My very narrow point was in direct rebuttal to the erroneous statement that a company can't expect to sell something publicly and keep something secret.
Right! if you point out what one of Coke's secret ingredients is, after finding out it's something harmful, they can expect to keep it legally secret, and that has nothing to do with his point. Oh, Wait - I guess it does after all and you're being an idiot.
I doubt it. As old guys retire, the supreme court gets filled with people appointed by the administration and approved by the congress. So the same people who championed the PATRIOT act are the ones picking who's going the be on the Supreme Court when those cases come up.
I'm sure you could easily download and install a copy of 'vi' if your Linux distribution didn't include it
Bad example. Vi is used by several applications as the default editor when none is defined in environment variables. Take it away and important system commands like "crontab -e" and vipw stop working by default.
Also, If you want a system where only the minimum tools are installed, you don't want Linux - you want Windows.
I would be perfectly happy with a world where nobody tried making Linux usable for "the masses" so long as that world didn't contain a Microsoft. They have a willingness to use the large marketshare they get from appealing to the lowest common denominator, as leverage against niche players like Linux. Microsoft has made it so that in order to make Linux more usable for *me*, more other people have to stop using Windows (thus reducing Microsoft's ability to dominate via non-standard standards.)
The difference is that in Windows, a signifigant portion of the executable code of the browser Internet Explorer is embedded in DLLs that are also needed for other functionality of the system - so there is a technical as well as economic marriage of the browser to the OS. With OSX the marriage is economic only - you can't BUY the OS without the browser, but you can USE the OS without the browser if you'd rather install some other browser.
But the weapon will have a side-effect of blinding, even if that is not the goal. I'm not sure how that falls under the Geneva convention. I suppose if the laser is always powerful enough that when you look at it a hole burns in your head killing you, then the fact that it blinded you a moment before killing you doesn't matter, but if the weapon is being shot through something that diminishes its strength, like fog or smoke, it will end up leaving people blind but not dead. And before you say that this isn't a likely scenario, consider what a likely defence tactic against a laser weapon would be - something to obscure the light - like a smoke screen or fog generator. (Or better yet a very high-quality mirror - one that reflects a large enough percentage of the light that the remainder isn't strong enough to destroy the mirror.)
Umm, some of us are a bit more civilised than that.
Yes. But until you can replace that word "some" with the word "all", even those who are more civilized will still need to maintain the machinery of war if they want to continue existing.
In order for a country to succeed at curing disease, exploring space, or feeding the hungry, it has to first succeed at merely existing. Strip the military down to nothing and that won't happen.
I wonder how Microsoft will convince consumers that loss of control is a good thing, and how long the convincing will take.
If someone is already a Microsoft customer, then that person already believes loss of control is a good thing, or they wouldn't be a Microsoft customer.
The US could have easily ignored Germany's declaration of war and concentrated on Japan. Germany was not in a position to threaten the US in any real way, other than to use submarines on shipping transports that were carrying supplies to Britain, which Germany was already doing anyway before they declared war. Had the US wanted to, they could have considered Hilter a secondary, irrelevant enemy. Where did I get this information from? Some ignorant organ of American hubris? No. Winston Churchill. In his 6 volume history of world war 2, at one point he is describing his voyage at sea on the way to Washington in december 1941. His entire staff was travelling with him to have the first official talks as allies with the US, and to plan strategies. On the way there, they worked long and hard on a document to attempt to convince the United States that Germany should be the primary goal. There was a real fear that the isolationist US would want to concentrate on just Japan, since Germany wasn't the one that attacked them. When they got to Washington and prepared to deliver this document, it turned out to Churchill's relief to be unneccesary. The US had already decided that Germany should be attacked first, and the disagreements between the war planners were only over the exact means by which to do so, not whether or not it should be done.
The US ended up "storming out pissed" because several key countries said they would veto any war on iraq no matter what. Not, "we don't see a reason for war yet." Not, "We'll only go to war if the following conditions are met.", no - nothing reasonable like that. It was, "No matter what, we promise we will veto any action that has war with iraq as even a POSSIBLE consequence, even if it's predicated on some list of conditions." Once that statement is made, then why should the US ever bother trying to prove it's point to the UN - it won't matter? Why should it ever bother pursuing the diplomatic path when such a statement robs it of all possible teeth? By making that statement, France guaranteed that there would be no reason to bother with further pursuit of a UN resolution.
It was a very stupid move. If they wanted to make diplomacy work, they should have never made such a statement. I'm not saying that France was wrong to oppose war under the current conditions. I'm saying France was wrong to make a public announcement that they would oppose it under any and all circumstances. That public announcement made Bush believe that he no longer had any reason to talk with the French - no reason to bother trying to convince them (which in turn, robs them of any avenue to try to convince him to tone it down) It was a tactical blunder, unless pushing the US into making war without UN approval was part of some larger plan of theirs.
Just a nitpick point, but the Nazis got into power during a democracy - a corrupted one, no doubt, but still a warped form of depocracy. It is possible to transform a democracy into a dictatorship by duping the people with promises until you get into power, and then pulling out the big guns and showing your true nature. So when Germany became a democracy (well, West Germany, anyway), they weren't so much trying a brand new idea as undoing the damage of the last decade and returning to democracy again.
I don't really know what my point here is. I guess it's just to say that the transformation of Japan into a democracy was a much larger feat than the transformation of Germany into one. Germans had gotten some practice with the concept beforehand.
My SUV gets 22 MPG. I am often carpooling with it (Not to work. For work I bike.) Yet there is no end of stupid assumptions from people claiming my driving habits are more wasteful than theirs based on nothing more than the type of car used.
And choosing to buy a bit less middle-east oil by having a more efficient car doesn't change the fact that you are still "funding the terrorists" - You're just doing it a little less. Why not go cold turkey by actually paying attention to which gas companies buy oil from which sources, and thereby avoid middle east oil 100%?
The answer is simple - people already had reasons to dislike SUV's and they use the weak terrorist connection as a scapegoat to attack SUV's. This is no different than what is done by those who say that you should stop buying drugs because they fund terrorists. They had a cause they already wanted to promote that had absolutley nothing to do with terrorists. (Kinda like Ashcroft pushing through snooping laws under the false pretense of stopping terrorists.)
The stupid thing is that people telling me my SUV feeds money to the terrorists don't realize that they probably give more money to them than I do if they fill their efficient car at any randomly chosen gas station, and I pick and choose carefully.
Whether the goal is actually to attract users to Linux or to keep it a plaything of geeks and afficianados is hard to judge, going by comments on/. and other fora.
Attracting end-users to Linux is a fine idea. Doing it by adopting the same evil strategies as Microsoft is not.
It's that one phrase in the middle that's the problem, the part that says "only on Linux". Most volunteer programmers absolutely hate the notion of artificial scarcity designed to make people need to use a platform they otherwise would never need to. Linux users have been on the recieving end of that tactic quite a bit ("I would use Linux on my desktop at work, but a lot of the company's operation requires an Exchange client.") So it's unlikely to find a group where people would go out of their way to avoid having their program ported to other systems. (They might not do the work themselves, but they'd be perfectly okay with letting someone else do the port.) Consider: today you can run Perl on Windows. You can run Apache on Windows. You can run gcc on Windows. This is the sort of thing that always naturally happens when a good product exists on an open platform first - eventually it shows up on the lesser platforms later.
It's not that being a windows user makes you a newbie. It's that being a newbie makes you unlikely to try being a linux user, thus you have many newbies diluting the results for Windows, but not many newbies diluting the results for Linux.
Linux desktoppers are on the cutting edge and may have better search techniques and not go trawling onto the 30th page of results in order to find something like some Windows novices.
More importantly, I think a Linux user is more likely to have a different set of browsing habits that tend to make him:
(a) have more bookmarks, and (b) re-visit the same sites frequently.
And those are habits that would reduce Google usage.
1) Create Linux applications that do compelling and unique things that Microsoft apps don't.
Unless the manner in which it is better is the user interface. People assume any deviation from the Windows interface is a deficit, which makes it impossible to compete on those grounds. Either your program feels exactly identical, or the sheep think it's a flaw that it is different. The notion that it might be different in a BETTER way never enters their minds.
I believe that Gnome and KDE would both like to clone the Windows(tm) UI as closely as possible
I sure hope not. I might have to go back to fvwm2 in order to have a usable window manager that actually knows that keyboard focus and topmost window are actually two seperate independant things that have nothing to do with each other.
This SUV owner just chooses carefully which gas stations to buy gas from so as not to fund terrorism, so despite the fact that your car may use less gas, unless you do the same you are funding terrorism more than I am.
See here for a list of which companies do and don't get their oil from the middle east:
Sorry to bust your bubble, but your own government is 100% responsible for all "drug-related" violence.
Apparently we aren't using the same English dictionary. Being responsible for X means more than just setting up a situation that SOMEONE ELSE can exploit to do X. The ones directly responsible for the drug-related violence are the criminals involved in the black-market who are doing the violence.
If the government stops enforcing the law against murder, and my neighbor decides to shoot me, my neighbor is still the one responsible for that action. In that example, the government would merely be guilty of ineptitude or complacency, which is a different thing from it being responsible.
Not all oil comes from the middle east. There exist companies that obtain all their oil from sources outside the middle east. A list can be found here:
http://www.boycott-middle-east-oil.com/
Even the smallest most efficient car still funds terrorism if the gas you put into it comes from a company that imports oil from the middle east. Poeple attacking SUVs for funding the terrorists are doing the very same thing as people attacking P2P for funding terrorists - they are using the currently popular scapegoat to attack something when their real reasons for wanting to attack it have nothing to do with that scapegoat.
The argument against SUVs is made weaker by this childish tactic, not stronger.
Slashdot Mirror
Right! if you point out what one of Coke's secret ingredients is, after finding out it's something harmful, they can expect to keep it legally secret, and that has nothing to do with his point. Oh, Wait - I guess it does after all and you're being an idiot.
I doubt it. As old guys retire, the supreme court gets filled with people appointed by the administration and approved by the congress. So the same people who championed the PATRIOT act are the ones picking who's going the be on the Supreme Court when those cases come up.
Bad example. Vi is used by several applications
as the default editor when none is defined in
environment variables. Take it away and important
system commands like "crontab -e" and vipw stop working by default.
Also, If you want a system where only the minimum tools are installed, you don't want Linux - you want Windows.
I would be perfectly happy with a world where nobody tried making Linux usable for "the masses" so long as that world didn't contain a Microsoft. They have a willingness to use the large marketshare they get from appealing to the lowest common denominator, as leverage against niche players like Linux. Microsoft has made it so that in order to make Linux more usable for *me*, more other people have to stop using Windows (thus reducing Microsoft's ability to dominate via non-standard standards.)
The difference is that in Windows, a signifigant portion of the executable code of the browser Internet Explorer is embedded in DLLs that are also needed for other functionality of the system - so there is a technical as well as economic marriage of the browser to the OS. With OSX the marriage is economic only - you can't BUY the OS without the browser, but you can USE the OS without the browser if you'd rather install some other browser.
But the weapon will have a side-effect of blinding, even if that is not the goal. I'm not sure how that falls under the Geneva convention. I suppose if the laser is always powerful enough that when you look at it a hole burns in your head killing you, then the fact that it blinded you a moment before killing you doesn't matter, but if the weapon is being shot through something that diminishes its strength, like fog or smoke, it will end up leaving people blind but not dead. And before you say that this isn't a likely scenario, consider what a likely defence tactic against a laser weapon would be - something to obscure the light - like a smoke screen or fog generator. (Or better yet a very high-quality mirror - one that reflects a large enough percentage of the light that the remainder isn't strong enough to destroy the mirror.)
Yes. But until you can replace that word "some" with the word "all", even those who are more civilized will still need to maintain the machinery of war if they want to continue existing.
In order for a country to succeed at curing disease, exploring space, or feeding the hungry, it has to first succeed at merely existing. Strip the military down to nothing and that won't happen.
The US could have easily ignored Germany's declaration of war and concentrated on Japan. Germany was not in a position to threaten the US in any real way, other than to use submarines on shipping transports that were carrying supplies to Britain, which Germany was already doing anyway before they declared war. Had the US wanted to, they could have considered Hilter a secondary, irrelevant enemy. Where did I get this information from? Some ignorant organ of American hubris? No. Winston Churchill. In his 6 volume history of world war 2, at one point he is describing his voyage at sea on the way to Washington in december 1941. His entire staff was travelling with him to have the first official talks as allies with the US, and to plan strategies. On the way there, they worked long and hard on a document to attempt to convince the United States that Germany should be the primary goal. There was a real fear that the isolationist US would want to concentrate on just Japan, since Germany wasn't the one that attacked them. When they got to Washington and prepared to deliver this document, it turned out to Churchill's relief to be unneccesary. The US had already decided that Germany should be attacked first, and the disagreements between the war planners were only over the exact means by which to do so, not whether or not it should be done.
The US ended up "storming out pissed" because several key countries said they would veto any war on iraq no matter what. Not, "we don't see a reason for war yet." Not, "We'll only go to war if the following conditions are met.", no - nothing reasonable like that. It was, "No matter what, we promise we will veto any action that has war with iraq as even a POSSIBLE consequence, even if it's predicated on some list of conditions." Once that statement is made, then why should the US ever bother trying to prove it's point to the UN - it won't matter? Why should it ever bother pursuing the diplomatic path when such a statement robs it of all possible teeth? By making that statement, France guaranteed that there would be no reason to bother with further pursuit of a UN resolution.
It was a very stupid move. If they wanted to make diplomacy work, they should have never made such a statement. I'm not saying that France was wrong to oppose war under the current conditions. I'm saying France was wrong to make a public announcement that they would oppose it under any and all circumstances. That public announcement made Bush believe that he no longer had any reason to talk with the French - no reason to bother trying to convince them (which in turn, robs them of any avenue to try to convince him to tone it down) It was a tactical blunder, unless pushing the US into making war without UN approval was part of some larger plan of theirs.
Just a nitpick point, but the Nazis got into power during a democracy - a corrupted one, no doubt, but still a warped form of depocracy. It is possible to transform a democracy into a dictatorship by duping the people with promises until you get into power, and then pulling out the big guns and showing your true nature. So when Germany became a democracy (well, West Germany, anyway), they weren't so much trying a brand new idea as undoing the damage of the last decade and returning to democracy again.
I don't really know what my point here is. I guess it's just to say that the transformation of Japan into a democracy was a much larger feat than the transformation of Germany into one. Germans had gotten some practice with the concept beforehand.
My SUV gets 22 MPG. I am often carpooling with it (Not to work. For work I bike.) Yet there is no end of stupid assumptions from people claiming my driving habits are more wasteful than theirs based on nothing more than the type of car used.
And choosing to buy a bit less middle-east oil by having a more efficient car doesn't change the fact that you are still "funding the terrorists" - You're just doing it a little less. Why not go cold turkey by actually paying attention to which gas companies buy oil from which sources, and thereby avoid middle east oil 100%?
The answer is simple - people already had reasons to dislike SUV's and they use the weak terrorist connection as a scapegoat to attack SUV's. This is no different than what is done by those who say that you should stop buying drugs because they fund terrorists. They had a cause they already wanted to promote that had absolutley nothing to do with terrorists. (Kinda like Ashcroft pushing through snooping laws under the false pretense of stopping terrorists.)
The stupid thing is that people telling me my SUV feeds money to the terrorists don't realize that they probably give more money to them than I do if they fill their efficient car at any randomly chosen gas station, and I pick and choose carefully.
Does X-mouse do all possible combinations of the following?
focus: click versus follow versus sloppy
raise: When border is clicked only, versus
Whenever focus is gained, versus when
the interior is clicked.
I don't know, having never used X-mouse.
Whether the goal is actually to attract users to Linux or to keep it a plaything of geeks and afficianados is hard to judge, going by comments on
Attracting end-users to Linux is a fine idea. Doing it by adopting the same evil strategies as Microsoft is not.
It's that one phrase in the middle that's the problem, the part that says "only on Linux". Most volunteer programmers absolutely hate the notion of artificial scarcity designed to make people need to use a platform they otherwise would never need to. Linux users have been on the recieving end of that tactic quite a bit ("I would use Linux on my desktop at work, but a lot of the company's operation requires an Exchange client.") So it's unlikely to find a group where people would go out of their way to avoid having their program ported to other systems. (They might not do the work themselves, but they'd be perfectly okay with letting someone else do the port.) Consider: today you can run Perl on Windows. You can run Apache on Windows. You can run gcc on Windows. This is the sort of thing that always naturally happens when a good product exists on an open platform first - eventually it shows up on the lesser platforms later.
It's not that being a windows user makes you a newbie. It's that being a newbie makes you unlikely to try being a linux user, thus you have many newbies diluting the results for Windows, but not many newbies diluting the results for Linux.
Linux desktoppers are on the cutting edge and may have better search techniques and not go trawling onto the 30th page of results in order to find something like some Windows novices.
More importantly, I think a Linux user is more likely to have a different set of browsing habits that tend to make him:
(a) have more bookmarks, and
(b) re-visit the same sites frequently.
And those are habits that would reduce Google usage.
1) Create Linux applications that do compelling and unique things that Microsoft apps don't.
Unless the manner in which it is better is the user interface. People assume any deviation from the Windows interface is a deficit, which makes it impossible to compete on those grounds. Either your program feels exactly identical, or the sheep think it's a flaw that it is different. The notion that it might be different in a BETTER way never enters their minds.
I believe that Gnome and KDE would both like to clone the Windows(tm) UI as closely as possible
I sure hope not. I might have to go back to fvwm2 in order to have a usable window manager that actually knows that keyboard focus and topmost window are actually two seperate independant things that have nothing to do with each other.
Sorry, typo in the URL. It's actually supposed to be:
http://www.boycott-middle-east-oil.com/
This SUV owner just chooses carefully which gas stations to buy gas from so as not to fund terrorism, so despite the fact that your car may use less gas, unless you do the same you are funding terrorism more than I am.
See here for a list of which companies do and don't get their oil from the middle east:
http://www.boycot-middle-east-oil/
Sorry to bust your bubble, but your own government
is 100% responsible for all "drug-related" violence.
Apparently we aren't using the same English dictionary. Being responsible for X means more than just setting up a situation that SOMEONE ELSE can exploit to do X. The ones directly responsible for the drug-related violence are the criminals involved in the black-market who are doing the violence.
If the government stops enforcing the law against murder, and my neighbor decides to shoot me, my neighbor is still the one responsible for that action. In that example, the government would merely be guilty of ineptitude or complacency, which is a different thing from it being responsible.
Not all oil comes from the middle east. There exist companies that obtain all their oil from sources outside the middle east. A list can be found here:
http://www.boycott-middle-east-oil.com/
Even the smallest most efficient car still funds terrorism if the gas you put into it comes from a company that imports oil from the middle east. Poeple attacking SUVs for funding the terrorists are doing the very same thing as people attacking P2P for funding terrorists - they are using the currently popular scapegoat to attack something when their real reasons for wanting to attack it have nothing to do with that scapegoat.
The argument against SUVs is made weaker by this childish tactic, not stronger.
No. It's because CompSci *users* know what they're doing, thus freeing the admins to not have to be so nasty about it.