I've already downloaded 2.3 yesterday - I wonder why Slashdot fails to announce cutting-edge news fast enough. One would assume that Firehose would help make the process faster, but it looks like more improvements could be made.
The psychology of the average employee is "get finish quickly so that I can go home" - they just don't care about code quality. Free software and open source people usually care, if they have enough free time to cater for their projects.
2017, The Free Republic of the Founding Fathers, The Free Capital City: The President today announced the formation of the Whitelist Committee. After years of deliberations, the criminologists decided that the blacklist approach to security is not effective. Instead of catching criminals after they committed a crime (the blacklist approach), the government will now analyse the brains of newborn babies and have the Whitelist Committe decide whether they deserve to live. If chemicals associated with aggressiveness, eg testosterone, are found in larger than allowed quantities, then these babies are going to be killed to save the society from having to catch them when they commit a crime. Babies that are found to have tolerable testosterone levels will be tagged with an RFID implant for life and be allowed to live in our wonderful society. To guarantee against misidentifications, the Whitelist Committe will also put another implant in the baby's heart that will allow the government to remotely stop the heart of any person who was allowed to live by mistake. This, the president announced, is going to lower the costs of the corrections system, so that more funds can be directed to the never-ending War on Thought.
To distillate: When you implement a whitelist, the people who have control over it become your absolute masters. You must be very careful with whitelists, because if they are mismanaged or used for reasons other than security then you end up screwed.
is it possible that everyone can be rich? Who will do the work?
You don't need to be poor in order to work. Money and income is not the only motivation for work. Read Maslow. You can volunteer out of interest for the community even if you are rich.
So I think I prabably would like a mini-Gimp program (named "Gimpie"?:-), that does away with all the layer stuff (transparency can be handy though), simply allows me to manipulate photo's (touch-up work, cut-paste, cropping, rotating, that's all) and nothing else.
Similarly, if potential employers cannot find any information about you on the Net, then this seems a bit suspicious... There're two sides in any story you know.
in 1404, a flat Earth was a "largely settled matter"
It was 'largely settled matter' because there was a bunch of Christians threatening to cut your head open if you ever said you believed otherwise.
It is however important to point out that it was mostly in the early Christian period (eg 300s) that Christian authors wrote a lot about a flat earth. Their problem, actually, was not the sphaericity of their world, but the idea of antipodes - of people living on the other side of their world that could potentially be unaffected by their Christ.
There were many books written before 1404 that regarded the Earth as a sphere. It is also important to point out that monarchs still carry a sphaerical object that symbolises their power over the world.
It is *very easy* to find out that we live on a sphere just by observing the world around you, eg a ship at a distance hiding below the horizon. Read some Ptolemy. Every sane person can easily discover the spericity of their own planet. It was only a few theologicians that believed otherwise.
it is difficult for an individual (even a doctor) to tell somebody to NOT do something that is not harmful, and (very, very unlikely) may be beneficial
I'm afraid that homeopathy can be potentially harmful from a financial and an intellectual perspective. When a patient, who may not have had the opportunity to get a solid scientific education and an understanding of critical thought, comes in contact with a homeopathy practitioner who demands payment for the provision of 'medicines' that are essentially water or alcohol, they are exposed to the dangers of magical thinking and they lose their money at the same time.
Homeopathy opens a whole can of worms. Behind every system of thought, there is an underlying philosophy. When a doctor tells you about a disease, they can show you the actual virus that causes it. When a homeopathy practitioner talks about your symptoms, they will refer to miasms and your life force, but no one will show these things to you (but, of course, if you believe in them you can see them everywhere).
The underlying philosophy behind science as it emerged from the dark ages is that of materialism. Homeopathy is supported by the philosophy that there is something 'spiritual' out there, something out of this world. It is important to understand that science can rapidly change its underlying philosophy the moment after we develop a machine to make observations and measurements into the so-called 'spiritual' world. Science is what we see. If we can see it, then we can study it, and we can develop a science around it. The reason materialism is the generally accepted underlying philosophy of scientists is because everything we have seen so far is of material quality and is consisted with a materialist viewpoint. But homeopathy will never change its assumptions regarding 'spiritual' essences like the life force or the miasms, simply because these ideas emerged not from careful observation but from the wishes (many people enjoy thinking there is something 'spiritual' out there, they really want to believe in it, and this is desire for the 'spiritual' may be too old as there is some evidence hinting to a Neanderthal religion), ignorance, and obscene doses of gross criminal stupidity.
An important property of science is that it is falsifiable. It is possible to say when a scientific theory is not true. But this is not so with homeopathy. There is no way you can disprove the existence of a life force or of miasms. Stupid people say lack of disproval correlates with existence, but those trained in critical thought know that when you cannot know when something is not true then you know nothing. When confronted with the idea of something you cannot see the proper answer is "I don't know" not "I can't see it so it must exist!". Science can very easily show you actual photographs of viruses that cause your diseases, but no homepathy practitioner will ever show you photographs of miasms or of the hypothetical 'life force'.
A short discussion between a patient and a homeopathy practitioner is enough to make the patient slip into a deep cycle of magical thinking and disapproval of science. What could a patient be thinking after they finish a consultation with a homeopathy practitioner? Here are some of what I think could portray their thoughts: "My cancer is the result of a miasm that affects my life force, and this miasm was attracted by my negative thoughts; now in order to cure myself I just have to give all of my money to my homeopathy practitioner and get their miracle-making diluted medicines", "Since my homeopathy practitioner talks about miasms, then what I have heard about viruses in the school was wrong", "Scientists believe in bullshit. Homeopathy has found out about the spiritual cause of disease, while science is still in the dark ages of materialism unable to see the true cause of disease, so I will never go to a medical doctor again".
Exposure to homeopathy will inevitably lead to exposure of its underlying philoso
Doctors may be in the profession for the money. They can't easily earn money just by disproving quackeries, so they don't lose their time doing it.
Unfortunately it is possible to be a practising doctor and still have no solid understanding of the scientific method. A person who went to university to study medicine and passed the exams by cheating can find work as a doctor but still be vulnerable to unscientific theories and magical thinking. Some doctors may actually believe in some quackery themselves.
Doctors may be smarter than the general population. Many smart people have had the sad experience of trying to educate the public, only to be attacked by them in a variety of ways. Smart people, such as doctors, therefore limit their interactions to their circles that are composed only of like-minded smart people.
Doctors may remember what happened to Socrates and Galileo. They may really be afraid of confronting a group of crazy ignorant people.
Considering that homeopathy has found its way into the government (public insuranse paying for it, public universities giving out official Master of Science degrees in it, all paid up by the tax payers by force of law and threat of imprisonment), doctors may feel uneasy about confronting the government.
Doctors may simply not care.
Doctors may be so busy actually saving lives that they have no time to read newspapers and write letters to any paper publishing articles on a quackery.
I'm not a parent, but here's what I am thinking: We all have limited time. Everything we can do has a different priority or importance. So, we have to invest our time in whatever has the highest priority or return on investment (ROI). If educating your teenager about sexually transmitted diseases has a ROI of 100, then what is the ROI of controlling their access to online pornography at home? 1? 5? 10? Perhaps 15 at the maximum? If my gut feeling regarding these numbers is correct, then this means that the parent should first educate the teenager about STDs, then manage access to pornography, or at least do both at the same time (if you believe access to pornography ought to be managed), but surely not first deal with the pornography and later (or worse, never) with the STDs. There are some sites with information on educating teenagers on sexual issues, such as Scarleteen and places where your teenager can ask questions and get answers rom people who probably know much more than you, such as GoAskAlice.
Does your Portege (very nice machines btw) has an Ethernet port? If its network card supports booting off the network, then you can try booting up this way. If not, then I would suggest removing its hard drive, connecting it to another laptop or to a desktop machine with adapter, writing any necessary files to boot and install Debian or other distro, and then connecting it back to the Portege.
I already do not follow Linus Torvalds in his political ideas, and I choose to listen to RMS instead. I do, however, listen to Linus Torvalds with great respect whenever he expresses technical opinions, although I still regard microkernels better than monolithic kernels. Both Torvalds and RMS are very successful, but in two very different areas: Torvalds is a programmer, while RMS is an activist. Both, of course, have a good grasp of both technology and politics, but each one has specialised on one of these two areas. Whether you prefer rms or Linus's political views is, however, a personal matter that only you can decide. I believe RMS's views and activism are much needed in our society today and for this reason I support him, as I am a Contributor Member of the FSF, supporting them with US$ 500 per year. I believe more people should listen to rms and FSF, but always with a critical mind. RMS explains very well the differences between free software and open source, and why we ought to support freedom, in his online essays and his book. Perhaps you should give them a read. Whatever you support, however, you must always keep in mind that it is important for the free software and open source community to be united against the common enemy of closed-source software.
By demanding them to fix the hardware of his GNU/Linux laptop, he takes a political fight that is good for all GNU/Linux users. While your advice is correct for helping him getting his laptop fixed, it is damaging to the fight of the GNU/Linux community for equality in the OS market. We want manufacturers to regard GNU/Linux a legitimate OS and support it. If we go underground and hide behind Windows whenever we ask for support, we will never get the manufacturers to support GNU/Linux.
I believe that at some point in the future tracking devices are going to be mandatory and embedded in all vehicles. This will probably be based on some security or safety concern, which may even be imaginary. Another one reason to be car-free.
I'm going to donate some of my time to help finding him. The ability to help someone over the Internet is wonderful. However, the Amazon's mechanical Turk page (this one) refers to non-standard units like feet. I'm told I'll have to set the height on my GoogleEarth client at 1500 feet and that the aeroplane is 22 feet long, but this is like talking nonsense to me, as I can understand only metres (I'm from EU). I had to convert this, but I can't stop thinking that the page author makes the life of non-US volunteers a bit more difficult. Shouldn't important emergency-related webpages contain both the customary/local (feet) and standard (metres) units? Not that in this occasion this is of much importance (I just typed '1500 feet in metres' in Google), but I just wanted to raise this issue. What if you are in a life-or-death emergency situation and your ability to save someone depends on you understanding a non-standard unit that someone thought everyone would know about but in reality it is used only in some parts of the world out of custom? This problem of course also exists in many non-emergency situations... eg last time I got to England whenever I was asking locals where I could find a shop etc I had to deal with yards, and I had to get our my PDA to find out how far I should walk. With the global commerce and increasingly international communications, can't all countries agree to a single set of universal units and fund campaigns to help common people get accustomed to the standard units? Apart from language barriers, different sets of units really make intercultural communication harder than it needs to be.
And do you really want a single company controlling not only the CPU market but also the GPU, wireless, and what else markets? Doesn't this sound like giving too much power to a single manufacturer?
I think AMD-ATI will soon satisfy GNU/Linux and BSD users. But even if they don't you can always support projects that seek to produce open graphics hardware.
I've no time to RTFA but, assuming the slashdot summary is correct (many times it isn't), if the courts can choose when to apply the new rules then when a small guy infringes against a big corporation the courts may choose to calculate damages based on the value of the whole product (ie the small guy gets screwed), but when a big corporation infringes against a rival smaller company or guy then the courts may choose to calculate the damages based on the part of the product that is covered by the patent (ie the small guy is again screwed). If you did RTFA and it isn't like this please correct me.
Why do anyone in their sane mind would think of using Flash or Silverlight when we have SVG and SMIL? Web developers and companies building websites seem to not understand or not care about vendor lockin.
DNA results take time to process.... A database can confirm quickly enough that a suspect could potentially be charged and given due process immediately.
A database violate civil rights and can be a great tool for a future totalitarian government, so it has shortcomings. Isn't there any other way to speed up DNA results?
Slashdot Mirror
Another one reason to prefer travel by ship, train, or car.
I've already downloaded 2.3 yesterday - I wonder why Slashdot fails to announce cutting-edge news fast enough. One would assume that Firehose would help make the process faster, but it looks like more improvements could be made.
The psychology of the average employee is "get finish quickly so that I can go home" - they just don't care about code quality. Free software and open source people usually care, if they have enough free time to cater for their projects.
2017, The Free Republic of the Founding Fathers, The Free Capital City: The President today announced the formation of the Whitelist Committee. After years of deliberations, the criminologists decided that the blacklist approach to security is not effective. Instead of catching criminals after they committed a crime (the blacklist approach), the government will now analyse the brains of newborn babies and have the Whitelist Committe decide whether they deserve to live. If chemicals associated with aggressiveness, eg testosterone, are found in larger than allowed quantities, then these babies are going to be killed to save the society from having to catch them when they commit a crime. Babies that are found to have tolerable testosterone levels will be tagged with an RFID implant for life and be allowed to live in our wonderful society. To guarantee against misidentifications, the Whitelist Committe will also put another implant in the baby's heart that will allow the government to remotely stop the heart of any person who was allowed to live by mistake. This, the president announced, is going to lower the costs of the corrections system, so that more funds can be directed to the never-ending War on Thought.
To distillate: When you implement a whitelist, the people who have control over it become your absolute masters. You must be very careful with whitelists, because if they are mismanaged or used for reasons other than security then you end up screwed.
Lock your laptop on your body by securing a Kensington lock all around you.
You don't need to be poor in order to work. Money and income is not the only motivation for work. Read Maslow. You can volunteer out of interest for the community even if you are rich.
Is KolourPaint what you need?
Similarly, if potential employers cannot find any information about you on the Net, then this seems a bit suspicious... There're two sides in any story you know.
It was 'largely settled matter' because there was a bunch of Christians threatening to cut your head open if you ever said you believed otherwise.
It is however important to point out that it was mostly in the early Christian period (eg 300s) that Christian authors wrote a lot about a flat earth. Their problem, actually, was not the sphaericity of their world, but the idea of antipodes - of people living on the other side of their world that could potentially be unaffected by their Christ.
There were many books written before 1404 that regarded the Earth as a sphere. It is also important to point out that monarchs still carry a sphaerical object that symbolises their power over the world.
It is *very easy* to find out that we live on a sphere just by observing the world around you, eg a ship at a distance hiding below the horizon. Read some Ptolemy. Every sane person can easily discover the spericity of their own planet. It was only a few theologicians that believed otherwise.
it is difficult for an individual (even a doctor) to tell somebody to NOT do something that is not harmful, and (very, very unlikely) may be beneficial
I'm afraid that homeopathy can be potentially harmful from a financial and an intellectual perspective. When a patient, who may not have had the opportunity to get a solid scientific education and an understanding of critical thought, comes in contact with a homeopathy practitioner who demands payment for the provision of 'medicines' that are essentially water or alcohol, they are exposed to the dangers of magical thinking and they lose their money at the same time.
Homeopathy opens a whole can of worms. Behind every system of thought, there is an underlying philosophy. When a doctor tells you about a disease, they can show you the actual virus that causes it. When a homeopathy practitioner talks about your symptoms, they will refer to miasms and your life force, but no one will show these things to you (but, of course, if you believe in them you can see them everywhere).
The underlying philosophy behind science as it emerged from the dark ages is that of materialism. Homeopathy is supported by the philosophy that there is something 'spiritual' out there, something out of this world. It is important to understand that science can rapidly change its underlying philosophy the moment after we develop a machine to make observations and measurements into the so-called 'spiritual' world. Science is what we see. If we can see it, then we can study it, and we can develop a science around it. The reason materialism is the generally accepted underlying philosophy of scientists is because everything we have seen so far is of material quality and is consisted with a materialist viewpoint. But homeopathy will never change its assumptions regarding 'spiritual' essences like the life force or the miasms, simply because these ideas emerged not from careful observation but from the wishes (many people enjoy thinking there is something 'spiritual' out there, they really want to believe in it, and this is desire for the 'spiritual' may be too old as there is some evidence hinting to a Neanderthal religion), ignorance, and obscene doses of gross criminal stupidity.
An important property of science is that it is falsifiable. It is possible to say when a scientific theory is not true. But this is not so with homeopathy. There is no way you can disprove the existence of a life force or of miasms. Stupid people say lack of disproval correlates with existence, but those trained in critical thought know that when you cannot know when something is not true then you know nothing. When confronted with the idea of something you cannot see the proper answer is "I don't know" not "I can't see it so it must exist!". Science can very easily show you actual photographs of viruses that cause your diseases, but no homepathy practitioner will ever show you photographs of miasms or of the hypothetical 'life force'.
A short discussion between a patient and a homeopathy practitioner is enough to make the patient slip into a deep cycle of magical thinking and disapproval of science. What could a patient be thinking after they finish a consultation with a homeopathy practitioner? Here are some of what I think could portray their thoughts: "My cancer is the result of a miasm that affects my life force, and this miasm was attracted by my negative thoughts; now in order to cure myself I just have to give all of my money to my homeopathy practitioner and get their miracle-making diluted medicines", "Since my homeopathy practitioner talks about miasms, then what I have heard about viruses in the school was wrong", "Scientists believe in bullshit. Homeopathy has found out about the spiritual cause of disease, while science is still in the dark ages of materialism unable to see the true cause of disease, so I will never go to a medical doctor again".
Exposure to homeopathy will inevitably lead to exposure of its underlying philoso
Some ideas:
I'm not a parent, but here's what I am thinking: We all have limited time. Everything we can do has a different priority or importance. So, we have to invest our time in whatever has the highest priority or return on investment (ROI). If educating your teenager about sexually transmitted diseases has a ROI of 100, then what is the ROI of controlling their access to online pornography at home? 1? 5? 10? Perhaps 15 at the maximum? If my gut feeling regarding these numbers is correct, then this means that the parent should first educate the teenager about STDs, then manage access to pornography, or at least do both at the same time (if you believe access to pornography ought to be managed), but surely not first deal with the pornography and later (or worse, never) with the STDs. There are some sites with information on educating teenagers on sexual issues, such as Scarleteen and places where your teenager can ask questions and get answers rom people who probably know much more than you, such as GoAskAlice.
Does your Portege (very nice machines btw) has an Ethernet port? If its network card supports booting off the network, then you can try booting up this way. If not, then I would suggest removing its hard drive, connecting it to another laptop or to a desktop machine with adapter, writing any necessary files to boot and install Debian or other distro, and then connecting it back to the Portege.
I already do not follow Linus Torvalds in his political ideas, and I choose to listen to RMS instead. I do, however, listen to Linus Torvalds with great respect whenever he expresses technical opinions, although I still regard microkernels better than monolithic kernels. Both Torvalds and RMS are very successful, but in two very different areas: Torvalds is a programmer, while RMS is an activist. Both, of course, have a good grasp of both technology and politics, but each one has specialised on one of these two areas. Whether you prefer rms or Linus's political views is, however, a personal matter that only you can decide. I believe RMS's views and activism are much needed in our society today and for this reason I support him, as I am a Contributor Member of the FSF, supporting them with US$ 500 per year. I believe more people should listen to rms and FSF, but always with a critical mind. RMS explains very well the differences between free software and open source, and why we ought to support freedom, in his online essays and his book. Perhaps you should give them a read. Whatever you support, however, you must always keep in mind that it is important for the free software and open source community to be united against the common enemy of closed-source software.
By demanding them to fix the hardware of his GNU/Linux laptop, he takes a political fight that is good for all GNU/Linux users. While your advice is correct for helping him getting his laptop fixed, it is damaging to the fight of the GNU/Linux community for equality in the OS market. We want manufacturers to regard GNU/Linux a legitimate OS and support it. If we go underground and hide behind Windows whenever we ask for support, we will never get the manufacturers to support GNU/Linux.
If you were in Germany you would have been dragged to the courts for installing a hackers's OS full of hacking tools.
I believe that at some point in the future tracking devices are going to be mandatory and embedded in all vehicles. This will probably be based on some security or safety concern, which may even be imaginary. Another one reason to be car-free.
I'll find it for you, and then keep it. Happy? :)
I'm going to donate some of my time to help finding him. The ability to help someone over the Internet is wonderful. However, the Amazon's mechanical Turk page (this one) refers to non-standard units like feet. I'm told I'll have to set the height on my GoogleEarth client at 1500 feet and that the aeroplane is 22 feet long, but this is like talking nonsense to me, as I can understand only metres (I'm from EU). I had to convert this, but I can't stop thinking that the page author makes the life of non-US volunteers a bit more difficult. Shouldn't important emergency-related webpages contain both the customary/local (feet) and standard (metres) units? Not that in this occasion this is of much importance (I just typed '1500 feet in metres' in Google), but I just wanted to raise this issue. What if you are in a life-or-death emergency situation and your ability to save someone depends on you understanding a non-standard unit that someone thought everyone would know about but in reality it is used only in some parts of the world out of custom? This problem of course also exists in many non-emergency situations... eg last time I got to England whenever I was asking locals where I could find a shop etc I had to deal with yards, and I had to get our my PDA to find out how far I should walk. With the global commerce and increasingly international communications, can't all countries agree to a single set of universal units and fund campaigns to help common people get accustomed to the standard units? Apart from language barriers, different sets of units really make intercultural communication harder than it needs to be.
Well, that's what happens when I slashdot while SQLing a DB just after I wake up...
And do you really want a single company controlling not only the CPU market but also the GPU, wireless, and what else markets? Doesn't this sound like giving too much power to a single manufacturer?
I think AMD-ATI will soon satisfy GNU/Linux and BSD users. But even if they don't you can always support projects that seek to produce open graphics hardware.
I've no time to RTFA but, assuming the slashdot summary is correct (many times it isn't), if the courts can choose when to apply the new rules then when a small guy infringes against a big corporation the courts may choose to calculate damages based on the value of the whole product (ie the small guy gets screwed), but when a big corporation infringes against a rival smaller company or guy then the courts may choose to calculate the damages based on the part of the product that is covered by the patent (ie the small guy is again screwed). If you did RTFA and it isn't like this please correct me.
Why limit ouselves to apps and not talk about bloat-free sites as well? Google's search homepage is a good example of bloat-free design, I think.
Why do anyone in their sane mind would think of using Flash or Silverlight when we have SVG and SMIL? Web developers and companies building websites seem to not understand or not care about vendor lockin.
A database violate civil rights and can be a great tool for a future totalitarian government, so it has shortcomings. Isn't there any other way to speed up DNA results?