He also said that faith is a belief beyond proof that something more exists.
The idea that faith is a belief beyond proof is a relatively recent one (in historical terms), and a reaction to the encroachment of reason and science into realms that were previously those of the church. Redefining faith to be a righteous, unwavering belief in the face of rational arguments to the contrary was a defensive reaction on the part of the church, and a fairly effective one, it seems.
Faith, in its original meaning, is loyalty, confidence, trust. "In good faith" means something done with loyalty to a cause or agreement. One has faith in one's spouse, faith in one's king, and faith in one's god, meaning you stick with them through thick and thin. Loyalty to your god was exactly the meaning of the 1st commandment - "thou shalt have no other gods before me". Testing one's faith was the same as testing one's loyalty; losing faith meant throwing one's lot in with Baal, or Osiris, or another god who might offer you a better deal, and one could certainly do this without any loss of belief in gods or even in God. One could even forsake God or all gods, without loss of belief - the test of Job was not whether he would lose belief (it's hard to lose belief when suffering from the wrath of God), but whether he would lose loyalty.
In the primitive world, belief in some god was not necessarily irrational; there was an awful lot of stuff that begged for an explanation, and precious little hard knowledge that afforded an explanation. Believing in gods as the ultimate cosmic actors was an entirely different matter than offering one's loyalty to one or another of them.
But in the modern world, the pernicious idea that faith is a belief beyond reason (and that this is somehow a good thing), is dangerously irrational and entirely without merit. Belief must be consistent with reason, or else it is insanity. It is possible to rationally believe in gods (one simply has to define god appropriately), but incredibly most of the "faithful" prefer the insanity option.
My favourite quote from TFA (in reference to the importance or not of tabbed browsing):
Windows does not use windows Indeed. I've always thought it should have been named "Screens".
I'm going to respond to myself, since I found actual information at http://realclimate.org/: It's not a Y2K bug at all, but a change in sources of temperature data that had not been calibrated with respect to each other. And it's not the gargantuan error that some people seem to be thinking. The anomalies for 1998 and 1934 used to be +1.24 degrees and +1.23 degrees, a difference of 0.01 degree. Now it's the other way around. And the long-term trend is unaffected. The uncertainties in data collection methods over the last 70 years mean that differences of less than 0.1 degree are not considered significant, so we're talking about changes *an order of magnitude* too low to even discuss meaningfully, much less get excited about.
Apache is a bit more difficult to get up and running...
Are you compiling from source or something? It's been pre-installed and pre-configured on every unixish box I've seen over the last 10 years (and that's gotta be 50-100 boxes running various OSes). I can see that some specialized modules can be difficult to get going, but for basic Apache, you just turn it on. In fact, for some early Linuxes, the first thing you had to do after setting up a system was turn if OFF, since it was running by default.
Tell me, do you compile your shit natively or do you install binaries
I understand what you're getting at, but the situation is not what you'd expect. The problematic SuSE system is hand-tweaked, which fixed a bad disk performance problem, but doesn't stop the load thrashing. The rock-solid RH7.3 system is an out-of-the-box binary, which furthermore was cloned and moved to an entirely new system when the original system disk started to show IO errors - so it's been a solid binary on two generations of hardware.
If you expect Open Source, in most cases amateur, developers to make their software automatically detect and work with older library versions, compile portable enough binaries to run on your hacked together system, you are sorely mistaken.
I don't expect the amateur developers to build robust, portable binaries. But they did! I *do* expect the enterprise developers at Novell, IBM, etc. to build robust, portable binaries. But they don't.
All that enterprise crap is what keeps the platform solid and almost crash free.
I want to agree with you, I really do. But my SuSE 10.1 desktop regularly has fits where it becomes completely unuseable - if I can manage to get a shell, I find that the load has spiked to 5-10 (on a single core system) when the system was doing *nothing*. Just this morning, I woke up, poured a bowl of cereal, walked over to it to read some Slashdot over my Cheerios, and found the system thrashing and refusing to come out of screensaver because the load was so high. This happened while I was sleeping. I had to ssh in from my Powerbook to kill off any processes that appeared to be using CPU before the system would respond to the mouse.
Meanwhile at work, we just tossed an Ubuntu server that should have been reasonably swift, but was regularly DOS'ing itself by spiking to loads of 40 or more several times a day under normal use. A load of 40-60, on a single-core machine! We "fixed" it by spending thousands of dollars replacing it with a pair of multicore beast with scads of memory and fast disks, which seems to overpower the problem.
Then there's that server belonging to a client, a RHES 4 system. When I ssh in through a tunnel to update it, it insists on running the update program as an X client for crissakes. Then it tells me to register the system at a URL, but the URL cannot be selected or copied to the clipboard. This is "enterprise" quality software?
Back at work, the dev server is still a RedHat 7.3 clunker. It has a half dozen developers fine-tuning their infinite loops, fork bombs, broken joins, buffer overruns, and spaghetti code, all day long. It simply never crashes or hangs, never gets slow, and never complains about the abuse it receives. It's a rock-solid dream. Except that it's a damn nuisance to update, since it's so old. And it's only hobbyist-quality software, after all, built before RedHat went all enterprise-centric
Posted, with regrets, from my Powerbook. I'm starting to think that software built for the home user is a safer bet than the "enterprise" shite I'm dealing with every day.
That's not a shell, it's a boot prompt with some firmware commands - the non-PC equivalent of a BIOS setup screen. Calling that a shell is like calling the BIOS setup screen Windows. Granted, it's a start, because it may allow you to load and boot alternative kernels, but "shell" implies a command shell around an OS. All they appear to have done is completely broken the iPhone so that it won't boot; the machine is falling back to its ROM prompt in the hopes that someone can manually tell it how to boot.
Where is the plastic that wouldn't have biodegraded? Where are the ruins of their cities? Where is their waste, particularly the radioactive kind? Shouldn't they have spanned the globe in seeking resources for their growth? Where are their religious and historical monuments? Why do we still have oil and fossil fuels? Why didn't they cause a spike of global warming in their quest for the energy needed for space flight? Why do we still have so many easily found fossils? Why don't we see any evidence of industrial mining?
You are presuming that another civilization would have achieved interstellar spaceflight by being just like us. In case it's not obvious, this is illogical, since we have not developed interstellar spaceflight. It is at least as likely that we are a model for how *not* to do it. Civilizations that waste their resources on Hummers, Big Macs, and WMDs may self-select for staying put.
I think we'd have a better shot at it, for instance, if we were more scientific and less mystical, if we were more visionary on a multigenerational scale, if we were less concerned with material wealth and acquisitiveness, and if we weren't so busy fighting each other due to population pressures and religious differences. If we were all of those things, we could easily have left the Earth thousands of years ago without having left a fraction of the mark we've made as earthbound primates.
I cannot fathom how that got +5 insightful... The observations presented are not insightful; at best they are +1 thoughtless fantasy.
I'm sorry, I thought the discussion was about flying saucers and little green men. Perhaps you take the subject very seriously, but otherwise stop interrupting with your humourless skepticism and learn to play along.
Now, the topic was "Why would the pilots of UFOs look humanoid?" (FYI, this is the part where wild speculation is required.)
The proposed hypotheses were:
Humanoid life forms are common in the universe.
They are homonids, directly related to us.
they come from the future, using some kind of time travel
they come from the past, from a lost period of history
they come from the present, and we've only recently achieved the technology to notice them
Now, the "insightful" mods are presumably there because hypotheses 2.2 and 2.3 were judged by Slashdot readers as more interesting and/or plausible than 1. and 2.1. Perhaps you disagree and think that humanoid aliens or time travel is more believable, in which case you're not really in a position to complain about thoughtless fantasy. Or perhaps you just don't understand the point of these games.
Like most amusements, it's a lot less amusing after it's been explained.
Maybe there has been plenty of time but if there really were dozens of space-faring hominid civilisations predating us then they must have spent an awfully long time cleaning up after themselves before they disappeared.
I think that good ol' nature has done a half-decent job even if they left a complete mess behind. First you have the ice ages scraping the north hemisphere bare, then the big melt causing sea levels to rise hundreds of feet eliminating all coastal settlements, then the Sahara desert burying most of north Africa in dunes, and any major fertile valley burying everything in hundreds of feet in sediment, and finally jungles burying everything in, er, jungle. (We're still finding whole cities in Central America, and that's from only 1,000 years ago.)
20,000 years is a very long time. Long enough for things to get buried or flooded beyond all reach, but not long enough for geological processes to thrust it back up into our faces. We *could* find it, if we were looking, but for the most part we haven't been, because it's only recently that the idea has even occurred to us, and we really don't know where to start. We've only started accidentally finding things since the advent of SCUBA, but we really don't know much about what we're looking at. See for example, the Yonaguni Monuments and the Bimini Road.
Also the head tends to contain a mouth-like orgain for feeding/drinking that often includes teeth or other specialized feeding aparatus. There is also a digestive tract throughout the body and abdomen, leading to a rectum or exit hole.
This is merely one solution to the fundamental problem faced by all organisms: maximizing the interface area between the organism and the environment. The more interface, the more efficiently you can extract energy from the environment. Spherical organisms of any appreciable size tend to be quite rare as a result. Branching organisms, on the other hand, seem to be quite common in all multi-cellular kingdoms. Tube-shaped organisms are unique to the animal kingdom, however. It's an interesting solution, since the internal part of the tube can be made quite convoluted to increase interface area, and yes it does tend to produce a head and a tail. Other conceivable solutions to the basic problem might include mesh organisms, swarm organisms, or amoeba-like blobs, none of which obviously leads to heads and tails. Terrestrial evolution has discovered several of these on its own, so it's not entirely clear to me that even something as basic as a head can be assumed to be universal.
I'm thinking it's us from the past. Considering that Homo Sapiens Sapiens is at least 50,000 years old, and recorded history about 5,000, there's been plenty of time for us to develop a few spacefaring civilizations. If you allow for some alternate branches of the homonid family you have a lot more time than that. You'd expect them to swing past the old farm from time to time to see what, if anything, has changed.
On the other hand, who's to say they're from space at all? Even if the stories are 100% true, there's not a shred of evidence to show that they're from space. We've never seen spacecraft, only aircraft. Is space alien really more plausible than some kind of technologically superior earthling who can live undetected (almost) on the same planet as us?
Heh. So basically you can keep the kernel running, but your X programs are fucked anyway. Well, gee, that's so different from rebooting the system.
Heh, you've never used any *nix before, except as a toy. There's a fucking mountain of difference. Does your box run any services for the network? Does it share any printers or disks? Does it have any other users logged into it? Does it run any scheduled tasks or background jobs? If you're doing *any* of these things, then there's no way in hell you want the system to reboot. If you're not doing any of these things, you're not running Linux, you're running a bloody X-terminal.
But the Windows world isn't like that. It's a cold, unforgiving place where nothing is sacred, users turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the smallest error
Windows users turn on any company that makes the smallest error? After all those years of patiently tolerating errors, insecurity, and instability, Windows users are now suddenly rabid wolves on software quality? And therefore Apple is toast because Mac users are world famous for not giving a rat's ass about quality?
Indeed. Nobody else seems to have grasped the irony of complaining that a browser is not as "powerful or feature-loaded as Firefox". Wasn't the original design goal of Firefox to be minimalist and fast? Any reviewer who thinks Firefox is great because of its power and feature set comes across as a bit of a noob.
FWIW, I use Firefox and Mozilla every day for web development, so I appreciate its power and feature set. However, I use Safari to Just Plain Browse, so then again I don't.
Everything they do is designed to make you want to give them more of your money.
Believe it or not, some things they do are designed to get their customers to give their money to YOU. Well, not you specifically, since it all seems to be going over your head. But if you were an application developer, then you get lots of free stuff from Apple (in this case, without even buying Apple hardware), and you can use that to build apps that make YOU (not Apple) money. Apple benefits by fostering a healthy ecosystem for their hardware, so they don't even really care that you aren't giving them your money. What you are giving them is an environment that allows them to prosper, and the fact that you also prosper is their payment to you in return. Software is not a zero-sum game.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Control characters have long-standing meanings, and the ones used by Windows have meanings that include End-of-file, Cancel, and Interrupt, all of which are quite dangerous to issue in certain apps. If one of those apps has focus, then your clipboard hotkeys can wreak a lot of damage accidentally. Apple took the right approach and used a command key instead; DOS PCs didn't have a command key, so MS changed the meaning of control, except that many apps still used the old meanings.
Can I say it? Windows has the worst desktop in all of computing. Start buttons, taskbars, a work paradigm that encourages monolithic apps and maximized windows, a desktop that gets abusively filled with every program shortcut known to man, a defective clipboard model (crtl-C!?), sloppy filename/type handling (annakournikova.jpg.exe), annoying alerts and confirmation dialogs, application-centric workflow, the list goes on and on.
It was "good enough" on 14-inch monitors in 1995, I'll grant you, and I'm no big fan of the Gnome/KDE attempts to replace it. But there are a few of us out there who think it's a pretty sorry excuse for a desktop in this day and age.
Crikey, it's just unix. Can you imagine saying that it's not possible to do real POS or finance on unix? You'd be laughed at. That stuff was being done on unix before Windows had any presence in the business world. The first unix system I ever saw was a Xenix POS system. Our good friend SCO specialized in POS systems.
Maybe you can't find any commodity small-business applications in these areas for unix platforms, but don't pretend that your bargain-brand applications are "real" and the unix ones are non-existent. If you want a real POS system that runs on the unix of your choice, I know of two, and it's not even my field. You can expect to pay 5-6 figures, though. If that's not real enough for you, just phone up IBM tell them you want to pay 7 figures for some Websphere monstrosity. They'll fix you up with something so real your eyes will bleed.
You think that Rumsfeld's real job was as a Secretary of Defense? The reality is that he, Cheney, and the others are on a little public service sabbatical from their real paymasters. In Rumsfeld's case, he has deep connections in finance and technology (pharma, electronics, engineering, and defense). He can expect to be paid more from a single board appointment than he was as SoD, and he can expect to hold numerous such board appointments in his "retirement" from that "job", just like he did before becoming SoD. That's the job secutiry the GP was referring to.
This story was in fact put out in December 2006. I know because according to my homepage, I submitted it to Slashdot on December 27, with the title "Network Neutrality top censored news story of 2007". It was rejected, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that faith is a belief beyond proof is a relatively recent one (in historical terms), and a reaction to the encroachment of reason and science into realms that were previously those of the church. Redefining faith to be a righteous, unwavering belief in the face of rational arguments to the contrary was a defensive reaction on the part of the church, and a fairly effective one, it seems.
Faith, in its original meaning, is loyalty, confidence, trust. "In good faith" means something done with loyalty to a cause or agreement. One has faith in one's spouse, faith in one's king, and faith in one's god, meaning you stick with them through thick and thin. Loyalty to your god was exactly the meaning of the 1st commandment - "thou shalt have no other gods before me". Testing one's faith was the same as testing one's loyalty; losing faith meant throwing one's lot in with Baal, or Osiris, or another god who might offer you a better deal, and one could certainly do this without any loss of belief in gods or even in God. One could even forsake God or all gods, without loss of belief - the test of Job was not whether he would lose belief (it's hard to lose belief when suffering from the wrath of God), but whether he would lose loyalty.
In the primitive world, belief in some god was not necessarily irrational; there was an awful lot of stuff that begged for an explanation, and precious little hard knowledge that afforded an explanation. Believing in gods as the ultimate cosmic actors was an entirely different matter than offering one's loyalty to one or another of them.
But in the modern world, the pernicious idea that faith is a belief beyond reason (and that this is somehow a good thing), is dangerously irrational and entirely without merit. Belief must be consistent with reason, or else it is insanity. It is possible to rationally believe in gods (one simply has to define god appropriately), but incredibly most of the "faithful" prefer the insanity option.
My reading of the abstract is that he looked at a sample size of 200,000, and found a 13-SD bias to one direction in that sample size.
I'm going to respond to myself, since I found actual information at http://realclimate.org/: It's not a Y2K bug at all, but a change in sources of temperature data that had not been calibrated with respect to each other. And it's not the gargantuan error that some people seem to be thinking. The anomalies for 1998 and 1934 used to be +1.24 degrees and +1.23 degrees, a difference of 0.01 degree. Now it's the other way around. And the long-term trend is unaffected. The uncertainties in data collection methods over the last 70 years mean that differences of less than 0.1 degree are not considered significant, so we're talking about changes *an order of magnitude* too low to even discuss meaningfully, much less get excited about.
And why would a Y2K bug change the data for 1998?
Are you compiling from source or something? It's been pre-installed and pre-configured on every unixish box I've seen over the last 10 years (and that's gotta be 50-100 boxes running various OSes). I can see that some specialized modules can be difficult to get going, but for basic Apache, you just turn it on. In fact, for some early Linuxes, the first thing you had to do after setting up a system was turn if OFF, since it was running by default.
I understand what you're getting at, but the situation is not what you'd expect. The problematic SuSE system is hand-tweaked, which fixed a bad disk performance problem, but doesn't stop the load thrashing. The rock-solid RH7.3 system is an out-of-the-box binary, which furthermore was cloned and moved to an entirely new system when the original system disk started to show IO errors - so it's been a solid binary on two generations of hardware.
If you expect Open Source, in most cases amateur, developers to make their software automatically detect and work with older library versions, compile portable enough binaries to run on your hacked together system, you are sorely mistaken.I don't expect the amateur developers to build robust, portable binaries. But they did! I *do* expect the enterprise developers at Novell, IBM, etc. to build robust, portable binaries. But they don't.
I want to agree with you, I really do. But my SuSE 10.1 desktop regularly has fits where it becomes completely unuseable - if I can manage to get a shell, I find that the load has spiked to 5-10 (on a single core system) when the system was doing *nothing*. Just this morning, I woke up, poured a bowl of cereal, walked over to it to read some Slashdot over my Cheerios, and found the system thrashing and refusing to come out of screensaver because the load was so high. This happened while I was sleeping. I had to ssh in from my Powerbook to kill off any processes that appeared to be using CPU before the system would respond to the mouse.
Meanwhile at work, we just tossed an Ubuntu server that should have been reasonably swift, but was regularly DOS'ing itself by spiking to loads of 40 or more several times a day under normal use. A load of 40-60, on a single-core machine! We "fixed" it by spending thousands of dollars replacing it with a pair of multicore beast with scads of memory and fast disks, which seems to overpower the problem.
Then there's that server belonging to a client, a RHES 4 system. When I ssh in through a tunnel to update it, it insists on running the update program as an X client for crissakes. Then it tells me to register the system at a URL, but the URL cannot be selected or copied to the clipboard. This is "enterprise" quality software?
Back at work, the dev server is still a RedHat 7.3 clunker. It has a half dozen developers fine-tuning their infinite loops, fork bombs, broken joins, buffer overruns, and spaghetti code, all day long. It simply never crashes or hangs, never gets slow, and never complains about the abuse it receives. It's a rock-solid dream. Except that it's a damn nuisance to update, since it's so old. And it's only hobbyist-quality software, after all, built before RedHat went all enterprise-centric
Posted, with regrets, from my Powerbook. I'm starting to think that software built for the home user is a safer bet than the "enterprise" shite I'm dealing with every day.
That's not a shell, it's a boot prompt with some firmware commands - the non-PC equivalent of a BIOS setup screen. Calling that a shell is like calling the BIOS setup screen Windows. Granted, it's a start, because it may allow you to load and boot alternative kernels, but "shell" implies a command shell around an OS. All they appear to have done is completely broken the iPhone so that it won't boot; the machine is falling back to its ROM prompt in the hopes that someone can manually tell it how to boot.
You are presuming that another civilization would have achieved interstellar spaceflight by being just like us. In case it's not obvious, this is illogical, since we have not developed interstellar spaceflight. It is at least as likely that we are a model for how *not* to do it. Civilizations that waste their resources on Hummers, Big Macs, and WMDs may self-select for staying put.
I think we'd have a better shot at it, for instance, if we were more scientific and less mystical, if we were more visionary on a multigenerational scale, if we were less concerned with material wealth and acquisitiveness, and if we weren't so busy fighting each other due to population pressures and religious differences. If we were all of those things, we could easily have left the Earth thousands of years ago without having left a fraction of the mark we've made as earthbound primates.
I'm sorry, I thought the discussion was about flying saucers and little green men. Perhaps you take the subject very seriously, but otherwise stop interrupting with your humourless skepticism and learn to play along.
Now, the topic was "Why would the pilots of UFOs look humanoid?" (FYI, this is the part where wild speculation is required.)
The proposed hypotheses were:
Now, the "insightful" mods are presumably there because hypotheses 2.2 and 2.3 were judged by Slashdot readers as more interesting and/or plausible than 1. and 2.1. Perhaps you disagree and think that humanoid aliens or time travel is more believable, in which case you're not really in a position to complain about thoughtless fantasy. Or perhaps you just don't understand the point of these games.
Like most amusements, it's a lot less amusing after it's been explained.
I think that good ol' nature has done a half-decent job even if they left a complete mess behind. First you have the ice ages scraping the north hemisphere bare, then the big melt causing sea levels to rise hundreds of feet eliminating all coastal settlements, then the Sahara desert burying most of north Africa in dunes, and any major fertile valley burying everything in hundreds of feet in sediment, and finally jungles burying everything in, er, jungle. (We're still finding whole cities in Central America, and that's from only 1,000 years ago.)
20,000 years is a very long time. Long enough for things to get buried or flooded beyond all reach, but not long enough for geological processes to thrust it back up into our faces. We *could* find it, if we were looking, but for the most part we haven't been, because it's only recently that the idea has even occurred to us, and we really don't know where to start. We've only started accidentally finding things since the advent of SCUBA, but we really don't know much about what we're looking at. See for example, the Yonaguni Monuments and the Bimini Road.
This is merely one solution to the fundamental problem faced by all organisms: maximizing the interface area between the organism and the environment. The more interface, the more efficiently you can extract energy from the environment. Spherical organisms of any appreciable size tend to be quite rare as a result. Branching organisms, on the other hand, seem to be quite common in all multi-cellular kingdoms. Tube-shaped organisms are unique to the animal kingdom, however. It's an interesting solution, since the internal part of the tube can be made quite convoluted to increase interface area, and yes it does tend to produce a head and a tail. Other conceivable solutions to the basic problem might include mesh organisms, swarm organisms, or amoeba-like blobs, none of which obviously leads to heads and tails. Terrestrial evolution has discovered several of these on its own, so it's not entirely clear to me that even something as basic as a head can be assumed to be universal.
I'm thinking it's us from the past. Considering that Homo Sapiens Sapiens is at least 50,000 years old, and recorded history about 5,000, there's been plenty of time for us to develop a few spacefaring civilizations. If you allow for some alternate branches of the homonid family you have a lot more time than that. You'd expect them to swing past the old farm from time to time to see what, if anything, has changed.
On the other hand, who's to say they're from space at all? Even if the stories are 100% true, there's not a shred of evidence to show that they're from space. We've never seen spacecraft, only aircraft. Is space alien really more plausible than some kind of technologically superior earthling who can live undetected (almost) on the same planet as us?
Every single person you're talking to, for starters. Haven't you just described the whole freakin' tech industry?
Heh, you've never used any *nix before, except as a toy. There's a fucking mountain of difference. Does your box run any services for the network? Does it share any printers or disks? Does it have any other users logged into it? Does it run any scheduled tasks or background jobs? If you're doing *any* of these things, then there's no way in hell you want the system to reboot. If you're not doing any of these things, you're not running Linux, you're running a bloody X-terminal.
Windows users turn on any company that makes the smallest error? After all those years of patiently tolerating errors, insecurity, and instability, Windows users are now suddenly rabid wolves on software quality? And therefore Apple is toast because Mac users are world famous for not giving a rat's ass about quality?
Well, a blogger said it, so it must be true.
Indeed. Nobody else seems to have grasped the irony of complaining that a browser is not as "powerful or feature-loaded as Firefox". Wasn't the original design goal of Firefox to be minimalist and fast? Any reviewer who thinks Firefox is great because of its power and feature set comes across as a bit of a noob.
FWIW, I use Firefox and Mozilla every day for web development, so I appreciate its power and feature set. However, I use Safari to Just Plain Browse, so then again I don't.
Believe it or not, some things they do are designed to get their customers to give their money to YOU. Well, not you specifically, since it all seems to be going over your head. But if you were an application developer, then you get lots of free stuff from Apple (in this case, without even buying Apple hardware), and you can use that to build apps that make YOU (not Apple) money. Apple benefits by fostering a healthy ecosystem for their hardware, so they don't even really care that you aren't giving them your money. What you are giving them is an environment that allows them to prosper, and the fact that you also prosper is their payment to you in return. Software is not a zero-sum game.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Control characters have long-standing meanings, and the ones used by Windows have meanings that include End-of-file, Cancel, and Interrupt, all of which are quite dangerous to issue in certain apps. If one of those apps has focus, then your clipboard hotkeys can wreak a lot of damage accidentally. Apple took the right approach and used a command key instead; DOS PCs didn't have a command key, so MS changed the meaning of control, except that many apps still used the old meanings.
Can I say it? Windows has the worst desktop in all of computing. Start buttons, taskbars, a work paradigm that encourages monolithic apps and maximized windows, a desktop that gets abusively filled with every program shortcut known to man, a defective clipboard model (crtl-C!?), sloppy filename/type handling (annakournikova.jpg.exe), annoying alerts and confirmation dialogs, application-centric workflow, the list goes on and on.
It was "good enough" on 14-inch monitors in 1995, I'll grant you, and I'm no big fan of the Gnome/KDE attempts to replace it. But there are a few of us out there who think it's a pretty sorry excuse for a desktop in this day and age.
Crikey, it's just unix. Can you imagine saying that it's not possible to do real POS or finance on unix? You'd be laughed at. That stuff was being done on unix before Windows had any presence in the business world. The first unix system I ever saw was a Xenix POS system. Our good friend SCO specialized in POS systems.
Maybe you can't find any commodity small-business applications in these areas for unix platforms, but don't pretend that your bargain-brand applications are "real" and the unix ones are non-existent. If you want a real POS system that runs on the unix of your choice, I know of two, and it's not even my field. You can expect to pay 5-6 figures, though. If that's not real enough for you, just phone up IBM tell them you want to pay 7 figures for some Websphere monstrosity. They'll fix you up with something so real your eyes will bleed.
You think that Rumsfeld's real job was as a Secretary of Defense? The reality is that he, Cheney, and the others are on a little public service sabbatical from their real paymasters. In Rumsfeld's case, he has deep connections in finance and technology (pharma, electronics, engineering, and defense). He can expect to be paid more from a single board appointment than he was as SoD, and he can expect to hold numerous such board appointments in his "retirement" from that "job", just like he did before becoming SoD. That's the job secutiry the GP was referring to.
This story was in fact put out in December 2006. I know because according to my homepage, I submitted it to Slashdot on December 27, with the title "Network Neutrality top censored news story of 2007". It was rejected, of course.