The original interview (which the blog has just copy-pasted, inexplicably introducing errors) is here. There is also another interview (another newspaper, another Indian city) here. Both of them are short and say the usual things, and not much info on GPLv3 itself (naturally, as they are newspaper interviews).
This policy in a nutshell:
Information on Wikipedia must be reliable and verifiable. Facts, viewpoints, theories, and arguments may only be included in articles if they have already been published by reliable and reputable sources. Articles should cite these sources whenever possible. Any unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Anytime you see something that does not have a reference, put {{Citeneeded}} or {{Fact}} after the sentence. You can also put {{Unreferenced}} to cover the entire article.
No, it's not a "communist state". It's a state in India (with the same constitution and political system as the rest) whose democratically elected coalition government is led by a party called the "Communist Party of India (Marxist)". Look it up (say here) if you like.
The ban on Coca-Cola and Pepsi came after an NGO reported dangerously high levels of pesticide in them, although it is possible that there were otherreasons.
Now the questions became really pointed. What do you think about 9/11? What are your views on the Iran issue? Do you think government is too big, too powerful? Would you ever "make a point?"
and
He then asked me to turn on my laptop. I did, and he began using it. I saw him open Spotlight and begin searching.
"Do you connect to the Internet on this laptop?" "Yes." "Have you downloaded and images?" "Huh? What do you mean?" "Do you have any pornography?" "No."
This guy is obviously lying, isn't he?:) But let's go on:
I waited in total silence for about 10 minutes as he kept searching and searching, until I finally asked him, "What are you looking for?"
"Contraband," he said without looking up at me. "Such as?" "Child pornography, hate propaganda." "Child porn I can understand, that's illegal. But hate propaganda is protected speech." Now he looked up. "What country do you think you're in?" "Oh, it's illegal in Canada?" "I honestly don't know. But that doesn't matter. I get to decide what goes in this country. Do you have a problem with that?" I paused for a long time while I thought about what I should say to this. "Yes." "Yes, you do have a problem?" "Yes, I do. If it's illegal in Canada I'll understand, but saying 'I don't want it in my country' isn't good enough when you're a government official."
Now he was pissed. "Don't fool around with me. I'm sure you want this to end as much as I do. So I will ask you questions, and you will answer. Do you understand?"
Maybe it was not a "born" talent, but the result of skills he picked up because of exposure to music at a young age? My father has never been formally trained in music, but he can nearly instantly recognise most ragas, sometimes even quicker than a professional musician. He ascribes it to having listened to a lot of music as a child (others at home learning it, and so on).
The problem with most of the anecdotes that seem to support the "innate" (nature) theory is that they can also be equally well applied to support the "trained" (nurture) idea. For instance, if the daughter of a chess player is a good chess player herself, is it because she inherited her father's "chess genes", or is it because she had a good chess teacher at home?
One thing is certain — children learn quicker, and are better at grasping ideas, than adults (consider learning foreign languages, etc.) By extrapolation, I believe that the earliest years have the most effect on the person. If someone cannot become a good musician despite slogging hard during high school, is it because he has no "innate talent", or is it because he didn't pick up the requisite skills when he was a child? Is musical ability innate, or does everyone have the first (say) five years of one's life to obtain it?
On the other hand, there are several indications of purely genetic predispositions — there have been some studies of identical twins with surprising results.
There is a fair amount about these things on Wikipedia, scattered among several articles. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this.
It reminds of me of another interesting observation about the eight (or was it seven?) Bernoullis, described in the chapter titled "Nature or Nurture?" in E. T. Bell's Men of Mathematics, many of whom started out in other fields, but eventually made contributions in mathematics (or physics, or "natural philosophy", or whatever it was called at that time).
adding information [...] that I had solid 100% reliable information on, [...] deleted because [...] the information was only "hearsay". Well, months later, the information turned out 100% correct
Well, duh, that's the whole point of what Wikipedia is supposed to be. The official policy is that the criterion for inclusion in Wikipedia is Verifiability, not truth. That it turned out to be true much later is irrelevant — how is your "information" to be distinguished from rumours and idle speculation? (If a notable number of people are indeed speculating on the same, you could maybe link to the message board or wherever the discussion is, with the words "It is speculated that ".
Now as to your other vandalism,
Kilobyte has been 1024 bytes for over 50 years. It is a de facto standard.
It is no such thing. A little reading around will show you that the entire situation with binary/SI prefixes is horrid mess, with at least three definitions of "megabyte" that are in usage, so the only sensible thing to do is to follow the standards. Funny that you should speak of "confusing people by changing the standards" when you're the one doing it. Also, it is exactly to avoid ambiguity like ton(ne)/metric ton(ne) that we must use the mebibyte (etc.) notation — "megabyte" is ambiguous; "mebibyte" has exactly one meaning.
I guess you're American — your insistence on "erroneous kibibyte to proper kilobyte" is comparable to saying "everyone knows mm/dd/yy is the standard format" (as opposed to ISO 8601: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss) or "no one uses the metric system".
FWIW, I've seen some GNOME apps, Azureus, etc., switching to the standard binary prefixes; and eventually (hopefully) all software will follow, and the world will be a less confusing place in at least one respect.
but the ability to respond quickly will lesson as they grow
Heh, completely offtopic I know, but reminds me:
`And how many hours a day did you do lessons?' said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.
`Ten hours the first day,' said the Mock Turtle: `nine the next, and so on.'
`What a curious plan!' exclaimed Alice.
`That's the reason they're called lessons,' the Gryphon remarked: `because they lessen from day to day.'
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
(If you're wondering what happened on the eleventh day and later, read the book; it's free!)
And to truly appreciate the Alice books, read The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Martin Gardner.
I have no statistics on how many people face this problem (obviously), but I can personally report that I experienced this issue with release 5.04 ("Hoary Hedgehog"), but haven't had it with (fresh) installs of either 5.10 ("Breezy Badger") or 6.06 ("Dapper Drake"). I guess they just added support for auto-detecting my monitor or something.
FWIW, in case someone still has this problem, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FixVideoResoluti onHowto has a few solutions.
Axiom 1: People do what they want to do.
Axiom 2: It would help to have more people doing X.
Corollaries of Axiom 2: (i) It would help to have more women doing X. (ii) It would help to have more men doing X. (iii) It would help to have more people from $ethnic_community doing X.
From these, it follows (among other things): It would help if more women wanted to do X. In other words, it would help if women were encouraged to do X.
Encouragement is never bad. If you (or enough people) feel that it would be good/useful to encourage men too, go ahead.
Also, have you ever considered that "natural" inclinations may depend not only on biological/genetic/evolutionary factors but also on societal/psychological/community factors? Since we can't change the former, we try to change the latter and see if it makes a difference. Every group that decides it wants more women (or $ethnic_community, or whatever) is free to encourage more women (or...) to join it. Have you considered that the reason there are very few women in field X might precisely be that it is considered "unnatural" for them to have inclinations towards it, and that if this perception were changed, more women might be naturally inclined towards it? Maybe we would also have more male nurses and more male teachers and more girls interested in mechanics and sports and..., if there wasn't much societal prejudice? (I do not make any pronouncement on whether this would be a good thing or not, to avoid the sort of replies that this would otherwise inevitably get.)
(In summary, maybe "natural" isn't so natural after all? Also, somewhat offtopic, see this and then this for something that would be "natural" once but seems very out-of-place today;) )
There's much more correlation between the spam's (literal, not intended;) text and the "art", at http://spamusement.com/. "Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!"
Not even the ";)" can help them recognise irony when they see it... Just take a look at http://www.shelleytherepublican.com/, probably the most successful troll site on the net, kept alive by people so naive that it stops being amusing after a while. (I have to admit not all the commenters are American, though.)
For what it's worth, at The Computer Language Shootout, OCaml does pretty well. Of course, C is still faster for most things (but note that the really high factors (29 and 281) are in OCaml's favour!), but OCaml is pretty fast compared to Java or Perl. Haskell does pretty well too. Functional programming, anyone?
Of course, these benchmarks measure only speed, are just for fun, and are "flawed", but they are still interesting to play with. If you haven't seen the site before, enjoy fiddling with things to try and get your favourite language on top:)
It's not a different distro, just a name for what's the default WM on the CD image you download.
Couldn't people just install Ubuntu, and then install the additional stuff to run KDE or XFCE? Maybe it would be nice if someone packaged up all the stuff they need in one easy to find place, but they certainly don't need to release an entire distro.
Yes, that's how it works. No matter which one (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu) you've installed, do
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop #To install whatever comes with Ubuntu (GNOME,...) sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop #To install whatever comes with Kubuntu (KDE,...) sudo apt-get install xubuntu-destkop #To install whatever comes with Xubuntu (XFCE,...) sudo apt-get install edubuntu-desktop #To install whatever comes with Edubuntu
Not only is this a dupe, it is also confusing that they use "binary search" to mean "searching inside binary files", and not binary search in its usual sense .
If an aeroplane crashes, you die.
If you're letting an encyclopedia have potentially life-threatening effects on you, there's something wrong with you.
Look, saying that "Wikipedia is bad because it contains inaccuracies and vandalism" is like saying that "the internet is dangerous because it contains phishers, pedophiles, and madmen". Both statements are true, but neither is a reason to not use the respective resource — both of them are just too valuable to stop using them. Instead, we should focus on
What part of "if you set it up for her" didn't you get? Those lines are intended for you to do. (Unless you're talking of a Grandma setting it up for her Grandma, which is, um, too theoretical.)
As I said, consider it just an idea of what can be done. I don't know why he's installing xterm when he already has a terminal (does Automatix need it?), or why he's using Automatix (which, although it does have a large number of satisfied users, has occasionally screwed up people's setups) when EasyUbuntu is just as good. Besides, as I said, the right way is to follow this.
Sheesh, why am I having to repeat my post?;)
Re:Dapper is good, but it's not there yet.
on
Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's not ready for grandma to use
Grandma can use it easily enough if you set it up for her. Take a look at this.
(Also consider it just proof of concept; you might not want to do exactly the same things. For example, it's better (IMHO) to do things the right way than to use automated options like Automatix or EasyUbuntu.)
You can first install the 5.10 to your hard disk, and then do the changes as above to get upto 6.06. Read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Installation for a more detailed description of everything. Some of those instructions mention Breezy (5.10) — it's only been two days since the new version came out, so those pages haven't been completely updated yet — but I expect most of them to work for the new Dapper too.
BTW, the version numbers are actually release dates, so 5.10 (not 5.1, actually) is 2005 October, and 6.06 is 2006 June.
Slashdot Mirror
The original interview (which the blog has just copy-pasted, inexplicably introducing errors) is here. There is also another interview (another newspaper, another Indian city) here. Both of them are short and say the usual things, and not much info on GPLv3 itself (naturally, as they are newspaper interviews).
No, it's not a "communist state". It's a state in India (with the same constitution and political system as the rest) whose democratically elected coalition government is led by a party called the "Communist Party of India (Marxist)". Look it up (say here) if you like.
The ban on Coca-Cola and Pepsi came after an NGO reported dangerously high levels of pesticide in them, although it is possible that there were other reasons.
Dude, you're behind the times. Saying "waist of time" is obviously the new hipster lingo. Get it? Ha ha...
*ducks and runs away* (So no, I won't be here all week.)
Yes, this was already covered yesterday — The iPod can be used, very well, and easily.
Maybe it was not a "born" talent, but the result of skills he picked up because of exposure to music at a young age? My father has never been formally trained in music, but he can nearly instantly recognise most ragas, sometimes even quicker than a professional musician. He ascribes it to having listened to a lot of music as a child (others at home learning it, and so on).
The problem with most of the anecdotes that seem to support the "innate" (nature) theory is that they can also be equally well applied to support the "trained" (nurture) idea. For instance, if the daughter of a chess player is a good chess player herself, is it because she inherited her father's "chess genes", or is it because she had a good chess teacher at home?
One thing is certain — children learn quicker, and are better at grasping ideas, than adults (consider learning foreign languages, etc.) By extrapolation, I believe that the earliest years have the most effect on the person. If someone cannot become a good musician despite slogging hard during high school, is it because he has no "innate talent", or is it because he didn't pick up the requisite skills when he was a child? Is musical ability innate, or does everyone have the first (say) five years of one's life to obtain it?
On the other hand, there are several indications of purely genetic predispositions — there have been some studies of identical twins with surprising results.
There is a fair amount about these things on Wikipedia, scattered among several articles. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this.
It reminds of me of another interesting observation about the eight (or was it seven?) Bernoullis, described in the chapter titled "Nature or Nurture?" in E. T. Bell's Men of Mathematics, many of whom started out in other fields, but eventually made contributions in mathematics (or physics, or "natural philosophy", or whatever it was called at that time).
Maybe it can't run Skype, but it will have the cool "voice chat" feature!
Now as to your other vandalism, It is no such thing. A little reading around will show you that the entire situation with binary/SI prefixes is horrid mess, with at least three definitions of "megabyte" that are in usage, so the only sensible thing to do is to follow the standards. Funny that you should speak of "confusing people by changing the standards" when you're the one doing it. Also, it is exactly to avoid ambiguity like ton(ne)/metric ton(ne) that we must use the mebibyte (etc.) notation — "megabyte" is ambiguous; "mebibyte" has exactly one meaning.
I guess you're American — your insistence on "erroneous kibibyte to proper kilobyte" is comparable to saying "everyone knows mm/dd/yy is the standard format" (as opposed to ISO 8601: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss) or "no one uses the metric system".
FWIW, I've seen some GNOME apps, Azureus, etc., switching to the standard binary prefixes; and eventually (hopefully) all software will follow, and the world will be a less confusing place in at least one respect.
(If you're wondering what happened on the eleventh day and later, read the book; it's free!)
And to truly appreciate the Alice books, read The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Martin Gardner.
I have no statistics on how many people face this problem (obviously), but I can personally report that I experienced this issue with release 5.04 ("Hoary Hedgehog"), but haven't had it with (fresh) installs of either 5.10 ("Breezy Badger") or 6.06 ("Dapper Drake"). I guess they just added support for auto-detecting my monitor or something.i onHowto has a few solutions.
FWIW, in case someone still has this problem, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FixVideoResolut
Axiom 1: People do what they want to do.
Axiom 2: It would help to have more people doing X.
Corollaries of Axiom 2: (i) It would help to have more women doing X. (ii) It would help to have more men doing X. (iii) It would help to have more people from $ethnic_community doing X.
From these, it follows (among other things): It would help if more women wanted to do X. In other words, it would help if women were encouraged to do X.
Encouragement is never bad. If you (or enough people) feel that it would be good/useful to encourage men too, go ahead.
Also, have you ever considered that "natural" inclinations may depend not only on biological/genetic/evolutionary factors but also on societal/psychological/community factors? Since we can't change the former, we try to change the latter and see if it makes a difference. Every group that decides it wants more women (or $ethnic_community, or whatever) is free to encourage more women (or
(In summary, maybe "natural" isn't so natural after all? Also, somewhat offtopic, see this and then this for something that would be "natural" once but seems very out-of-place today
There's much more correlation between the spam's (literal, not intended ;) text and the "art", at http://spamusement.com/. "Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!"
Whoa, those are really long lines! At least here, the lines stay on the mainland.
*throws 'Hint: aisles' and ducks*
Not even the ";)" can help them recognise irony when they see it...
Just take a look at http://www.shelleytherepublican.com/, probably the most successful troll site on the net, kept alive by people so naive that it stops being amusing after a while. (I have to admit not all the commenters are American, though.)
For what it's worth, at The Computer Language Shootout, OCaml does pretty well. Of course, C is still faster for most things (but note that the really high factors (29 and 281) are in OCaml's favour!), but OCaml is pretty fast compared to Java or Perl. Haskell does pretty well too. Functional programming, anyone? :)
Of course, these benchmarks measure only speed, are just for fun, and are "flawed", but they are still interesting to play with. If you haven't seen the site before, enjoy fiddling with things to try and get your favourite language on top
Yes, that's how it works. No matter which one (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu) you've installed, do
Not only is this a dupe, it is also confusing that they use "binary search" to mean "searching inside binary files", and not binary search in its usual sense .
It's not a question of "no longer"; it has been debated for several years. See Serial comma.
If you're letting an encyclopedia have potentially life-threatening effects on you, there's something wrong with you.
Look, saying that "Wikipedia is bad because it contains inaccuracies and vandalism" is like saying that "the internet is dangerous because it contains phishers, pedophiles, and madmen". Both statements are true, but neither is a reason to not use the respective resource — both of them are just too valuable to stop using them. Instead, we should focus on
- being careful about everything we read
- trying to improve the situation
.Of course they are: http://mafiaa.org/.
Oh, you're speaking of the laptops. I thought you were speaking about Slashdot.
- What part of "if you set it up for her" didn't you get? Those lines are intended for you to do. (Unless you're talking of a Grandma setting it up for her Grandma, which is, um, too theoretical.)
- As I said, consider it just an idea of what can be done. I don't know why he's installing xterm when he already has a terminal (does Automatix need it?), or why he's using Automatix (which, although it does have a large number of satisfied users, has occasionally screwed up people's setups) when EasyUbuntu is just as good. Besides, as I said, the right way is to follow this.
Sheesh, why am I having to repeat my post?(Also consider it just proof of concept; you might not want to do exactly the same things. For example, it's better (IMHO) to do things the right way than to use automated options like Automatix or EasyUbuntu.)
You can first install the 5.10 to your hard disk, and then do the changes as above to get upto 6.06. Read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Installation for a more detailed description of everything. Some of those instructions mention Breezy (5.10) — it's only been two days since the new version came out, so those pages haven't been completely updated yet — but I expect most of them to work for the new Dapper too.
BTW, the version numbers are actually release dates, so 5.10 (not 5.1, actually) is 2005 October, and 6.06 is 2006 June.