No, my observational might tells me that just under 50% of the American population (those about to vote for Bush) deny any wrongdoing by Washington. And in many states, like where I live, far, far less than 50%. We have an open society that tolerates debate and dissent - not that John Ashcroft wouldn't love to change that, but he hasn't succeeded on a large scale yet.
Democracy shouldn't favor the informed over the uninformed.
I'm not sure what you mean by "shouldn't" here. If you are suggesting that in an ideal world, the opinions of the stupid should have as much weight as those of the smart, then I strongly disagree with you.
If you mean that we, the intellectual elite, require the services of the imbeciles on our side of the political spectrum to cast a ballot to maintain the facade that they have control over their political destiny, then yes, I agree with you. It would scarcely be fair if the far right got to tell their religious nutjob Rush Limbaugh-listening, Bill-O'Reilly watchers who to vote for if we couldn't get our MTV-generation, pot smoking, hippie youth, and unemployed black female Oprah watchers to get out and vote in our general direction.
Don't fetishize democracy too much, buddy. It's just the least bad system we've come up with so far. That doesn't mean it's good, or that dumb uneducated people really deserve a say what the government is doing.
Okay, then enlighten me, how is it done? I assumed the answer was diapers, bedpans, and lots of unpleasant manual cleanup labor for the nurses who tend to them. Not exactly practical for a long hibernation-enabled journey. If you could point me to a link to the automated crap-cleaner-upper machine of which you speak, I'd be curious to learn more.
This has to be the most foul discussion I've ever had on/. .
If you've never tried KDE before, then give MEPIS a try. MEPIS comes as a bootable CD, so you don't even have to install it to try it out, and if you like it, installing to hard drive is very easy.
Personally, I've gone through GNOME and KDE desktops over the years in Linux-land. These days, when I use Linux, I far prefer to use KDE.
In most respects, the projects have very comparable goals, and both seem like they are of pretty high quality, though MEPIS has been around a while longer (but Ubuntu is better funded) - kind of a toss up in my mind. Both apparently do a very good job of keeping things Debian compatible, and apparently Ubuntu is just as easy to install as MEPIS (though it's hard for me to imagine, since MEPIS is the easiest OS install I've ever seen, and can be run without installing at all on the boot CD).
As far as I know MEPIS is 100% compatible with Debian unstable repositories, and comes configured with those repositories in its list. MEPIS is great - I guess if you hate KDE, you probably won't like MEPIS' default configuration. If you hate GNOME (like me) you probably won't like Ubuntu. Other than that, the projects, their organizations and so on are very similar in aim and scope and quality. Ubuntu is better funded, but MEPIS has a more well-established user base at this point, and a great community support site at mepislovers.org. Basically, I'd say it's a toss up, and probably best to try them both if you don't already know whether you're a KDE or GNOME person.
Re:Does hibernation slow or stop aging?
on
Hibernating to Mars
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Umm... how would you evacuate waste from a hibernating person's body if they are being constantly fed? Sounds like an unpleasant engineering challenge indeed.
Yes, I'm happy too, but a bit apprehensive. The Mozillazine Firefox forums, which used to be a friendly place for new users to get support and to visit and help others occasionally, but generally a great resource for learning about FF/Mozilla, have become a massive troll and flamefest. Annoying people come by to say how they tried Firefox and it didn't have Java or Flash out of the box or couldn't view their favorite ActiveX site, and thus they are going back to IE. Then they rant about how nasty the Firefox forum people are and THAT'S why they're going back to IE.
It's really become quite awful. Everybody was generally friendly and collegial there a while back, because it was the early adopter crowd. Now all these people, who are either the most nasty trolls I've ever seen, or just the most obnoxious human beings imaginable have ruined it. And as a result, when somebody says something like "I don't like this part of Firefox" they are likely to start a flamewar. I am saddened by this. I'm sure there's still useful discussion elsewhere, but I'm beginning to think having that "Firefox Support" link right in the toolbar is not such a great idea. I wouldn't want people to go to that forum and see the nastiness going on there and judge a fabulous browser and otherwise excellent community by it.
Dealing with TRUE mass market desktop applications is something the Open Source community is just now broaching. Several million installs of a piece of software that is probably the most commonly used thing on somebody's desktop - that's getting seriously mainstream. And mainstream means dealing with mainstream idiocy, infantile children, illiterate adults, and all the other annoying people in between. I'm not saying we shouldn't care about user friendliness, on the contrary, I'm saying that it's hard to maintain user friendliness supported by the community when the community stops being a bunch of tech-saavy hackers and starts being a bunch of idjits.
Using genuine Microsoft software ensures that you get world-class reliability, security, and support...
I don't think I need to comment on the reliability and security issue around here. But I have a strange feeling if Microsoft really gave "world-class" support, half of Slashdot's readers would be out of jobs. I think they need to come up with a more realistic explanation of why it's worth spending 300 dollars for Windows.
After the last LinuxWorld debacle I now refuse to click on LinuxWorld links. For once, I am not reading the article, and for a principled reason. Until LinuxWorld terminates Ms. O'Gara and denounces her page-view-whoring troll tactics, they will get no ad impressions from me.
This is almost as bad as posting Roland Piquepaille submissions.
This is all roughly correct for your average American. Frankly, the only people who are at a substantial risk of dying in a terrorist attack are people who live in or work in downtown or midtown Manhattan. I would say our risk factor is somewhere between 100 and 1000 times greater than the average American, simply on the basis of where attacks have accured and are likely to occur in the future - NYC is like a lightening rod for Islamic militants for a whole variety of reasons.
And you know the funny thing? The vast majority of us here, despite the fact that we are one of the few groups of people with a legitimate reason to fear death in a terrorist attack, are almost all going to vote for Kerry.
Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it. I fail to see why a person from Ohio or Oklahoma should have a vote in preventing terrorism, since the likelihood of their being a victim in an attack is essentially zero. Dear rest of America: you aren't here, you aren't at risk of a terrorist attack, please don't go to the polls and vote based on some vague fear that has no personal relevance to you. Let us worry about it here in New York, we promise to vote for the candidate that will best prevent future terrorist attacks in the United States, since it's eminently in our interests to do so.
Okay, but in a large scale system like Wikipedia, this is why discussion areas exist. If Joe Blogger comes along and says something in a discussion on astrophysics, it's definitely not as credible as if Joe Astrophysicist, PhD says it. And who are the people who spend their days editing the astrophysics articles on Wikipedia? The "consensus-reaching" process that goes on in editing is likely to reject Joe Blogger's information where it conflicts with Joe Astrophysicist's. Is it possible that the masses would drown out a few experts? Sure, but it's pretty unlikely in a subject like astrophysics, and one or two crazy people who believe the celestial spheres are painted on the cosmic shell aren't going to have much success getting their theories to stick as facts in Wikipedia.
Wikis are much more likely to have issues with non-factual content, and most of the "policy" stuff that Wikipedia has adopted is there to resolve disputes in subjects that are likely to be heavily opinion-laden and subjective. The problem in these subjects is that Wikipedia policy regarding NPOV (neutral point of view) is hard because it's difficult for anybody to describe a very emotionally charged subject from a neutral point of view, and others will invariably see that "neutral" point of view as biased by virtue of inclusion of exclusion of certain facts or tone or presentation.
Now I'm not sure what you are arguing for. Pure credentialism as a way to validate knowledge? That doesn't work either. Ultimately some sort of building of reputation and so forth has to occur, whether formally or informally. Wikis tend to be on the informal, open, democratic end of the spectrum, while a scientific journal is at the far extreme. Scientific journals take a long time to get something published, and require a lot of time and effort (that people primarily put into them because publishing in them and editing for them looks good on an academic CV). You're saying there's no room for Wikis in the world?
And frankly, when it comes to corporate knowledge management systems and the like, which is really the subject of this/. article, information like "here's how to setup and install our new SuperWidget software from the intranet" is not exactly the kind of thing that is likely to be problematic for wikis.
I can't really solve the "problem" you've stated, which is small communities of nutjobs getting together on the web and reinforcing each other's crazy, non-scientific ideas, but as you've pointed out yourself, these people have been finding each other and disinforming each other using static web pages and generic discussion software - I'm not so sure that the consensus opinion of a bunch of nutters is so different from the edited opinions of a bunch of nutters, stuck up on the web by a nutter. One of the beautiful things about the web, and one of the sick things, is that it lets fringe elements get their voice out there. On the other hand, you wouldn't have a vibrant Free/Open Source Software community without it, along with many other counterintuitive ideas that would have been dismissed by mass market media prior to the existance of the Internet. Ultimately, people have to have a mechanism for assessing the type of community they are acquiring information from on the web. On Wikipedia, you can usually be assured it's a pretty academic, smart crowd. On Slashdot, you can rest assured that plenty of people will pick up any mistakes in a perl script you post. On Joe Nutjob's Wiki, who the hell knows.
Yes, well, umm, we can call them wikis everywhere else and call them "Collaborative Knowledge Systems" in the workplace, mmkay?
Re:Is it an open protocol?
on
Replacing TCP?
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· Score: 1
By the way - after googling a bit for the libasync stuff, it looks like it was almost all written by their advisor, David Mazieres, so they are presumably using it all with permission - if their site had been a bit more clear I probably wouldn't have been confused about this in the first place. But I think your point about the Cygwin distribution still stands, though I don't know much about Cygwin licensing (I'll take your word for it though).
Maybe they do have a license, and everything is in the clear. I think it was the strange "source coming real soon now" messages that threw me off, sort of led me to assume there was something funky going on.
That John Kerry ad in your sig is ridiculous. It takes a bunch of out of context sound bites and strings them together. In the several of them which I know the context of, their presentation is completely distorted by including sentence fragments and leaving out the preceding sentences. As for the comments on the existance of WMDs, he has no more "flip-flopped" than our own president, that's a legitimate case of being misled by inaccurate intelligence. Read this and you'll see far more substantive flip-flopping by the dear Mr. Bush than you'll ever hear from Kerry. Also see my discussion of this issue from the other day.
I don't really get it. SG advertises on Slashdot. I've been to the site a few times, but I'm not into uber-goth looking chicks. The site is cool, I kinda like the concept, but these girls don't do it for me, and there is zero diversity - they all look alike, as another reply points out.
Is everybody on/. into this sort of look? What is with the strange association between geek news site and goth chicks? I don't get it. I'm all for slightly funky girls with some spice, but I also like a bit of class, somebody I can take out to a nice restaurant with and not get thrown out on the street. You know, not the first psychological wreck of a pincushion that comes my way.
I think they're talking about the desktop background where you can see two nice topless women in the arms of this beautifull guy, with a ubuntu logo on the right.
So *THAT'S* what Ubuntu means. Remind me to tell my girlfriend I need more Ubuntu.
Most of us have found that MEPIS Just Works too, and has been doing so for longer than Ubuntu. Installation is equally trivial, probably even more so since it comes as a bootable CD. I have found all the packages to be stable and up to date. If I were to have any quibbles it would probably be about some of their selections for packages to leave out (vim but no emacs) but adding packages is so easy it's not much of an issue. Package management is so automagic is shames even Mandrake urpmi, which I used to think was pretty excellent.
My metric for "Just Working" is putting a CD in an NForce motherboard desktop and seeing what happens. MEPIS handles this test with flying colors. It even Just Worked on my Dell Inspiron 8500 with two caveats: manual intervention was required to get widescreen aspect ratio support working (15 minutes of Google time), and my Microsoft MN-700 WLAN card required me to download drivers to use with the included version of ndiswrapper, but ndiswrapper is actually much more stable on this machine than the native Prism2 drivers were on an old laptop. But considering the unusual nature of the hardware, I suspect I'd have to do some tweaking to get Windows XP working from a clean install on this laptop too.
The only thing MEPIS lacks is nipples. Clearly Ubuntu has the lock on nipples and slightly sexually ambiguous multiracial harmony scenes.
MEPIS comes pretty close to 100% Debian compatible for all practical purposes. As far as I know you can install pretty much any Debian package. And everything "just works" out of the box. And it has a nice graphical installer and comes on a bootable CD.
I think I must have edited the part of my post where I explained that poodles don't have to have those effeminate looking poodle-cuts you see in shows. Most normal people wouldn't do that to their pets. So no, poodles are not themselves unmanly, that reputation has been created by people who show them in dog shows.
And while it may not be optimally manly to have a toy-sized dog, it's a matter of convenience here in New York City - it's not really fair to put a big country dog into a little New York apartment and expect them to be happy.
My dog likes to play catch and play with his toys, to sit on his bed by my feet when I'm watching TV or if I'm at the computer, and to be petted. He also guards our door vigilantly - he really doesn't know he's as small as he is, and will sometimes put on a rather violent display when unknown people show up at the door.
So is he as macho as a boxer (very manly - we had one when I was a little kid, other male dogs would either cower or fight when he came by) or a german shepherd? No, but we are comparing to freaking cats here.
Fine, but Google does it too, and so do many caching proxy servers out there. I do think it's possible that lawyers could eventually force Coral to put headers at the top of their pages indicating that it is a cached copy as Google does, though. But simply being a distributed, caching proxy server itself doesn't seem to be much legally different from any other proxy server, and many of those cache content too. I don't think such a case would get very far anyway.
Yes, I'm sure your military of 52,000 is going to sack the White House.:) I'm just kidding around with you guys, I love Canadians, but the indoctrination they give you in your elementary schools about the War of 1812 is hysterical (I've never met a Canadian who wouldn't cite this event at the drop of a hat).
Of course, here in the US we learn it as the British burning of the White House in 1812. While I'm certain the Canadians defended their country admirably, the offensive force that invaded the US was, I believe, composed of red coats that the British shipped over after defeating Napolean (so this source indicates anyway).
As for the second burning of the White House, I'm not really sure what you mean. I'm only aware of the one time (but I'm certain some Canadians will educate me now) and Google didn't turn up anything else.
In any case, don't take this all too seriously. Like I said, I really like Canadians, and I often wish more people in America had your attitude (and can we have more of your beer too, please?).
Slashdot Mirror
No, my observational might tells me that just under 50% of the American population (those about to vote for Bush) deny any wrongdoing by Washington. And in many states, like where I live, far, far less than 50%. We have an open society that tolerates debate and dissent - not that John Ashcroft wouldn't love to change that, but he hasn't succeeded on a large scale yet.
I'm not sure what you mean by "shouldn't" here. If you are suggesting that in an ideal world, the opinions of the stupid should have as much weight as those of the smart, then I strongly disagree with you.
If you mean that we, the intellectual elite, require the services of the imbeciles on our side of the political spectrum to cast a ballot to maintain the facade that they have control over their political destiny, then yes, I agree with you. It would scarcely be fair if the far right got to tell their religious nutjob Rush Limbaugh-listening, Bill-O'Reilly watchers who to vote for if we couldn't get our MTV-generation, pot smoking, hippie youth, and unemployed black female Oprah watchers to get out and vote in our general direction.
Don't fetishize democracy too much, buddy. It's just the least bad system we've come up with so far. That doesn't mean it's good, or that dumb uneducated people really deserve a say what the government is doing.
This has to be the most foul discussion I've ever had on
Personally, I've gone through GNOME and KDE desktops over the years in Linux-land. These days, when I use Linux, I far prefer to use KDE.
In most respects, the projects have very comparable goals, and both seem like they are of pretty high quality, though MEPIS has been around a while longer (but Ubuntu is better funded) - kind of a toss up in my mind. Both apparently do a very good job of keeping things Debian compatible, and apparently Ubuntu is just as easy to install as MEPIS (though it's hard for me to imagine, since MEPIS is the easiest OS install I've ever seen, and can be run without installing at all on the boot CD).
As far as I know MEPIS is 100% compatible with Debian unstable repositories, and comes configured with those repositories in its list. MEPIS is great - I guess if you hate KDE, you probably won't like MEPIS' default configuration. If you hate GNOME (like me) you probably won't like Ubuntu. Other than that, the projects, their organizations and so on are very similar in aim and scope and quality. Ubuntu is better funded, but MEPIS has a more well-established user base at this point, and a great community support site at mepislovers.org. Basically, I'd say it's a toss up, and probably best to try them both if you don't already know whether you're a KDE or GNOME person.
Umm... how would you evacuate waste from a hibernating person's body if they are being constantly fed? Sounds like an unpleasant engineering challenge indeed.
It's really become quite awful. Everybody was generally friendly and collegial there a while back, because it was the early adopter crowd. Now all these people, who are either the most nasty trolls I've ever seen, or just the most obnoxious human beings imaginable have ruined it. And as a result, when somebody says something like "I don't like this part of Firefox" they are likely to start a flamewar. I am saddened by this. I'm sure there's still useful discussion elsewhere, but I'm beginning to think having that "Firefox Support" link right in the toolbar is not such a great idea. I wouldn't want people to go to that forum and see the nastiness going on there and judge a fabulous browser and otherwise excellent community by it.
Dealing with TRUE mass market desktop applications is something the Open Source community is just now broaching. Several million installs of a piece of software that is probably the most commonly used thing on somebody's desktop - that's getting seriously mainstream. And mainstream means dealing with mainstream idiocy, infantile children, illiterate adults, and all the other annoying people in between. I'm not saying we shouldn't care about user friendliness, on the contrary, I'm saying that it's hard to maintain user friendliness supported by the community when the community stops being a bunch of tech-saavy hackers and starts being a bunch of idjits.
From their site:
Using genuine Microsoft software ensures that you get world-class reliability, security, and support...
I don't think I need to comment on the reliability and security issue around here. But I have a strange feeling if Microsoft really gave
"world-class" support, half of Slashdot's readers would be out of jobs. I think they need to come up with a more realistic explanation of why it's worth spending 300 dollars for Windows.
This is almost as bad as posting Roland Piquepaille submissions.
And you know the funny thing? The vast majority of us here, despite the fact that we are one of the few groups of people with a legitimate reason to fear death in a terrorist attack, are almost all going to vote for Kerry.
Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it. I fail to see why a person from Ohio or Oklahoma should have a vote in preventing terrorism, since the likelihood of their being a victim in an attack is essentially zero. Dear rest of America: you aren't here, you aren't at risk of a terrorist attack, please don't go to the polls and vote based on some vague fear that has no personal relevance to you. Let us worry about it here in New York, we promise to vote for the candidate that will best prevent future terrorist attacks in the United States, since it's eminently in our interests to do so.
But is it Phantom Menace bad?
Wikis are much more likely to have issues with non-factual content, and most of the "policy" stuff that Wikipedia has adopted is there to resolve disputes in subjects that are likely to be heavily opinion-laden and subjective. The problem in these subjects is that Wikipedia policy regarding NPOV (neutral point of view) is hard because it's difficult for anybody to describe a very emotionally charged subject from a neutral point of view, and others will invariably see that "neutral" point of view as biased by virtue of inclusion of exclusion of certain facts or tone or presentation.
Now I'm not sure what you are arguing for. Pure credentialism as a way to validate knowledge? That doesn't work either. Ultimately some sort of building of reputation and so forth has to occur, whether formally or informally. Wikis tend to be on the informal, open, democratic end of the spectrum, while a scientific journal is at the far extreme. Scientific journals take a long time to get something published, and require a lot of time and effort (that people primarily put into them because publishing in them and editing for them looks good on an academic CV). You're saying there's no room for Wikis in the world?
And frankly, when it comes to corporate knowledge management systems and the like, which is really the subject of this
I can't really solve the "problem" you've stated, which is small communities of nutjobs getting together on the web and reinforcing each other's crazy, non-scientific ideas, but as you've pointed out yourself, these people have been finding each other and disinforming each other using static web pages and generic discussion software - I'm not so sure that the consensus opinion of a bunch of nutters is so different from the edited opinions of a bunch of nutters, stuck up on the web by a nutter. One of the beautiful things about the web, and one of the sick things, is that it lets fringe elements get their voice out there. On the other hand, you wouldn't have a vibrant Free/Open Source Software community without it, along with many other counterintuitive ideas that would have been dismissed by mass market media prior to the existance of the Internet. Ultimately, people have to have a mechanism for assessing the type of community they are acquiring information from on the web. On Wikipedia, you can usually be assured it's a pretty academic, smart crowd. On Slashdot, you can rest assured that plenty of people will pick up any mistakes in a perl script you post. On Joe Nutjob's Wiki, who the hell knows.
Yes, well, umm, we can call them wikis everywhere else and call them "Collaborative Knowledge Systems" in the workplace, mmkay?
By the way - after googling a bit for the libasync stuff, it looks like it was almost all written by their advisor, David Mazieres, so they are presumably using it all with permission - if their site had been a bit more clear I probably wouldn't have been confused about this in the first place. But I think your point about the Cygwin distribution still stands, though I don't know much about Cygwin licensing (I'll take your word for it though).
Maybe they do have a license, and everything is in the clear. I think it was the strange "source coming real soon now" messages that threw me off, sort of led me to assume there was something funky going on.
That John Kerry ad in your sig is ridiculous. It takes a bunch of out of context sound bites and strings them together. In the several of them which I know the context of, their presentation is completely distorted by including sentence fragments and leaving out the preceding sentences. As for the comments on the existance of WMDs, he has no more "flip-flopped" than our own president, that's a legitimate case of being misled by inaccurate intelligence. Read this and you'll see far more substantive flip-flopping by the dear Mr. Bush than you'll ever hear from Kerry. Also see my discussion of this issue from the other day.
I don't really get it. SG advertises on Slashdot. I've been to the site a few times, but I'm not into uber-goth looking chicks. The site is cool, I kinda like the concept, but these girls don't do it for me, and there is zero diversity - they all look alike, as another reply points out.
/. into this sort of look? What is with the strange association between geek news site and goth chicks? I don't get it. I'm all for slightly funky girls with some spice, but I also like a bit of class, somebody I can take out to a nice restaurant with and not get thrown out on the street. You know, not the first psychological wreck of a pincushion that comes my way.
Is everybody on
So *THAT'S* what Ubuntu means. Remind me to tell my girlfriend I need more Ubuntu.
My metric for "Just Working" is putting a CD in an NForce motherboard desktop and seeing what happens. MEPIS handles this test with flying colors. It even Just Worked on my Dell Inspiron 8500 with two caveats: manual intervention was required to get widescreen aspect ratio support working (15 minutes of Google time), and my Microsoft MN-700 WLAN card required me to download drivers to use with the included version of ndiswrapper, but ndiswrapper is actually much more stable on this machine than the native Prism2 drivers were on an old laptop. But considering the unusual nature of the hardware, I suspect I'd have to do some tweaking to get Windows XP working from a clean install on this laptop too.
The only thing MEPIS lacks is nipples. Clearly Ubuntu has the lock on nipples and slightly sexually ambiguous multiracial harmony scenes.
MEPIS comes pretty close to 100% Debian compatible for all practical purposes. As far as I know you can install pretty much any Debian package. And everything "just works" out of the box. And it has a nice graphical installer and comes on a bootable CD.
Please explain how this differs from . To me it sounds like a clone of the MEPIS project that simply duplicates effort and has slicker marketing due to a bigger budget.
And while it may not be optimally manly to have a toy-sized dog, it's a matter of convenience here in New York City - it's not really fair to put a big country dog into a little New York apartment and expect them to be happy.
My dog likes to play catch and play with his toys, to sit on his bed by my feet when I'm watching TV or if I'm at the computer, and to be petted. He also guards our door vigilantly - he really doesn't know he's as small as he is, and will sometimes put on a rather violent display when unknown people show up at the door.
So is he as macho as a boxer (very manly - we had one when I was a little kid, other male dogs would either cower or fight when he came by) or a german shepherd? No, but we are comparing to freaking cats here.
Fine, but Google does it too, and so do many caching proxy servers out there. I do think it's possible that lawyers could eventually force Coral to put headers at the top of their pages indicating that it is a cached copy as Google does, though. But simply being a distributed, caching proxy server itself doesn't seem to be much legally different from any other proxy server, and many of those cache content too. I don't think such a case would get very far anyway.
From the previously linked to page:
The FTA does not require retrospective protection of copyright material already in the public domain.
I think that's pretty clear, isn't it?
Of course, here in the US we learn it as the British burning of the White House in 1812. While I'm certain the Canadians defended their country admirably, the offensive force that invaded the US was, I believe, composed of red coats that the British shipped over after defeating Napolean (so this source indicates anyway).
As for the second burning of the White House, I'm not really sure what you mean. I'm only aware of the one time (but I'm certain some Canadians will educate me now) and Google didn't turn up anything else.
In any case, don't take this all too seriously. Like I said, I really like Canadians, and I often wish more people in America had your attitude (and can we have more of your beer too, please?).
Sometimes I think the only reason we haven't annexed Canada yet is that the Republicans are afraid of adding all those socialist electoral votes.