As a 25-y.o. Italian, I can assure you that the people you see smokin'pot in the park all day are NOT maintained by the government, but by their parents. There is virtually no unemployment income in Italy (though I know there is in other European countries, often actually higher than my Ph.D. student income).
Italian social services are not that good, but in the end of the day are actually better than nothing. Having a painkiller is not that tough at all (the E.R. or the doctor will give you a so-called "recipe" to give to the pharmacist, and you'll often have your painkiller for free), an annual dental checkup actually is, yes. But I had wonderful and very professional service at a university clinic when I got appendicitis, without having to pay a cent. I have free basic medical analyses and so on.
"Virtually no concept of sexual harassment or workplace misconduct." - This is what keeps me at bay from USA. Not that I spend my day slapping my female collegues on the ass yelling them "yo!bitch", but sure no one minds innocent joking or even normal approaches. If you actually sexually harass someone, you're sure to be punished badly and be fired, but the approach to the thing is not as nearly as paranoid as I've read often about the USA. I shouldn't stand working in a lab where I can't talk less than strictly formally to my new female collegues just because they could feel "sexually harassed".
I like my old Europe. I wish to leave Italy, but to go to some Scandinavian country, probably.
is it hard to believe that autism, which is characterized by lacking or inappropriate responses to our environment, might be exacerbated?
Autistic individuals have significant changes in their neurophysiology. As I said before, it is possible that too much TV "helps" an autistic phenotype to emerge, but I bet that these children would never have been normal. Moreover autistic children are often seriously impaired in everyday life (we often associate "autism" with "highly functional autism", like that of fictional "Rain Man" or Temple Grandin, but this is not the norm - autistics often need 24/7 care by professionals.)
Moreover autism is often linked to mental retardation (of course not always, and there are highly intelligent autistics, but they're more the exception than the norm). Are we suggesting TV induces true mental retardation?
Parents might want to think about not using the TV to babysit their very young kids too. Of course, pediatricians and child psychologists have been warning against doing that for years.
I fully agree with this, but I don't think it has to do with autism.
It makes more sense because there's plenty of genetic, anatomopathological and physiological data showing that autism has biochemical and genetic basis, so I find quite perplexing that TV can induce autism. The best I can think is that TV helps a latent autistic phenotype to emerge.
any artistic endeavour can only ever be, in any circumstances, a social good and should be allowed total freedom?
If I understand correctly, yes, it happens I think that any artistic endevour (but not only: every kind of human expression) should be completely free. But this has nothing to do with my doubts on this study on autism. It's two years I don't practically watch TV, except for some Futurama and House MD episode:) . I'd never let my children see a lot of tv, I think it's not good for children. But it won't make them autistic.
I am personally with hypothesis 3. It can also be (as an example) the case that places with early cable TV are the most industrialized, and therefore have some higher concentration of some pollutant agent. This could make more sense.
That is, it is entirely possible (and plausible) that a correlation exists. However I'd interpret it in the reverse way. That is, the study shows just that children born with autism are more likely to spend time watching TV (knowing the features of autism, this is entirely possible).
Moreover, the existence of a correlation does not show necessarily a cause-effect relationship. Do you remember Lisa Simpson showing Homer a rock that protected from tigers?
This kind of papers are what my collegues call "scientific pornography" -papers thrown up just to stir up controversy, but based on very fragile assumptions and with a few data inflated as much as possible. Quite a common occurrence, sadly, these days.
LaTeX is an unnecessary pain in the ass for non-mathematical writing where a WYSIWYG editor will suffice
Biting the flamebait here... you are (bzzt!) wrong. I wrote my graduation molecular biology thesis (almost no math involved) in LaTeX. I learned LaTeX for that purpose, and looking at my collegues struggling with word processors compared with the damn ease and elegance of LaTeX, I'd never turn back.
I wish my boss let me write research papers with LaTeX too *sigh*.
Agreed. Macs really are better for audio production - it's not a silly myth. I'm a pro and if a guy turns up with a PC for serious use everyone just thinks 'amateur'. Sorry, it's just the way it is.
Any actual, practical reason for this? Or am I just feeding a troll?
It's like Gentoo users get a kick out of making their install as complex and unforgiving as possible in some lame attempt to make their penis look larger. With my Debian install I can kick back, hit enter through all the screens and be done with an install in under a half hour depending on my network speed.
Gentoo has a definite target: that is, people that want to have as fine control as possible on their system, without using Linux from Scratch but with all the goodies of a package manager. Fine personal control and, overall, being always quite up to date means you have to go through pains (I'm 2-year gentooer and sometimes I sweared... the GCC 3.3-->3.4-->4.x transitions, for example) but it's your choice. If you don't like it, well, go to another distro (I use Gentoo at home, but Ubuntu at work because there I just care about having it all working without having to care about too much). It's not a problem of being ricers. It's the inevitable design of something aimed to total user control.
I don't contribute to Wikipedia as an expert simply because I don't want my edits to compete with wanna-be experts. Why should some bored 17-year-old be able to, without evidence, revert one of my changes? The edit process on Wikipedia seems to revolve around number of edits, too, and general popularity.
If you back your edits with references, I'm sure you can beat anyone else. Being myself a Ph.D. student and a Wikipedia contributor, I can affirm that there's noise from "wanna-be" experts, sure, but good edits usually make their way,sooner or later, expecially if you're backed up by sources (something quite harder for a "wanna-be").
Don't get upset so easily. I'm a Gentoo diehard too -my home desktop runs it almost from 2 years. I'm accustomed in using tons of Linux distros -and I like Linux for the very fact we have many different distros- but I just wanted to joke on the usual "my-distro-is-better-than-yours" flaming. As for the meaning of "ricers", you can check http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ricer , meaning 2.
If we all would just settle on Slackware, the ONE TRUE DISTRO, everything would be perfect.
(rumours start in the plaza)
- Slackware? Hah! No package management!The one true distro is Debian and its mighty apt-get!
- What are you saying? It's clearly Gentoo! You compile everything from source!
- Gentoo is for ricers! People that want their work done use Ubuntu!
- Ubuntu? I'm more comfortable with Suse and Novell support...
- What? Bear that RPM hell? Go use Knoppix!
- What about RPMs? On my Fedora work so well... ...
I actively participate on http://www.asphalto.org/ , a purely social Italian online forum. It has no main subject(s) or what, it's simply a place that was born as a little "collective" blog, and now is a large forum where people gather together, post something (interesting news, questions of any kind, blog-like things...) and let the thread begin. Having about 2000 users, with a hard kernel of 100 users, it has developed a distinct humour and subculture of its own (just like Slashdot). Funny place with many brilliant people, if you like clever flaming mixed to harsh and politically uncorrect humour.
I use Inkscape almost every day at work to produce publication-quality illustrations, and last versions are perfectly fit for the work. The only thing I'd love would be a better compatibility with Illustrator files (since many collegues use it, and it's a pain to ask all of them to export to SVG, which doesn't work everytime because the Illustrator SVG export is crap).
Of course YMMV.
Huh? I didnt' talk about a loss. I did talk of no added benefit.
I like the GPL (it is not perfect and I'm not always along the radicalism of RMS, but I like it in general) because it forces people just to play fair. You build upon my work? Great, but please give back your changes.
What the community can lose could be, for example, enhancements, bugfixes etc., so in a sense there is a loss.
So including the app with my mod would mean players just download and go, no other downloads or installation necessary.
Fine. You can go along with it.
I can't do that without distributing all the source, including that for my modifications. Nevermind how to distribute what little I modified in "source"; I renamed the files in the Finder and copied some icon graphics into the app package, what's the source to that? Nevermind that I couldn't code my way out of "hello world"; even if I wanted to ship a completely unmodified binary, I'm not even sure how to get the source to it, much less how to distribute it properly.
You don't need to know how to program to redistribute the source. Just take the source, rename the files you renamed, copy the files you copied, zip it all and link it on your home page. You don't have to give it to everyone also downloades your binary, you just have to keepi it there, "just in case".
Must you ship an "installer package" and make people download the installer separately if they don't already have it? So, self-extracting archives are not feasible under the GPL, since everyone who used one would have to distribute the source to the archive-maker as well?
You don't get it. You don't need to give people an installer-source package EVERY time they take the self-installer.
It's enough you put on your program webpage a link saying "This program uses OpeenSoorceSelfInstallaz 1.2.3-rc1, you can grab the source of this installer right here". Maybe nobody will download it, who cares, what's important is that it's there.
the GPL as it stands is not appropriate for the distribution of all types of applications (like game engines or self-installer programs), even when it is otherwise appropriate for the projects that develop those programs, and thus I think the GPL could use some modifications to allow for such reasonable uses.
Perhaps (perhaps) the GPL is not the right license for that program. Perhaps the developers of your game engine could add an exception to the license about cases like yours, if you feel it's really important. There's no reason the GPL should take care of ALL possible cases: unusual cases can licence a program with GPL+exceptions instead of pure GPL, and they actually do.
But does that mean I can't serve my favorite home-made fruit punch mix to company at a party or other event without photocopying the bottle-making instructions and distributing them with the drinks? I don't care know or care what the bottles are made out of, I just need something to serve my fruit punch in.
Again, you don't get it. It's enough to have copies of the instructions somewhere in the place you do the party, if someone wants to have them, no to give it to everyone.
Sorry if I bite the flamebait, but... so I must wait for my code -and therefore, my work- to be reused and sold by money by commercial software houses without any benefit to the community, just because I'm too lazy to tar up some source code?
I thought the point of the GPL was to encourage people to share and reuse code. Enforcing that EACH person who reuses code also shares it themselves is counter to this intention.
Quite an oxymoron.
If the point is to share AND reuse, why enforcing sharing along with reusing is against sharing and reusing?
Slashdot Mirror
As a 25-y.o. Italian, I can assure you that the people you see smokin'pot in the park all day are NOT maintained by the government, but by their parents. There is virtually no unemployment income in Italy (though I know there is in other European countries, often actually higher than my Ph.D. student income).
Italian social services are not that good, but in the end of the day are actually better than nothing. Having a painkiller is not that tough at all (the E.R. or the doctor will give you a so-called "recipe" to give to the pharmacist, and you'll often have your painkiller for free), an annual dental checkup actually is, yes. But I had wonderful and very professional service at a university clinic when I got appendicitis, without having to pay a cent. I have free basic medical analyses and so on.
"Virtually no concept of sexual harassment or workplace misconduct." - This is what keeps me at bay from USA. Not that I spend my day slapping my female collegues on the ass yelling them "yo!bitch", but sure no one minds innocent joking or even normal approaches. If you actually sexually harass someone, you're sure to be punished badly and be fired, but the approach to the thing is not as nearly as paranoid as I've read often about the USA. I shouldn't stand working in a lab where I can't talk less than strictly formally to my new female collegues just because they could feel "sexually harassed".
I like my old Europe. I wish to leave Italy, but to go to some Scandinavian country, probably.
is it hard to believe that autism, which is characterized by lacking or inappropriate responses to our environment, might be exacerbated?
Autistic individuals have significant changes in their neurophysiology. As I said before, it is possible that too much TV "helps" an autistic phenotype to emerge, but I bet that these children would never have been normal. Moreover autistic children are often seriously impaired in everyday life (we often associate "autism" with "highly functional autism", like that of fictional "Rain Man" or Temple Grandin, but this is not the norm - autistics often need 24/7 care by professionals.)
Moreover autism is often linked to mental retardation (of course not always, and there are highly intelligent autistics, but they're more the exception than the norm). Are we suggesting TV induces true mental retardation?
Parents might want to think about not using the TV to babysit their very young kids too. Of course, pediatricians and child psychologists have been warning against doing that for years.
I fully agree with this, but I don't think it has to do with autism.
Probably it's me not being of English mother language, but I can't understand if you're mocking me or not. Can you explain? :)
It makes more sense because there's plenty of genetic, anatomopathological and physiological data showing that autism has biochemical and genetic basis, so I find quite perplexing that TV can induce autism. The best I can think is that TV helps a latent autistic phenotype to emerge.
any artistic endeavour can only ever be, in any circumstances, a social good and should be allowed total freedom?
If I understand correctly, yes, it happens I think that any artistic endevour (but not only: every kind of human expression) should be completely free. But this has nothing to do with my doubts on this study on autism. It's two years I don't practically watch TV, except for some Futurama and House MD episode :) . I'd never let my children see a lot of tv, I think it's not good for children. But it won't make them autistic.
D'oh. In the Italian translation it was tigers.
I am personally with hypothesis 3. It can also be (as an example) the case that places with early cable TV are the most industrialized, and therefore have some higher concentration of some pollutant agent. This could make more sense.
I call bullshit.
That is, it is entirely possible (and plausible) that a correlation exists. However I'd interpret it in the reverse way. That is, the study shows just that children born with autism are more likely to spend time watching TV (knowing the features of autism, this is entirely possible).
Moreover, the existence of a correlation does not show necessarily a cause-effect relationship. Do you remember Lisa Simpson showing Homer a rock that protected from tigers?
This kind of papers are what my collegues call "scientific pornography" -papers thrown up just to stir up controversy, but based on very fragile assumptions and with a few data inflated as much as possible. Quite a common occurrence, sadly, these days.
LaTeX is an unnecessary pain in the ass for non-mathematical writing where a WYSIWYG editor will suffice
Biting the flamebait here... you are (bzzt!) wrong. I wrote my graduation molecular biology thesis (almost no math involved) in LaTeX. I learned LaTeX for that purpose, and looking at my collegues struggling with word processors compared with the damn ease and elegance of LaTeX, I'd never turn back.
I wish my boss let me write research papers with LaTeX too *sigh*.
Agreed. Macs really are better for audio production - it's not a silly myth. I'm a pro and if a guy turns up with a PC for serious use everyone just thinks 'amateur'. Sorry, it's just the way it is.
Any actual, practical reason for this? Or am I just feeding a troll?
And most importantly: does mouse brain run Linux?
Hi. You are welcome in the magic world of sarcasm. I know, it can take a bit to get used to.
The problem is, it should NOT be a crime.
What's the benefits over rpm or deb?
USE flags.
It's like Gentoo users get a kick out of making their install as complex and unforgiving as possible in some lame attempt to make their penis look larger. With my Debian install I can kick back, hit enter through all the screens and be done with an install in under a half hour depending on my network speed.
Gentoo has a definite target: that is, people that want to have as fine control as possible on their system, without using Linux from Scratch but with all the goodies of a package manager. Fine personal control and, overall, being always quite up to date means you have to go through pains (I'm 2-year gentooer and sometimes I sweared... the GCC 3.3-->3.4-->4.x transitions, for example) but it's your choice. If you don't like it, well, go to another distro (I use Gentoo at home, but Ubuntu at work because there I just care about having it all working without having to care about too much). It's not a problem of being ricers. It's the inevitable design of something aimed to total user control.
I don't contribute to Wikipedia as an expert simply because I don't want my edits to compete with wanna-be experts. Why should some bored 17-year-old be able to, without evidence, revert one of my changes? The edit process on Wikipedia seems to revolve around number of edits, too, and general popularity.
If you back your edits with references, I'm sure you can beat anyone else. Being myself a Ph.D. student and a Wikipedia contributor, I can affirm that there's noise from "wanna-be" experts, sure, but good edits usually make their way,sooner or later, expecially if you're backed up by sources (something quite harder for a "wanna-be").
Don't get upset so easily. I'm a Gentoo diehard too -my home desktop runs it almost from 2 years. I'm accustomed in using tons of Linux distros -and I like Linux for the very fact we have many different distros- but I just wanted to joke on the usual "my-distro-is-better-than-yours" flaming. As for the meaning of "ricers", you can check http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ricer , meaning 2.
If we all would just settle on Slackware, the ONE TRUE DISTRO, everything would be perfect.
(rumours start in the plaza)
- Slackware? Hah! No package management!The one true distro is Debian and its mighty apt-get!
...
- What are you saying? It's clearly Gentoo! You compile everything from source!
- Gentoo is for ricers! People that want their work done use Ubuntu!
- Ubuntu? I'm more comfortable with Suse and Novell support...
- What? Bear that RPM hell? Go use Knoppix!
- What about RPMs? On my Fedora work so well...
(everything in flames)
I actively participate on http://www.asphalto.org/ , a purely social Italian online forum. It has no main subject(s) or what, it's simply a place that was born as a little "collective" blog, and now is a large forum where people gather together, post something (interesting news, questions of any kind, blog-like things...) and let the thread begin. Having about 2000 users, with a hard kernel of 100 users, it has developed a distinct humour and subculture of its own (just like Slashdot). Funny place with many brilliant people, if you like clever flaming mixed to harsh and politically uncorrect humour.
I would love it, but this wins the Wishful Thinking Prize 2006, I fear...
But his karma whoring allows my total laziness to even avoid clicking TFA, so I can just scroll down the thread!
I use Inkscape almost every day at work to produce publication-quality illustrations, and last versions are perfectly fit for the work. The only thing I'd love would be a better compatibility with Illustrator files (since many collegues use it, and it's a pain to ask all of them to export to SVG, which doesn't work everytime because the Illustrator SVG export is crap).
Of course YMMV.
Huh? I didnt' talk about a loss. I did talk of no added benefit.
I like the GPL (it is not perfect and I'm not always along the radicalism of RMS, but I like it in general) because it forces people just to play fair. You build upon my work? Great, but please give back your changes.
What the community can lose could be, for example, enhancements, bugfixes etc., so in a sense there is a loss.
So including the app with my mod would mean players just download and go, no other downloads or installation necessary.
Fine. You can go along with it.
I can't do that without distributing all the source, including that for my modifications. Nevermind how to distribute what little I modified in "source"; I renamed the files in the Finder and copied some icon graphics into the app package, what's the source to that? Nevermind that I couldn't code my way out of "hello world"; even if I wanted to ship a completely unmodified binary, I'm not even sure how to get the source to it, much less how to distribute it properly.
You don't need to know how to program to redistribute the source. Just take the source, rename the files you renamed, copy the files you copied, zip it all and link it on your home page. You don't have to give it to everyone also downloades your binary, you just have to keepi it there, "just in case".
Must you ship an "installer package" and make people download the installer separately if they don't already have it? So, self-extracting archives are not feasible under the GPL, since everyone who used one would have to distribute the source to the archive-maker as well?
You don't get it. You don't need to give people an installer-source package EVERY time they take the self-installer. It's enough you put on your program webpage a link saying "This program uses OpeenSoorceSelfInstallaz 1.2.3-rc1, you can grab the source of this installer right here". Maybe nobody will download it, who cares, what's important is that it's there.
the GPL as it stands is not appropriate for the distribution of all types of applications (like game engines or self-installer programs), even when it is otherwise appropriate for the projects that develop those programs, and thus I think the GPL could use some modifications to allow for such reasonable uses.
Perhaps (perhaps) the GPL is not the right license for that program. Perhaps the developers of your game engine could add an exception to the license about cases like yours, if you feel it's really important. There's no reason the GPL should take care of ALL possible cases: unusual cases can licence a program with GPL+exceptions instead of pure GPL, and they actually do.
But does that mean I can't serve my favorite home-made fruit punch mix to company at a party or other event without photocopying the bottle-making instructions and distributing them with the drinks? I don't care know or care what the bottles are made out of, I just need something to serve my fruit punch in.
Again, you don't get it. It's enough to have copies of the instructions somewhere in the place you do the party, if someone wants to have them, no to give it to everyone.
Sorry if I bite the flamebait, but... so I must wait for my code -and therefore, my work- to be reused and sold by money by commercial software houses without any benefit to the community, just because I'm too lazy to tar up some source code?
No thanks.
I thought the point of the GPL was to encourage people to share and reuse code. Enforcing that EACH person who reuses code also shares it themselves is counter to this intention.
Quite an oxymoron.
If the point is to share AND reuse, why enforcing sharing along with reusing is against sharing and reusing?