Wrong. Freedom of speech is a right even Kasparov, the communists _and_ neo-nazis should have. Breaking the law, through public discrimination, _illegal_ demonstrations and other such actions, should be punished. But the freedom of speech (and the right to gather) should be bestowed upon each and every single individual - even those who themselves would like to abolish it - otherwise, how are _you_ any better than them in your opinion?
And just for the record, I fancy neither the communists, nor the neo-nazis. I do, however, fancy what freedom I have left.
Excellent! Let's take all those habits with us and "civilize" the rest of the galaxy - I've always wanted to see a drunk, drugged martian crime overlord:-)
Yet another reason why I like our justice system. We have a term known as "Fri Proces" (Free Process) which means that if your case is non-trivial and/or you really can't afford lawyers, the state will provide you with one. This guarantees that resolving a case in a fair and correct manner gets priority over the matter of money. (btw, the "loser pays"-idea is the most widespread in our system as well).
Well duh, Apple OSX (or whatever it's called by then) costs 100$. Ubuntu Linux (for example) is free as in gratis. How many Ubuntu licenses do you have to sell to reach the revenue of one "Apple Unix" license?
Not to defend this InfoWorld guy in any way, but he did write "commercial Linux", as in RHEL, Novell Linux and the like.
As stated before, the reason he compared win binaries to linux menu entries was because the article did the opposite (compared linux binaries to win menu entries). As for the tooltips, if I hover over the amaroK icon (amaroK isn't a very explaining name, right?) a little tooltip pops up telling me that it's an "audio player" (not a lot of babble about what else it does, and why I should choose that over rhythmbox). Next, you mention that the aforementioned apps were non-native to the windows system... well, can you even speak of "native" Linux apps? That is, apps that comes along with your linux kernel. If you decide to install one of the more fancy distributions, like fedora, you will have absolutely no problem knowing what the various programs with "funny names" does since they've put a lot of effort into making things as easy as possible. If you use one of the more "advanced" distributions, slackware or gentoo, then yes, you'll have to know what an app does before you'll be able to install it - in some cases. With gentoo you can browse the Portage tree where several thousand apps have been sorted nicely into various categories like "games/strategy" and so on. If you want to know what a single package does, then you'll simply query for more info about it.
x = sqrt(1+sqrt(1+sqrt(1...))) -- continue forever. If you square both sides, you can remove the first squareroot: x^2 = 1+sqrt(1+sqrt(1...)) Because the other value on the right side has an infinite number of squareroots itt is almost equal to x itself. Therefore, we can write: x^2 = 1 + x And that is the equation that defines the golden proportion. Find r1 and r2: r = (1 ± sqrt(5))/2 Discard the negative vlues and you get r1 = (1 + sqrt(5))/2. This is approximately close to 1.6180339887...
The golden mean is quite absurd It's not your ordinary surd. If you invert it (this is fun!) You'll get itself, reduced by one; But if increased by unity, This yields its square, take it from me.
- Paul S. Bruckmann
Re:Let's just have one Linux desktop
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
All the whining about how choice is good and it makes better products distracts from a more important factor. All the competing options make incompatability and confusion unavoidable.
So basically, one has to decide: Is it better with several parallel applications, that allow for a lot of people to test many different implementations of features, to find those that work best, or is it better to put one, standardized desktop-application on top of the X-standard?
Sure, it could allow for lesser confusion due to incompatibility, but this isn't a competition. This is about exploring different paths to satisfy the most users. I enjoy having the power of choice in regard to which window-manager I want to use, and I intend to keep this power, more than allowing some sort of monopoly on such an important part of the Linux system.
"Why do I have to waste my time "thinking for myself" about things that can be automated? My goal is to spend as much time as possible writing the actual document and as little time as possible figuring out the quirks of the program."
But in the end, that might prove to be a bad idea. By using keyboard shortcuts (and no, I don't speak of thse fancy "web-buttons" and so on), instead of mouseclicks, things will, in the end, go much faster. You can access almost all of OOo's features with a few keyboard strokes, whereas the same features would require several clicks with the mouse instead. So to begin with, yes, you might have to spend more time figuring out what to do, than with MS Office (at least I had to). But once you accustomed to the program, OOo is a lot faster. Again, this is my experience based on several years of using MS Office, and so far 1½ years of using OOo.
What i meant is that many features in MS Office is regular overkill. They provide you with at function, or tool that otherwise would require two clicks instead of one. It's like writing a 10-line script to add 2 and 3 and give you the answer. And for that difference (between OOo and MS) they charge you a fair bit of money.
Then have a look at OO.o 2.0b... never crashed once for me, boots in 2.5sec (@ 2x1.6 GHz, 1GB RAM), and I can't tell a single feature in MS Office, not supported here. The difference, really is, you have to think for yourself, when using OOo, whereas MS Office as usual does that job for you.
".. finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff"
This doesn't have to mean, that we should shut down the pages. TBL says "accidentally" which is the keyword here. Feel free to browse the page, but ending up on it without meaning to isn't necessarily a good idea. I will not suggest directly what ways to use, for as he said: they still need to be found, but something along the lines of smarter searchengines, that doesn't take you to "drugs" if you search for, say, john rug.
No, the allied soldier didn't carry out holocaust, and, I don't think they would do such a thing. That was the work of a madman. But crimes of war? No my friend... allied troops were no better than german or japanese... they just happened to win the war
Again... it all depends on your perspective. Yes, we (me too, have no doubt about that) see them as brutal dictators, but we have a "western" view on things. What I am trying to say is (and you would know, if you'd read my post) that the winner writes the history. Would we think of Hitler as a brutal dictator if he had won WWII? Yes, he committed crimes against humanity, but to believe that the allied soldiers were much better is narrowminded, and foolish
"You should thank God, Ala or what ever higher power you believe in that Japanese or the Germans didn't get the A-Bomb first."
Actually, If they had got the bomb first, I'd probably be thinking along the lines "Good, that the US didn't get it first"... it's always the winner who writes the history. Had the allied nations lost, they would've been portrayed as evil, and Germany/Japan/Italy/whatever would have been portrayed as good.
Yes, the A-bomb saved lives. But wouldn't it be saving lives as well, if 10,000 americans we're killed to make US pull out from some country (say... Iraq, for example), thus preventing another 100,000 Iraqis (and some americans) from dying? Again, it's the winner who writes the history, therefore, US were the good liberator and Nazi-germany was the bad boy (I agree on this, though but I don't know if the opinion would've been like that _if_ Germany had won!). The same goes for Iraq (and anywhere else, for that matter)... US won that war, therefore, US were the liberators, and Iraq were terrorists. In fact... how big is the difference between freedom fighters and terrorists? It only depends on perspective, and perspective is decided by the winner. Freedom fighters too, have caused civilian losses during different wars, but they won, thus making them freedom fighters and not terrorists...
"I do *not* blame you for this. How could I blame someone I don't even know for policies? I just ask myself how I would manage to be part of a society who "did" it as I do ask myself as part of a nation that was forced to the nazy-system..."
Erm... I'm from Denmark... nevertheless: I guess that depends on you view on society. Can you blame individuals of a society, for the actions carried out by it? And if so, can you blame all individuals? Or perhaps only, a few responsible persons? Personally, I don't think of "Americans" as a stereotypical, warmongering, asshole. But I know that they exists within the american society. As well as they do in the danish society and any other society. In the end, the problem is, that the human brain tends to stereotype in order to comprehend. This sort of ignorance leads to prejudices. These leads to fear, which leads to hate. And hate leads to wars... so it all begins with ignorance and negligence.
In fact, if we are to prevent this from happening ever again, the only sure way, would be to accept all humans as individuals with different thoughts and meanings, and respect their right to have them. Unfortunately... when debating on the net, I'm beginning to loose my faith in the human race. Again, prejudices leads to flaming which are used far too often on the net... *sigh* but that's just me, being sentimental (or perhaps only mental?)
"Or is that somehow better, since those people were murdered individually with bullets instead of with a pair of bombings that ended a bloody war?"
Not better, but different. A nuclear bomb has much more power, than a single bullet. I we were to commemorate each death, carried out by a bullet, we wouldn't be doing anything else. The reason why we commemorate this, is that one (uno, 1, en!) bomb killed approx 350K (wikipedia), that _one_ bomb did as much damage as 350K bullets (and even more, if you consider material damage... have you ever seen a bullet melt down an entire concrete building?)... remember that!
"The UN sanctions against Iraq killed more civilians (500,000 to 1,200,000) than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined (~350,000)."
Yes, but the bombs did it far more... shall we say, effectively. What I mean is, if you threw nuclear bombs, just as you made sanctions, the world would've been destroyed by now
I did not speak of whether the dropping of the bomb(s) were a good or a bad idea. What I said was, that it's way too cynical to justify the killing of 210K by saying that it prevented many more from being killed. I'm sorry, I didn't make that clear.:-)
However, let me give you my view on the bombing: I think, in the end, that the nuclear bombing have proved, not to be justifiable, but reasonable. In fact, no one _really_ knew what they were standing with (Einstein later said, that if he had known what he knew now, he would've been a locksmith instead) And afterall, the raid were so terrible, that it prevented anybody else from using the bomb, so far.
You can't really blame the Americans for throwing the bomb(s). Noone, not even Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer and the rest of the scientists could really predict the devastating consequences of that bomb. Of course, the atomic bomb had been tested, but afterall, you never know what good a weapon really is, before it has been used.
The good thing about the two bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they were terrible enough to have prevented anybody else from throwing them... afterall... we learned our lesson there (no, I'm not American, but it was a lesson for the entire world to learn).
Just a side-comment. Einstein actually said once, that if he had known what his research would've led to, he would have become a locksmith instead.
"... saving many hundreds of thousands of lives... "
By doing what? Oh, that's right... by killing hundreds of thousands (70,000 when the first bomb were thrown, 70,000 of complications afterwards, 25,000 when the bomb over Nagasaki were thrown 40,000 afterwards. That sums up to 205,000 deaths...)
Geez.... Talk about hairsplitting, but okay... if that's the way it's going to be:
No! You Can't be sued for anything. A court must approve the sueing before they will consider it. Therefore, if you tried to sue me for breathing oxygen, that you've claimed as your own, you would be told to go somewhere else with your extortiate demands
Does that mean if I visited a website in '99, then turned off the computer and haved turned it back on, that I can be sued for having the page in cache?
No it doesn't.
You can be sued if you publish the cache for everyone to see, which is what the Web Archive has done
Because the damage has been made. I'm sure, if the firm wins this case (which i hope they don't), the web archive will be forced to remove their copies as well as paying.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Freedom of speech is a right even Kasparov, the communists _and_ neo-nazis should have. Breaking the law, through public discrimination, _illegal_ demonstrations and other such actions, should be punished. But the freedom of speech (and the right to gather) should be bestowed upon each and every single individual - even those who themselves would like to abolish it - otherwise, how are _you_ any better than them in your opinion?
And just for the record, I fancy neither the communists, nor the neo-nazis. I do, however, fancy what freedom I have left.
Excellent! Let's take all those habits with us and "civilize" the rest of the galaxy - I've always wanted to see a drunk, drugged martian crime overlord :-)
Yet another reason why I like our justice system. We have a term known as "Fri Proces" (Free Process) which means that if your case is non-trivial and/or you really can't afford lawyers, the state will provide you with one. This guarantees that resolving a case in a fair and correct manner gets priority over the matter of money. (btw, the "loser pays"-idea is the most widespread in our system as well).
Well duh, Apple OSX (or whatever it's called by then) costs 100$. Ubuntu Linux (for example) is free as in gratis. How many Ubuntu licenses do you have to sell to reach the revenue of one "Apple Unix" license?
Not to defend this InfoWorld guy in any way, but he did write "commercial Linux", as in RHEL, Novell Linux and the like.
It's been a computergame forever... any *nix-user with a proper game-environment should just run 'monop'
As stated before, the reason he compared win binaries to linux menu entries was because the article did the opposite (compared linux binaries to win menu entries).
As for the tooltips, if I hover over the amaroK icon (amaroK isn't a very explaining name, right?) a little tooltip pops up telling me that it's an "audio player" (not a lot of babble about what else it does, and why I should choose that over rhythmbox).
Next, you mention that the aforementioned apps were non-native to the windows system... well, can you even speak of "native" Linux apps? That is, apps that comes along with your linux kernel. If you decide to install one of the more fancy distributions, like fedora, you will have absolutely no problem knowing what the various programs with "funny names" does since they've put a lot of effort into making things as easy as possible. If you use one of the more "advanced" distributions, slackware or gentoo, then yes, you'll have to know what an app does before you'll be able to install it - in some cases. With gentoo you can browse the Portage tree where several thousand apps have been sorted nicely into various categories like "games/strategy" and so on. If you want to know what a single package does, then you'll simply query for more info about it.
x = sqrt(1+sqrt(1+sqrt(1...))) -- continue forever.
If you square both sides, you can remove the first squareroot:
x^2 = 1+sqrt(1+sqrt(1...))
Because the other value on the right side has an infinite number of squareroots itt is almost equal to x itself. Therefore, we can write:
x^2 = 1 + x
And that is the equation that defines the golden proportion. Find r1 and r2:
r = (1 ± sqrt(5))/2
Discard the negative vlues and you get
r1 = (1 + sqrt(5))/2. This is approximately close to 1.6180339887...
The golden mean is quite absurd
It's not your ordinary surd.
If you invert it (this is fun!)
You'll get itself, reduced by one;
But if increased by unity,
This yields its square, take it from me.
- Paul S. Bruckmann
So basically, one has to decide: Is it better with several parallel applications, that allow for a lot of people to test many different implementations of features, to find those that work best, or is it better to put one, standardized desktop-application on top of the X-standard?
Sure, it could allow for lesser confusion due to incompatibility, but this isn't a competition. This is about exploring different paths to satisfy the most users. I enjoy having the power of choice in regard to which window-manager I want to use, and I intend to keep this power, more than allowing some sort of monopoly on such an important part of the Linux system.
"Why do I have to waste my time "thinking for myself" about things that can be automated? My goal is to spend as much time as possible writing the actual document and as little time as possible figuring out the quirks of the program."
But in the end, that might prove to be a bad idea.
By using keyboard shortcuts (and no, I don't speak of thse fancy "web-buttons" and so on), instead of mouseclicks, things will, in the end, go much faster. You can access almost all of OOo's features with a few keyboard strokes, whereas the same features would require several clicks with the mouse instead.
So to begin with, yes, you might have to spend more time figuring out what to do, than with MS Office (at least I had to). But once you accustomed to the program, OOo is a lot faster. Again, this is my experience based on several years of using MS Office, and so far 1½ years of using OOo.
What i meant is that many features in MS Office is regular overkill. They provide you with at function, or tool that otherwise would require two clicks instead of one. It's like writing a 10-line script to add 2 and 3 and give you the answer. And for that difference (between OOo and MS) they charge you a fair bit of money.
Then have a look at OO.o 2.0b ... never crashed once for me, boots in 2.5sec (@ 2x1.6 GHz, 1GB RAM), and I can't tell a single feature in MS Office, not supported here. The difference, really is, you have to think for yourself, when using OOo, whereas MS Office as usual does that job for you.
".. finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff"
This doesn't have to mean, that we should shut down the pages. TBL says "accidentally" which is the keyword here. Feel free to browse the page, but ending up on it without meaning to isn't necessarily a good idea. I will not suggest directly what ways to use, for as he said: they still need to be found, but something along the lines of smarter searchengines, that doesn't take you to "drugs" if you search for, say, john rug.
No, the allied soldier didn't carry out holocaust, and, I don't think they would do such a thing. That was the work of a madman. But crimes of war? No my friend... allied troops were no better than german or japanese... they just happened to win the war
Again... it all depends on your perspective. Yes, we (me too, have no doubt about that) see them as brutal dictators, but we have a "western" view on things. What I am trying to say is (and you would know, if you'd read my post) that the winner writes the history. Would we think of Hitler as a brutal dictator if he had won WWII? Yes, he committed crimes against humanity, but to believe that the allied soldiers were much better is narrowminded, and foolish
"MAKE NO MISTAKE They would have shown no mercy."
And neither did you!
"You should thank God, Ala or what ever higher power you believe in that Japanese or the Germans didn't get the A-Bomb first."
Actually, If they had got the bomb first, I'd probably be thinking along the lines "Good, that the US didn't get it first"... it's always the winner who writes the history. Had the allied nations lost, they would've been portrayed as evil, and Germany/Japan/Italy/whatever would have been portrayed as good.
Yes, the A-bomb saved lives. But wouldn't it be saving lives as well, if 10,000 americans we're killed to make US pull out from some country (say... Iraq, for example), thus preventing another 100,000 Iraqis (and some americans) from dying? Again, it's the winner who writes the history, therefore, US were the good liberator and Nazi-germany was the bad boy (I agree on this, though but I don't know if the opinion would've been like that _if_ Germany had won!). The same goes for Iraq (and anywhere else, for that matter)... US won that war, therefore, US were the liberators, and Iraq were terrorists. In fact... how big is the difference between freedom fighters and terrorists? It only depends on perspective, and perspective is decided by the winner. Freedom fighters too, have caused civilian losses during different wars, but they won, thus making them freedom fighters and not terrorists...
"I do *not* blame you for this. How could I blame someone I don't even know for policies? I just ask myself how I would manage to be part of a society who "did" it as I do ask myself as part of a nation that was forced to the nazy-system..."
Erm... I'm from Denmark... nevertheless:
I guess that depends on you view on society. Can you blame individuals of a society, for the actions carried out by it? And if so, can you blame all individuals? Or perhaps only, a few responsible persons?
Personally, I don't think of "Americans" as a stereotypical, warmongering, asshole. But I know that they exists within the american society. As well as they do in the danish society and any other society.
In the end, the problem is, that the human brain tends to stereotype in order to comprehend. This sort of ignorance leads to prejudices. These leads to fear, which leads to hate. And hate leads to wars... so it all begins with ignorance and negligence.
In fact, if we are to prevent this from happening ever again, the only sure way, would be to accept all humans as individuals with different thoughts and meanings, and respect their right to have them. Unfortunately... when debating on the net, I'm beginning to loose my faith in the human race. Again, prejudices leads to flaming which are used far too often on the net... *sigh* but that's just me, being sentimental (or perhaps only mental?)
"Or is that somehow better, since those people were murdered individually with bullets instead of with a pair of bombings that ended a bloody war?"
Not better, but different. A nuclear bomb has much more power, than a single bullet. I we were to commemorate each death, carried out by a bullet, we wouldn't be doing anything else.
The reason why we commemorate this, is that one (uno, 1, en!) bomb killed approx 350K (wikipedia), that _one_ bomb did as much damage as 350K bullets (and even more, if you consider material damage... have you ever seen a bullet melt down an entire concrete building?)... remember that!
"The UN sanctions against Iraq killed more civilians (500,000 to 1,200,000) than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined (~350,000)."
Yes, but the bombs did it far more... shall we say, effectively. What I mean is, if you threw nuclear bombs, just as you made sanctions, the world would've been destroyed by now
I did not speak of whether the dropping of the bomb(s) were a good or a bad idea. What I said was, that it's way too cynical to justify the killing of 210K by saying that it prevented many more from being killed. I'm sorry, I didn't make that clear. :-)
However, let me give you my view on the bombing:
I think, in the end, that the nuclear bombing have proved, not to be justifiable, but reasonable. In fact, no one _really_ knew what they were standing with (Einstein later said, that if he had known what he knew now, he would've been a locksmith instead)
And afterall, the raid were so terrible, that it prevented anybody else from using the bomb, so far.
You can't really blame the Americans for throwing the bomb(s).
Noone, not even Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer and the rest of the scientists could really predict the devastating consequences of that bomb. Of course, the atomic bomb had been tested, but afterall, you never know what good a weapon really is, before it has been used.
The good thing about the two bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they were terrible enough to have prevented anybody else from throwing them... afterall... we learned our lesson there (no, I'm not American, but it was a lesson for the entire world to learn).
Just a side-comment. Einstein actually said once, that if he had known what his research would've led to, he would have become a locksmith instead.
"... saving many hundreds of thousands of lives ... "
By doing what? Oh, that's right... by killing hundreds of thousands (70,000 when the first bomb were thrown, 70,000 of complications afterwards, 25,000 when the bomb over Nagasaki were thrown 40,000 afterwards. That sums up to 205,000 deaths...)
erm... no.... you aren't
I did that as well
Geez.... Talk about hairsplitting, but okay... if that's the way it's going to be: No! You Can't be sued for anything. A court must approve the sueing before they will consider it. Therefore, if you tried to sue me for breathing oxygen, that you've claimed as your own, you would be told to go somewhere else with your extortiate demands
Does that mean if I visited a website in '99, then turned off the computer and haved turned it back on, that I can be sued for having the page in cache?
No it doesn't.
You can be sued if you publish the cache for everyone to see, which is what the Web Archive has done
Because the damage has been made.
I'm sure, if the firm wins this case (which i hope they don't), the web archive will be forced to remove their copies as well as paying.