Obama's doing what he needs to do. Anything less and he'd be accused of perpetuating the terrible foreign policy of the US to Latin America that existed during the cold war. It doesn't mean the accusations are anything less than ridiculous, but there is no other politically viable course of action for Obama considering his foreign policy ideas (or, at the very least, the impression he wishes to give about his foreign policy ideas).
I agree with your general idea, but it's important to note Chavez very much promotes violence by citizens as long as it favors his own political movement. To be fair, he has recently put on a (hardly credible) show pointing to the contrary (by calling for the arrest of Lina Ron, for example), but it's not precisely significant; there's various of armed Chavista gangs that go around our various cities acting essentially as PSUV militia, to the point of defending "Chavista territory" in various cities, especially in Caracas; see, for example, what happened just last week when a peaceful protest by journalists came near the offices of Avila TV (one of our pro-Chavez channels, state-run of course). Or any of the various times the headquarters of Globovision (one of the few remaining broadcast TV channels that don't constantly and exclusively spread government propaganda) has been attacked with tear gas, fragmentation grenades, gunshots, etc.
The Castro-like cult of personality for Chavez already exists. There is frankly little more to his political movement than obedience to Chavez. You can find ample evidence of this in the radical change of the movement's core principles that fit with almost perfect correlation the comings and goings of Chavez's political discourse. It's quite fun, actually, to observe the contrast between his old 1998 campaign speeches and what he says in his more recent public appearances. Not to pull a Godwin (as the personal similarities between the two dictators are few and far between), but it's reminiscent of the stuff Hitler used to say in his own speeches; once he said the Third Reich posed absolutely no threat to Poland, and, well, you know how that ended up.
If by "collectivist" you mean we can't resist taking by force that which belongs to others (especially if it belongs to everyone)? Yes, correct. Make no mistake, though; this is entirely and exclusively about corruption which is so prevalent in our society it's almost an axiom in venezuelan culture. Most of our history is entirely reigned by the comings and goings of power with the sole purpose of personal enrichment. Read around for the history of the CompañÃa Guipuzcoana for some early (colonial period) examples of this.
Don't make the mistake of interpreting venezuelan "collectivism" as anything of the sort you find in many of Europe's successful societies.
I'll bite despite obvious offtopicness that makes me cringe (if only because the parent -somehow- made it to score 2).
How about some credible evidence of CIA involvement in ANY public protest in Venezuela during, say, the last 10 years? Emphasis on "credible": ridiculous conspiracy theories and other random youtube bullshit about magic snipers don't quite pass the test, especially considering the very clear video footage we all saw on live TV of the Chavista thugs shooting freely down at the march from the bridge.
This is not what would typically be said since, in humans, there's an ample range of physiological traits associated to sex. There's also the possibility that you might -have- the physiological traits required for producing sperm but they might simply not be functional; only the strictest (and least useful) definition of sex would leave you out of the "male" category.
Argh, closed the tab just before submitting. Curse you,/., for your javascript antics. Anyways.
A female is an organism that can produce an ova to create young during its lifespan.
So women who have their ovaries removed become men? Or what about women born without reproductive organs? Are they not women anymore?
A male is an organism that can create sperm to fertilize said Ova during its lfiespan.
So if I chop your nuts off, you become a woman? Do you forget a lifetime of experiences being male? Do you have to change the little 'M' on your driver's license to an 'F'?
You're confused. What's being discussed is not the socially-defined categories of "man" and "woman", but the biologically unambiguous categories of "male" and "female". Note there is no dichotomy: the categories are neither mutually exclusive nor complete.
Any organism that can do neither of those two during its lifespan is neuter, and any that can do both is hemaphroditic (sic).
Again, your definition is in error: A hermaphrodite is an organism that has both male and female reproductive organs. Nowhere in that definition is "Ova" or "sperm" included -- it is possible to have both male and female reproductive organs and have either, both, or neither, of those conditions met. Neuter is a an adjective that refers to either a lack of gender (a social construct, not physical), or the lack of reproductive organs.
Except that the precise purpose of gonads is to produce gametes, which happen to be, in humans, precisely either ova or sperm. Just for the sake of clarity: this has nothing to do with external genitalia.
ANY OTHER DEFINITION is cultural, subjective, non-scientific crap.
The very definition of gender is cultural, subjective, and very much not scientific. You're attempting to use science to advance your own religious or personal beliefs about how the world "should be", not how it is. Science is about how things ARE not how they SHOULD be. The moment you start saying "should", you've left the realm of science.
Yes, precisely; indeed the issue of gender is outside the direct scope of science. But this is about sex, not about gender. The issue of sex has absolutely nothing, not a thing, zip to do with anyone's religious or personal beliefs about how the world should be. It has to do with the role of an individual in reproduction. More specifically, it has to do with the relative size of its gametes as compared to those of other members of the species. Granted, "male" is typically associated to all sorts of traits when used in the context of humanity, but this is essentially a simplification that (surprise!) doesn't necessarily apply in the particularily odd situation this story is about.
Take your activism elsewhere, please. As valid, worthy, respectable, understandable and necessary as it might be, it happens to be off-topic, annoying and childish in this discussion.
Just for the sake of nitpicking, I'd like to note that it isn't much of a lottery (because of the complex mate selection and other reproductive mechanisms that exist for humans at the physiological and social levels) and it isn't precisely at birth (but, to keep things concise, during the entire lives of the relevant progenitors up to the process of conception). And let's not even get into the socioeconomic factors that in one way or another happen to influence gene expression.
Although I can certainly understand the reason this happens, it seems rather difficult to have a public discussion about this sort of issue without anti-transgender trolling or pro-transgender activism. Indeed, this is Slashdot and there is -some- expectation of intelligence in the discussions here (no, I'm not new here; I'm just a silly idealist:-), so it's somewhat annoying to see so much subjective argument of this sort. It's understandable that silly, ignorant people can't talk about this without, one might say, politicizing the discussion. But to see it in here is just sad. Science makes no statement of social or moral agreeability; "scientific values" is a bit of an oxymoron, at least as used by the GP.
Microsoft should just give up on the browser wars and fork Firefox.
4) If there's some horrible exploit released it will hit both Firefox and IE users so it can't be said that one is more secure than the other. This even gives Microsoft the added benefit of railing against the problems of Open Source software and claiming that their own closed source solution would be better, even though that's probably not true.
(emphasis mine)
My (limited and probably inaccurate) understanding of free software licenses tells me the GPL would probably not allow this except for some very slow and impractical trickery, but I'm not sure about the LGPL and MPL. How could they manage to do this?
With the current layout I can type stuff in all caps relatively easily because my hands are still in the correct position even holding the shift key. With your proposed layout I would have to type with my thumbs which is more awkward.
While I absolutely agree with the general idea you're referring to, NetworkManager does have a cute GUI that can very easily change, among other things, the configuration of a network interface from DHCP to static, much as one is accustomed to do with other OSes. Granted, I believe this dialog is quite a recent addition to the project; I'm quite sure it wasn't there a couple of months ago.
On a related note, this particular problem is an excellent example of over-innovation on the part of Vista; am I the only one who despises Vista's new network connections configuration GUI? It was perfectly unbroken in XP, IMHO, and they went and "fixed" it.
Not only does it make them look evil, but also incompetent. I'm sure it's been said many, many times in other articles (and possibly this one), but Microsoft is starting to look seriously pathetic. When was the last time they rolled out a successful new product that was really important?
Winamp and such get big, and they decide to pump their media player full of crazy new stuff; they even changed the interface to somewhat copy some aspects of Winamp's and some other media players'. They tried to enter the search engine market back in the day and, frankly, the only reason they got anywhere is little tricks like defaulting IE's homepage to their MSN search crap. That, and Hotmail, which, by the way, they were giving a truly miserable service with until Google came in and set things right.
And then there's all those press releases we've been seeing lately. Their rip-off of Google Maps/Earth, and such. I suppose you could say Google's not exactly innocent of this practice; while Google Maps is somewhat innovative, it's mostly just a fusion of two services that were already widely available; then there's Google Talk, and the browser bars, and so on and on and on. But Google actually rolls out GOOD software, and it's not obnoxiously full of ads like Microsoft's many products. Just look at Hotmail, or MSN Messenger, or just about anything else of the sort they have.
Not that this is anything new, anyways; I'm sure many here will point out Microsoft wasn't exactly being original with MS DOS, Windows, and so on. But it's seriously sad and pathetic, and they're beginning to be displaced in every area of the market. MSN Messenger is still huge in many countries, but other services are making head. IE is slowly being eaten by Firefox. Linux is making more and more progress towards being usable by the average Windows user. Google Mail is stomping on Hotmail. And let's not even mention MSN's search engine.
Everywhere you look, Microsoft's sucking. I wouldn't want to be a stockholder of theirs right now.
Glad to see MIT researchers are dedicating their sharp minds to something like this.:P
Seriously, though, this could really come in handy after a coding marathon on the night before a midterm. Hell, it's probably the reason these guys even considered making something like this...
There's a fundamental flaw in the reasoning in this article, and it has nothing to do with the definition of free software, or the importance of freedom, or any such deep things already discussed.
"What do we do when we have a substandard free software product that we could use, but would be more productive with a proprietary competitor?" The author argues, throughout the entire article, about productivity; we're talking about a commericial, professional enviroinment, where money is made through using software.
On the GIMP, "It can of course be made to work in place of Photoshop, depending on your needs and budget. But if you have paying work to do, how much of a hassle are you willing to go through to use free software?" The author argues free software doesn't offer good enough alternatives to proprietary software, still in a commercial, professional enviroinment.
Continuing, "The majority of proprietary software licenses restrict the user's ability to use, share, modify, and study the software, but there is virtually no enforcement of these terms in the non-business portion of the software world." The author argues it's acceptable and risk-free to "share" proprietary software as long as you're not going to use it comercially. While I question the validity of this, let's let it pass for the sake of argument.
Free software is criticized as sub-par for commercial use where a job or a contract is on the line, and it's argued that the benefit of free (speech) software being free (beer) is negligible, since nobody's going to sue you for "sharing" proprietary software for personal use. The article sets the bar for free software in business use, which is clearly much more demanding, and excuses the ridiculous cost of proprietary software commonly used in business since it's okay to steal it, but, erm, if you were to use this proprietary software in the same way the author says free software lags behind, you'd get at least a million dollar lawsuit, and at most a visit from the FBI.
They can live without the 3% of their market that's made up of hardcore nerds, but the nerds probably won't live without the 25% or more of their entertainment that comes from mainstream media distributors.
Yes, and then that 3% of hardcore nerds is going to give the MPAA the finger, and, in retaliation, code up a bunch of P2P protocols and video codecs and whatnot, making piracy of their precious movies far easier than it has ever been before. They effectively shoot themselves in the foot by neglecting or outright keeping us from their product.
It'd be nice if you (as in all who this applies to) would stop thinking of Chavez as a socialist in any sense. His populist rethoric is definitely socialist, but it's just that: populist rethoric; bullshit, in layman's terms. Chavez is a totalitarian, militaristic president responsible for numerous violations of basic human rights, multiple cases of murder (both directly and indirectly), widespread political repression, and bringing this country down to shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama's doing what he needs to do. Anything less and he'd be accused of perpetuating the terrible foreign policy of the US to Latin America that existed during the cold war. It doesn't mean the accusations are anything less than ridiculous, but there is no other politically viable course of action for Obama considering his foreign policy ideas (or, at the very least, the impression he wishes to give about his foreign policy ideas).
I agree with your general idea, but it's important to note Chavez very much promotes violence by citizens as long as it favors his own political movement. To be fair, he has recently put on a (hardly credible) show pointing to the contrary (by calling for the arrest of Lina Ron, for example), but it's not precisely significant; there's various of armed Chavista gangs that go around our various cities acting essentially as PSUV militia, to the point of defending "Chavista territory" in various cities, especially in Caracas; see, for example, what happened just last week when a peaceful protest by journalists came near the offices of Avila TV (one of our pro-Chavez channels, state-run of course). Or any of the various times the headquarters of Globovision (one of the few remaining broadcast TV channels that don't constantly and exclusively spread government propaganda) has been attacked with tear gas, fragmentation grenades, gunshots, etc.
The Castro-like cult of personality for Chavez already exists. There is frankly little more to his political movement than obedience to Chavez. You can find ample evidence of this in the radical change of the movement's core principles that fit with almost perfect correlation the comings and goings of Chavez's political discourse. It's quite fun, actually, to observe the contrast between his old 1998 campaign speeches and what he says in his more recent public appearances. Not to pull a Godwin (as the personal similarities between the two dictators are few and far between), but it's reminiscent of the stuff Hitler used to say in his own speeches; once he said the Third Reich posed absolutely no threat to Poland, and, well, you know how that ended up.
If by "collectivist" you mean we can't resist taking by force that which belongs to others (especially if it belongs to everyone)? Yes, correct. Make no mistake, though; this is entirely and exclusively about corruption which is so prevalent in our society it's almost an axiom in venezuelan culture. Most of our history is entirely reigned by the comings and goings of power with the sole purpose of personal enrichment. Read around for the history of the CompañÃa Guipuzcoana for some early (colonial period) examples of this.
Don't make the mistake of interpreting venezuelan "collectivism" as anything of the sort you find in many of Europe's successful societies.
I'll bite despite obvious offtopicness that makes me cringe (if only because the parent -somehow- made it to score 2).
How about some credible evidence of CIA involvement in ANY public protest in Venezuela during, say, the last 10 years? Emphasis on "credible": ridiculous conspiracy theories and other random youtube bullshit about magic snipers don't quite pass the test, especially considering the very clear video footage we all saw on live TV of the Chavista thugs shooting freely down at the march from the bridge.
This is not what would typically be said since, in humans, there's an ample range of physiological traits associated to sex. There's also the possibility that you might -have- the physiological traits required for producing sperm but they might simply not be functional; only the strictest (and least useful) definition of sex would leave you out of the "male" category.
A female is an organism that can produce an ova to create young during its lifespan.
So women who have their ovaries removed become men? Or what about women born without reproductive organs? Are they not women anymore?
A male is an organism that can create sperm to fertilize said Ova during its lfiespan.
So if I chop your nuts off, you become a woman? Do you forget a lifetime of experiences being male? Do you have to change the little 'M' on your driver's license to an 'F'?
You're confused. What's being discussed is not the socially-defined categories of "man" and "woman", but the biologically unambiguous categories of "male" and "female". Note there is no dichotomy: the categories are neither mutually exclusive nor complete.
Any organism that can do neither of those two during its lifespan is neuter, and any that can do both is hemaphroditic (sic).
Again, your definition is in error: A hermaphrodite is an organism that has both male and female reproductive organs. Nowhere in that definition is "Ova" or "sperm" included -- it is possible to have both male and female reproductive organs and have either, both, or neither, of those conditions met. Neuter is a an adjective that refers to either a lack of gender (a social construct, not physical), or the lack of reproductive organs.
Except that the precise purpose of gonads is to produce gametes, which happen to be, in humans, precisely either ova or sperm. Just for the sake of clarity: this has nothing to do with external genitalia.
ANY OTHER DEFINITION is cultural, subjective, non-scientific crap.
The very definition of gender is cultural, subjective, and very much not scientific. You're attempting to use science to advance your own religious or personal beliefs about how the world "should be", not how it is. Science is about how things ARE not how they SHOULD be. The moment you start saying "should", you've left the realm of science.
Yes, precisely; indeed the issue of gender is outside the direct scope of science. But this is about sex, not about gender. The issue of sex has absolutely nothing, not a thing, zip to do with anyone's religious or personal beliefs about how the world should be. It has to do with the role of an individual in reproduction. More specifically, it has to do with the relative size of its gametes as compared to those of other members of the species. Granted, "male" is typically associated to all sorts of traits when used in the context of humanity, but this is essentially a simplification that (surprise!) doesn't necessarily apply in the particularily odd situation this story is about.
Take your activism elsewhere, please. As valid, worthy, respectable, understandable and necessary as it might be, it happens to be off-topic, annoying and childish in this discussion.
No self-respecting biologist would ever so much as suggest it's that simple, especially not in this sort of situation of ambiguity.
Just for the sake of nitpicking, I'd like to note that it isn't much of a lottery (because of the complex mate selection and other reproductive mechanisms that exist for humans at the physiological and social levels) and it isn't precisely at birth (but, to keep things concise, during the entire lives of the relevant progenitors up to the process of conception). And let's not even get into the socioeconomic factors that in one way or another happen to influence gene expression.
Although I can certainly understand the reason this happens, it seems rather difficult to have a public discussion about this sort of issue without anti-transgender trolling or pro-transgender activism. Indeed, this is Slashdot and there is -some- expectation of intelligence in the discussions here (no, I'm not new here; I'm just a silly idealist :-), so it's somewhat annoying to see so much subjective argument of this sort. It's understandable that silly, ignorant people can't talk about this without, one might say, politicizing the discussion. But to see it in here is just sad. Science makes no statement of social or moral agreeability; "scientific values" is a bit of an oxymoron, at least as used by the GP.
How long have been watching this debate repeat itself over and over and over again in the precise and exact same and identical manner?
Oh, right, only since we have Slashdot.
Microsoft should just give up on the browser wars and fork Firefox.
4) If there's some horrible exploit released it will hit both Firefox and IE users so it can't be said that one is more secure than the other. This even gives Microsoft the added benefit of railing against the problems of Open Source software and claiming that their own closed source solution would be better, even though that's probably not true.
(emphasis mine)
My (limited and probably inaccurate) understanding of free software licenses tells me the GPL would probably not allow this except for some very slow and impractical trickery, but I'm not sure about the LGPL and MPL. How could they manage to do this?
With the current layout I can type stuff in all caps relatively easily because my hands are still in the correct position even holding the shift key. With your proposed layout I would have to type with my thumbs which is more awkward.
IT'S A FEATURE, NOT A BUG
While I absolutely agree with the general idea you're referring to, NetworkManager does have a cute GUI that can very easily change, among other things, the configuration of a network interface from DHCP to static, much as one is accustomed to do with other OSes. Granted, I believe this dialog is quite a recent addition to the project; I'm quite sure it wasn't there a couple of months ago.
On a related note, this particular problem is an excellent example of over-innovation on the part of Vista; am I the only one who despises Vista's new network connections configuration GUI? It was perfectly unbroken in XP, IMHO, and they went and "fixed" it.
So, is this the first version of the glowy spaceship engines we see in movies? 'bout time we came up with it...
Not only does it make them look evil, but also incompetent. I'm sure it's been said many, many times in other articles (and possibly this one), but Microsoft is starting to look seriously pathetic. When was the last time they rolled out a successful new product that was really important?
Winamp and such get big, and they decide to pump their media player full of crazy new stuff; they even changed the interface to somewhat copy some aspects of Winamp's and some other media players'. They tried to enter the search engine market back in the day and, frankly, the only reason they got anywhere is little tricks like defaulting IE's homepage to their MSN search crap. That, and Hotmail, which, by the way, they were giving a truly miserable service with until Google came in and set things right.
And then there's all those press releases we've been seeing lately. Their rip-off of Google Maps/Earth, and such. I suppose you could say Google's not exactly innocent of this practice; while Google Maps is somewhat innovative, it's mostly just a fusion of two services that were already widely available; then there's Google Talk, and the browser bars, and so on and on and on. But Google actually rolls out GOOD software, and it's not obnoxiously full of ads like Microsoft's many products. Just look at Hotmail, or MSN Messenger, or just about anything else of the sort they have.
Not that this is anything new, anyways; I'm sure many here will point out Microsoft wasn't exactly being original with MS DOS, Windows, and so on. But it's seriously sad and pathetic, and they're beginning to be displaced in every area of the market. MSN Messenger is still huge in many countries, but other services are making head. IE is slowly being eaten by Firefox. Linux is making more and more progress towards being usable by the average Windows user. Google Mail is stomping on Hotmail. And let's not even mention MSN's search engine.
Everywhere you look, Microsoft's sucking. I wouldn't want to be a stockholder of theirs right now.
Glad to see MIT researchers are dedicating their sharp minds to something like this. :P
Seriously, though, this could really come in handy after a coding marathon on the night before a midterm. Hell, it's probably the reason these guys even considered making something like this...
There's a fundamental flaw in the reasoning in this article, and it has nothing to do with the definition of free software, or the importance of freedom, or any such deep things already discussed.
"What do we do when we have a substandard free software product that we could use, but would be more productive with a proprietary competitor?"
The author argues, throughout the entire article, about productivity; we're talking about a commericial, professional enviroinment, where money is made through using software.
On the GIMP, "It can of course be made to work in place of Photoshop, depending on your needs and budget. But if you have paying work to do, how much of a hassle are you willing to go through to use free software?"
The author argues free software doesn't offer good enough alternatives to proprietary software, still in a commercial, professional enviroinment.
Continuing,
"The majority of proprietary software licenses restrict the user's ability to use, share, modify, and study the software, but there is virtually no enforcement of these terms in the non-business portion of the software world."
The author argues it's acceptable and risk-free to "share" proprietary software as long as you're not going to use it comercially. While I question the validity of this, let's let it pass for the sake of argument.
Free software is criticized as sub-par for commercial use where a job or a contract is on the line, and it's argued that the benefit of free (speech) software being free (beer) is negligible, since nobody's going to sue you for "sharing" proprietary software for personal use. The article sets the bar for free software in business use, which is clearly much more demanding, and excuses the ridiculous cost of proprietary software commonly used in business since it's okay to steal it, but, erm, if you were to use this proprietary software in the same way the author says free software lags behind, you'd get at least a million dollar lawsuit, and at most a visit from the FBI.
"Well argued" my ass.
They can live without the 3% of their market that's made up of hardcore nerds, but the nerds probably won't live without the 25% or more of their entertainment that comes from mainstream media distributors.
Yes, and then that 3% of hardcore nerds is going to give the MPAA the finger, and, in retaliation, code up a bunch of P2P protocols and video codecs and whatnot, making piracy of their precious movies far easier than it has ever been before. They effectively shoot themselves in the foot by neglecting or outright keeping us from their product.
It'd be nice if you (as in all who this applies to) would stop thinking of Chavez as a socialist in any sense. His populist rethoric is definitely socialist, but it's just that: populist rethoric; bullshit, in layman's terms. Chavez is a totalitarian, militaristic president responsible for numerous violations of basic human rights, multiple cases of murder (both directly and indirectly), widespread political repression, and bringing this country down to shit.
That's, erm, not what socialism is about.