> I'll volunteer to live by an oil generated plant if you volunteer to live by a nuclear power plant.
Done. In fact, I've lived and worked near both, and (modulo the sheer size of the plant) a nuke is a much better neighbor than an oil-fired plant. Much cleaner, for one thing.
> Three Mile Island... Cherynoble (sp)...
Chernobyl was a wonderful example of socialist engineering; even the original design engineers warned that the graphite-based sheilding design was grossly inadequate and accident-prone, but of course the government had more pressing concerns at the time than the mere safety of its citizens.
TMI, on the other hand, showed that in spite of completely wrong decisions by operations personnel at every point during the incident, the plant design avoided any danger to the surrounding area.
(Basically, what happened was that a valve stuck open. During the next six hours the plant repeatedly tried to shut itself down but the operators, misunderstanding the cause of the problem, kept overriding the automatic systems.)
Observe that radiation never rose above normal background levels anywhere outside the plant's boundary, notwithstanding continuous mismanagement.
... like similar lobbying groups ( The Club of Rome comes to mind), has so far been completely wrong about everything in the 30 or so years of its history, so I have to wonder why you take them seriously.
Consider just these two facts --
Over the last thirty years there has been no global atmospheric temperature rise; in fact, the best evidence says there's been a very slight cooling (within the range of expected normal variation).
There has been a warming in this century, but nearly all of it occurred before the second world war, while most of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere happened after the war.
In fact, most of the worlds climatologists do not believe any serious global warming is occurring now. References on request.
> You won't happen to represent the oil industry, would you?
No, I represent the five or so billion people whose health and well-being are endangered by mendacious fascists with megaphones.
> now you're saying capitalism has been around at least a thousand years?
No, I'm saying that the history of the last thousand years shows that every conceivable alternative to capitalism produces results that are disastrous by any rational criterion. Socialism is simply a return to the medieval idea that an elite needs to decide for the common people what to do with their lives, since they're too stupid to decide for themselves; all it adds is the window-dressing of voting.
> Capitalism is a recent thing, popularized by such great thinkers as Adam Smith...
Nope, capitalism is simply what happens when people are free to make their own economic arrangements. It's been around for a very long time. So has socialism; note that the government of ancient Rome provided free bread to its citizens. Write me for references.
> ... pits people against each other and discourages cooperation.
How many people had to work together cooperatively to make your car, or your computer, or your ballpoint pen? Capitalism encourages cooperation to a greater extent than any known economic system; that's why the 19th century -- having for the most part gotten rid of mercantilism and the feudal system -- was by comparison anyway so peaceful compared to the twentieth century. (Notice what the remnants of feudalism and mercantilism did to Ireland in 1848-49, for example, and observe that the system under socialism as proposed by "agrarian reformers" would be little different.)
> Read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle...
Upton Sinclair was an idiologically-motivated liar. References upon request.
OK, Microsoft should be condemned for their HTML-crunching products for using characters in that numeric range. (They should also be condemned for hard-coding absolute font sizes instead of +1, -2 etc.)
But the HTML spec has a glaring lack that motivates this violation in the first place: no curved quotes and apostrophes, and no em-dash.
Now, HTML is supposed to display by default in a proportional font, like printed matter (it's easier to read, among other advantages). But proportional fonts always use curved, symmetric double and single quotes.
Likewise proportional fonts always distinguish between a hyphen and a dash; most, in fact, have two dashes (the endash and the emdash) of slightly different widths, in addition to the hyphen.
But the HTML spec (and ISO8859-1) assumes the broken ASCII/Typewriter usage, which in proportional fonts is jarring and ugly. Font specs should be designed by people who know something about fonts, not by engineers!
The situation is potentially worse in other languages, though I'm not sure how the other ISO-8859-x specs handle it. In German, for example, the opening double and single quotes are traditionally at the bottom of the print line rather than the top, in addition to being reverse-curved, and French uses "guillaumettes", which look like doubled marks.
Search the Web for things like ampersand-emdash-semicolon and ampersand-lquot-semicolon -- which are attempts to address the problem -- and you'll see that this gaping mistake in HTML/ISO8859-1 bothers a lot of people.
So yeah, blame Microsoft for a kluge that works on only maybe four out of five of the web-surfing PCs out there. But complain to the ISO and to W3C for their oversight, too.
> a small percentage of the world's population is profiting at the expense of the majority...
Who, precisely?
> It is capitalism as a system that is the problem...
Odd, most of the rest of the world has concluded that capitalism is the solution, a proposition which is supported by the history of (at least) the last thousand years. What new facts have you unearthed?
Ignore the idiots who posted above. One of them confuses "scientists" with "dentists and politicians" and the other one makes no arguments at all. They should both get out more; every serious climatologist in the world knows that there is no evidence whatever for global warming, and that the same charlatans pushing this were pushing global cooling back in the '70s.
To the two anonymous idiots who posted above: if you want some references, write me.
> Microsoft is WORSE than the tobacco or gun lobby, and we all know the other party is a puppet for this group...;-)
Sorry, is there something wrong with the tobacco and gun lobbies?
And if the RNC is a shining example of "standing up" for both of those groups, then we should all stock up on cigarettes and bricks of.22 right now, because by spring they'll be illegal (which of course means only that schoolchildren will find it easier to buy them on streetcorners, but the price will be higher)....
> Microsoft is WORSE than the tobacco or gun lobby, and we all know the other party is a puppet for this group...;-)
Sorry, is there something wrong with the tobacco and gun lobbies?
And if the RNC is a shining example of "standing up" for both of those groups, then we should all stock up on cigarettes and bricks of.22 right now, because by spring they'll be illegal....
Winner is prof of Political Science specializing (recently, anyhow) in technology. One brief glance at his writings is enough to demonstrate that the man is ideally qualified for this post by the criteria of modern American academia, in that he manifestly knows nothing whatever about politics, nor science, nor technology.
Basically he's just another postmodern academic spouting touchy-feely kindergarten Marxism.
... Jon manages to say nothing at all in roughly a thousand words, while maintaining his trademark political correctness (reality to the contrary notwithstanding) and sensitivity (there may be someone, somewhere on the planet who actually cares how poor Jon feels about something. I hope they read Slashdot, so at least this isn't a total waste...).
Why on earth should any rational human pay any attention at all to a reviewer whose research is so unbelievably wretched that he takes the idiot Winner seriously?
> There is no difference between pulling the trigger of a gun, and supplying the complete details of a target to the gunman looking for them.
If you really believe this, then a) the Southern Directory Company, which publishes the 'phone book (at least around here) is morally responsible for a very large number of crimes; and b) you are about to hire a pack of wolves to keep the chipmunks out. Because the greatest danger to life and limb comes not from fanatics on some point or other -- not even from fanatics with guns, let alone fanatics with web sites -- but from governments and legal systems which have been allowed to place some value -- any value -- above the basic rights of individuals. In this century alone the toll is nearly two hundred million lives, dwarfing the cost of all of our wars, abortions, murders, and natural disasters combined.
Even religious fanaticism -- like the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition -- takes no serious toll until it becomes a government program....
This ruling is not good, people. Without regard to the political issue involved, it's not good. The politicians, lawyers, and do-gooders are itching for any opening to control speech on the internet, and this one will, you can be sure, be exploited.
If these same people who put up the web site had instead taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times saying the same thing, would the result have been the same? No.
Freedom of speech is freedom of speech, regardless of the medium, and (modulo libel) regardless of content, however repulsive you may find it. (Remember that freedom of speech is only important for unpopular views; even in totalitarian states you're quite free to praise the government as much as you like.)
How can one possibly write a paper on the history of computing/programming and make absolutely no mention of Iowa State University... Mauchly and Eckert... Hollerith, or Babbage... Blaise Pascal and...:) Aristotle and Archimedes....
This isn't about the history of programming, though; whatever lovely things Babbage and Pascal may have done, they weren't part of an overtly code-sharing hacker culture (even though they were sort of nerdy).
This post does raise an interesting point, though; throughout known history, deep thinkers -- always a nerdy minority in any culture, since somebody always has to harvest the food -- have tended to group together and argue. Think about the Greek philosophers, the Italian cities of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on. Imagine if superhacker Leonardo da Vinci had had the Internet....
And then, of course, we've always had something like the trial of Socrates, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Federal Government....
I count myself a KDE person (as a spectator sport, anyway). These flamers are not "KDE people," they're just adolescent imbeciles.
Personally, when I have time and bandwidth and the GNOME library situation is straightened out (I understand it's much better now), I plan to get it, play with it, and make whatever constructive criticism/contribution I can -- as I do now with KDE.
Competition and choice are good things. These children are simply confused by their hormones, and would flame over shoe sizes....
(b) the idea is to announce, and get as many as possible interested in using/trying Linux. Education in the culture, institutions, and icons of the free software universe will inevitably follow once they're hooked [nyah-ha-ha!].
Yeah, GNU gets only brief mention, like XFree and Samba and all the other pieces that make Linux the richest OS on the planet. But that's OK; I'm sure Richard will get another dozen or so interviews when the final release comes; he's too picturesque a character for the press to ignore....
Has it ever occurred to you that government morons with unlimited tax money are the cause of most "serious and very real" problems?
In the case of Y2K, for example, businesses -- small and large, US and overseas -- will muddle through all right with (my fearless prediction) for the most part only minor annoyances to their customers.
But if the government comes in with everybody-has-to-do-it-this-way regulations, red tape, and the National Guard, we're in for some real hassles.
I was one of Connie Morella's constituents for nearly a decade. Yep, she's a moron, all right, but that's not the relevant consideration. The more dangerous morons are the bureaucrats that our congresscritters will depend on to "implement" whatever vague recommendations the elected morons come up with.
I installed the nearly-free [-beer] Solaris X86 on my desktop at work as an experiment, and I can see why Sun is interested in Linux on UltraSPARC.
There's no question that Solaris is a heavy-duty, high-performance OS. Its SMP is way ahead of Linux 2.[12].x, and so on and so on. But I found it quirky and difficult to set up, and full of little gotchas -- like, for example, after you've filled in your nameservers in resolv.conf, there's yet another obscure little file that you need to edit to tell Solaris to use DNS to resolve hostnames!
Again, not surprisingly given its commercial orientation, its hardware support sucks compared to Linux. Its ppp is such a nightmare to set up that Sun itself recommends the free pppd as a substitute!
Solaris x86 has a terrible time understanding large IDE (LBA) disks and partition tables; I had to give it a whole drive to itself. And so on and so on.
So I think it's fair to say that for ordinary desktop use, Solaris is indeed more "hard core" than Linux. Companies who need the (great and undeniable) advantages of Solaris and Sun hardware, either in the machine room or on desktops, will have gurus available to set it up properly. And if I were a Sun guru at work, I'd probably be happily running Solaris at home, too.
But I'm not, so I'll just stick with good ol' Linux. One very valuable lesson I learned playing with Solaris, though, is just how confusing and frustrating initial setup of an unfamiliar system can be. It renewed my sympathy for Linux novices, and made me resolve to be even more patient and helpful.
Slightly off-topic: I saw an ad somewhere for an OS/2 4.1 upgrade CD for about $40; apparently IBM plans to start shipping some time this quarter.
Aside from the fact that IBM is as usual too late and hesitant about this, it could be a good sign. Especially if IBM can finally get some mass marketers to preload OS/2 -- which they might be able to do if they're aggressive and if they make the licensing terms attractive enough -- both of which are , for IBM, improbable.
Still, one can hope. I love Linux, but OS/2 really is a nice piece of work....
> This simply gives the states of the US the right to keep up their own militia. That's all. No right to arm bears!
This absurd interpretation of the Second Amendment isn't shared by serious legal scholars -- or indeed by anyone who has studied the Amendment's history.
These are just a few of the more than 40 articles published in the last two decades on the subject. Of these articles, only two (both, incidentally, by lawyers known more as political hacks than scholars) agree with your assertion.
Slashdot Mirror
Done. In fact, I've lived and worked near both, and (modulo the sheer size of the plant) a nuke is a much better neighbor than an oil-fired plant. Much cleaner, for one thing.
> Three Mile Island ... Cherynoble (sp) ...
Chernobyl was a wonderful example of socialist engineering; even the original design engineers warned that the graphite-based sheilding design was grossly inadequate and accident-prone, but of course the government had more pressing concerns at the time than the mere safety of its citizens.
TMI, on the other hand, showed that in spite of completely wrong decisions by operations personnel at every point during the incident, the plant design avoided any danger to the surrounding area.
(Basically, what happened was that a valve stuck open. During the next six hours the plant repeatedly tried to shut itself down but the operators, misunderstanding the cause of the problem, kept overriding the automatic systems.)
Observe that radiation never rose above normal background levels anywhere outside the plant's boundary, notwithstanding continuous mismanagement.
Craig
Consider just these two facts --
- Over the last thirty years there has been no global atmospheric temperature rise; in fact, the best evidence says there's been a very slight cooling (within the range of expected normal variation).
- There has been a warming in this century, but nearly all of it occurred before the second world war, while most of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere happened after the war.
In fact, most of the worlds climatologists do not believe any serious global warming is occurring now. References on request.> You won't happen to represent the oil industry, would you?
No, I represent the five or so billion people whose health and well-being are endangered by mendacious fascists with megaphones.
Craig
No, I'm saying that the history of the last thousand years shows that every conceivable alternative to capitalism produces results that are disastrous by any rational criterion. Socialism is simply a return to the medieval idea that an elite needs to decide for the common people what to do with their lives, since they're too stupid to decide for themselves; all it adds is the window-dressing of voting.
> Capitalism is a recent thing, popularized by such great thinkers as Adam Smith ...
Nope, capitalism is simply what happens when people are free to make their own economic arrangements. It's been around for a very long time. So has socialism; note that the government of ancient Rome provided free bread to its citizens. Write me for references.
> ... pits people against each other and discourages cooperation.
How many people had to work together cooperatively to make your car, or your computer, or your ballpoint pen? Capitalism encourages cooperation to a greater extent than any known economic system; that's why the 19th century -- having for the most part gotten rid of mercantilism and the feudal system -- was by comparison anyway so peaceful compared to the twentieth century. (Notice what the remnants of feudalism and mercantilism did to Ireland in 1848-49, for example, and observe that the system under socialism as proposed by "agrarian reformers" would be little different.)
> Read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle ...
Upton Sinclair was an idiologically-motivated liar. References upon request.
Craig
But the HTML spec has a glaring lack that motivates this violation in the first place: no curved quotes and apostrophes, and no em-dash.
Now, HTML is supposed to display by default in a proportional font, like printed matter (it's easier to read, among other advantages). But proportional fonts always use curved, symmetric double and single quotes.
Likewise proportional fonts always distinguish between a hyphen and a dash; most, in fact, have two dashes (the endash and the emdash) of slightly different widths, in addition to the hyphen.
But the HTML spec (and ISO8859-1) assumes the broken ASCII/Typewriter usage, which in proportional fonts is jarring and ugly. Font specs should be designed by people who know something about fonts, not by engineers!
The situation is potentially worse in other languages, though I'm not sure how the other ISO-8859-x specs handle it. In German, for example, the opening double and single quotes are traditionally at the bottom of the print line rather than the top, in addition to being reverse-curved, and French uses "guillaumettes", which look like doubled marks.
Search the Web for things like ampersand-emdash-semicolon and ampersand-lquot-semicolon -- which are attempts to address the problem -- and you'll see that this gaping mistake in HTML/ISO8859-1 bothers a lot of people.
So yeah, blame Microsoft for a kluge that works on only maybe four out of five of the web-surfing PCs out there. But complain to the ISO and to W3C for their oversight, too.
Craig
Who, precisely?
> It is capitalism as a system that is the problem...
Odd, most of the rest of the world has concluded that capitalism is the solution, a proposition which is supported by the history of (at least) the last thousand years. What new facts have you unearthed?
Craig
To the two anonymous idiots who posted above: if you want some references, write me.
Craig
Sorry, is there something wrong with the tobacco and gun lobbies?
And if the RNC is a shining example of "standing up" for both of those groups, then we should all stock up on cigarettes and bricks of .22 right now, because by spring they'll be illegal (which of course means only that schoolchildren will find it easier to buy them on streetcorners, but the price will be higher)....
Craig
Sorry, is there something wrong with the tobacco and gun lobbies?
And if the RNC is a shining example of "standing up" for both of those groups, then we should all stock up on cigarettes and bricks of .22 right now, because by spring they'll be illegal....
Craig
Basically he's just another postmodern academic spouting touchy-feely kindergarten Marxism.
Craig
> Anyway, the DOJ trial is nothing but a government attempt to take away the right of Microsoft to innovate.
No, the DOJ trial is nothing but a government attempt to make Microsoft contribute its share to the DNC....
Craig
Why on earth should any rational human pay any attention at all to a reviewer whose research is so unbelievably wretched that he takes the idiot Winner seriously?
Craig
If you really believe this, then a) the Southern Directory Company, which publishes the 'phone book (at least around here) is morally responsible for a very large number of crimes; and b) you are about to hire a pack of wolves to keep the chipmunks out. Because the greatest danger to life and limb comes not from fanatics on some point or other -- not even from fanatics with guns, let alone fanatics with web sites -- but from governments and legal systems which have been allowed to place some value -- any value -- above the basic rights of individuals. In this century alone the toll is nearly two hundred million lives, dwarfing the cost of all of our wars, abortions, murders, and natural disasters combined.
Even religious fanaticism -- like the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition -- takes no serious toll until it becomes a government program....
Craig
This ruling is not good, people. Without regard to the political issue involved, it's not good. The politicians, lawyers, and do-gooders are itching for any opening to control speech on the internet, and this one will, you can be sure, be exploited.
If these same people who put up the web site had instead taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times saying the same thing, would the result have been the same? No.
Freedom of speech is freedom of speech, regardless of the medium, and (modulo libel) regardless of content, however repulsive you may find it. (Remember that freedom of speech is only important for unpopular views; even in totalitarian states you're quite free to praise the government as much as you like.)
Craig
http://airnet.net/craig/g4c
This isn't about the history of programming, though; whatever lovely things Babbage and Pascal may have done, they weren't part of an overtly code-sharing hacker culture (even though they were sort of nerdy).
This post does raise an interesting point, though; throughout known history, deep thinkers -- always a nerdy minority in any culture, since somebody always has to harvest the food -- have tended to group together and argue. Think about the Greek philosophers, the Italian cities of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on. Imagine if superhacker Leonardo da Vinci had had the Internet....
And then, of course, we've always had something like the trial of Socrates, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Federal Government....
Craig
I'm sure McNealy's comments were taken out of context and/or misunderstood, but it'll take Sun's PR people a while to fix this anyway....
Craig
Personally, when I have time and bandwidth and the GNOME library situation is straightened out (I understand it's much better now), I plan to get it, play with it, and make whatever constructive criticism/contribution I can -- as I do now with KDE.
Competition and choice are good things. These children are simply confused by their hormones, and would flame over shoe sizes ....
Craig
(b) the idea is to announce, and get as many as possible interested in using/trying Linux. Education in the culture, institutions, and icons of the free software universe will inevitably follow once they're hooked [nyah-ha-ha!].
Yeah, GNU gets only brief mention, like XFree and Samba and all the other pieces that make Linux the richest OS on the planet. But that's OK; I'm sure Richard will get another dozen or so interviews when the final release comes; he's too picturesque a character for the press to ignore....
Craig
In the case of Y2K, for example, businesses -- small and large, US and overseas -- will muddle through all right with (my fearless prediction) for the most part only minor annoyances to their customers.
But if the government comes in with everybody-has-to-do-it-this-way regulations, red tape, and the National Guard, we're in for some real hassles.
I was one of Connie Morella's constituents for nearly a decade. Yep, she's a moron, all right, but that's not the relevant consideration. The more dangerous morons are the bureaucrats that our congresscritters will depend on to "implement" whatever vague recommendations the elected morons come up with.
Craig
There's no question that Solaris is a heavy-duty, high-performance OS. Its SMP is way ahead of Linux 2.[12].x, and so on and so on. But I found it quirky and difficult to set up, and full of little gotchas -- like, for example, after you've filled in your nameservers in resolv.conf, there's yet another obscure little file that you need to edit to tell Solaris to use DNS to resolve hostnames!
Again, not surprisingly given its commercial orientation, its hardware support sucks compared to Linux. Its ppp is such a nightmare to set up that Sun itself recommends the free pppd as a substitute!
Solaris x86 has a terrible time understanding large IDE (LBA) disks and partition tables; I had to give it a whole drive to itself. And so on and so on.
So I think it's fair to say that for ordinary desktop use, Solaris is indeed more "hard core" than Linux. Companies who need the (great and undeniable) advantages of Solaris and Sun hardware, either in the machine room or on desktops, will have gurus available to set it up properly. And if I were a Sun guru at work, I'd probably be happily running Solaris at home, too.
But I'm not, so I'll just stick with good ol' Linux. One very valuable lesson I learned playing with Solaris, though, is just how confusing and frustrating initial setup of an unfamiliar system can be. It renewed my sympathy for Linux novices, and made me resolve to be even more patient and helpful.
Craig
Aside from the fact that IBM is as usual too late and hesitant about this, it could be a good sign. Especially if IBM can finally get some mass marketers to preload OS/2 -- which they might be able to do if they're aggressive and if they make the licensing terms attractive enough -- both of which are , for IBM, improbable.
Still, one can hope. I love Linux, but OS/2 really is a nice piece of work....
Craig
This absurd interpretation of the Second Amendment isn't shared by serious legal scholars -- or indeed by anyone who has studied the Amendment's history.
You may want to check out some or all of these:
Palladium of Liberty? (Oklahoma City U Law Review, 1996)
The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration (Georgetown Law Journal, 1991)
The Embarrassing Second Amendment (Yale Law Journal, 1989)
These are just a few of the more than 40 articles published in the last two decades on the subject. Of these articles, only two (both, incidentally, by lawyers known more as political hacks than scholars) agree with your assertion.
Craig