...Learning good typography skills makes for prettier documents. Yeah. Old news. But alas, it's the purpose of word processors to avoid learning proper typo, and LatTeX is already far better at typesetting than any suite out there.
As long as word processors won't erase superfluous spaces, doubled returns, and start of line tabs, I see no hope of a global users' skills rising.
I hate to say it but your are wrong.
I'd rather say I was a bit oversimplistic.
1. WIPO is an UN organisation, to be more precise a diplomatic conference
WIPO = World Intellectual Property Organisations.
WIPO has little institutional political interests.
2. You probably refer to ab WIPO treaty.
WIPO as an organisation has for sole purpose to issue and modify a handful of treaties dealing with IP ; granted, I didn't wanted to dwelve into it, but since you mention, well... But to go as far as saying that WIPO has little institutional political interests, allow me a good laugh. Why would they promote such an agenda as they do on their site if they had not ?
At WIPO corporations are more or less weak as stakeholders. The main influential stakeholders at WIPO are the Us movie industry and Cptech. Strong stakeholders are also patent attorneys associations and national patent offices. Delegates to WIPO are representatives from member states. Any organisation can accredit to WIPO and sure they do.
Sorry to bring you out of wonderland, but what are lobbies made for if not to influence political representatives, opinion groups, etc. There is a kind of genious I admire into it, that is that while industry obviously is in command of the whole thing, they carefully hide behind various pressure groups, going as far as creating a pseudo-competition. But in the end, most organisations share the same agenda and opponents are restricted to a very small margin.
No, the aim of some members of WIPO is to enforce these harshest possible protection e.g. the US. WIPO is full of IP critics, esp. Brazil.
Yes, but those who produce IP have the power, and Brazil can say whatever it wants, nobody gives a RA as long as it represents nothing except itself.
The more I see examples of IP laws enforcement (from both sides of the Atlantic ocean), the more I feel certain that public outrage has been pondered during WIPO talks, forseen and taken into account.
See how it works in this case : fashion design is protected by WIPO ; but the scope of protection in the actual laws of various states bound by WIPO differs. The aim of WIPO is to enforce the harshest possible IP protection, so states are required to cross-apply judgements from other members of the treaty. Here, the USA say : "oh well, we don't like it, but ya know, it's good for economy so, what's a constitutional amendement between friends ?". Take other matters (DMCA), and see how it's reversed : we french had an exception of copyright comparable to fair use, called "exception de copie privée" by wich anybody was entitled to make any number of copies from any copyrighted work he may came by, restricted to his home use. This exception was wiped away and now is much closer aligned on your US fair use.
My point is that the problem isn't in the "OMG LOOK HOW THOSE ALIENS ARE TAKING OUR GOD GIVEN RIGHTS FROM US !!!", but in the uncontroled discussion, adoption, transposition and enforcement of WIPO upon citizens of the world without them having been informed of the consequences, and the political will to give industry an edge over the physical persons who should have decided because they are the citizens of the bound states, while corporations do not vote ! And WIPO is only one such treaty, among others.
If we do not put corporations under the law, soon, laws will be issued at an international level by the corporations and enforced on us. This is clearly not something we should be looking forward.
Know your hardware - there's plenty of help with google to learn what's inside your computer.
Stop hardware autodetection (not linux fault if the computer falsely report a sound chipset which is not the one in use).
Edit your modules.conf with vi to setup the correct kernel module for your sound chipset.
(optional) if your distro is too dumb to respect your choices, protect your modules configuration file with the +i(mmutable) attribute (again not a linux problem, but a packager's one).
Thinkpads are especialy tricky to work with, but at least they generaly behave absolutely perfectly under linux once setup correctly. I had a 390 until recently, and I managed to get *all* the functions work as under windows (including apm suspend to disk, battery report, sound etc.). Mine had no internal modem, so I didn't try to setup this. Otherwise, it was just perfect. I changed for a HP/compaq NX9005, and I found the hard way that most functions are not usable by linux - it's working "good enough", though, but if I could I'd revert to a thinkpad anyday for linux use.
While minitel is still alive as a network, most of the users access it through internet today via an IE plugin. Most like you probably access the news via nntp instead of uucp.
Not much, I think ; historicaly, *.fr has been reserved to chartered companies and trademarks holders, so many french individuals had to buy a.com or.net already. Many companies did, too,because.fr is f*cking expensive. This afnic nonsense is backfiring today, because those who might have been interested are avoiding "continental red tape" (we invented it, so we have developped more strategies than others to turn around it whenever possible) and will probably stick with a general TLD unless the almighty USoA start pissing us by tightening the conditions of registration.
If humans in then stone-age were aware of how to handle toothdecay in such detail. (not just knocking out the affected teeth, but drilling) how come in the mideavil ages humans seemed to have reached a deep low? (I thought the French used anise to cover the smell of their rotting teeth and themselves)
It was not until later in history that this trend developped ; during the middle ages, people were cleaner than you'd have thought. They took bath, knew how to make soap and used it. In fact, bathing was part of the knighting procedure, for instance.
The trend toward unhygienic practices settled after the XVth century, and I don't know if it was "regressive" but it was tied to a shift in the Catholic Church's attitude in the troubled times of religious wars ; the Church enforced a very harsh view on the body, claiming that it was by essence evil. So as it was already lost to God, people were not expected to care about it. If they did, they would have been suspect of the sin of lust.
Back in the Uni, I was in charge of merging some 20+ articles from various authors into a single document. The target was to give the publisher a uniform document which he would then transform into a book.
All documents were made with a flavour of Word or another, from word for MacOS 6.0 to the latest (at the time) word XP for windows. As you'd have already guessed, the only word processor able to make sense of all the documents at once was Openoffice.org. Of course, I faced issues (bulleting appearing "funny", for instance), but as I was applying a style I created, that was not a problem as long as the text was there.
No single version of word in my possession was able to open all the documents, some documents even crashing word XP with thunder and lighting.
I think the most wonderful thing a man could offer a woman on their wedding night is the assurance that he has never lusted over another woman in his life. That's almost impossible. But being a virgin until your wedding night is just as important.
Oh, believe me, no. What a painful time it is to bear the feeble assaults of a newbie ! Learning to use your tools *is* the most wonderful present you can offer.
I say BS, because being honest, how many people watch movies with the lights on? at my house we even turn the lights off to watch The Mighty Boosh on BBC America!
Like most people suffering from frequent headaches, I never watch at a screen (be it TV or computer) without an ambient light. Without, I can be sure to develop a severe migraine after 1 hour of concentrated watch. With a dim light, I can watch TV up to 4 hours without side effects (save brain wash). This sadly apply to theatres too, so I really don't watch a film on a big screen often.
I've done it with linux, I suppose it's possible to achieve with windows : have a two disk install, and make sure that there is a read only strap on one. Just put whatever binaries you have (/boot,/,/usr...) on that disk, then move the strap to ro ; on the other disk, put/var and/home. If you're paranoid about it, have syslogd hard print everything on an old line printer. Done. It doesn't prevent a break-in, but the attacker is stuck an can't damage the files, so when you reboot (because you notice the security log printing strange things) the evidences are easy to find.
...I just dug out of basement tonight my old floppies of Sam & Max and gave a shot to the game with scumm ; while I had already finished it a long time ago, I'm still nearly peeing myself in laughter every time Max is speaking. Great great great game.
As the old saying goes, they don't make them like this anymore. Didn't you notice how games have become so boringly serious since the eve of "realistic 3D" everything ? At least, cartoon characters had to rely on humor to be entertaining. I miss them all, Indiana Jones, Monkey Island, BASS, Day of the tentacles (what a game... I spent an enormous amount of time on this one, really, it was huge!). Give us back the fun !
While my memories are a bit shadowy on that point, I don't remember networks to be such a big thing in those times (at least at home and and in small businesses), and when it went mainstream, OS/2 had gained every needed bits to come as a decent CIFS over ethernet server, while performing OK on internet. At least, it was in every respect better than the ubiquitous Win 3.11 and trumpet winsock. Even Win 95 originaly was totaly lacking in the network departement, and that didn't stop it for a second to have "cool" apps programmed for it. In my personal opinion, OS/2 was "windows better than windows", but IBM was blind to see that the machines required to run it were completely out of reach of their prospective market.
I still run a warp 3 box from now and then, attached to my home network via ethernet, and this works really fine. I love the "full object" desktop, very addictive compared to the pale emulations of windows, Mac OS and most everything else.
Desktop Linux is sort of a new OS/2 -- they tried to pretend it was cool with "WaRp", but the reality was the only people who bought it were stodgy banks and insurance companies trying to keep PCs under lock-and-key. Doesn't play music? That's a feature.
While I reckon you're right that only banks and insurance companies bought OS/2 by the dozen, I don't think it was for the un-coolness factor of it. OS/2 stayed without cool apps because the basic requirements to run it were way ahead of the consumer market : *at least* 8 MB of RAM, when 1 MB was the norm, 2 was good enough and 4 made you and über geek. Not to speak of HD footprint. So yes, warp on a cool machine *was* indeed cool, and you had the added benefit of a windows box better than a stand alone windows, and dos boxes with compatibility settings avoiding all the hassles of tweakings boot disks to run each and every game (it wasn't uncommon until DOS 6 to have a full box of FD tweaked to set various EMM386 and XMS memory partitions, not to speak of your sound card settings).
But it came to a price point not many could shell out, and that was the final killer. OS/2 otherwise had every possible hooks to be really cool.
This stupid Guttenberg is only printing Public Domain Bibles in crap quality ; what a shame his books are not fine hand written manuscripts of Plato, Aristotle and great scholars commentaries !
Of course, it doesn't account for the fact that printed books created a massive upsurge in written production, from novels to new streams in philosophy. I sure hope that the music won't be mainstream to reach new levels of creativity which would have been strangled in the old fashioned music economy.
Most religions (if not all) have behaviors that they advocate - the Golden Rule, for example, or giving to charity. Christ, for example, said that on two things were the laws of the Jews based: love God and love your neighbor. Now, these aren't statements, and so they have no truth value, but you might argue against the morality they define. The fact remains that they define behaviors that a Christian should attempt to adhere to. I'm sure there are equivalents in any other modern religion - defined explicitly in the holy literature or implicitly in the values they support. I guess my main response is purely that religions contain a great deal more than places to go when you die.
Oh indeed, yes ! Religions are very powerful social tools : they classify behaviours, and define rewards or punishments for following them or not. That's absolutely needed to bound societies of individuals and gear them toward a common aim. Think of it : it's been a long time since a man has been able to fully sustain himself alone. And yet, you could only have spoken of survival. For society to evolve, you need much much more cooperation. But we all know human nature is not exactly kind to the weakest, despite the fact that they may have something to offer for the common good. So religions were very handy to justify "abnormal" behaviours (with regards to natural "laws") with the promise of a distant future reward. And interestingly, we can notice that some type of religions are better suited to growing communities than others. For instance, primitive tribes are often animists - the cult is embodied into a single magician. If he dies without a ready apprentice, then hard times are ahead. So primitive cities switched to polytheism, with a clergy dedicated to each god. That works at a city level (think Athens), but it doesn't fit a nation for long : too much people means dispersion of cults, and ultimately the population has not enough bonds to stay together (see the fall of Rome). Monotheism jumps then into the picture : a unique God is very suited for the bonding of millions of worshippers, because it's easier to grasp, and you can force a real unity on the masses. Political powers (kings) understood the concept very early and very well, and that's no wonder christianity has been the root of europe for so long. Despite many feodal wars, europeans have always managed to use christianism as a bond and a tool for developpement throughout the centuries until 200 years ago.
Since then, we try (at least in France) to live in an era of reason ; we try to educate people into learning that living in a society is willing to bind our personal freedom to the laws for the general good. But this concept is difficult for citizens to catch, and there's not much perceived rewards at an individual level. While I think personaly it's a good thing to be treated as a grown up, I can't ignore that there is a tendency in some parts of the population to reject that freedom of thought and call for more "babysitting". Hence, a certain revival of cults in the poorest communities.
Most of the time, religion is just a good excuse to avoid facing our individual social responsability. It takes away certain unpleasant realities like "you've got a shitty job because you were to lazy to earn good grades in school" (or worse : "you don't have any job because you're too dumb") and replace them with "if you suffer in this life, it's the will of God almighty and you will be rewarded in heaven because last will be first". Living without this walking stick can be very frustrating.
But it's very far away from concepts like truth, good, or wrong. It' much closer to how a society manages to progress on a global level, and benefit to most of its members, not alienating the most powerful (who must benefit from their extra committment), and without desperating the weakest (who can become handy for some basic tasks).
I think that our definitions of truth are different, which is interesting. I define truth as an inherent property of the statement, not of our own knowledge. You define truth in terms of the knowledge we have of the statement. Interesting.
That's because you believe there's such a thing as a universal, absolute truth, which may be false outside the scope of pure mathematics (only because mathematics are built on that assumption). Problem is that as far as we know, we're submitted to time and we can't do much about it. Our perception of the outside world is at best limited to the present, and we can extend it only toward the past ; everything in front of us has only "chances" or a "potential" to happen the way we think, even if that potential can be maximized by a clever use of reason applied to past observations. For instance, if you're Keppler, you look at Mars every night during ten years and *bing*, you calculate some laws to predict where in the sky Mars will appear in the next thousand years. But even if your formula works for a long time, it's still not the TRUTH as an inherent property of the statement "Mars revovles around the Sun in x years", because a pesky little rock can put Mars out of its course in 200 years from now, and the formula can wear out and become wrong in x billions years because there's a small force which hasn't been included in the scientific law.
Even our knowledge of past events is submitted to distortions or potentialities making the truth less absolute than it seems ; think for a moment of sollipsism (theory that I'm the only being thing "dreaming" of a complete universe, this universe including you). You can't prove that sollipsism is absolutely wrong. You can't even prove to yourself that you're not trapped in that dream, and nothings really exists outside of me. Scary, huh ?
My personal position is that we souldn't bother of what's outside the scope of our minds ; that means that as far as I'm concerned, everybody's entitled to dream his own future the way he likes (sticking to wichever belief suits him), and shouldn't interfere with my own vision by trying to force his down my throat.
Religions attempt to address the question of our future ; if we're good, then we'll go to paradise and yadayada. But we can't look to that future from our place, so they may be absolutely true, or absolutely wrong, but that doesn't alleviate that fact that the future is neither true nor false, it just isn't yet.
French as in France, or Quebec, or someplace in Africa, or what?
You seem to be arguing that if a statement isn't experimentally verifiable, it is neither true nor false [...]
Yes. That's what I think. The statement is in an undecided state until you can experiment it.
[...] which is logically specious: the statement "it will rain tomorrow" isn't experimentally verifiable until tomorrow (at which time "it'll be too late to share your knowledge"), but it quite definitely is either true or false.
No ; it will be proven true or false tomorrow. If you make that statement out of your own mind ("I believe it'll rain tomorrow"), then you have a kind of religious conviction about it. Some people may have other methods to come to that conclusion (for 10 years, there was always at least a little rain on the 22nd of february there, so tomorrow it'll rain) or make other attempts to "prove" the contrary, but ultimately, it's undecided until tomorrow.
Now, you can argue forever that there's an absolute truth lying in it (wether tomorrow will be rainy or not), but that truth is outside the scope of our feeble brain, therefore it's not truth or falsehood, it's another level of reality that no matter how hard we try, we can't reach in our present state.
By the way, what is your mother tongue?
French. I hope I'm not butchering english too much.
[...] the actual truth value (like I say) is external to the belief. What you're saying is on par to saying that whether the Crusades happened or not depends on what an individual believes about it. If they happened, they happened for everyone! You can't decide whether or not they happened for you as an individual. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but saying that truth depends on the observer is screwed up.
You don't get what I try to say (but it might be my lack of skill iin english, which isn't my mother tongue). You're correct when you say that crusades happened for everyone, because this historical fact is in the realm of materiality, the one we can subject to experiment, with universal results such as true or false. The emphasis on the past is added, because this is the part where you are yourself making the kind of historical "experiment" I'm reffering to : you're locating the event in a web of chronological evidences.
Religions don't have the same substance because you can't experiment with God in the same way. Therefore, yes, in my opinion religious truth is purely individual. It doesn't matter that a certain number of people claim to share the same religion, because that's only an appearance ; you can't know individually which credo any believer is holding for himself in any given religion at any given moment. My guess is that the apparent unity of most creeds is a weil thrown on widely different perceptions of deity.
The fact that some options are mutualy exclusive and that therefore if one happens to be the truth, then others will be wrong, isn't into debate because once you'll know, it'll be too late to share your knowledge.
religion is a statement of fact. Statements are true or false.
I think you get it backward ; religion is a statement, but has nothing to see with facts. It's more an ontology : if you believe, then you are in the truth, and others are therefore wrong. Granted, the methodology is a bit more subtle, because most religions try to base their beliefs on some proven facts, like for instance the historical evidence of some persons (Jesus, Mohamed...) ; but even if Jesus or Mohamed are historical, that don't make them anything more than brilliant orators, for what can be known with a certain level of confidence. The rest is pure belief : if I'm catholic, then I'll be sure that Jesus is God's son. If I'm not, I'll think that he was something between a prophet and a fraud, depending on my convictions.
Either God exists or He does not. If religion is not true or false, it is no longer something you can believe - belief is a statement of what one thinks is truth.
As I told you, it's the essence of religion to be an ontology : if you are of this religion, it is the truth. If you're outside, it's false. End of it.
Some religions give incompatible truths. Therefore, (at least) some people are incorrect.
Nobody should care about that, because that's the kind of truth you only know when you die or when the end of times comes, whichever the first. Truth and falsehood are words of the material, scientific world : you can experiment them. You can't experiment God who belongs to the transcendantal world, therefore God is not true or false, he is or not. But this has no implication whatsoever in day to day life, because you can't prove someone else is wrong for not being in your realm of personal "truth".
My point wasn't to say that some are right or wrong to believe this or that or zilch. My point was to say that religions being outside the scope of materiality (for if they weren't, they'd be subject to scientifical scrutinity), nobody can tell a fellow human being that he's out of his shoes. Whereas when it comes to the materiality of historical events, you can experiment with some statements and tell a good work from a fraud, and treat the fraud accordingly.
You might want to read my previous answer on that topic ; I had no intent to deny the suffering of other communities, but to stay on topic I restrained my speech specificaly to what happened in the death camps. The reason is that noone denies the fatalities outside the camps. Revisionists only target the camps because it's the main difference between nazis' crimes and war crimes made by other nations, before and after WWII. Camps were also very secret to the point where you had to be involved in them to learn about their very existence.
Slashdot Mirror
Because NTSC stands for "never twice the same color", that's why.
As long as word processors won't erase superfluous spaces, doubled returns, and start of line tabs, I see no hope of a global users' skills rising.
I'd rather say I was a bit oversimplistic.
1. WIPO is an UN organisation, to be more precise a diplomatic conference
WIPO = World Intellectual Property Organisations.
WIPO has little institutional political interests.
2. You probably refer to ab WIPO treaty.
WIPO as an organisation has for sole purpose to issue and modify a handful of treaties dealing with IP ; granted, I didn't wanted to dwelve into it, but since you mention, well... But to go as far as saying that WIPO has little institutional political interests, allow me a good laugh. Why would they promote such an agenda as they do on their site if they had not ?
At WIPO corporations are more or less weak as stakeholders. The main influential stakeholders at WIPO are the Us movie industry and Cptech. Strong stakeholders are also patent attorneys associations and national patent offices. Delegates to WIPO are representatives from member states. Any organisation can accredit to WIPO and sure they do.
Sorry to bring you out of wonderland, but what are lobbies made for if not to influence political representatives, opinion groups, etc. There is a kind of genious I admire into it, that is that while industry obviously is in command of the whole thing, they carefully hide behind various pressure groups, going as far as creating a pseudo-competition. But in the end, most organisations share the same agenda and opponents are restricted to a very small margin.
No, the aim of some members of WIPO is to enforce these harshest possible protection e.g. the US. WIPO is full of IP critics, esp. Brazil.
Yes, but those who produce IP have the power, and Brazil can say whatever it wants, nobody gives a RA as long as it represents nothing except itself.
See how it works in this case : fashion design is protected by WIPO ; but the scope of protection in the actual laws of various states bound by WIPO differs. The aim of WIPO is to enforce the harshest possible IP protection, so states are required to cross-apply judgements from other members of the treaty. Here, the USA say : "oh well, we don't like it, but ya know, it's good for economy so, what's a constitutional amendement between friends ?". Take other matters (DMCA), and see how it's reversed : we french had an exception of copyright comparable to fair use, called "exception de copie privée" by wich anybody was entitled to make any number of copies from any copyrighted work he may came by, restricted to his home use. This exception was wiped away and now is much closer aligned on your US fair use.
My point is that the problem isn't in the "OMG LOOK HOW THOSE ALIENS ARE TAKING OUR GOD GIVEN RIGHTS FROM US !!!", but in the uncontroled discussion, adoption, transposition and enforcement of WIPO upon citizens of the world without them having been informed of the consequences, and the political will to give industry an edge over the physical persons who should have decided because they are the citizens of the bound states, while corporations do not vote ! And WIPO is only one such treaty, among others.
If we do not put corporations under the law, soon, laws will be issued at an international level by the corporations and enforced on us. This is clearly not something we should be looking forward.
because you didn't found this ?
Thinkpads are especialy tricky to work with, but at least they generaly behave absolutely perfectly under linux once setup correctly. I had a 390 until recently, and I managed to get *all* the functions work as under windows (including apm suspend to disk, battery report, sound etc.). Mine had no internal modem, so I didn't try to setup this. Otherwise, it was just perfect. I changed for a HP/compaq NX9005, and I found the hard way that most functions are not usable by linux - it's working "good enough", though, but if I could I'd revert to a thinkpad anyday for linux use.
While minitel is still alive as a network, most of the users access it through internet today via an IE plugin. Most like you probably access the news via nntp instead of uucp.
Not much, I think ; historicaly, *.fr has been reserved to chartered companies and trademarks holders, so many french individuals had to buy a .com or .net already. Many companies did, too,because .fr is f*cking expensive. This afnic nonsense is backfiring today, because those who might have been interested are avoiding "continental red tape" (we invented it, so we have developped more strategies than others to turn around it whenever possible) and will probably stick with a general TLD unless the almighty USoA start pissing us by tightening the conditions of registration.
It was not until later in history that this trend developped ; during the middle ages, people were cleaner than you'd have thought. They took bath, knew how to make soap and used it. In fact, bathing was part of the knighting procedure, for instance.
The trend toward unhygienic practices settled after the XVth century, and I don't know if it was "regressive" but it was tied to a shift in the Catholic Church's attitude in the troubled times of religious wars ; the Church enforced a very harsh view on the body, claiming that it was by essence evil. So as it was already lost to God, people were not expected to care about it. If they did, they would have been suspect of the sin of lust.
Of course, all of this is very sketchy.
All documents were made with a flavour of Word or another, from word for MacOS 6.0 to the latest (at the time) word XP for windows. As you'd have already guessed, the only word processor able to make sense of all the documents at once was Openoffice.org. Of course, I faced issues (bulleting appearing "funny", for instance), but as I was applying a style I created, that was not a problem as long as the text was there.
No single version of word in my possession was able to open all the documents, some documents even crashing word XP with thunder and lighting.
Oh, believe me, no. What a painful time it is to bear the feeble assaults of a newbie ! Learning to use your tools *is* the most wonderful present you can offer.
Like most people suffering from frequent headaches, I never watch at a screen (be it TV or computer) without an ambient light. Without, I can be sure to develop a severe migraine after 1 hour of concentrated watch. With a dim light, I can watch TV up to 4 hours without side effects (save brain wash). This sadly apply to theatres too, so I really don't watch a film on a big screen often.
A physical switch, of course ; generally it's a little contraption you slide over two pointing pins silkscreened "ro" on the electronics of the disk.
I've done it with linux, I suppose it's possible to achieve with windows : have a two disk install, and make sure that there is a read only strap on one. Just put whatever binaries you have (/boot, /, /usr...) on that disk, then move the strap to ro ; on the other disk, put /var and /home. If you're paranoid about it, have syslogd hard print everything on an old line printer. Done. It doesn't prevent a break-in, but the attacker is stuck an can't damage the files, so when you reboot (because you notice the security log printing strange things) the evidences are easy to find.
As the old saying goes, they don't make them like this anymore. Didn't you notice how games have become so boringly serious since the eve of "realistic 3D" everything ? At least, cartoon characters had to rely on humor to be entertaining. I miss them all, Indiana Jones, Monkey Island, BASS, Day of the tentacles (what a game... I spent an enormous amount of time on this one, really, it was huge!). Give us back the fun !
I still run a warp 3 box from now and then, attached to my home network via ethernet, and this works really fine. I love the "full object" desktop, very addictive compared to the pale emulations of windows, Mac OS and most everything else.
While I reckon you're right that only banks and insurance companies bought OS/2 by the dozen, I don't think it was for the un-coolness factor of it. OS/2 stayed without cool apps because the basic requirements to run it were way ahead of the consumer market : *at least* 8 MB of RAM, when 1 MB was the norm, 2 was good enough and 4 made you and über geek. Not to speak of HD footprint. So yes, warp on a cool machine *was* indeed cool, and you had the added benefit of a windows box better than a stand alone windows, and dos boxes with compatibility settings avoiding all the hassles of tweakings boot disks to run each and every game (it wasn't uncommon until DOS 6 to have a full box of FD tweaked to set various EMM386 and XMS memory partitions, not to speak of your sound card settings).
But it came to a price point not many could shell out, and that was the final killer. OS/2 otherwise had every possible hooks to be really cool.
Of course, it doesn't account for the fact that printed books created a massive upsurge in written production, from novels to new streams in philosophy. I sure hope that the music won't be mainstream to reach new levels of creativity which would have been strangled in the old fashioned music economy.
Yes, but not on a moral ground. I'm a lawyer, after all, that's not surprising. :-)
Oh indeed, yes ! Religions are very powerful social tools : they classify behaviours, and define rewards or punishments for following them or not. That's absolutely needed to bound societies of individuals and gear them toward a common aim. Think of it : it's been a long time since a man has been able to fully sustain himself alone. And yet, you could only have spoken of survival. For society to evolve, you need much much more cooperation. But we all know human nature is not exactly kind to the weakest, despite the fact that they may have something to offer for the common good. So religions were very handy to justify "abnormal" behaviours (with regards to natural "laws") with the promise of a distant future reward. And interestingly, we can notice that some type of religions are better suited to growing communities than others. For instance, primitive tribes are often animists - the cult is embodied into a single magician. If he dies without a ready apprentice, then hard times are ahead. So primitive cities switched to polytheism, with a clergy dedicated to each god. That works at a city level (think Athens), but it doesn't fit a nation for long : too much people means dispersion of cults, and ultimately the population has not enough bonds to stay together (see the fall of Rome). Monotheism jumps then into the picture : a unique God is very suited for the bonding of millions of worshippers, because it's easier to grasp, and you can force a real unity on the masses. Political powers (kings) understood the concept very early and very well, and that's no wonder christianity has been the root of europe for so long. Despite many feodal wars, europeans have always managed to use christianism as a bond and a tool for developpement throughout the centuries until 200 years ago.
Since then, we try (at least in France) to live in an era of reason ; we try to educate people into learning that living in a society is willing to bind our personal freedom to the laws for the general good. But this concept is difficult for citizens to catch, and there's not much perceived rewards at an individual level. While I think personaly it's a good thing to be treated as a grown up, I can't ignore that there is a tendency in some parts of the population to reject that freedom of thought and call for more "babysitting". Hence, a certain revival of cults in the poorest communities.
Most of the time, religion is just a good excuse to avoid facing our individual social responsability. It takes away certain unpleasant realities like "you've got a shitty job because you were to lazy to earn good grades in school" (or worse : "you don't have any job because you're too dumb") and replace them with "if you suffer in this life, it's the will of God almighty and you will be rewarded in heaven because last will be first". Living without this walking stick can be very frustrating.
But it's very far away from concepts like truth, good, or wrong. It' much closer to how a society manages to progress on a global level, and benefit to most of its members, not alienating the most powerful (who must benefit from their extra committment), and without desperating the weakest (who can become handy for some basic tasks).
That's because you believe there's such a thing as a universal, absolute truth, which may be false outside the scope of pure mathematics (only because mathematics are built on that assumption). Problem is that as far as we know, we're submitted to time and we can't do much about it. Our perception of the outside world is at best limited to the present, and we can extend it only toward the past ; everything in front of us has only "chances" or a "potential" to happen the way we think, even if that potential can be maximized by a clever use of reason applied to past observations. For instance, if you're Keppler, you look at Mars every night during ten years and *bing*, you calculate some laws to predict where in the sky Mars will appear in the next thousand years. But even if your formula works for a long time, it's still not the TRUTH as an inherent property of the statement "Mars revovles around the Sun in x years", because a pesky little rock can put Mars out of its course in 200 years from now, and the formula can wear out and become wrong in x billions years because there's a small force which hasn't been included in the scientific law.
Even our knowledge of past events is submitted to distortions or potentialities making the truth less absolute than it seems ; think for a moment of sollipsism (theory that I'm the only being thing "dreaming" of a complete universe, this universe including you). You can't prove that sollipsism is absolutely wrong. You can't even prove to yourself that you're not trapped in that dream, and nothings really exists outside of me. Scary, huh ?
My personal position is that we souldn't bother of what's outside the scope of our minds ; that means that as far as I'm concerned, everybody's entitled to dream his own future the way he likes (sticking to wichever belief suits him), and shouldn't interfere with my own vision by trying to force his down my throat.
Religions attempt to address the question of our future ; if we're good, then we'll go to paradise and yadayada. But we can't look to that future from our place, so they may be absolutely true, or absolutely wrong, but that doesn't alleviate that fact that the future is neither true nor false, it just isn't yet.
French as in France, or Quebec, or someplace in Africa, or what?
French as in Paris, France, very late at night...
Yes. That's what I think. The statement is in an undecided state until you can experiment it.
[...] which is logically specious: the statement "it will rain tomorrow" isn't experimentally verifiable until tomorrow (at which time "it'll be too late to share your knowledge"), but it quite definitely is either true or false.
No ; it will be proven true or false tomorrow. If you make that statement out of your own mind ("I believe it'll rain tomorrow"), then you have a kind of religious conviction about it. Some people may have other methods to come to that conclusion (for 10 years, there was always at least a little rain on the 22nd of february there, so tomorrow it'll rain) or make other attempts to "prove" the contrary, but ultimately, it's undecided until tomorrow.
Now, you can argue forever that there's an absolute truth lying in it (wether tomorrow will be rainy or not), but that truth is outside the scope of our feeble brain, therefore it's not truth or falsehood, it's another level of reality that no matter how hard we try, we can't reach in our present state. By the way, what is your mother tongue?
French. I hope I'm not butchering english too much.
You don't get what I try to say (but it might be my lack of skill iin english, which isn't my mother tongue). You're correct when you say that crusades happened for everyone, because this historical fact is in the realm of materiality, the one we can subject to experiment, with universal results such as true or false. The emphasis on the past is added, because this is the part where you are yourself making the kind of historical "experiment" I'm reffering to : you're locating the event in a web of chronological evidences.
Religions don't have the same substance because you can't experiment with God in the same way. Therefore, yes, in my opinion religious truth is purely individual. It doesn't matter that a certain number of people claim to share the same religion, because that's only an appearance ; you can't know individually which credo any believer is holding for himself in any given religion at any given moment. My guess is that the apparent unity of most creeds is a weil thrown on widely different perceptions of deity.
The fact that some options are mutualy exclusive and that therefore if one happens to be the truth, then others will be wrong, isn't into debate because once you'll know, it'll be too late to share your knowledge.
I think you get it backward ; religion is a statement, but has nothing to see with facts. It's more an ontology : if you believe, then you are in the truth, and others are therefore wrong. Granted, the methodology is a bit more subtle, because most religions try to base their beliefs on some proven facts, like for instance the historical evidence of some persons (Jesus, Mohamed...) ; but even if Jesus or Mohamed are historical, that don't make them anything more than brilliant orators, for what can be known with a certain level of confidence. The rest is pure belief : if I'm catholic, then I'll be sure that Jesus is God's son. If I'm not, I'll think that he was something between a prophet and a fraud, depending on my convictions.
Either God exists or He does not. If religion is not true or false, it is no longer something you can believe - belief is a statement of what one thinks is truth.
As I told you, it's the essence of religion to be an ontology : if you are of this religion, it is the truth. If you're outside, it's false. End of it.
Some religions give incompatible truths. Therefore, (at least) some people are incorrect.
Nobody should care about that, because that's the kind of truth you only know when you die or when the end of times comes, whichever the first. Truth and falsehood are words of the material, scientific world : you can experiment them. You can't experiment God who belongs to the transcendantal world, therefore God is not true or false, he is or not. But this has no implication whatsoever in day to day life, because you can't prove someone else is wrong for not being in your realm of personal "truth".
My point wasn't to say that some are right or wrong to believe this or that or zilch. My point was to say that religions being outside the scope of materiality (for if they weren't, they'd be subject to scientifical scrutinity), nobody can tell a fellow human being that he's out of his shoes. Whereas when it comes to the materiality of historical events, you can experiment with some statements and tell a good work from a fraud, and treat the fraud accordingly.
You might want to read my previous answer on that topic ; I had no intent to deny the suffering of other communities, but to stay on topic I restrained my speech specificaly to what happened in the death camps. The reason is that noone denies the fatalities outside the camps. Revisionists only target the camps because it's the main difference between nazis' crimes and war crimes made by other nations, before and after WWII. Camps were also very secret to the point where you had to be involved in them to learn about their very existence.