"The only danger is sending out the wrong message. Drugs kill, and anyone advocating their use is little better than a killer."
"Sending messages" your government has killed hundreds of thousands of people either directly or indirectly.
In Europe, we give heroin and speed users clean needles so they won't catch an ultimately deadly infection.
In Europe, we don't have prison industry.
Many countries are already separating hard and soft drugs and decriminalising use-related crimes, so that addicts dare to seek medical care before rather than after their lives have already been destroyed.
In Holland and Switzerland, at least, even clean heroin is provided to addicts, so that their addiction turns into a treatable chronic illness - treated with heroin, but under medical attention.
Holland has less hard drug users than the US, and the young people try drugs far less than in your country (I assume you're a proud fscing american).
It's about who owns your genome. It's about who owns your medical and/or crime records.
It's about medicine companies denying life from hundreds of millions of people.
About GM labs creating seeds that produce sterile plants so farmers have to buy new seeds each year. Well, most farmers in the world couldn't afford GM seeds anyway.
It's about companies denying your right to develop software and give it away.
It's about your right to think.
It's about the very evolution of mankind and the whole of this globe.
Greed may help an individual go far, but for us as species it's like a disease that we're just learning to control.
If somebody dies because you denied him or her the cure _which you could have afforded to give him or her_, in my opinion you just killed him/her. That's it. No shit-talk about property or patents. Human life goes before all that.
Not one even remotely civilized nation values industry or economy more than the health and safety of its inhabitants.
I always thought it'd be nice if Linux was ported to Java virtual machine.
I've also thought it'd be nice to have a good assembler and, say, egcs toolchain for JVM.. so people could write applets and stuff without having to learn all that JavaBlahBlahFsckingCrap.
"I've have run quite a few beta drivers in Windows, but none have required me to manually remove OpenGL files from the path!"
Actually, when Windows fucks up some install, that's exactly what the poor user may have to do. Or edit the registry. Or reinstall Windows. Sure, reinstalling works almost always, only C:\WINDOWS takes up more and more disk space every time.
You forget mobile telephones... at least I get most of my microwaves from a crappy Ericsson, I think.
At least in Finland mob. phones meet the radiation regulations only because of the fact that GSM sends data in bursts - half the time there's no radiation, half the time there's more radiation than what would be allowed continuously.
Luckily (at least for the phone industry) the technology develops in such leaps, that the long-term health effects haven't got the time to develop... yesterday NMT's, today GSM/PCS, tomorrow GPRS and stuff. And as development continues and the frequencies go up, the transmitting power goes down.
I think I should be more worried about using laptop, anyway. Not for the TFT, but for the PIII 450 MHz ticking at my groin...
Re:Maybe your mom shouldn't be using the computer
on
Suck On Skins And UI
·
· Score: 1
Personally I would be pretty pissed if developers stop writing cool features such as skins into their apps just because a few moms are "scared"
Well I for one liked having a browser that looks like a computer program, consistent with the rest of the desktop, instead of the horrible mess of Netscape 6. And I am a hacker, have been a hacker for quite some time and love using Linux on a bunch of machines.
It'll take long before I update to NS/moz 6, probably only when I can't read web pages anymore with 4.7. I just hope somebody creates a "skin" that just makes the browser look like a good normal X app... or that Konqueror becomes a viable alternative without all that decoration shit.
Come on. If Internet Explorer ever starts to refuse all GIF cookies, the ad people will start pushing you HTML in small frames or, even more annoying, little popup windows.
Even now there are certain sites I cannot access, because the site administrators have set their pages up so that if I don't load the DoubleClick banner, I will not see the page. Or then they redirect their pages via doubleclick or something.
I have WWWoffle in my home network and it doesn't ever fetch anything from doubleclick.net.
of the advantages of open-book, is at least the prof knows what sources the students have available to them.
Yeah, IF the prof has all the books checked so that there be nothing extra written on the marigins and so on. Imagine giving your book to be checked for a couple of days before an exam... not good.
Seriously, the people that can't add two and two without a calculator shouldn't be in a university to begin with.
That's a point. But things like this should be checked before one gets in the university.
If I could find an exact problem on the subject of line integrals, imagine what one could find on a subject like Hamlet or American History...?
In Finland, the newspapers recently reported about a site that posts example essays to aid students in ground school and lyceum. The papers' claim was that students just copy the essays - Bad, Bad Internet again!
But truth is, Internet is here and what can you do about it. Either raise those kids to be reasonable, honest and creative, or let them act like grown adults, ie. steal other people's work or sell their work to be used by others.
We at the infamous Linu(x/s) University can only dream of extensive use of laptops. No connecting one's own computers to university network, in certain exams even calculators are prohibited (because students gotta learn convert binaries by hand) and so on.
Many people here seem to think Multics was too huge and complicated. What do you think about EROS then? A specifically designed, reliable system, with security and reliability features Unix or Windows people can only dream of. And a hell of a lot more difficult to conceive than Unix.
To me, it seems the only right way to go from Unix. Because Unix won't be the ideal system forever. What do you think, is EROS too complex to survive?
When we edit our own cshrc then the symlink gets remove and we get our own copy - this is a very cool idea
It means just applying copy-on-write to files when copying them inside a filesystem. Or maybe the Microsoft way of calculating checksums does it more complicatedly, but the same basic idea. So there are actually sort of hard links, not soft:)
And is not a new idea... or then, maybe my CS lab professor who told about this precise idea about a week ago had got the idea from M$? I don't think so.
With Microsoft OS's and programs, this feature means that when the file gets corrupted, it gets corrupted for everybody. Hooray.
I have never had wrist pains, although the last five or so years I have regularly typed for hours every day. Well, if not always typed, then used the same crappy keyboards and mice to play games etc.
But I also try to keep my hands (as well as other body parts) in some shape. I'm not sporty in any way, but I like to ride bike, I shoot pistol almost well and I can do twenty push-ups anytime (I really don't know what would be a nerd standard).
Having a five kilogram weight somewhere near the workstation is a good idea. Just holding it in your hands when reading stuff or browsing web makes you use different muscles than when typing. Of course it'd be a bad idea for Windows users, they'd smash their computers to pieces with the weight the nth time they bluescreened:)
The percentage of the population that has the skill and time to use Linux (as it currently is) is extremely small. I would guess about 0.1%.
Oh yeah? This is probably true, if population == all the people on Earth.
If the population means all the people currently using computers, I'd say it's more like forty per cent, even more.
Of course, most people wouldn't even try to install Linux, just as they wouldn't install Win98 or NT. But using a preconfigured Red Hat 6x, Suse 6x, Caldera or Corel distribution is in no way more difficult than using Windows. Assuming, of course, that the system boots up to a graphical login, but that's assumed of the Windowses also.
If up comes Gnome or KDE, a user most likely clicks on the menus a few times and soon is happily browsing the web or typing a letter or whatever he or she does with a computer.
If you survive in NT environment, you'll be able to use Linux. Or just aboot any other Unix with a decent desktop. Many Windows users don't understand anything about the Windows GUI, but are using it anyway. The problem for both home and corporate environments is the lack of applications and the learning curve in existing software.
If the free software community replicated MS Office as faithfully as they did Minesweeper and Solitaire, even the most clueless people would now be buying cheap computers with Linux preinstalled. And for a hudred bucks less price.
So what about the benefit to the community? We all do our typing in Emacs or sometimes StarOffice. Why should we care about having more people use Linux?
For me, the answer is simple. Drivers and games. I would buy a DVD drive and an mpeg card right away, if it had Linux drivers. I'm not going to software decode movies. I'd buy a good fast USB scanner and a digital camera, if I'd know I could use them with Linux. I'd probably even buy games, if I could play them on Linux. All this would be so much better, were there only 25 per cent or so Linux users.
CNet doesn't seem to respond. I wonder if some evil frustrated teenager somewhere has just sent instructions to bomb news.cnet.com down to all the machines he has compromised...
I like and use KDE all the time, the other desktops I've tried are mostly more beautiful but otherwise crap, kind of unintuitive, too much animations and other useless shit, panels behave strangely etc. At least with KDE all the machines behave the same or can easily be made to behave. I think KDE is easy, too, and anybody that can use Windows could live perfectly well with KDE. The silly part is, there are practically no useful applications that support KDE. I use Gtk+ stuff all the time.
I just hope this new "even-your-granma-can-use" desktop isn't just a Windows-like theme on Gnome. if it's something as well-organised as KDE, AND theme-and-stuff-compatible with Gnome, then I think it's good news.
So it has an 18 gig hard drive. And firewire and DVD. Otherwise, it's not something I'd fancy.
I'll get an Acer Travelmate 340T sometime soon. The price tag (assuming a UK pound is about ten Finnish marks) is well below half of that of the VAIO in question, it weighs only 1.8 kilograms with the CD/floppy unit detached, it has a PIII at 450 MHz, 128 MB mem (64 in the default configuration) and a big enough 6 gig hard drive. There's also a DVD drive available, but I think it'll be more useful to get one for the desktop machine and use a decoder card for good TV output.
There's also a Lucent modem (can be used under Linux) and a Linux-compatible RJ45 network interface, though I'm going to primarily use a 3Com 589 PCMCIA card, since I have a combo connector for it (I and a couple of my friends and the people I work for have 10base2 networks, so this makes sense).
On the other hand, the Acer is so much smaller than the VAIO, that it makes sense that I can get two of them for the price of the Sony:)
Could the free version of Warcraft 2 engine, the ALE clone, be modified so it could use Starcraft data files?
Of course it would require some modification in the UI and other stuff, but it's true that the game is old, and most people wouldn't buy it for Linux just because they already have it for Windows and can use even that version with Wine.
And the Windows version is already out for a low price. Were there a free engine, the data files could be easily and legally acquired.
Me, I'm still searching for Warcraft 2... the last box I saw in a store was a couple of months ago and they wanted full price for it. Not bad for a DOS game, huh?
Oh, and a free, open source engine would also allow for, say, a campaign like Orcs vs. the Zerg or something like that.
Is it eventually very wise to let kids meddle with shapeless things that can be converted into anything? First somebody should make sure that they work only in three spatial dimensions.
And then there's the name of Dagon, which children will have to say aloud always when talking about these objects.
Already a couple of years ago I thought about how nice it would be to have a gas pedal under the desk; when playing or compiling, you could speed the system up like a car... of course it's pretty idiotic idea. And now, it seems, anyone can do just that.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sending messages" your government has killed hundreds of thousands of people either directly or indirectly.
In Europe, we give heroin and speed users clean needles so they won't catch an ultimately deadly infection.
In Europe, we don't have prison industry.
Many countries are already separating hard and soft drugs and decriminalising use-related crimes, so that addicts dare to seek medical care before rather than after their lives have already been destroyed.
In Holland and Switzerland, at least, even clean heroin is provided to addicts, so that their addiction turns into a treatable chronic illness - treated with heroin, but under medical attention.
Holland has less hard drug users than the US, and the young people try drugs far less than in your country (I assume you're a proud fscing american).
See for yourself,
http://www.dea.gov/stats/overview.htm
and http://www.emcdda.org/publications/publications_a
We are even starting to get rid of the crappy drug education that turns people into murderous morons (who sound just like you).
IP is not about value. It's about life itself.
It's about who owns your genome. It's about who owns your medical and/or crime records.
It's about medicine companies denying life from hundreds of millions of people.
About GM labs creating seeds that produce sterile plants so farmers have to buy new seeds each year. Well, most farmers in the world couldn't afford GM seeds anyway.
It's about companies denying your right to develop software and give it away.
It's about your right to think.
It's about the very evolution of mankind and the whole of this globe.
Greed may help an individual go far, but for us as species it's like a disease that we're just learning to control.
If somebody dies because you denied him or her the cure _which you could have afforded to give him or her_, in my opinion you just killed him/her. That's it. No shit-talk about property or patents. Human life goes before all that.
Not one even remotely civilized nation values industry or economy more than the health and safety of its inhabitants.
With all the buggy and exploitable crap coming out of wu, wouldn't it be wiser to let some other university pioneer in nanotech?
"Of course we can use strcpy here, why would anybody want to overwrite the code that just prevents the machine from replicating exponentially..."
I always thought it'd be nice if Linux was ported to Java virtual machine.
I've also thought it'd be nice to have a good assembler and, say, egcs toolchain for JVM.. so people could write applets and stuff without having to learn all that JavaBlahBlahFsckingCrap.
"I've have run quite a few beta drivers in Windows, but none have required me to manually remove OpenGL files from the path!"
Actually, when Windows fucks up some install, that's exactly what the poor user may have to do. Or edit the registry. Or reinstall Windows. Sure, reinstalling works almost always, only C:\WINDOWS takes up more and more disk space every time.
And hey - Konqueror actually looks like an application designed to be used in a windowing system. Not skinned and awful like the new Netscape :)
You forget mobile telephones... at least I get most of my microwaves from a crappy Ericsson, I think.
At least in Finland mob. phones meet the radiation regulations only because of the fact that GSM sends data in bursts - half the time there's no radiation, half the time there's more radiation than what would be allowed continuously.
Luckily (at least for the phone industry) the technology develops in such leaps, that the long-term health effects haven't got the time to develop... yesterday NMT's, today GSM/PCS, tomorrow GPRS and stuff. And as development continues and the frequencies go up, the transmitting power goes down.
I think I should be more worried about using laptop, anyway. Not for the TFT, but for the PIII 450 MHz ticking at my groin...
Well I for one liked having a browser that looks
like a computer program, consistent with the rest of the desktop, instead of the horrible mess of Netscape 6. And I am a hacker, have been a hacker for quite some time and love using Linux on a bunch of machines.
It'll take long before I update to NS/moz 6, probably only when I can't read web pages anymore
with 4.7. I just hope somebody creates a "skin" that just makes the browser look like a good normal X app... or that Konqueror becomes a viable alternative without all that decoration shit.
I think that in the Linux communities a virus that could infect source packages would probably spread more efficiently than a traditional file virus.
:)
And like Windows/Mac macro virii, it'd be Open Source before the victim compiled it
Come on. If Internet Explorer ever starts to refuse all GIF cookies, the ad people will start
pushing you HTML in small frames or, even more annoying, little popup windows.
Even now there are certain sites I cannot access, because the site administrators have set their pages up so that if I don't load the DoubleClick banner, I will not see the page. Or then they redirect their pages via doubleclick or something.
I have WWWoffle in my home network and it doesn't ever fetch anything from doubleclick.net.
Not VMS, but TENEX. VMS ran on VAX, TENEX on
:)
PDP-10 (the 36-bit line of PDP's).
Actually, this can also be found in AST's
Minix Book
Yeah, IF the prof has all the books checked so
that there be nothing extra written on the marigins and so on. Imagine giving your book to be checked for a couple of days before an exam... not good.
Seriously, the people that can't add two and two without a calculator shouldn't be in a university to begin with.
That's a point. But things like this should be checked before one gets in the university.
In Finland, the newspapers recently reported about a site that posts example essays to aid students in ground school and lyceum. The papers' claim was that students just copy the essays - Bad, Bad Internet again!
But truth is, Internet is here and what can you do about it. Either raise those kids to be reasonable, honest and creative, or let them act like grown adults, ie. steal other people's work or sell their work to be used by others.
We at the infamous Linu(x/s) University can only dream of extensive use of laptops. No connecting one's own computers to university network, in certain exams even calculators are prohibited (because students gotta learn convert binaries by hand) and so on.
To me, it seems the only right way to go from Unix. Because Unix won't be the ideal system forever. What do you think, is EROS too complex to survive?
Well, at least they didn't push any cookies this way when I turned the proxy off temporarily.
It means just applying copy-on-write to files when copying them inside a filesystem. Or maybe the Microsoft way of calculating checksums does it more complicatedly, but the same basic idea. So there are actually sort of hard links, not soft :)
And is not a new idea... or then, maybe my CS lab professor who told about this precise idea about a week ago had got the idea from M$? I don't think so.
With Microsoft OS's and programs, this feature means that when the file gets corrupted, it gets corrupted for everybody. Hooray.
Darn darn darn! The laptop I got has a Trident chip. Well, with a P3 450 it just may be possible to watch DVD's with software decoding in Linux...
I have never had wrist pains, although the last five or so years I have regularly typed for hours every day. Well, if not always typed, then used the same crappy keyboards and mice to play games etc.
:)
But I also try to keep my hands (as well as other body parts) in some shape. I'm not sporty in any way, but I like to ride bike, I shoot pistol almost well and I can do twenty push-ups anytime (I really don't know what would be a nerd standard).
Having a five kilogram weight somewhere near the workstation is a good idea. Just holding it in your hands when reading stuff or browsing web makes you use different muscles than when typing. Of course it'd be a bad idea for Windows users, they'd smash their computers to pieces with the weight the nth time they bluescreened
Oh yeah? This is probably true, if population == all the people on Earth.
If the population means all the people currently using computers, I'd say it's more like forty per cent, even more.
Of course, most people wouldn't even try to install Linux, just as they wouldn't install Win98 or NT. But using a preconfigured Red Hat 6x, Suse 6x, Caldera or Corel distribution is in no way more difficult than using Windows. Assuming, of course, that the system boots up to a graphical login, but that's assumed of the Windowses also.
If up comes Gnome or KDE, a user most likely clicks on the menus a few times and soon is happily browsing the web or typing a letter or whatever he or she does with a computer.
If you survive in NT environment, you'll be able to use Linux. Or just aboot any other Unix with a decent desktop. Many Windows users don't understand anything about the Windows GUI, but are using it anyway. The problem for both home and corporate environments is the lack of applications and the learning curve in existing software.
If the free software community replicated MS Office as faithfully as they did Minesweeper and Solitaire, even the most clueless people would now be buying cheap computers with Linux preinstalled. And for a hudred bucks less price.
So what about the benefit to the community? We all do our typing in Emacs or sometimes StarOffice. Why should we care about having more people use Linux?
For me, the answer is simple. Drivers and games. I would buy a DVD drive and an mpeg card right away, if it had Linux drivers. I'm not going to software decode movies. I'd buy a good fast USB scanner and a digital camera, if I'd know I could use them with Linux. I'd probably even buy games, if I could play them on Linux. All this would be so much better, were there only 25 per cent or so Linux users.
CNet doesn't seem to respond. I wonder if some evil frustrated teenager somewhere has just sent instructions to bomb news.cnet.com down to all the machines he has compromised...
I like and use KDE all the time, the other desktops I've tried are mostly more beautiful but otherwise crap, kind of unintuitive, too much animations and other useless shit, panels behave strangely etc. At least with KDE all the machines behave the same or can easily be made to behave. I think KDE is easy, too, and anybody that can use Windows could live perfectly well with KDE. The silly part is, there are practically no useful applications that support KDE. I use Gtk+ stuff all the time.
I just hope this new "even-your-granma-can-use" desktop isn't just a Windows-like theme on Gnome. if it's something as well-organised as KDE, AND theme-and-stuff-compatible with Gnome, then I think it's good news.
So it has an 18 gig hard drive. And firewire and DVD. Otherwise, it's not something I'd fancy.
:)
I'll get an Acer Travelmate 340T sometime soon. The price tag (assuming a UK pound is about ten Finnish marks) is well below half of that of the VAIO in question, it weighs only 1.8 kilograms with the CD/floppy unit detached, it has a PIII at 450 MHz, 128 MB mem (64 in the default configuration) and a big enough 6 gig hard drive. There's also a DVD drive available, but I think it'll be more useful to get one for the desktop machine and use a decoder card for good TV output.
There's also a Lucent modem (can be used under Linux) and a Linux-compatible RJ45 network interface, though I'm going to primarily use a 3Com 589 PCMCIA card, since I have a combo connector for it (I and a couple of my friends and the people I work for have 10base2 networks, so this makes sense).
On the other hand, the Acer is so much smaller than the VAIO, that it makes sense that I can get two of them for the price of the Sony
TM 340T info
Linux on TM 340
Could the free version of Warcraft 2 engine, the ALE clone, be modified so it could use Starcraft data files?
Of course it would require some modification in the UI and other stuff, but it's true that the game is old, and most people wouldn't buy it for Linux just because they already have it for Windows and can use even that version with Wine.
And the Windows version is already out for a low price. Were there a free engine, the data files could be easily and legally acquired.
Me, I'm still searching for Warcraft 2... the last box I saw in a store was a couple of months ago and they wanted full price for it. Not bad for a DOS game, huh?
Oh, and a free, open source engine would also allow for, say, a campaign like Orcs vs. the Zerg or something like that.
Is it eventually very wise to let kids meddle
with shapeless things that can be converted
into anything? First somebody should make sure
that they work only in three spatial dimensions.
And then there's the name of Dagon, which
children will have to say aloud always when
talking about these objects.
Already a couple of years ago I thought about how nice it would be to have a gas pedal under the desk; when playing or compiling, you could speed the system up like a car... of course it's pretty idiotic idea. And now, it seems, anyone can do just that.