the cause is neither religion nor atheism. The cause is not being tolerant of people who are different from you. Sometimes this is caused by genuine concerns (even if unjustified ones), but most often its caused by powermongers whipping people up into a frenzy so as to establish a 'new order' where they will be in charge.
The first rule of establishing a dictatorship is to define an enemy for people to hate, thus helping them convince themselves that the privations at home are worth it, if the wider goal of 'safety from [insert enemy here] is to be acheived'.
a) alas they start that way b) nope, well educated, but blinkered against science by neccesity, which has frightening ramifications for america's scientific future. c) yes, sadly so.
This first exhibit shows god with his little bag of mysteries. He is shown placing dinosaur bones in the rocks because even god likes a good laugh.
And further on we have another aspect of God. This is god in his aspect of 'having to make all the animals himself because he is too stupid to create a universe that can do this shit on its own'.
Now we have a stuffed monkey. You will see that the monkey, while superficially similar is not at all related to man. This is proved by the fact that the monkey is holding a placard stating that god made him as part of a batch job, 4103 years ago, on a tuesday. Further you will see that the stuffed Man we have next to him is also holding a placard, and this states definatelly that god made him the previous wednesday as part of an entirely different batch of wonders. This disparity, proved by our scientifically validated placards, is all the proof any sensible person should need.
Lastly we have the flood exhibit. This exhibit houses a model earth, three feet in diameter, and shows what it would look like covered in water. As you can see only the tip of mount arrarat is visible, even though it isn't the highest peak in the world. This is because it was a very curvy mysterious flood. If you look closely you will see one tiny wooden boat near arrarat which contains a pair of every species on the planet, their diverse ecological requirements and foods, all neatly seperated to stop them eating each other. Next to this model you will see the explanation of where the water went, and how, when the entire world was engulfed in a flood of sufficient depth to kill everything living, a boat made of wood was able to survive. As you can clearly see, that notice says 'shut up and go away, heretical unbeleiver'.
This concludes the tour, please give us loads of money as you leave.
lack of change == lack of profit for corporations. This is, I'm guessing, the reson for this constant demand that people take up the latest thing. We sure don't need the 'tiny increment for complete game price' marketting method, nor the 'buy this new version of office and uninstall the perfectly good version of office you currently have' thing. Mobile phones are a perfect example of this, has the technology changed much in the last few years? Not really, but the new models of phone appear thick and fast. They change the appearance, and mix and match features to convince people that this new phone is better than the one you bought a few months back. I also hate mobile phones...
I enjoy my games, but a new purchase is usually a thing that only happens once, or sometimes twice a year for me. I also don't own a telly, because the mindless pap they push between mindless adverts depresses me.
Planet = anything that was suggested as possibly existing by Lowell, even if it turns out only to be a fraction of the predicted size, so as to distract the world from the fact he was convinced there was an advanced civilisation on Mars.
I disagree with WoW being the cause of that. I've known people drop out at uni with the same disorganisation/lack of personal hygeine, but causes vary from drugs/booze/hating the course and not wanting to admit it, or just being a moron (ok, I made up that last one).
Still, I've seen exactly the same 'symptoms' that people ascribe to WoW existing before WoW ever turned up. In the eighties I knew people who neglected work and school for Pacman and Firebird.
When people don't want to do something, whether they admit it or not, they will distract themselves with something/anything, often becoming obsessed to the point of losing touch with reality. I knew one guy who got that way with scratchcards, he went without food to get them.
People don't change that fast, but maddeningly every knew 'fad' is touted as the cause of problems that have existed for millenia.
their business model works perfectly in a world without competition. That world no longer exists, even though they are doing their best to bring it back (reference all this novell patent crap). Thus we have this hard work to get people to upgrade, because alternatives do exists.
Even if people don't buy the alternatives, the fact that those alternatives don't have such a steep forced upgrade path is enough to give them pause.
"Therein lies Microsoft's problem -- each new iteration of their software all of a sudden must render their older generation software "not good enough", giving the lie to all earlier claims about previous generations of product."
Much as I hate to be in any way seen to be siding with microsoft, that's *every* closed source vendors way of doing things, not just microsofts.
Open source people do it to, it's just that since we don't have to charge for our products, we just say 'go grab the new stuff, it's much better', and we don't need to bad mouth our old stuff to get people to change. Or if it was shit, we can say so without looking bad. Not quite the same, but I for one would hate to see someone using an older version of my program when I've worked so hard on the new one.
The Monk in question had been left at the monestary as a baby and raised there. Chess was, and remains, a major entertainment in that monestary. We're probably talking over 70 years of constant chess playing.
What struck me as odd at the time was that I didn't seem to be able to come up with a single long term strategy that he didn't block several moves before I got to a checkmate. I got a few checks, but usually before I realised something horrible was happening elsewhere on the board.
"As you get older you lose your mental faculties. That's not patronizing - it's what happens."
Sometimes true, however I once had opportunity over several weeks to play a Monk in his late eighties at chess, a game at which I have some talent. I've never been so completelly destroyed in chess so many times in a row, his abilities were fearsome.
Yet he seemed absent minded, it was all very puzzling.
actually it's called 'that tiny little Island that used to own most of the known world, including america, and gave most of it away.'
Also known as 'The place that invented Jet engines and gave the tech away to everyone for free', or 'the country that invented Radar and gave the tech to america without retaining copyright or patents first.' or my personal favorite
'The people who created the worlds first electronic computer, ordered it destroyed after the war, gave the inventor enough money to barely cover his costs, and made him keep it secret for decades, thus irrecovably ruining any chance of being a major player in the computer age.'
Because if they can re-define what is essentially the same old stuff to make it sound exciting to investors, they can trigger another boom and make trillions....
loads of people refer to 1984 without actually reading it, which is interesting. It's as if the book has been boiled down into a single idea that can be easily applied to multiple situations.
It's wrong of course, 1984 is very complex, too complex for a single idea to be distilled from its pages. I love the book myself.
I more often compare the RIAA/MPAA/DMCA situation to Plato's Republic, which predates 1984 somewhat.
Sometimes I think we need a good kicking. People sit in their comfy houses, with reguler electricity and their WholeFoods store nearby, and forget that for some people, life's damn hard, and getting harder.
You can indeed say they should have food instead of a laptop, however all that truckloads of food does is extend their dependence on the people who screwed them over to start with, by slaving them, stealing their resources, and more recently by causing pollution induced famines in Africa.
No, the best way to help them is to give them tools, be they shovels, or tech tools like computers, and let *them* decide what's best. Perhaps foods would be nice as well, but since we live in food stuffed luxury while poorer nations starve and *still* struggle to pay off vast debts to international banks, I think that's just an insult 'ah, poor you, here, have our scraps'. It makes me sick, it really does.
So, um, I think the laptop things a good thing, although I think a rich company like microsoft should quit worrying about market share and domination, and cough up a few billion to buy a few cargo ships full of these laptops and communications equipment.
Being from another generation, the one for whom the zx spectrum was an awesomely powerful computer (no really), 'grind' has an entirely different meaning. I can't get used to it just meaning 'boring the crap out of myself by doing something over and over again till my head explodes just to get a level up'.
What does it mean to me? Well that would be using naughty words, and I'm not nearly drunk enough.
I still play it, and enjoy it. Warcraft II was one of the best of the crop of early RTS games I think. It was the first RTS game that made sea based warfare enjoyable and tactically useful. I think the sea based warfare wasn't equalled until Total Annihalation, and never bettered. Oddly even Warcraft III didn't better it, or so I feel, it just looked nicer.
I am annoyed that I can't play it multi-player any more though, the modem/null modem/ipx-spx connection methods don't exactly work on my network these days.
Oh wait, the topic is WoW. I played it, found it tedious and repetitive, and gave up. It would need to be radically changed for me to like it. How I'm not exactly sure, since I haven't spent any time thinking on the issue.
Microsoft are scared, really scared. If they can't get some leverage in the linux world, then they lose their monopoly. Can you list how many products Microsoft have released outside of a monopoly position that have made money?
Offering indemnification regarding other peoples products is crazy, unless they need to in order to hold their position as market leader. They can only be hoping to stir up more doubt.
BSD, being from unix, has been around a long time, that might be why it's forked, or it could have just been conflicting ideals early on, I don't know.
You're right, forking of the kernel wouldn't neccesarily be a bad thing. However, there aren't that many linux kernel hackers, and there just might not be enough to obtain the critical mass required for a succesful fork of the linux kernel.
It's still early days for linux, we might see changes in the future. I'd be reluctant to change from the standard kernel at the moment.
Linux is just the kernel, did you mean to say the entire operating systems could be forked?
It's extremely unlikely that the kernel will be forked, as it's such a huge effort to maintain and improve as it is. There are some custom kernels, but those are for specific purposes, not general use.
Slashdot Mirror
the cause is neither religion nor atheism. The cause is not being tolerant of people who are different from you. Sometimes this is caused by genuine concerns (even if unjustified ones), but most often its caused by powermongers whipping people up into a frenzy so as to establish a 'new order' where they will be in charge.
The first rule of establishing a dictatorship is to define an enemy for people to hate, thus helping them convince themselves that the privations at home are worth it, if the wider goal of 'safety from [insert enemy here] is to be acheived'.
a) alas they start that way
b) nope, well educated, but blinkered against science by neccesity, which has frightening ramifications for america's scientific future.
c) yes, sadly so.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you'll just follow me.
This first exhibit shows god with his little bag of mysteries. He is shown placing dinosaur bones in the rocks because even god likes a good laugh.
And further on we have another aspect of God. This is god in his aspect of 'having to make all the animals himself because he is too stupid to create a universe that can do this shit on its own'.
Now we have a stuffed monkey. You will see that the monkey, while superficially similar is not at all related to man. This is proved by the fact that the monkey is holding a placard stating that god made him as part of a batch job, 4103 years ago, on a tuesday. Further you will see that the stuffed Man we have next to him is also holding a placard, and this states definatelly that god made him the previous wednesday as part of an entirely different batch of wonders. This disparity, proved by our scientifically validated placards, is all the proof any sensible person should need.
Lastly we have the flood exhibit. This exhibit houses a model earth, three feet in diameter, and shows what it would look like covered in water. As you can see only the tip of mount arrarat is visible, even though it isn't the highest peak in the world. This is because it was a very curvy mysterious flood. If you look closely you will see one tiny wooden boat near arrarat which contains a pair of every species on the planet, their diverse ecological requirements and foods, all neatly seperated to stop them eating each other. Next to this model you will see the explanation of where the water went, and how, when the entire world was engulfed in a flood of sufficient depth to kill everything living, a boat made of wood was able to survive. As you can clearly see, that notice says 'shut up and go away, heretical unbeleiver'.
This concludes the tour, please give us loads of money as you leave.
you're still ok, you didn't end your post with :wq
:-)
Unless you did, and just caught it before hitting 'submit' in which case you're probably screwed
lack of change == lack of profit for corporations. This is, I'm guessing, the reson for this constant demand that people take up the latest thing. We sure don't need the 'tiny increment for complete game price' marketting method, nor the 'buy this new version of office and uninstall the perfectly good version of office you currently have' thing.
Mobile phones are a perfect example of this, has the technology changed much in the last few years? Not really, but the new models of phone appear thick and fast. They change the appearance, and mix and match features to convince people that this new phone is better than the one you bought a few months back. I also hate mobile phones...
I enjoy my games, but a new purchase is usually a thing that only happens once, or sometimes twice a year for me. I also don't own a telly, because the mindless pap they push between mindless adverts depresses me.
Planet = anything that was suggested as possibly existing by Lowell, even if it turns out only to be a fraction of the predicted size, so as to distract the world from the fact he was convinced there was an advanced civilisation on Mars.
is it extortion if it involves possibly deactivating a product you suspect someone doesn't have a license to use?
Unfair business practice perhaps, violation of rights by denying people access to their data maybe, but I don't think extortion is the right term.
Is 'uncaring barstards' a legal term? That might fit....
I disagree with WoW being the cause of that. I've known people drop out at uni with the same disorganisation/lack of personal hygeine, but causes vary from drugs/booze/hating the course and not wanting to admit it, or just being a moron (ok, I made up that last one).
Still, I've seen exactly the same 'symptoms' that people ascribe to WoW existing before WoW ever turned up. In the eighties I knew people who neglected work and school for Pacman and Firebird.
When people don't want to do something, whether they admit it or not, they will distract themselves with something/anything, often becoming obsessed to the point of losing touch with reality. I knew one guy who got that way with scratchcards, he went without food to get them.
People don't change that fast, but maddeningly every knew 'fad' is touted as the cause of problems that have existed for millenia.
their business model works perfectly in a world without competition. That world no longer exists, even though they are doing their best to bring it back (reference all this novell patent crap). Thus we have this hard work to get people to upgrade, because alternatives do exists.
Even if people don't buy the alternatives, the fact that those alternatives don't have such a steep forced upgrade path is enough to give them pause.
"Therein lies Microsoft's problem -- each new iteration of their software all of a sudden must render their older generation software "not good enough", giving the lie to all earlier claims about previous generations of product."
Much as I hate to be in any way seen to be siding with microsoft, that's *every* closed source vendors way of doing things, not just microsofts.
Open source people do it to, it's just that since we don't have to charge for our products, we just say 'go grab the new stuff, it's much better', and we don't need to bad mouth our old stuff to get people to change. Or if it was shit, we can say so without looking bad. Not quite the same, but I for one would hate to see someone using an older version of my program when I've worked so hard on the new one.
interesting stuff.
The Monk in question had been left at the monestary as a baby and raised there. Chess was, and remains, a major entertainment in that monestary. We're probably talking over 70 years of constant chess playing.
What struck me as odd at the time was that I didn't seem to be able to come up with a single long term strategy that he didn't block several moves before I got to a checkmate. I got a few checks, but usually before I realised something horrible was happening elsewhere on the board.
"As you get older you lose your mental faculties. That's not patronizing - it's what happens."
Sometimes true, however I once had opportunity over several weeks to play a Monk in his late eighties at chess, a game at which I have some talent. I've never been so completelly destroyed in chess so many times in a row, his abilities were fearsome.
Yet he seemed absent minded, it was all very puzzling.
the open source guideline for laptop chucking
aim early, aim often...
actually it's called 'that tiny little Island that used to own most of the known world, including america, and gave most of it away.'
Also known as 'The place that invented Jet engines and gave the tech away to everyone for free', or 'the country that invented Radar and gave the tech to america without retaining copyright or patents first.' or my personal favorite
'The people who created the worlds first electronic computer, ordered it destroyed after the war, gave the inventor enough money to barely cover his costs, and made him keep it secret for decades, thus irrecovably ruining any chance of being a major player in the computer age.'
Which leads to the final name - 'idiots'.
Because if they can re-define what is essentially the same old stuff to make it sound exciting to investors, they can trigger another boom and make trillions....
there's a big difference between 'could' and 'allowed'.
I doubt that NT or any other windows would have much trouble on ext2/3, but microsoft are not exactly likely to allow it.
um, ah yes, of course, um, ooh, was that the doorbell? Must go..
loads of people refer to 1984 without actually reading it, which is interesting. It's as if the book has been boiled down into a single idea that can be easily applied to multiple situations.
It's wrong of course, 1984 is very complex, too complex for a single idea to be distilled from its pages. I love the book myself.
I more often compare the RIAA/MPAA/DMCA situation to Plato's Republic, which predates 1984 somewhat.
Sometimes I think we need a good kicking. People sit in their comfy houses, with reguler electricity and their WholeFoods store nearby, and forget that for some people, life's damn hard, and getting harder.
You can indeed say they should have food instead of a laptop, however all that truckloads of food does is extend their dependence on the people who screwed them over to start with, by slaving them, stealing their resources, and more recently by causing pollution induced famines in Africa.
No, the best way to help them is to give them tools, be they shovels, or tech tools like computers, and let *them* decide what's best.
Perhaps foods would be nice as well, but since we live in food stuffed luxury while poorer nations starve and *still* struggle to pay off vast debts to international banks, I think that's just an insult 'ah, poor you, here, have our scraps'. It makes me sick, it really does.
So, um, I think the laptop things a good thing, although I think a rich company like microsoft should quit worrying about market share and domination, and cough up a few billion to buy a few cargo ships full of these laptops and communications equipment.
Being from another generation, the one for whom the zx spectrum was an awesomely powerful computer (no really), 'grind' has an entirely different meaning. I can't get used to it just meaning 'boring the crap out of myself by doing something over and over again till my head explodes just to get a level up'.
What does it mean to me? Well that would be using naughty words, and I'm not nearly drunk enough.
I still play it, and enjoy it. Warcraft II was one of the best of the crop of early RTS games I think. It was the first RTS game that made sea based warfare enjoyable and tactically useful. I think the sea based warfare wasn't equalled until Total Annihalation, and never bettered. Oddly even Warcraft III didn't better it, or so I feel, it just looked nicer.
I am annoyed that I can't play it multi-player any more though, the modem/null modem/ipx-spx connection methods don't exactly work on my network these days.
Oh wait, the topic is WoW. I played it, found it tedious and repetitive, and gave up. It would need to be radically changed for me to like it. How I'm not exactly sure, since I haven't spent any time thinking on the issue.
dammit, I was drinking when I read that, now I have to clean my desk... :-)
Microsoft are scared, really scared. If they can't get some leverage in the linux world, then they lose their monopoly. Can you list how many products Microsoft have released outside of a monopoly position that have made money?
Offering indemnification regarding other peoples products is crazy, unless they need to in order to hold their position as market leader. They can only be hoping to stir up more doubt.
BSD, being from unix, has been around a long time, that might be why it's forked, or it could have just been conflicting ideals early on, I don't know.
You're right, forking of the kernel wouldn't neccesarily be a bad thing. However, there aren't that many linux kernel hackers, and there just might not be enough to obtain the critical mass required for a succesful fork of the linux kernel.
It's still early days for linux, we might see changes in the future. I'd be reluctant to change from the standard kernel at the moment.
Linux is just the kernel, did you mean to say the entire operating systems could be forked?
It's extremely unlikely that the kernel will be forked, as it's such a huge effort to maintain and improve as it is. There are some custom kernels, but those are for specific purposes, not general use.