applicability to dating disputed texts in the Pentateuch. Reeeeeeeal useful stuff.
But one must ask, "Why pretend to be evil people doing terrible things?" which some fellow D&D players prefered. "We burnt the village and raped..." One can call it fantasy, but why fantasize such things?
I had a small number of "guidelines" for my campaigns one of which was very simple. NO EVIL CHARACTERS. PERIOD.
If one defends the harmlessness of D&D by harping about Ph.D. theses and good over evil then why play evil characters doing evil things? Logically if it is so harmless and perhaps even good then shucks why not put your alignment choices where your rhetoric is?
For what it is worth I am a Baptist minister. The son of another minister asked if I could help teach D&D to him and some of his buddies. The parents (strongly involved in the church) know full well their sons have purchased D&D books and want me to teach them how to play.
I agreed at first, but after trying to decipher the 3rd edition rule books informed them that I might not be much help. What the heck is a DC?!?
One final comment. I stopped playing not because I started to question the "morality" of playing D&D. I started to question the wisdom of spending so much time playing D&D when I had other things to get cracking on such as a graduate degree... then a wife... then children... then a coupla jobs...
D&D is not evil. But it might not be the best use of my time and energy.
The box itself is AMD K6 and at least 5-6 years old. The IT whiz who set this up - this is one of those "donate old equipment fer a good cause else it gets thrown away" situations - wanted to use RH 9. Too slow and he could not get the kernel trimmed down the way he wanted. Tried RH 8. Same deal. Finally he tried Caldera OpenLinux, was able to cut out various chunks of the kernel, recompile, and it works quite well. GUI is KDE 2 if anybody is interested. Blast from the past! And quite lovely.
Don't get me wrong. SCO is on my "when the revolution comes" list. May their homes be left desolate. May their fields be salted. And other delicious ancient curses from Egyptian and Akkadian literature. Our IT whiz agrees. [Oh, and he could not update online a few broken packages he found because those packages are on the SCO website(s)... he'll have to haul in a CD the old fashioned way.]
PS. While at my daughter's taekwondo school in the "parents wait here" section, chatted with an IBM employee who handles database apps for major corporate client. He pronounced SCO as [skoo] {where oo = long o vowel} rather than [es-sii-oo].
There are almost no Ogg Vorbis boom boxes... portable players... or music buying sites.
Any opinions or reactions?
1) Quite so, and I think I acknowledged that.
2) Hence the (?) after his name, but thanks for the info! [I lived in UK for 5 years as a teenager, when my dad was transfered during his career with Digital.]
Here's another thing. If Phipps of Sun wants to raise the issue of "shucks, why should MS, an American company, benefit from software fees from the Chinese and other non-American nations?", then one has to ask the painfully obvious question: "whose economy benefits from China working with Sun Microsystems?"
Globalism is a two edged sword.
"If you spend a dollar with a local company working on Linux, that dollar stays in your economy," said Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems.
"When you spend a dollar with a multi-national corporation as a license fee for a piece of software, that dollar leaves your country."
"It's about keeping the money in your local economy, developing skills and developing the local economy to be strong in its own right in a global context."
At first I wondered, "Wait a sec. Microsoft is an American company, right? So if other nations pay fees to M$, then the 'local economy' is... the American economy. 'We' are the economy that this benefits!"
Obviously Phipps wants China and other nations to recognize that if they develop open source software (presumably Linux based) then whatever money the government spends on software supports their own people.
One has to ask. "Where does Phipps live and work?"
Do not misunderstand me. I love Linux. I want it to grow and expand and compete effectively with Microsoft. Especially because I want poorer nations to have a solid alternative that works - and works well. Even discounted M$ software imposes a burden on Third World nations.
My only point is that is struck me as odd that an American(?) like Phipps working for Sun Microsystems would invoke the "we want them to invest in their own nations' economies" argument.
I assume many others noticed the following odd retort from Darl: {quote} Another gripe Torvalds has with McBride is that the Linux community has pleaded all along, 'tell us what the code is, and if it doesn't belong there, we'll remove it.' McBride says SCO has shown plenty. "They're disingenuous on that or they would be ripping out the million lines of code we've already pointed to," he said, adding that the violations are too far-reaching to simply rip out anyway. One million lines amounts to roughly 20 percent of the entire Linux kernel. McBride says SCO revealed the offending code last August at its Las Vegas SCOForum. "Truly, and then they just ignored it," he said.{end} I beg your pardon, Darl, but... 1) "million lines of code"?!? How many lines of code were even present when the alleged borrowing occurred? 2) "we've already pointed to"?!? That's rich. This is precisely the heart of the issue: which are the offending lines of code, Darl?!? Show them! SCO consistently refuses, although the article suggests that 60 pages of... something... was provided IBM. You cannot blame Linux programmers for not fixing lines that you refuse to point out! Wright's First Observation states: "Whenever someone is in error, they will, at some point, in word or deed, not merely refute but contradict themselves. They will do this not because it is logically necessary but because this is how human beings have been observed to behave." This Observation is subject to Wright's First and Second Laws. McBride's arguments are not merely wrong - they are internally incoherent and self-contradictory.
Besides all the "false and misleading advertising" points which are correct, another issue is when someone is trying to make sure their hardware will work with their favorite OS. Such as some versions of Linux. My Athlon box has an ATI 9200. When I first installed Red Hat Linux 9.0 I discovered that RH 9.0 can handle many ATI cards including older slower cards - but not the 9200. Grrr! Fortunately I now have Fedora Core 1.0 which rocks and works fine with my graphics card. But - what if I was expecting the card with this new laptop to work with a certain OS and discovered that it would not because that is not really the correct GPU!