If you have the desire to play - try Sudoku, Kakuro or Chess! These three games will make your brains sharper - video games will only make you dumb.
All those will teach you something.
Chess will teach you how to do high-level pattern matching on chess pieces to win chess games.
Darwinia will teach you how to do high-level pattern matching on positions of characters to win Darwinia games.
Both provide almost no real-world benefits compared to doing something intentionally educational like reading Wikipedia. However, not everyone is trying to better themselves constantly, you know?
Okay, let me put this differently. Arnold Schwartzenegger movies generally contain a large deal of killing on the part of Arnie. Are these movies incitement to kill?
First of all, morality is not just a set of social norms, it's about discovering how to live a life that does as little harm to others and as much good to others as possible.
That is shorthand for a set of social norms. You're simplying it a bit by leaving "harm" and "good" undefined -- that's where the society-relative variables come in.
Commonly accepted forms of harm include pain, coercion, force, killing. You can try to argue that causing another person pain is good in general, or that coercing them is good in general, and so on, but to me that's just going down the road of stupid. Please note that I'm not suggesting these can be completely avoided, and such actions may even be morally necessary. One example would be that using force to constrain someone from committing murders might be necessary. In such cases, using the minimum force necessary is the goal of the moral life.
Sure, you can use some general rules of thumb, because most societies have some general standards in common for what ought to be done. See the "Comparative morality among cultures" section of the WP article I linked to.
Murder is killing, so it goes into the don't allow it bin. You use the laws to create the minimum of force necessary to prevent it, as best you can. You certainly don't leave it up to small groups of people. You don't let people have duels to the death even if they think it is fun.
Except that this exactly was allowed and in some cases would actually be considered immoral in the past -- it would be dishonorable to back down from a duel. Unless you feel that the metric of harm has changed over the years, it would seem that this would be a good example of how this is society-relative.
The existence of obscene materials is comparatively harmless, though in the case of child pornography there's enough evidence that it encourages the harm of children that the force involved in removing it can probably be justified.
I suspect that alcohol causes at least as much by way of damages. Is the drinking of alcohol immoral?
Slavery is one of the worst offenders: pain, coercion, force, killing, all in one package.
Christianity accepts slavery -- there is a large canon of text regarding the appropriate way to keep slaves in the Bible. Is the Bible or Christianity immoral? There are many people who would probably say that Christianity *defines* morality.
The same thing, incidently, goes for at least limited forms of rape (war captives).
1. Murder. Does it really seem reasonable to allow a state to define murder? Should a state be allowed to say that killing poor people for sport is ok?
I think that few societies are going to allow outright killing for sport, simply because that tends to, y'know, make civilization collapse and all that.
However, I could see a state allow, say, dueling between two consenting parties. I think that it would probably be a bad idea, but that's not the point. Dueling *was* legal in the civilized world for quite some time, and society seemed to keep functioning.
2. Obscenity. Does it really seem ok for a state to be allowed to allow child pornography?
Absolutely. I personally don't have any problem with child pornography, per se.
The only practical grounds I'm aware of for making possession of and production of child pornography illegal is because of possible concerns that the production industry will result in sexual abuse of children (a whole different ballgame). The rationale behind making possession a felony is that some of those who possess child pornography will be funding that industry. It's similar to the rationale behind making it a felony to possess controlled substances. It's not that you're directly hurting someone else, it's that you're funding people that society has deemed it valuable to squish.
Direct damage from child pornography? When National Geographic goes to Africa or somewhere and takes a picture of a bunch of people, including kids, in the nude squatting around a campfire, said kids somehow avoid being grieviously damaged.
In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is thirteen and both being married and having sex. It's just a function of the current social norms on what is approved of in terms of sexual activity and things related to sexual activity in today's society.
I don't think that any states *are* going to legalize child pornography, even given the option. It tends to piss off a lot of people who adhere to said social norms. But as for it being okay for a state to choose its own laws here -- sure, I don't see why not.
3. Wealth Distribution (taxes). This one I guess I can't think of a good argument against, because there's no fundamentally inescapable coercion involved, as is the case with all the others.
States do make their own tax laws.
As for federal tax, we tried having a federal government that couldn't tax people very early on. See the Continental Congress. It flopped financially.
4. Theft. Same argument as murder. Weaker if you're only going to consider non violent thefts.
If it's so obvious, why not allow the states to make that obvious decision?
What about situations like theft to retrieve stolen property?
5. Rape. Same argument as murder.
Same counterargument.
6. Slavery. Should a state be allowed to make it's own decision about slavery?
Yes, I think so, though I don't think I'd go to war over the point.
morally, should be decided by the most global authority available, which in the case of US states is the federal government.
Morality is just the current set of social norms. It's kind of silly to use it in an argument about whether social norms should be enforced.
The problem is that while Slashdot is a good place for general technical-social discussion (the sort of stuff like Wired likes to talk about) and some technical things, it's a little limited for in-depth technical discussions. The stories fly by too quickly, whisking threads away, and the folks that read it are not all developers.
If you want to talk about techniques for developing software, you might get a good comment or two, but people are unlikely to keep going back and reading a thread.
Slashdot still isn't a perfect replacement for Usenet. If you read comp.lang.c or similar, you'll learn a lot more than you will from Slashdot about technical stuff.
If you like open source development, it's wonderful to spend some time in the Freenode channel for the project you like hacking on. It's nice to be able to talk with people who are also interested in the same ideas you are, and not just work in a vacuum.
Freenode singlehandedly restarted my interest in IRC.
The reason children get used so effectively is because they make a phenomenal psychological tool.
A salesman wants to find some irrational point that his customers have that he can exploit, and wants to have uninformed customers for the same reason -- so that he can have a better assessment of the situation than those customers. That places him in a position where he can make money playing off the lack of knowledge and irrationality of his customers.
Children fit this bill perfectly. First-time parents are uninformed about children and have a strong emotional attachment ("Oh, what if we screw up little Billy forever?!")
You know, in the US, there is a very strong correllation between how socially conservative an area is and how thinly populated the area is. More population density, more liberal.
Australia is one of the few industrialized nations that is more thinly populated than the United States.
My guess is that you will probably get breakage -- RH9 has a few years on it by now.
I don't think that RH supports skipping versions when upgrading. It may work, it may not.
Unless you're really interested in learning about your system by breaking it six ways to Sunday, I'd probably take a deep breath and suck down *all* the Fedora Core CD images and upgrade incrementally through them. Yes, all 20+ CD images.
You don't actually need every CD image -- you don't need the CDs that just contain source, for example. I don't know which ones you can skip, though.:-| Sorry.
You might try fedoraforum.org for a better answer.
I think the idea is that SELinux is fine on a server that's doing more-or-less standard things. I know that it can interfere with hobbyist stuff, where you're significantly changing the system around. I also don't think that the end user is supposed to directly write SELinux policy rules, but to use high-level tools that control it (though I'm unaware of what tools exist to do this). SELinux is more of a toolkit for letting you build systems that provide secure environments than actually such a secure environment.
Also, I'm unaware of any ties between TCPA and SELinux. I would be surprised if such exist -- SELinux was done by the NSA, which obviously has little stake in DRM.
In terms of performance, I can tell you that I can play Darwinia and NWN, though both have slowdown at places (and NWN unnecessarily limits any card that doesn't support texture compression to minimum-resolution textures). It's not a card that would be acceptable for someone seriously interested in playing modern games, however.
Good question. No, the 9250 uses the RV280, not the R300. I've had some interest in the R300 project, but last time I looked at it, it was nowhere near as far along as the R200 code. The R200 drivers have been part of DRI for quite some time.
And even the R200 drivers have problems. I can't use the accelerated framebuffer driver at the same time as xorg (I have to use the standard VESA one). I don't have texture compression support, despite the fact that my card supports it (this may be because S3 has the texture compression format used in graphics cards patented -- not sure). While the drivers are usable, I *have* managed to hang the system before while playing 3d games as a non-root user -- that could be an xorg bug or a R200 bug.
I haven't used the official ATI drivers after one attempt long ago where I couldn't get them working.
I've been using RHL and Fedora for a long time, though, and never bothered to learn the GUI. The GUIs always change and shift around -- first there was the Tk control-panel back in the day, then system-config, then a sequence of other utilities. If you learn some of the GUI, you wind up having to relearn the thing down the road. The config files stay in the same place over the years.
Although that does disable selinux earlier in the boot process, which, I guess, could be useful if somehow selinux was preventing you from booting.
You'd add "selinux=0" to the kernel arguments by (E)diting the boot option and then (E)diting the line starting with "kernel". That'd disable it for the current boot. To permanently disable it, you can edit/boot/grub/grub.conf and add "selinux=0" to the list of arguments after "kernel".
I ran into this mostly because I wanted to try out reiserfs v3 (and reiserfs does not support selinux).
FWIW, while I've seen the benchmarks that should mean that resiser is somewhat faster than ext3, I was kinda disappointed -- I didn't notice any speed benefit on my machine.
Actually, this *is* a bug. It was not intentional on the part of the Fedora folks.
Of course, I don't *like* binary drivers very much, but ATI and NVidia have agreed to stick with 'em if you want 3d support on their modern cards. I have a Radeon 9250 (with the 128-bit datapath), which is about as peppy a card as you can get and still have open source drivers.
If the Open Graphics Project ever releases any hardware, unless it's $400 or something like that, I'll buy it -- it'll be fully open source.
If one vendor would release even a half-decent card and support it fully with open-source drivers, I'd buy it in a moment (binary microcode is okay, but I want everything running host-side to be OSS).
I know that few people feel this way, and most gamers are happy just using binary drivers and the current NVidia or ATI cards, but there are a group of people who feel the same way I do.
First, Fedora has an "upgrade" (as opposed to "install") option in the installer that lets you upgrade from the previous version. Download the CD images for FC4, burn 'em, boot off the CD, choose "upgrade", and then do the same for FC5. That's the "supported" path.
Second, it may be possible to just stuff the FC5 CDs in and upgrade directly from FC3 to FC5. Dunno.
Third (and this is probably not the best choice if you're new to Fedora), you can usually upgrade via yum. Download the fedora-release RPM package from FC5, and then run "yum update" and with some tweaking (apt is really better than yum at this kind of whole-system update, since it will actually uninstall things), you can generally update a system on-line. This is really best for people who are hobbyists, like me, and aren't worried about a server going down and can handle fixing any breakage. Red Hat doesn't support this approach, and while I've done this for a long time, there have been some nasty interactions -- on one version I remember, RH didn't include a dependency on fsck, and the new kernel required a new modutils that was incompatible both with the old kernel and the old modutils. Doing this meant that you'd get a new kernel with a new modutils, but one that couldn't boot without the new fsck. You do tend to learn a lot about your system doing this.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
If you have the desire to play - try Sudoku, Kakuro or Chess! These three games will make your brains sharper - video games will only make you dumb.
All those will teach you something.
Chess will teach you how to do high-level pattern matching on chess pieces to win chess games.
Darwinia will teach you how to do high-level pattern matching on positions of characters to win Darwinia games.
Both provide almost no real-world benefits compared to doing something intentionally educational like reading Wikipedia. However, not everyone is trying to better themselves constantly, you know?
Okay, let me put this differently. Arnold Schwartzenegger movies generally contain a large deal of killing on the part of Arnie. Are these movies incitement to kill?
First of all, morality is not just a set of social norms, it's about discovering how to live a life that does as little harm to others and as much good to others as possible.
That is shorthand for a set of social norms. You're simplying it a bit by leaving "harm" and "good" undefined -- that's where the society-relative variables come in.
Commonly accepted forms of harm include pain, coercion, force, killing. You can try to argue that causing another person pain is good in general, or that coercing them is good in general, and so on, but to me that's just going down the road of stupid. Please note that I'm not suggesting these can be completely avoided, and such actions may even be morally necessary. One example would be that using force to constrain someone from committing murders might be necessary. In such cases, using the minimum force necessary is the goal of the moral life.
Sure, you can use some general rules of thumb, because most societies have some general standards in common for what ought to be done. See the "Comparative morality among cultures" section of the WP article I linked to.
Murder is killing, so it goes into the don't allow it bin. You use the laws to create the minimum of force necessary to prevent it, as best you can. You certainly don't leave it up to small groups of people. You don't let people have duels to the death even if they think it is fun.
Except that this exactly was allowed and in some cases would actually be considered immoral in the past -- it would be dishonorable to back down from a duel. Unless you feel that the metric of harm has changed over the years, it would seem that this would be a good example of how this is society-relative.
The existence of obscene materials is comparatively harmless, though in the case of child pornography there's enough evidence that it encourages the harm of children that the force involved in removing it can probably be justified.
I suspect that alcohol causes at least as much by way of damages. Is the drinking of alcohol immoral?
Slavery is one of the worst offenders: pain, coercion, force, killing, all in one package.
Christianity accepts slavery -- there is a large canon of text regarding the appropriate way to keep slaves in the Bible. Is the Bible or Christianity immoral? There are many people who would probably say that Christianity *defines* morality.
The same thing, incidently, goes for at least limited forms of rape (war captives).
1. Murder. Does it really seem reasonable to allow a state to define murder? Should a state be allowed to say that killing poor people for sport is ok?
I think that few societies are going to allow outright killing for sport, simply because that tends to, y'know, make civilization collapse and all that.
However, I could see a state allow, say, dueling between two consenting parties. I think that it would probably be a bad idea, but that's not the point. Dueling *was* legal in the civilized world for quite some time, and society seemed to keep functioning.
2. Obscenity. Does it really seem ok for a state to be allowed to allow child pornography?
Absolutely. I personally don't have any problem with child pornography, per se.
The only practical grounds I'm aware of for making possession of and production of child pornography illegal is because of possible concerns that the production industry will result in sexual abuse of children (a whole different ballgame). The rationale behind making possession a felony is that some of those who possess child pornography will be funding that industry. It's similar to the rationale behind making it a felony to possess controlled substances. It's not that you're directly hurting someone else, it's that you're funding people that society has deemed it valuable to squish.
Direct damage from child pornography? When National Geographic goes to Africa or somewhere and takes a picture of a bunch of people, including kids, in the nude squatting around a campfire, said kids somehow avoid being grieviously damaged.
In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is thirteen and both being married and having sex. It's just a function of the current social norms on what is approved of in terms of sexual activity and things related to sexual activity in today's society.
I don't think that any states *are* going to legalize child pornography, even given the option. It tends to piss off a lot of people who adhere to said social norms. But as for it being okay for a state to choose its own laws here -- sure, I don't see why not.
3. Wealth Distribution (taxes). This one I guess I can't think of a good argument against, because there's no fundamentally inescapable coercion involved, as is the case with all the others.
States do make their own tax laws.
As for federal tax, we tried having a federal government that couldn't tax people very early on. See the Continental Congress. It flopped financially.
4. Theft. Same argument as murder. Weaker if you're only going to consider non violent thefts.
If it's so obvious, why not allow the states to make that obvious decision?
What about situations like theft to retrieve stolen property?
5. Rape. Same argument as murder.
Same counterargument.
6. Slavery. Should a state be allowed to make it's own decision about slavery?
Yes, I think so, though I don't think I'd go to war over the point.
morally, should be decided by the most global authority available, which in the case of US states is the federal government.
Morality is just the current set of social norms. It's kind of silly to use it in an argument about whether social norms should be enforced.
I am sure you could classify BDSM as 'an incitement to violence' relatively easily depending on how you look at it.
Yes, if you were a conservative Christian. On acid.
Basically, the appeals court said that there was no example of what the plaintiffs had in mind.
So what we need to resolve the whole issue is one valiant defender of civil rights to selflessly browse through porn illegal in their locale?
The problem is that while Slashdot is a good place for general technical-social discussion (the sort of stuff like Wired likes to talk about) and some technical things, it's a little limited for in-depth technical discussions. The stories fly by too quickly, whisking threads away, and the folks that read it are not all developers.
If you want to talk about techniques for developing software, you might get a good comment or two, but people are unlikely to keep going back and reading a thread.
Slashdot still isn't a perfect replacement for Usenet. If you read comp.lang.c or similar, you'll learn a lot more than you will from Slashdot about technical stuff.
If you like open source development, it's wonderful to spend some time in the Freenode channel for the project you like hacking on. It's nice to be able to talk with people who are also interested in the same ideas you are, and not just work in a vacuum.
Freenode singlehandedly restarted my interest in IRC.
I thought it was a scientists job to find the truth.
Truth is often lacking in short-term profitability.
Someone has to pay those scientists.
Because Microsoft has its own weighty share of technically incompetent people, perhaps?
The reason children get used so effectively is because they make a phenomenal psychological tool.
A salesman wants to find some irrational point that his customers have that he can exploit, and wants to have uninformed customers for the same reason -- so that he can have a better assessment of the situation than those customers. That places him in a position where he can make money playing off the lack of knowledge and irrationality of his customers.
Children fit this bill perfectly. First-time parents are uninformed about children and have a strong emotional attachment ("Oh, what if we screw up little Billy forever?!")
"What about the children" just plain works.
You know, in the US, there is a very strong correllation between how socially conservative an area is and how thinly populated the area is. More population density, more liberal.
Australia is one of the few industrialized nations that is more thinly populated than the United States.
I'd say you just kicked the hornets' nest pretty solidly, there.
FWIW, I can run Tropico nicely under wine-0.9.10-1.fc4.
I dunno if it's exactly what you're looking for, but have you tried out NationStates? It's free and all that...
My guess is that you will probably get breakage -- RH9 has a few years on it by now.
:-| Sorry.
I don't think that RH supports skipping versions when upgrading. It may work, it may not.
Unless you're really interested in learning about your system by breaking it six ways to Sunday, I'd probably take a deep breath and suck down *all* the Fedora Core CD images and upgrade incrementally through them. Yes, all 20+ CD images.
You don't actually need every CD image -- you don't need the CDs that just contain source, for example. I don't know which ones you can skip, though.
You might try fedoraforum.org for a better answer.
I think the idea is that SELinux is fine on a server that's doing more-or-less standard things. I know that it can interfere with hobbyist stuff, where you're significantly changing the system around. I also don't think that the end user is supposed to directly write SELinux policy rules, but to use high-level tools that control it (though I'm unaware of what tools exist to do this). SELinux is more of a toolkit for letting you build systems that provide secure environments than actually such a secure environment.
Also, I'm unaware of any ties between TCPA and SELinux. I would be surprised if such exist -- SELinux was done by the NSA, which obviously has little stake in DRM.
In terms of performance, I can tell you that I can play Darwinia and NWN, though both have slowdown at places (and NWN unnecessarily limits any card that doesn't support texture compression to minimum-resolution textures). It's not a card that would be acceptable for someone seriously interested in playing modern games, however.
Good question. No, the 9250 uses the RV280, not the R300. I've had some interest in the R300 project, but last time I looked at it, it was nowhere near as far along as the R200 code. The R200 drivers have been part of DRI for quite some time.
And even the R200 drivers have problems. I can't use the accelerated framebuffer driver at the same time as xorg (I have to use the standard VESA one). I don't have texture compression support, despite the fact that my card supports it (this may be because S3 has the texture compression format used in graphics cards patented -- not sure). While the drivers are usable, I *have* managed to hang the system before while playing 3d games as a non-root user -- that could be an xorg bug or a R200 bug.
I haven't used the official ATI drivers after one attempt long ago where I couldn't get them working.
Fair enough.
I've been using RHL and Fedora for a long time, though, and never bothered to learn the GUI. The GUIs always change and shift around -- first there was the Tk control-panel back in the day, then system-config, then a sequence of other utilities. If you learn some of the GUI, you wind up having to relearn the thing down the road. The config files stay in the same place over the years.
Although that does disable selinux earlier in the boot process, which, I guess, could be useful if somehow selinux was preventing you from booting.
/boot/grub/grub.conf and add "selinux=0" to the list of arguments after "kernel".
You'd add "selinux=0" to the kernel arguments by (E)diting the boot option and then (E)diting the line starting with "kernel". That'd disable it for the current boot. To permanently disable it, you can edit
I ran into this mostly because I wanted to try out reiserfs v3 (and reiserfs does not support selinux).
FWIW, while I've seen the benchmarks that should mean that resiser is somewhat faster than ext3, I was kinda disappointed -- I didn't notice any speed benefit on my machine.
Surely that only disables selinux for the kernel being used to execute the installer, and does not actually affect the installed copy?
Actually, this *is* a bug. It was not intentional on the part of the Fedora folks.
Of course, I don't *like* binary drivers very much, but ATI and NVidia have agreed to stick with 'em if you want 3d support on their modern cards. I have a Radeon 9250 (with the 128-bit datapath), which is about as peppy a card as you can get and still have open source drivers.
If the Open Graphics Project ever releases any hardware, unless it's $400 or something like that, I'll buy it -- it'll be fully open source.
If one vendor would release even a half-decent card and support it fully with open-source drivers, I'd buy it in a moment (binary microcode is okay, but I want everything running host-side to be OSS).
I know that few people feel this way, and most gamers are happy just using binary drivers and the current NVidia or ATI cards, but there are a group of people who feel the same way I do.
You know, I didn't even realize that this was the case -- I only have .ogg and .flac files.
There are three things you can do:
:-)
First, Fedora has an "upgrade" (as opposed to "install") option in the installer that lets you upgrade from the previous version. Download the CD images for FC4, burn 'em, boot off the CD, choose "upgrade", and then do the same for FC5. That's the "supported" path.
Second, it may be possible to just stuff the FC5 CDs in and upgrade directly from FC3 to FC5. Dunno.
Third (and this is probably not the best choice if you're new to Fedora), you can usually upgrade via yum. Download the fedora-release RPM package from FC5, and then run "yum update" and with some tweaking (apt is really better than yum at this kind of whole-system update, since it will actually uninstall things), you can generally update a system on-line. This is really best for people who are hobbyists, like me, and aren't worried about a server going down and can handle fixing any breakage. Red Hat doesn't support this approach, and while I've done this for a long time, there have been some nasty interactions -- on one version I remember, RH didn't include a dependency on fsck, and the new kernel required a new modutils that was incompatible both with the old kernel and the old modutils. Doing this meant that you'd get a new kernel with a new modutils, but one that couldn't boot without the new fsck. You do tend to learn a lot about your system doing this.