Not necessarily. You can easily derive the big moral no-nos (such as murder, theft, etc) from first principles, For example, most people don't want to be murdered, so murder is morally wrong - you don't need some being or beings in the sky to tell you not to murder. Morals such as "You shall not wear a mixed stuff, wool and linen together." (Dueteronomy 22:11) would probably be harder to justify.
You don't get killed for being the wrong flavour of Christian, you die for being either a Nationalist or a Loyalist, which tends to run along the same lines.
Which is something that is often forgotten, that it's not quite a 1:1 mapping between religion and nation/union-ism. I once knew someone from NI who was of Catholic origin but didn't want the North to be a part of the South because of the south's social conservatism.
Fair enough, but what about those "swingers mags" and such like, where people advertise, but it is a medium meant for the advertising of such things amongst consenting adults.
the Irish, whom, I believe, you converted to Christianity in the first place
Actually, it's more like the other way round and long before Ireland was invaded. Christianity made it's way to Ireland on it's own, and for some strange reason really found a home there. Then when Christianity started to wane a bit in Europe, it was bolstered up by Irish missionaries. For example, look at a list of saints related to Scotland (such as at http://www.visitdunkeld.com/scottish-saints.htm) and you'll see that a lot of them are Irish missionaries. And if you'll look at when they lived, most if not all of them lived long (500 odd years) before the "English" invaded in 1169. It even debateable if the people who invaded Ireland should even be called English as they were the decendants of the Norman invaders of England 100 years previously, so Anglo-Norman would probably be a better term.
I don't see anything wrong with asking someone who forks your codebase to use a different name to avoid confusion. What's the problem with that?
The problem is is that when somebody (in this case Debian) complies with that request a whole different group of people start complaining that doing so will cause confusion and make it look like the original codebase's market share is shrinking.
I think that's going to be a bit of a challenge for Apple outside of the US, at least for English language programming being sold to English speaking countries. For US programmes they'd either have to make a deal with the studios to get the international rights (which might get expensive, as selling the rights to Apple will dilute the value of the programmes in foreign markets) or they'll have to deal with each rights holder in each individual market they want to enter (which will take longer, but may be cheaper). So I really wouldn't want to hold my breath waiting for apple to launch video services outside the US.
It's been a few years since I last tried Epiphany, but I remember that it kinda sucked. The developers took GNOME's "users are idiots who need to be protected from themselves" philosophy way too far and made the software almost useless - for example, they redid bookmarks in such a way as to make them unusable for anyone with more than a trivial number of bookmarks (they didn't even call them bookmarks anymore). I seem to remember that there was a previous Gecko based gnome browser (I think it was called Galeon), which was less brain dead, but I think that project was dropped for epiphany (as epiphany was more in keeping with "protecting users from themselves").
Are certain domain names under US fiefdom and not others?
Pretty much. Because it was mostly just sites in the US that were on the interent when DNS was created, there wasn't seen to be a need for using a country code for US domains, so.com,.org,.edu,.mil etc are considered to be American domains, even though there is now the.US country code.
I'm pretty certain that Neilsen/NetRatings are American, so that may explain some of it. Also I'm somewhat curious as to how the survey was done - it alludes to "online Britons", but makes no mention of how the statistics were collected, what defined an "online" Briton, what size the sample population is, etc. The whole article smells of bad statistics used to lazily write a "technology is hard to understand" article.
Apparently Stewart no longer cares about balancing his show for the opinions of his more conservative viewers
Maybe that's because the Democrats haven't done anything funny recently (only a party in power would have the consistent opprotunity to screw up).
Also, why would you ever expect a comedian to be "fair and balanced"? TDS is a comedy show and I would expect the biases of the comedians to come in to play (in the same way if you went and saw a stand up comedian and he or she started talking politics, you would expect it to be thier biased opinion).
I admit, I don't really understand the American desire for journalists to not be biased (I live in the UK, but I watch every episode of TDS on More 4) - I'd much rather have thier biases out in the open so I can pick and choose which news source I want to listen to. They've tried to import that concept here with TV news (which is suppossed to be "fair and balanced", at least on the BBC, I'm not sure of the others), but it doesn't work that well (the bias still comes shining through). I'd much rather pick my TV news like I can pick my newspapers, where the biases are both obvious and well known.
The BBC isn't all that, either, you know. It's leaps and bounds better than anything in the States, but it's got a very discernable conservative bias, and it's too damn polite to ever dig very deep
Bollocks.
The BBC has a left of centre bias. Just because they attack the current government doesn't give them a conservative bias, seeing as the current government is right of centre (that's what put the "new" in New Labour). And I've seen enough interviews on the BBC to know that they will mercilessly attack those who they don't agree with and give a soft touch to those they do.
Access to the code has saved my ass more than once.
Same here and I think it's a benefit that lot of people (such as the article poster) don't realize how much of a benefit it can be. I don't understand why some people believe that a support contract with a closed source vendor garuntees them bug fixes for thier particular bugs (especially in some reasonable amount of time) seeing as a lot of closed software is sold as "not fit for any purpose". At least if you have the source, you can either fix it yourself (if you have developers on staff) or you can pay someone external to fix it.
I have to disagree on this one (with the usual IANAL) - the "distributing derived works" clause only kicks in once you start to distribute what you've created, so you can create all the GPL derived software you like and never distribute it.
Why don't you just get a games console? No screwing about with dual boots or cedaga/wine - just an appliance that does one thing and does it well. Is Halo 2 that much better on the PC than the XBox?
I would think that with the peak oil production point possibly having been reached, humanities polluting days are numbered anyway, global warming or not.
I thought that the ribbon is having a hard time getting accepted.
The menu-bar paradigm is OLD older than me and older than lots of you.
ouch.
Just because it's old doesn't mean that there's anything overly wrong with it (if you think about it, most things in computing are "old" by your standards). A few apps might be pushing the paradigm to it's limits, but then you have to wonder if maybe it's the apps that need to be simplified and not the menubar.
why not remapping that menubar as a web-2.0 "cloud" which makes some options bigger than others.
Maybe it's old age, but I can't think of anything less aesthetically pleasing to replace menu bars with. If anything you'd end up with an even harder to use system.
Groovy has closures. They seem reasonably effecient (it's a scripting language on top of Java, so let's face facts - run time effeciency is not the main reason for choosing the language).
I also seem to recall that the next version of Java will have some enhancements for dynamic languages (though it came out of Sun's effort to port Visual Basic to Java)
It is somewhat illogical to accuse Debian from lack of direction, when by your own words it has a direction: a commandline-driven server OS. It has direction, the direction simply happens to be different from what you want it to be.
But where on the Debian homepage does it state that "The direction of Debian is to be a commandline-line driven server OS"?. It doesn't because that isn't Debian's direction - Debian doesn't have any direction at all, it just happens to be a reasonable server OS (but then, Ubuntu Server is also a fine server OS).
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't good ol' VRML be a start?
Simple, you're an evolutionary dead end :-)
Morals are based on religion
Not necessarily. You can easily derive the big moral no-nos (such as murder, theft, etc) from first principles, For example, most people don't want to be murdered, so murder is morally wrong - you don't need some being or beings in the sky to tell you not to murder. Morals such as "You shall not wear a mixed stuff, wool and linen together." (Dueteronomy 22:11) would probably be harder to justify.
The OP did bring up the nazis, so in this case Godwins law kicks in, but yeah I have to agree with you.
You don't get killed for being the wrong flavour of Christian, you die for being either a Nationalist or a Loyalist, which tends to run along the same lines.
Which is something that is often forgotten, that it's not quite a 1:1 mapping between religion and nation/union-ism. I once knew someone from NI who was of Catholic origin but didn't want the North to be a part of the South because of the south's social conservatism.
Fair enough, but what about those "swingers mags" and such like, where people advertise, but it is a medium meant for the advertising of such things amongst consenting adults.
the Irish, whom, I believe, you converted to Christianity in the first place
Actually, it's more like the other way round and long before Ireland was invaded. Christianity made it's way to Ireland on it's own, and for some strange reason really found a home there. Then when Christianity started to wane a bit in Europe, it was bolstered up by Irish missionaries. For example, look at a list of saints related to Scotland (such as at http://www.visitdunkeld.com/scottish-saints.htm) and you'll see that a lot of them are Irish missionaries. And if you'll look at when they lived, most if not all of them lived long (500 odd years) before the "English" invaded in 1169. It even debateable if the people who invaded Ireland should even be called English as they were the decendants of the Norman invaders of England 100 years previously, so Anglo-Norman would probably be a better term.
I don't see anything wrong with asking someone who forks your codebase to use a different name to avoid confusion. What's the problem with that?
The problem is is that when somebody (in this case Debian) complies with that request a whole different group of people start complaining that doing so will cause confusion and make it look like the original codebase's market share is shrinking.
they'd have to provide content
I think that's going to be a bit of a challenge for Apple outside of the US, at least for English language programming being sold to English speaking countries. For US programmes they'd either have to make a deal with the studios to get the international rights (which might get expensive, as selling the rights to Apple will dilute the value of the programmes in foreign markets) or they'll have to deal with each rights holder in each individual market they want to enter (which will take longer, but may be cheaper). So I really wouldn't want to hold my breath waiting for apple to launch video services outside the US.
It's been a few years since I last tried Epiphany, but I remember that it kinda sucked. The developers took GNOME's "users are idiots who need to be protected from themselves" philosophy way too far and made the software almost useless - for example, they redid bookmarks in such a way as to make them unusable for anyone with more than a trivial number of bookmarks (they didn't even call them bookmarks anymore). I seem to remember that there was a previous Gecko based gnome browser (I think it was called Galeon), which was less brain dead, but I think that project was dropped for epiphany (as epiphany was more in keeping with "protecting users from themselves").
Are certain domain names under US fiefdom and not others?
.com, .org, .edu, .mil etc are considered to be American domains, even though there is now the .US country code.
Pretty much. Because it was mostly just sites in the US that were on the interent when DNS was created, there wasn't seen to be a need for using a country code for US domains, so
I'm pretty certain that Neilsen/NetRatings are American, so that may explain some of it. Also I'm somewhat curious as to how the survey was done - it alludes to "online Britons", but makes no mention of how the statistics were collected, what defined an "online" Briton, what size the sample population is, etc. The whole article smells of bad statistics used to lazily write a "technology is hard to understand" article.
Apparently Stewart no longer cares about balancing his show for the opinions of his more conservative viewers
Maybe that's because the Democrats haven't done anything funny recently (only a party in power would have the consistent opprotunity to screw up).
Also, why would you ever expect a comedian to be "fair and balanced"? TDS is a comedy show and I would expect the biases of the comedians to come in to play (in the same way if you went and saw a stand up comedian and he or she started talking politics, you would expect it to be thier biased opinion).
I admit, I don't really understand the American desire for journalists to not be biased (I live in the UK, but I watch every episode of TDS on More 4) - I'd much rather have thier biases out in the open so I can pick and choose which news source I want to listen to. They've tried to import that concept here with TV news (which is suppossed to be "fair and balanced", at least on the BBC, I'm not sure of the others), but it doesn't work that well (the bias still comes shining through). I'd much rather pick my TV news like I can pick my newspapers, where the biases are both obvious and well known.
The BBC isn't all that, either, you know. It's leaps and bounds better than anything in the States, but it's got a very discernable conservative bias, and it's too damn polite to ever dig very deep
Bollocks.
The BBC has a left of centre bias. Just because they attack the current government doesn't give them a conservative bias, seeing as the current government is right of centre (that's what put the "new" in New Labour). And I've seen enough interviews on the BBC to know that they will mercilessly attack those who they don't agree with and give a soft touch to those they do.
Access to the code has saved my ass more than once.
Same here and I think it's a benefit that lot of people (such as the article poster) don't realize how much of a benefit it can be. I don't understand why some people believe that a support contract with a closed source vendor garuntees them bug fixes for thier particular bugs (especially in some reasonable amount of time) seeing as a lot of closed software is sold as "not fit for any purpose". At least if you have the source, you can either fix it yourself (if you have developers on staff) or you can pay someone external to fix it.
you had no legal right to create it,
I have to disagree on this one (with the usual IANAL) - the "distributing derived works" clause only kicks in once you start to distribute what you've created, so you can create all the GPL derived software you like and never distribute it.
Why don't you just get a games console? No screwing about with dual boots or cedaga/wine - just an appliance that does one thing and does it well. Is Halo 2 that much better on the PC than the XBox?
I would think that with the peak oil production point possibly having been reached, humanities polluting days are numbered anyway, global warming or not.
Does anyone really know where they were relative to the equator further back in time?
Yes, geologists.
Those fossils are from a time recent enough that Canada would not be that far away from where it is now.
Thats the primary reason why the *ribbon* exists.
I thought that the ribbon is having a hard time getting accepted.
The menu-bar paradigm is OLD older than me and older than lots of you.
ouch.
Just because it's old doesn't mean that there's anything overly wrong with it (if you think about it, most things in computing are "old" by your standards). A few apps might be pushing the paradigm to it's limits, but then you have to wonder if maybe it's the apps that need to be simplified and not the menubar.
why not remapping that menubar as a web-2.0 "cloud" which makes some options bigger than others.
Maybe it's old age, but I can't think of anything less aesthetically pleasing to replace menu bars with. If anything you'd end up with an even harder to use system.
Groovy has closures. They seem reasonably effecient (it's a scripting language on top of Java, so let's face facts - run time effeciency is not the main reason for choosing the language).
I also seem to recall that the next version of Java will have some enhancements for dynamic languages (though it came out of Sun's effort to port Visual Basic to Java)
It is somewhat illogical to accuse Debian from lack of direction, when by your own words it has a direction: a commandline-driven server OS. It has direction, the direction simply happens to be different from what you want it to be.
But where on the Debian homepage does it state that "The direction of Debian is to be a commandline-line driven server OS"?. It doesn't because that isn't Debian's direction - Debian doesn't have any direction at all, it just happens to be a reasonable server OS (but then, Ubuntu Server is also a fine server OS).
But that still requires work on the part of the human and is not the "black box money making machine" of the gp poster's friend's dreams.
And I'll be honest, it's a dream I've long had as well - I've just been too damn lazy to do anything about it.
Europe drop tax rates? I think we'll be talking about the "solar system economy" before that happens.