This is a fabulous post, I must say. Ownership of an idea is silly as a value in and of itself.
People familiar with copyright, patent and trademark as concepts and law will probably agree with you - if idea ownership is an end in and of itself it's silly. Similarly, as you point out, ownership of goods is based on a historical attempt to trace ownership of raw materials and compensation for labor put into the process of transforming said materials.
However, you discount many important parts of ownership. Ownership is in fact the only mechanism known that works at providing incentives for the use of capital to transform raw materials into useful goods. Without ownership, incentive is lost. Then you have to turn to coersion. Economics may be the "dismal science" but it is also a realistic science. While you might successfully argue to me that ownership itself is not a "fundamental value", I remain convinced that the good of society and of the many (i.e. a utilitarian good) has meaning - and the only way to achieve that good is through ownership (incentivizing production, and making stuff that lets me not live in a cave and hunt with sticks) or coersion (communist economics, do it for the good of the many or else, question the system and suffer the consequences).
I believe that coersion is a greater ill than ownership, and that living in a cave and hunting with a stick is pretty bad too, as it generally leaves humans too busy trying to survive to think about nice things like philosophy.
Finally, on the idea of ideas as property, the argument is again utilitarian for the existence of IP, patents and copyright. People won't write great novels or poems purely out of the kindness of their hearts, and the options for supporting such beneficial work break down to coersion or ownership.
There are a lot of instances where patent law is being abused, overly broad and silly patents are being granted, the system is outdated and protection lengths are absurd, and we all agree on these things. The details are complicated, defining who should "own" what and for how long is complicated, but that doesn't mean that usage protections and IP are out-of-whack, silly and provide no benefit to society.
True, you can distribute derivatives, but you cannot use the code, nor derivatives in a company setting.
This is the absurd restriction here. You cannot use internally for "business operations" nor can you sell derivative works under this license.
So you quote only part of the story. "Any non-commercial purpose, including distributing derivatives" explicitly excludes a large user base from even _using_ let along modifying.
Furthermore, your derivative works may only be distributed for non-company use (I won't say non-commercial, since that usually implies don't sell it for money. This implies don't sell it for money and don't use it in any organization that has something called "business operations" without defining any more parameters).
This post is one large postmodern fallacy. I understand your claim that the Taliban are misguided and that they are attempting to legislate religion rather than finding morality through the heart, but this is about where the similarity to anything resembling Western-style democratic government ends.
This does not in any way indicate a vast similarity between the two governmental structures other than the basic fact that they are both governments and therefore represent attempts to legislate a common understanding of "workable" cultural codes and compromises under which people live their day-to-day lives, work, eat, sleep, shit and fuck.
The similarities end there. The Taliban bases their moral code on the most extreme and doctrinaire interpretation possible of the Koran and religious exegesis by that over the years from the most insane of Islamists. Western-style democracy bases its moral code on a few fundamental first principles like Hillel's "Golden Rule" (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) and a tradition based on the value of freedom and the individual, equality, and other values derived by way of application of reason to the human condition. Is Western society influenced by religious values? Sure. But the superiority of a system that embraces and allows for all religious practices, except where they are imposed on others, carries an aesthetic that is human in origin and ultimately founded on rational social behavior, and not limited to any particular government, society or people.
In other words -- I reject the postmodern hypothesis that any culture is as good as any other culture and we cannot judge them as we are inherently polluted by our own culture's view point. I strive to understand other cultures, but I rely on observation and reason, firm scientific principles. Humanist philosophy is _not_ just another religion, it is the pursuit of truth and the rejection of irrational, false principles, with which radical Islamist societies are riddled.
I met lots of annoying people just like you at Harvard - they repeat this mantra about how we are misguided in judging any other culture. I say that's bunk. We can value other cultures for their positive aspects and reject their negative aspects in the same way as we do our own -- I certainly don't blindly accept all practices, of the people, nor of the government of the United States. Nevertheless, the fact that I live in a country where I am allowed to hold such an opinion puts me miles ahead of any unfortunate Afghanis still left to live under the Taliban regime.
Umm... you do know we tried to do this once, right? Remember, we blew up several terrorist training camps in western Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border? Those were Osama Bin Laden's camps, and believe me, we were trying to hit him. The reason we don't do it is that we are terrified of the reprisal from Islamic nutcase terrorists and from our "ally" Arab nations if we undertook an all-out attack on Bin Laden camps. It would be even more embarrassing if we kept missing him, and then he'd blow up more of our embassies.
Frankly, I just think we're incompetent sometimes.
If you write an application, you can link it to anything you want. If you choose to distribute it under the GPL, then that's fine, as you hold copyright.
It's not so clear if you take another person's GPLed code and link it to a binary module. Then YOU may be in violation of the GPL, unless they have made some sort of special exception for this condition.
However, this is no way affects the license under which said binary module was previously distributed. You can't affect the license to code that you don't own copyright to, period. A license is between the copyright holder and the licensee, and that's why this is pure FUD.
The GPLed libraries that people try to link to from proprietary applications that you cite as examples above did cause problems, but that's all about using existing code you obtain under the GPL license and linking TO IT from binary code of your own. These situations have nothing to do with changing the licensing conditions of software you didn't write.
In other words, you sir, are a FUD-spewing, Microserf.
Hmm. Apparently you need to go do some homework on how hard it is to factor large pseudoprimes.
Not to say that there couldn't be implementation weaknesses in PGP, but it's certainly reviewed and audited by a lot of folks.
As somebody who has worked on quantum computers (one of the few technologies that could make "cracking" RSA and lots of other NP-hard-ish problems possible), I'll tell you it's not that easy. The Math PhDs might have some luck, since nobody has ever proved definitively that RSA is NP-complete. But this is far from a certain bet.
I do sincerely doubt that the NSA has built a sufficiently large quantum computer than deals with the quantum state cohesion issues over a computational timescale though.:)
Brute force computing power won't even remotely cut it against 128 bit IDEA/ 112 bit 3DES, nor against 1024 bit RSA.
1) Exercise as others have helpfully mentioned
2) Buy a Herman Miller Aeron chair. This will be the best 700 dollars you ever spent. Your back will love you for it. I got one for work and one for my office at home, I loved it so much.
A bunch of repliers on this post have pointed out that Mr. Wheat's reply to Cliff's review is overly hostile. It certainly isn't friendly in content, but based on past observations, this is par for the course for academics or those who fancy themselves as such when faced with criticism from nonacademics.
The problem here is that Wheat's rebuttal is suffused in the realm of the English literature academe. He _brags_ that he hasn't read script notes, etc. He is just interpreting symbolism in his own way and getting hot and bothered about it.
This jibes poorly with the practical minded (read: engineers, programmers, and general tech geeks) Slashdot audience, which says collectively: "Go read the fucking notes from Kubrick and Clarke". While I can't claim to have read those notes on the creation of 2001, a couple of points are obvious.
For one thing, these basic allegorical connections that Wheat is referring to are clearly not just the perception of a wacko reader. They are pretty obvious (both the Odyssey and the Also Sprach Zarathustra connections). The problem is that Wheat carries things too far for this audience and thereby discredits himself to the/. crowd. He also gets so hung up on attacking Cliff over a couple of detailed points that seem far fetched to us or aren't mentioned or connected to in any way in the supporting literature.
But let's face it: whether the three rocket jets are the collective anus of the spaceship or not is not a question to be resolved in the realm of the factual. To Wheat, it's a symbol supporting a basic theme (2001 -> TSZ). To us, it sounds silly and unsupported by fact. Neither side could possibly disprove the other side, and thus people get hot and bothered. It's a silly and narrow point.
As for some of the other symbols TMA-1, Bowman, Tycho - are they "real"? I don't know, what is real? To an English major or literary theorist they are real. To an engineer looking at this story and how it was constructed they are not real. Was Discovery supposed to look vaguely human? Well, it had an AI in it, a brain, it "died" at the end of the movie. Nobody denies these plot elements. I don't personally think Kubrick said "let's give Discovery a big ole anus and we'll all get a scatological chuckle over it", but does it matter to me?
Symbolism provides a useful way to understand and interpret a story. Wheat is too caught up in proving every symbolic connection is absolute, true and intended by Kubrick, and most of you are too caught up with "proving" Wheat is a moron to draw those conclusions.
Sorry, you are right. That was my mistake - I misremembered the QPL, as I have sort of lost interest in tracking all of these roll-your-own license games.
However, the QPL does allow linking with non-GPLed Open Source-ish software, so it gives developers more freedom to choose their own license (no, I know, this is not what the FSF calls Freedom, but I didn't mean to set off a philisophical argument).
Qt is dual licensed under the GPL and the QPL. The QPL does not lock people out who don't use the GPL nor does it lock people out who don't use the QPL. It's closer in intent and spirit to the LGPL, as I understand it (and IANAL so don't take my word on it).
But I know enough to know that the above poster is spewing FUD.
Err, nope. You must mean the Swing classes and JFC infrastructure for user interfaces. That is definitely not the speediest or most well designed stuff in the world.
Server side apps written in Java have the general benefit that you can produce the same application in far less time taking advantage of a more standardized set of library classes and simpler language syntax than C++ which makes team development much more pleasant. Of course, when I'm building end user GUI applications, I don't do it using Swing. But there are Java bindings for Qt now and other interesting options to check out too that might avoid a lot of the annoyances of Swing.
Which is quite interesting, because @themoment, who is supplying IBM's software for this, got into the business of dynamic e-commerce (auction/RFQ/bid-ask markets) in the interests of increasing information flow to maximize efficiency in markets, not to fuck over people by concealing information. Hehe. We all sell out our technology to the highest bidder in the end though, and if IBM wants to pay to increase their margins, you'll sell to them.
Protective suits stop Alpha radiation in addition to preventing contact with or inhaling of Alpha emitters. They prevent contamination by all radioactive materials as well (beta and gamma emitters), though the beta and gamma radiation itself will go right through the suit.
I'm all for bitchslapping spammers, but Kozmo was the best thing in my life. And now Kozmo is gone. And you rub it in my face by _suing_ them for 50 dollars, when you should have been _giving_ them 50 dollars and thanking them for lugging groceries, munchies, booze, cigarettes and pr0n to your lazy ass.
Kozmo took care of me when I was sick, tired or just feeling lazy.
Everything from a Dreamcast and a bunch of new and used Dreamcast games, to the weekly cherry garcia frozen yogurt cravings. At least one DVD purchase a week, and usually a rental every week or two.
Occasionally even a porn DVD rental, which I never would have ripped to a DivX movie and distributed globally, or anything like that.
I got fed because of Kozmo - I work 80 hours a week, and don't have time to go to grocery stores.
I got laid because of Kozmo - you can take a girl home after a date and order movies from Kozmo and skip that unromantic trip to the video store, not to mention you have to sit around for 45 minutes waiting for the movie. I was _always_ getting it on by the time the movie got to my apartment.
I was happy because of Kozmo. They made my workaholic, geeky life bearable.
DON'T SUE MY KOZMO, DAMMIT! KOZMO, COME BACK! NOOOOOOO......
Re:Good question in "talkbacks"
on
QT Mozilla Port
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· Score: 2
You are dead on about pavlov. He is the major reason Mozilla is even close to usable on high end Linux boxes today. Based on Bugzilla logs and conversations, he was the guy who checked in all the enhancements that made real improvements in performance for Mozilla on Linux.
Anyway, I haven't followed this stuff in ages really. I don't know about gcc and mozilla. Not enough of a guru to explain that one.:)
I believe that's a big part of the point of the theorem:
You can get it in the limit from below, but it converges very, very slowly --- you can never know how close you are --- there is no computable regulator of convergence, there is no way to decide how far out to go to get the first N bits of W right.
So it looks like it appears to converge, but you can't really know whether it's converging or not.:) Or something along those lines.
I believe the posters point was the the members of the set of _significant_ irrational numbers (i.e. those that occur in "fundamental" mathematical proofs) are mostly on the order of magnitude of 1. But this itself might just be one of those random, proof-averse facts that this theorem theorizes about itself. Enough to give me a headache in any case.
I don't think this study disproved the general concept. As you said there are lots of other factors that CAN'T be controlled for in a double blind study. What was tested were the claims the therapeutic touch practitioners themselves made, namely they CLAIMED they could sense fields even without seeing the person, through cardboard, whatever. Those claims were refuted to some confidence interval. That doesn't "prove that therapeutic touch is fake" or that "people can't sense bioelectric fields". It just proves that the people practicing therapeutic touch are either misinformed, ignorant of what they are really doing, or in some way think they can do something that they cannot. Which sheds some light on the general likelihood of the rest of their claims being accurate. It "proves" that their perception of what they do is not really what they do. Whether what they do helps people or not, this study says nothing about.
As a desktop OS? Probably true, you won't save enough money for it to be worth your while and you limit application support. Of course, if your desired application usage is single purpose and not general purpose desktop usage, it may not really matter. On the server side, this comparison is somewhat silly. I mean, I would imagine that a government is dealing with a lot of client/server style systems here and big databases, etc. The cost of the Windows OS is relatively small compared to application cost within the enterprise, and I would assume that is the case for a governmental entity as well. Linux is a rational choice as a *nix OS that runs on low cost hardware and is well supported by the Open Source/Free Software community at large and has a large number of free and low cost apps available for it. Yah, the professionals may cost money to set it up, but a well set up and managed set of Linux boxes can have a lower TCO than Windows.
See other comments. Problem isn't so much bandwidth with X apps (especially over DSL line, where you should have plenty of bandwidth), it's latency due to the chattiness of X, i.e. it's tendency to make lots of roundtrips for small chunks of information that have serial interdependencies.
You are 100% on the ball. It is absurd, and relies on hard-core psychological mind-screwing to produce indoctrinated believers. A real "modern religion" would would make the target of worship and the doctrine of the faith so compelling to the modern mind that it grew of it's own accord. I believe that Jesus and the disciples did that incredibly effectively 2000 years ago. It doesn't exactly jibe with the modern mind anymore to the same degree.
But I believe you're mistaken if you believe that was L Ron Hubbard's goal. A moderately intelligent person could do just what I described. L Ron Hubbard was a nutcase, was embedded in the sci fi he wrote and I believe, like many in that realm, really disliked humanity as a whole. In other words, his religion was not created to produce a positive constructive influence to provide moral guidance to humanity, but rather was created to prove how he was so damned smart that he could make people genuinely believe the worst sort of sci-fi-babble drivel religion and defend it as if it was the absolute truth. He succeeded in creating a self-propagating organization with the craziest sort of religious mythos. And in his lunacy, I think that's what he wanted. I'm sure his Body Thetans are all laughing somewhere about it now.:)
This may be the case. But other religions make their documents public and don't hide the stories that underly their faith. They are upfront and honest about them and allow their flocks to achieve faith in their own way. Scientology does NOT do this, they conceal and hide information and then indoctrinate, piece by piece over time. THAT is the bad part, not the content of their allegories, although I may find them weird. Note that the Bible and other legitimate religious texts are the collections of collective cultural knowledge and stories built up over the years. They document a set of cultural morality tales. In these cases, L Ron Hubbard wrote his own set of cultural creation myths, etc. about 50 years ago (whenever it was, it was this century in any case). You can believe them as you will - the issue here is the way in which the organization CoS hides, obfuscates, sues, brainwashes, etc. Practices that make cults out of religions.
You touched on another important point.... the computer provides a medium for instant, easy digital exchange of information between all these apps. Just save it as a file and load it up in app 2. If you have a word processor, and an image editing studio, and a video editor, well, you have a lot more trouble moving data around, since they all have to speak the same formats over some sort of plug system. It's more work to wire those damned things together and get them to understand and incorporate each others data than to use your image editing app which does image editing quite nicely on your peecee and then load that into your video editing app, etc. You get the gist. I don't know how general this is, but persisting data and sharing between apps in pure digital format en masse in a hard drive is a pretty killer function of a PC.
Slashdot Mirror
People familiar with copyright, patent and trademark as concepts and law will probably agree with you - if idea ownership is an end in and of itself it's silly. Similarly, as you point out, ownership of goods is based on a historical attempt to trace ownership of raw materials and compensation for labor put into the process of transforming said materials.
However, you discount many important parts of ownership. Ownership is in fact the only mechanism known that works at providing incentives for the use of capital to transform raw materials into useful goods. Without ownership, incentive is lost. Then you have to turn to coersion. Economics may be the "dismal science" but it is also a realistic science. While you might successfully argue to me that ownership itself is not a "fundamental value", I remain convinced that the good of society and of the many (i.e. a utilitarian good) has meaning - and the only way to achieve that good is through ownership (incentivizing production, and making stuff that lets me not live in a cave and hunt with sticks) or coersion (communist economics, do it for the good of the many or else, question the system and suffer the consequences).
I believe that coersion is a greater ill than ownership, and that living in a cave and hunting with a stick is pretty bad too, as it generally leaves humans too busy trying to survive to think about nice things like philosophy.
Finally, on the idea of ideas as property, the argument is again utilitarian for the existence of IP, patents and copyright. People won't write great novels or poems purely out of the kindness of their hearts, and the options for supporting such beneficial work break down to coersion or ownership.
There are a lot of instances where patent law is being abused, overly broad and silly patents are being granted, the system is outdated and protection lengths are absurd, and we all agree on these things. The details are complicated, defining who should "own" what and for how long is complicated, but that doesn't mean that usage protections and IP are out-of-whack, silly and provide no benefit to society.
This is the absurd restriction here. You cannot use internally for "business operations" nor can you sell derivative works under this license.
So you quote only part of the story. "Any non-commercial purpose, including distributing derivatives" explicitly excludes a large user base from even _using_ let along modifying.
Furthermore, your derivative works may only be distributed for non-company use (I won't say non-commercial, since that usually implies don't sell it for money. This implies don't sell it for money and don't use it in any organization that has something called "business operations" without defining any more parameters).
This does not in any way indicate a vast similarity between the two governmental structures other than the basic fact that they are both governments and therefore represent attempts to legislate a common understanding of "workable" cultural codes and compromises under which people live their day-to-day lives, work, eat, sleep, shit and fuck.
The similarities end there. The Taliban bases their moral code on the most extreme and doctrinaire interpretation possible of the Koran and religious exegesis by that over the years from the most insane of Islamists. Western-style democracy bases its moral code on a few fundamental first principles like Hillel's "Golden Rule" (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) and a tradition based on the value of freedom and the individual, equality, and other values derived by way of application of reason to the human condition. Is Western society influenced by religious values? Sure. But the superiority of a system that embraces and allows for all religious practices, except where they are imposed on others, carries an aesthetic that is human in origin and ultimately founded on rational social behavior, and not limited to any particular government, society or people.
In other words -- I reject the postmodern hypothesis that any culture is as good as any other culture and we cannot judge them as we are inherently polluted by our own culture's view point. I strive to understand other cultures, but I rely on observation and reason, firm scientific principles. Humanist philosophy is _not_ just another religion, it is the pursuit of truth and the rejection of irrational, false principles, with which radical Islamist societies are riddled.
I met lots of annoying people just like you at Harvard - they repeat this mantra about how we are misguided in judging any other culture. I say that's bunk. We can value other cultures for their positive aspects and reject their negative aspects in the same way as we do our own -- I certainly don't blindly accept all practices, of the people, nor of the government of the United States. Nevertheless, the fact that I live in a country where I am allowed to hold such an opinion puts me miles ahead of any unfortunate Afghanis still left to live under the Taliban regime.
Frankly, I just think we're incompetent sometimes.
It's not so clear if you take another person's GPLed code and link it to a binary module. Then YOU may be in violation of the GPL, unless they have made some sort of special exception for this condition.
However, this is no way affects the license under which said binary module was previously distributed. You can't affect the license to code that you don't own copyright to, period. A license is between the copyright holder and the licensee, and that's why this is pure FUD.
The GPLed libraries that people try to link to from proprietary applications that you cite as examples above did cause problems, but that's all about using existing code you obtain under the GPL license and linking TO IT from binary code of your own. These situations have nothing to do with changing the licensing conditions of software you didn't write.
In other words, you sir, are a FUD-spewing, Microserf.
Not to say that there couldn't be implementation weaknesses in PGP, but it's certainly reviewed and audited by a lot of folks.
As somebody who has worked on quantum computers (one of the few technologies that could make "cracking" RSA and lots of other NP-hard-ish problems possible), I'll tell you it's not that easy. The Math PhDs might have some luck, since nobody has ever proved definitively that RSA is NP-complete. But this is far from a certain bet.
I do sincerely doubt that the NSA has built a sufficiently large quantum computer than deals with the quantum state cohesion issues over a computational timescale though. :)
Brute force computing power won't even remotely cut it against 128 bit IDEA/ 112 bit 3DES, nor against 1024 bit RSA.
1) Exercise as others have helpfully mentioned
2) Buy a Herman Miller Aeron chair. This will be the best 700 dollars you ever spent. Your back will love you for it. I got one for work and one for my office at home, I loved it so much.
The problem here is that Wheat's rebuttal is suffused in the realm of the English literature academe. He _brags_ that he hasn't read script notes, etc. He is just interpreting symbolism in his own way and getting hot and bothered about it.
This jibes poorly with the practical minded (read: engineers, programmers, and general tech geeks) Slashdot audience, which says collectively: "Go read the fucking notes from Kubrick and Clarke". While I can't claim to have read those notes on the creation of 2001, a couple of points are obvious.
For one thing, these basic allegorical connections that Wheat is referring to are clearly not just the perception of a wacko reader. They are pretty obvious (both the Odyssey and the Also Sprach Zarathustra connections). The problem is that Wheat carries things too far for this audience and thereby discredits himself to the /. crowd. He also gets so hung up on attacking Cliff over a couple of detailed points that seem far fetched to us or aren't mentioned or connected to in any way in the supporting literature.
But let's face it: whether the three rocket jets are the collective anus of the spaceship or not is not a question to be resolved in the realm of the factual. To Wheat, it's a symbol supporting a basic theme (2001 -> TSZ). To us, it sounds silly and unsupported by fact. Neither side could possibly disprove the other side, and thus people get hot and bothered. It's a silly and narrow point.
As for some of the other symbols TMA-1, Bowman, Tycho - are they "real"? I don't know, what is real? To an English major or literary theorist they are real. To an engineer looking at this story and how it was constructed they are not real. Was Discovery supposed to look vaguely human? Well, it had an AI in it, a brain, it "died" at the end of the movie. Nobody denies these plot elements. I don't personally think Kubrick said "let's give Discovery a big ole anus and we'll all get a scatological chuckle over it", but does it matter to me?
Symbolism provides a useful way to understand and interpret a story. Wheat is too caught up in proving every symbolic connection is absolute, true and intended by Kubrick, and most of you are too caught up with "proving" Wheat is a moron to draw those conclusions.
However, the QPL does allow linking with non-GPLed Open Source-ish software, so it gives developers more freedom to choose their own license (no, I know, this is not what the FSF calls Freedom, but I didn't mean to set off a philisophical argument).
But I know enough to know that the above poster is spewing FUD.
Server side apps written in Java have the general benefit that you can produce the same application in far less time taking advantage of a more standardized set of library classes and simpler language syntax than C++ which makes team development much more pleasant. Of course, when I'm building end user GUI applications, I don't do it using Swing. But there are Java bindings for Qt now and other interesting options to check out too that might avoid a lot of the annoyances of Swing.
Agreed one hundred percent. Why are they taking consensual packets (http packets) and routing them, then blackholing them? This is despicable.
Which is quite interesting, because @themoment, who is supplying IBM's software for this, got into the business of dynamic e-commerce (auction/RFQ/bid-ask markets) in the interests of increasing information flow to maximize efficiency in markets, not to fuck over people by concealing information. Hehe. We all sell out our technology to the highest bidder in the end though, and if IBM wants to pay to increase their margins, you'll sell to them.
Protective suits stop Alpha radiation in addition to preventing contact with or inhaling of Alpha emitters. They prevent contamination by all radioactive materials as well (beta and gamma emitters), though the beta and gamma radiation itself will go right through the suit.
Haha! That is truly funny. I'd mod you up, buddy, but I don't want to get a meta-mod smack down.
I'm all for bitchslapping spammers, but Kozmo was the best thing in my life. And now Kozmo is gone. And you rub it in my face by _suing_ them for 50 dollars, when you should have been _giving_ them 50 dollars and thanking them for lugging groceries, munchies, booze, cigarettes and pr0n to your lazy ass. Kozmo took care of me when I was sick, tired or just feeling lazy. Everything from a Dreamcast and a bunch of new and used Dreamcast games, to the weekly cherry garcia frozen yogurt cravings. At least one DVD purchase a week, and usually a rental every week or two. Occasionally even a porn DVD rental, which I never would have ripped to a DivX movie and distributed globally, or anything like that. I got fed because of Kozmo - I work 80 hours a week, and don't have time to go to grocery stores. I got laid because of Kozmo - you can take a girl home after a date and order movies from Kozmo and skip that unromantic trip to the video store, not to mention you have to sit around for 45 minutes waiting for the movie. I was _always_ getting it on by the time the movie got to my apartment. I was happy because of Kozmo. They made my workaholic, geeky life bearable. DON'T SUE MY KOZMO, DAMMIT! KOZMO, COME BACK! NOOOOOOO......
Anyway, I haven't followed this stuff in ages really. I don't know about gcc and mozilla. Not enough of a guru to explain that one. :)
You can get it in the limit from below, but it converges very, very slowly --- you can never know how close you are --- there is no computable regulator of convergence, there is no way to decide how far out to go to get the first N bits of W right.
So it looks like it appears to converge, but you can't really know whether it's converging or not.I believe the posters point was the the members of the set of _significant_ irrational numbers (i.e. those that occur in "fundamental" mathematical proofs) are mostly on the order of magnitude of 1. But this itself might just be one of those random, proof-averse facts that this theorem theorizes about itself. Enough to give me a headache in any case.
I don't think this study disproved the general concept. As you said there are lots of other factors that CAN'T be controlled for in a double blind study. What was tested were the claims the therapeutic touch practitioners themselves made, namely they CLAIMED they could sense fields even without seeing the person, through cardboard, whatever. Those claims were refuted to some confidence interval. That doesn't "prove that therapeutic touch is fake" or that "people can't sense bioelectric fields". It just proves that the people practicing therapeutic touch are either misinformed, ignorant of what they are really doing, or in some way think they can do something that they cannot. Which sheds some light on the general likelihood of the rest of their claims being accurate. It "proves" that their perception of what they do is not really what they do. Whether what they do helps people or not, this study says nothing about.
As a desktop OS? Probably true, you won't save enough money for it to be worth your while and you limit application support. Of course, if your desired application usage is single purpose and not general purpose desktop usage, it may not really matter. On the server side, this comparison is somewhat silly. I mean, I would imagine that a government is dealing with a lot of client/server style systems here and big databases, etc. The cost of the Windows OS is relatively small compared to application cost within the enterprise, and I would assume that is the case for a governmental entity as well. Linux is a rational choice as a *nix OS that runs on low cost hardware and is well supported by the Open Source/Free Software community at large and has a large number of free and low cost apps available for it. Yah, the professionals may cost money to set it up, but a well set up and managed set of Linux boxes can have a lower TCO than Windows.
See other comments. Problem isn't so much bandwidth with X apps (especially over DSL line, where you should have plenty of bandwidth), it's latency due to the chattiness of X, i.e. it's tendency to make lots of roundtrips for small chunks of information that have serial interdependencies.
But I believe you're mistaken if you believe that was L Ron Hubbard's goal. A moderately intelligent person could do just what I described. L Ron Hubbard was a nutcase, was embedded in the sci fi he wrote and I believe, like many in that realm, really disliked humanity as a whole. In other words, his religion was not created to produce a positive constructive influence to provide moral guidance to humanity, but rather was created to prove how he was so damned smart that he could make people genuinely believe the worst sort of sci-fi-babble drivel religion and defend it as if it was the absolute truth. He succeeded in creating a self-propagating organization with the craziest sort of religious mythos. And in his lunacy, I think that's what he wanted. I'm sure his Body Thetans are all laughing somewhere about it now. :)
This may be the case. But other religions make their documents public and don't hide the stories that underly their faith. They are upfront and honest about them and allow their flocks to achieve faith in their own way. Scientology does NOT do this, they conceal and hide information and then indoctrinate, piece by piece over time. THAT is the bad part, not the content of their allegories, although I may find them weird. Note that the Bible and other legitimate religious texts are the collections of collective cultural knowledge and stories built up over the years. They document a set of cultural morality tales. In these cases, L Ron Hubbard wrote his own set of cultural creation myths, etc. about 50 years ago (whenever it was, it was this century in any case). You can believe them as you will - the issue here is the way in which the organization CoS hides, obfuscates, sues, brainwashes, etc. Practices that make cults out of religions.
You touched on another important point.... the computer provides a medium for instant, easy digital exchange of information between all these apps. Just save it as a file and load it up in app 2. If you have a word processor, and an image editing studio, and a video editor, well, you have a lot more trouble moving data around, since they all have to speak the same formats over some sort of plug system. It's more work to wire those damned things together and get them to understand and incorporate each others data than to use your image editing app which does image editing quite nicely on your peecee and then load that into your video editing app, etc. You get the gist. I don't know how general this is, but persisting data and sharing between apps in pure digital format en masse in a hard drive is a pretty killer function of a PC.