Your analysis of Clinton's efforts is not correct. The 1998 operation desert fox where Clinton expended all those cruise missiles was a great success. It degraded Saddam's ability to produced WMDs. The same oversight and containment prevented Saddam from another slaughter of the Kurds. Bush was later able to build on this success and get Saddam to agree to having international weapons inspectors again. These inspectors pretty much demonstrated that Saddam no longer had WMDs before the Iraq war. If Bush had stopped there, he would have looked like a genius. Instead, he has made a mess of things with the Iraq war. We have now lost our ability to use the threat of force as a diplomatic tactic, because our forces are pinned down in Iraq. We have been weakened, allowing kooks like Kim-Jong-Il to be emboldened and go forwarded with Nuke development. Also, by destroying the Iraqi government completely due to incompetence, we have upset the balance of power in the mid-east in favor of Iran. Compared to Bush, Clinton's policies was moderate, reasonable. He used containment to counter threats and abuses by Saddam.
He was also successful in Serbia. He managed to use enough force to get Serbia to end their program of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and brought the UN in to act as a buffer between various ethnic groups and ended the pogroms and slaughters happening in that part of the world.
Regarding taking out Osama. Hindsight is 20-20. Before 9-11, Osama was not regarded as having the same level of threat. It was a judgment call deciding between the getting him no matter what, and between causing an international uproar over American interventionism, or a national uproar over "wag the dog" type accusations from the Republican party. In hindsight, I think we can say that he made mistakes in not getting Osama when he had the chance, but it was a difficult judgment call. He still acted responsibly and professionally. I wish I could say the same of Bush, but it sure seems to me that he provoked an unnecessary and costly war for no good reason, for his own personal reasons -- irresponsible and unprofessional behavior.
I agree that Clinton should have been tougher on North Korea, but Bush policies have now left us with no real options then hoping that China can reign them in. We are in a much worse position with regard to North Korea now, then we were under Clinton.
I agree that Bush has been demonized by the left in ridiculous ways with absurd conspiracy theories and false accusations of many kinds. Neither was Clinton perfect. But the Bush policy in Iraq, and his foreign policy over all has been a catastrophe. And, yes, I voted for the guy. It's sad really.
It may be amusing taht there are ramps that lead to grass, but if the City or a business newly built on that corner chooses to install sidewalks, then the ramp will be there.
I don't know myself, but -- does the ramp cost more to build than a curb in the same location? If the cost is not a lot different, then why is it so much less than Brilliant to ask that ramps be installed, even on corners which do not have sidewalks, but could have in the not too distant future?
Also -- how does the presence of a ramp make walking more difficult? Or are you refering to grass?
Lights are not really lights -- they are dark absorbers.
The sun is one of many white holes that suck in all the surrounding darkness.
So called central heating actually consists of a set of cool absorbers.
A/C units are really cool extracters. They commonly operate by compressing heavily cool laden freon gas to squeeze out the cool which is in turn transferred to cool deficient air used to "cool" a house. Later, the freon is permitted to expand again via evaporation during which it extracts and concentrates cool from the outside.
You are absolutely right. I worked on SCO systems as a contractor for TACO BELL for a few years programming and maintaining their back of house software used on PC's in the store. They had an effort to create a windows based in-store system, but that has been abandoned. Now, they are porting their back of house applications to SUSE Linux with a view to getting off of SCO systems as soon as they can. The same is true, I believe for their fellow Yum brands company, Pizza Hut.
This latest move by SCO is desperation -- trying to find some new market in which to stay alive while their bread and butter UnixWare and OpenServer business withers and dies. SCO is going down.
I don't know that you should be depressed. This looks to me like a great scenario for FOSS. Companies other than Apple or MS that wish to market specialized end to end solutions with tightly linked hardware and software will need inexpensive, secure and reliable OS and application software unemcumbered by IP claims and royalties. And Open Standards will be essential for such devices to inter-operate. No other companies will be able to develop pure proprietary solutions from scratch, or have to license their solutions from their competition. All this looks to me like powerful incentives to embrace FOSS solutions. And, yes, they will be extended, much as Apple has in fact done with OS-X which if your recall is built on top of BSD. But the continued use of FOSS in all sorts of niches will ensure the survival and viability of free solutions for "the rest of us."
Sure, the Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, but Dan Brown prefaces it with a Fact page that calls the Priory of Sion a real organization founded in 1099. The truth of the matter is that the Prior of Sion was a Hoax, originally started in 1957. (See Priory of Sion for the evidence of this.) He also makes this generic claim: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.
The book goes on to make laughable errors -- Gospels in the Dead Sea Scrolls!? (There are no gospels or any Christian or New Testament material in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jesus had thousands of followers in his lifetime? Jesus was of no consequence at all in his lifetime -- an unknown rabbi in an obscure part of the Roman Empire. 5,000,000 witches burned!? No. More like 200,000 and all after 1400, and mostly by local governments. Constantine made Christ A God?! -- Constantine was pro-Arian (the losing side) in that fight. All he cared about was the unity of the church for political purposes, not its doctrine. Mithras was called the "Son of God" and "Light of the World" and was raised after three days!? All wrong. Sunday worship started by Constantine -- again wrong -- history shows it is predominant back int the 2nd century (Constantine is fourth century).
The book is schlock, both as literature, and in its research.
That is exactly what the Y2K crackpots did 6 years ago -- claim credit for saving the world after all the ludicrous Y2K disaster predictions failed to materialize. I say this in spite of being more inclined to accept global warming claims.
Evolution does have successful predictions. What is predicted is not the future course of evolution, but what observations one would expect to find in nature given evolution. You would expect to find fossilized remains of life forms that show a pattern of change over time from simplier forms to more complex forms. You would expect to see patterns in our DNA consistent with common descent. You would expect to be able to observe species differentiation in the wild consistent with patterns of population isolation, natural selection and genetic drift. All of these and many more are successful predictions of evolution.
Note, I say this as someone who wishes the ID folks well, and believe many of its advocates to be talented people who make interesting arguments. Unlike what the judge in Pennsylvania assertsn, no idea is inherently unscientific so long as it can be formulated as a successful research program. I do not see how ID can be so formulated. There is very little in the way of prediction that can be done with ID. That is why I regard it as a philosophical idea, not a scientific one, but evolution is a powerful scientific theory.
RMS has four philosophical criteria in his definition of free software:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
OSI has a more specified, practical, but less philosophical definition that may be found here.
The chief difference appears to me to be in RMS's "freedom 0". An Open Source license can impose some restrictions on the end user, limited restrictions to be sure, but some restrictions. It may not be a simple matter to apply RMS's criteria -- his definition is not as specific as the OSI one, but it is not purely subjective based on RMS's whim. That in turn means that there is a difference, and the terms are not identical.
Given, that -- if you read the gnu materials -- RMS is not disparaging to Open Source. He says quite clearly, "... the differences in extension of the category are small: nearly all free software is open source, and nearly all open source software is free."
No. There is a difference, albeit not very great to non-partisan onlookers. Check out gnu.orgs explanation here.
They also examine some licenses here, some of which are listed as Open Source on opensource.org.
When I read Linus's criticism's of the DRM issues in V.3, I was inclined to agree with him. I have found him to be reasonable and non-partisan in the past while RMS has always come accross as highly ideological. Ironically, having read TFA, I find RMS's explanations to be enlightening, and believe that Linus has not represented what V.3 is trying to do. I suspect that Linus has been polarized abit due to conflicts with RMS on these issues, causing him to be perhaps a little bit less reasonable and more partisan than is normal for him.
I agree that the Christian symbolism and allegory is not instrusive. In fact, Narnia is inhabited by fawns and centaurs among other Greek (Pagan!) mythological characters. Also -- read the later books, Narnia is flat!
One point regarding all the positive reviews. A lot of big evangelical churches are treating this movie much like The Passion of the Christ was treated -- i.e. go see the movie a lot and promote it as much as you can as part of an evangelistic campaign. For this reason, I suspect that there have been many positive reviews put up by people who otherwise would never post -- all with a positive bias.
I would not reject the movie for these reasons -- I saw it and liked it a lot. But skepticism regarding many of the glowing reviews is warranted.
After thinking about it a bit, I believe they downplayed Aslan more for dramatic effect than to steer away from the Jesus angle. I mean, if you know all along that the lion is pretty much God Almighty, there's not a lot of conflict.
I saw the movie on Saturday. It was better than I expected because the movie version did succeed in conveying some level of conflict and feeling that I found a bit lacking in the books for exactly the reason you mention.
Curiously, the director and actors downplay the Christian connection a bit. See Narnia Christian link played down. But it is obviously there because the movie is very faithful to the book.
So, I guess I was pleasantly surprised and not disappointed because I did not have the same kind of expectation that I did for similar works like the The Lord of the Rings. If LOTR was a ten, then this was a nine. Still very good.
The guy running SuSE 9.3 sounded like he tried Linux for a grand total of 10 minutes, of course you aren't going to know how everything works in that time frame. Sheesh.
I have done both -- installed 9.3 and recently 10.0. 9.3 has lots of issues -- the audio is turned off by default and works only for one user, and numerous drivers do not install correctly, even when they are available through Yast. I installed 9.3 three different times and always had to do some extra work to get everything working correctly. In one case (to get the NVIDIA 3-D graphics working driver working correctly), I had to recompile the kernel.
Now OpenSuse 10.0 was a completely different story. I installed it recently and everything worked flawlessly -- much to my surprise. It is more polished, and a much better experience. It is an excellent product.
So, regarding that guy, Yes -- he could have gotten it working with some work, and maybe some help, but No -- 9.3 can be a pain, but if he had used 10.00, he likely would have had a good experience. So, far OpenSuse looks like a great step forward in the right direction for the Linux desktop.
If your students are not running Linux, and their backgrounds are in the Windows and mainframe worlds, then it might be best to approach OSS from the Windows side. This is especially true if your student's are not willing to install Linux on their own boxen or on whatever they may use at their place of employment.
For development tools you should cover the creating programs from the command line using make, etc., but also cover OSS IDE's -- Eclipse in particular would be a good one. And of course use g++ for C++ and Sun's java (I am not a purist so I think Java's Sun will suffice but Sun's Java is not regarded as true OSS, so you may need to find something else for Java.)
If you use g++ with cygwin on windows, then also consider introducing them to minGW so they can make their programs run natively on windows.
I run both windows and Linux at home, and prefer Linux. But at work I have to use a window box. I have cygwin with X installed and use both firefox and OpenOffice as replacements with no problems. I am posting to let you know about the windows possibilities because I beleive that you may encounter some resistance if you require your student's to run Linux. OSS on windows is a good way to introduce those who are new to OSS and Unix like file systems and tools to newbies.
Microsoft does not need to win any lawsuits -- all they need to do is to drag out the lawsuits in the courts for years until technological obsolesence has rendered the issue moot, or until they can buy off enough politicians to gut the law.
The irony here, is that they just might have a strong enough case to win, but Google's tactic of dragging out the lawsuit will render any future judgment years down the road moot.
I am a Christian. I don't speak for all Christians by any means.
I favor stem-cell research because I do not regard the embryo as human life until it has a functioning brain and nervous system. I regard "ensoulment" as occurring at that time. This can only occur well after the point when a zygote can be twinned or cloned. As a practical matter, I oppose abortion anytime after the zygote has become implanted in the mother's uterus. This position allows for stem cell research and in vitro fertilization -- even cloning.
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It seems I replied to the parent by mistake.
Your analysis of Clinton's efforts is not correct. The 1998 operation desert fox where Clinton expended all those cruise missiles was a great success. It degraded Saddam's ability to produced WMDs. The same oversight and containment prevented Saddam from another slaughter of the Kurds. Bush was later able to build on this success and get Saddam to agree to having international weapons inspectors again. These inspectors pretty much demonstrated that Saddam no longer had WMDs before the Iraq war. If Bush had stopped there, he would have looked like a genius. Instead, he has made a mess of things with the Iraq war. We have now lost our ability to use the threat of force as a diplomatic tactic, because our forces are pinned down in Iraq. We have been weakened, allowing kooks like Kim-Jong-Il to be emboldened and go forwarded with Nuke development. Also, by destroying the Iraqi government completely due to incompetence, we have upset the balance of power in the mid-east in favor of Iran. Compared to Bush, Clinton's policies was moderate, reasonable. He used containment to counter threats and abuses by Saddam.
He was also successful in Serbia. He managed to use enough force to get Serbia to end their program of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and brought the UN in to act as a buffer between various ethnic groups and ended the pogroms and slaughters happening in that part of the world.
Regarding taking out Osama. Hindsight is 20-20. Before 9-11, Osama was not regarded as having the same level of threat. It was a judgment call deciding between the getting him no matter what, and between causing an international uproar over American interventionism, or a national uproar over "wag the dog" type accusations from the Republican party. In hindsight, I think we can say that he made mistakes in not getting Osama when he had the chance, but it was a difficult judgment call. He still acted responsibly and professionally. I wish I could say the same of Bush, but it sure seems to me that he provoked an unnecessary and costly war for no good reason, for his own personal reasons -- irresponsible and unprofessional behavior.
I agree that Clinton should have been tougher on North Korea, but Bush policies have now left us with no real options then hoping that China can reign them in. We are in a much worse position with regard to North Korea now, then we were under Clinton.
I agree that Bush has been demonized by the left in ridiculous ways with absurd conspiracy theories and false accusations of many kinds. Neither was Clinton perfect. But the Bush policy in Iraq, and his foreign policy over all has been a catastrophe. And, yes, I voted for the guy. It's sad really.
Interesting. It seems to me that YouTube is already between #3 and #4. Where are the cool kids now?
I also wonder how many of those older my-spacers are the parents of the teenagers with accounts used basically to spy on their kids.And your point is ...?
It may be amusing taht there are ramps that lead to grass, but if the City or a business newly built on that corner chooses to install sidewalks, then the ramp will be there.
I don't know myself, but -- does the ramp cost more to build than a curb in the same location? If the cost is not a lot different, then why is it so much less than Brilliant to ask that ramps be installed, even on corners which do not have sidewalks, but could have in the not too distant future?
Also -- how does the presence of a ramp make walking more difficult? Or are you refering to grass?
Works for me :)
You are absolutely right. I worked on SCO systems as a contractor for TACO BELL for a few years programming and maintaining their back of house software used on PC's in the store. They had an effort to create a windows based in-store system, but that has been abandoned. Now, they are porting their back of house applications to SUSE Linux with a view to getting off of SCO systems as soon as they can. The same is true, I believe for their fellow Yum brands company, Pizza Hut.
This latest move by SCO is desperation -- trying to find some new market in which to stay alive while their bread and butter UnixWare and OpenServer business withers and dies. SCO is going down.
I don't know that you should be depressed. This looks to me like a great scenario for FOSS. Companies other than Apple or MS that wish to market specialized end to end solutions with tightly linked hardware and software will need inexpensive, secure and reliable OS and application software unemcumbered by IP claims and royalties. And Open Standards will be essential for such devices to inter-operate. No other companies will be able to develop pure proprietary solutions from scratch, or have to license their solutions from their competition. All this looks to me like powerful incentives to embrace FOSS solutions. And, yes, they will be extended, much as Apple has in fact done with OS-X which if your recall is built on top of BSD. But the continued use of FOSS in all sorts of niches will ensure the survival and viability of free solutions for "the rest of us."
Sure, the Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, but Dan Brown prefaces it with a Fact page that calls the Priory of Sion a real organization founded in 1099. The truth of the matter is that the Prior of Sion was a Hoax, originally started in 1957. (See Priory of Sion for the evidence of this.) He also makes this generic claim: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.
The book goes on to make laughable errors -- Gospels in the Dead Sea Scrolls!? (There are no gospels or any Christian or New Testament material in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jesus had thousands of followers in his lifetime? Jesus was of no consequence at all in his lifetime -- an unknown rabbi in an obscure part of the Roman Empire. 5,000,000 witches burned!? No. More like 200,000 and all after 1400, and mostly by local governments. Constantine made Christ A God?! -- Constantine was pro-Arian (the losing side) in that fight. All he cared about was the unity of the church for political purposes, not its doctrine. Mithras was called the "Son of God" and "Light of the World" and was raised after three days!? All wrong. Sunday worship started by Constantine -- again wrong -- history shows it is predominant back int the 2nd century (Constantine is fourth century).
The book is schlock, both as literature, and in its research.
That is exactly what the Y2K crackpots did 6 years ago -- claim credit for saving the world after all the ludicrous Y2K disaster predictions failed to materialize. I say this in spite of being more inclined to accept global warming claims.
Evolution does have successful predictions. What is predicted is not the future course of evolution, but what observations one would expect to find in nature given evolution. You would expect to find fossilized remains of life forms that show a pattern of change over time from simplier forms to more complex forms. You would expect to see patterns in our DNA consistent with common descent. You would expect to be able to observe species differentiation in the wild consistent with patterns of population isolation, natural selection and genetic drift. All of these and many more are successful predictions of evolution.
Note, I say this as someone who wishes the ID folks well, and believe many of its advocates to be talented people who make interesting arguments. Unlike what the judge in Pennsylvania assertsn, no idea is inherently unscientific so long as it can be formulated as a successful research program. I do not see how ID can be so formulated. There is very little in the way of prediction that can be done with ID. That is why I regard it as a philosophical idea, not a scientific one, but evolution is a powerful scientific theory.
RMS has four philosophical criteria in his definition of free software:
See The Free Software Definition
OSI has a more specified, practical, but less philosophical definition that may be found here.
The chief difference appears to me to be in RMS's "freedom 0". An Open Source license can impose some restrictions on the end user, limited restrictions to be sure, but some restrictions. It may not be a simple matter to apply RMS's criteria -- his definition is not as specific as the OSI one, but it is not purely subjective based on RMS's whim. That in turn means that there is a difference, and the terms are not identical.
Given, that -- if you read the gnu materials -- RMS is not disparaging to Open Source. He says quite clearly, "... the differences in extension of the category are small: nearly all free software is open source, and nearly all open source software is free."
No. There is a difference, albeit not very great to non-partisan onlookers. Check out gnu.orgs explanation here.
They also examine some licenses here, some of which are listed as Open Source on opensource.org.
When I read Linus's criticism's of the DRM issues in V.3, I was inclined to agree with him. I have found him to be reasonable and non-partisan in the past while RMS has always come accross as highly ideological. Ironically, having read TFA, I find RMS's explanations to be enlightening, and believe that Linus has not represented what V.3 is trying to do. I suspect that Linus has been polarized abit due to conflicts with RMS on these issues, causing him to be perhaps a little bit less reasonable and more partisan than is normal for him.
Looks like Blizzard entertainment is located in Irvine, California, where sexual orientation is a protected class.
I agree that the Christian symbolism and allegory is not instrusive. In fact, Narnia is inhabited by fawns and centaurs among other Greek (Pagan!) mythological characters. Also -- read the later books, Narnia is flat!
One point regarding all the positive reviews. A lot of big evangelical churches are treating this movie much like The Passion of the Christ was treated -- i.e. go see the movie a lot and promote it as much as you can as part of an evangelistic campaign. For this reason, I suspect that there have been many positive reviews put up by people who otherwise would never post -- all with a positive bias.
I would not reject the movie for these reasons -- I saw it and liked it a lot. But skepticism regarding many of the glowing reviews is warranted.
I saw the movie on Saturday. It was better than I expected because the movie version did succeed in conveying some level of conflict and feeling that I found a bit lacking in the books for exactly the reason you mention.
Curiously, the director and actors downplay the Christian connection a bit. See Narnia Christian link played down. But it is obviously there because the movie is very faithful to the book.
So, I guess I was pleasantly surprised and not disappointed because I did not have the same kind of expectation that I did for similar works like the The Lord of the Rings. If LOTR was a ten, then this was a nine. Still very good.
The article incorrectly reports the name of the High School. It's named after Pope John the 23rd of Vatican II fame, not the John XIII.
I regard the school's actions as ludicrous.
I have done both -- installed 9.3 and recently 10.0. 9.3 has lots of issues -- the audio is turned off by default and works only for one user, and numerous drivers do not install correctly, even when they are available through Yast. I installed 9.3 three different times and always had to do some extra work to get everything working correctly. In one case (to get the NVIDIA 3-D graphics working driver working correctly), I had to recompile the kernel.
Now OpenSuse 10.0 was a completely different story. I installed it recently and everything worked flawlessly -- much to my surprise. It is more polished, and a much better experience. It is an excellent product.
So, regarding that guy, Yes -- he could have gotten it working with some work, and maybe some help, but No -- 9.3 can be a pain, but if he had used 10.00, he likely would have had a good experience. So, far OpenSuse looks like a great step forward in the right direction for the Linux desktop.
If your students are not running Linux, and their backgrounds are in the Windows and mainframe worlds, then it might be best to approach OSS from the Windows side. This is especially true if your student's are not willing to install Linux on their own boxen or on whatever they may use at their place of employment.
So, be sure to include Windows based OSS programs such as found on the Open CD and check out the the source forge osswin site at http://osswin.sourceforge.net/.
You need to give them a flavor of what Linux is like to be sure, so include Knoppix in the mix somewhere.
It sounds like your course will be for programmers. If so, then introducing them to Cygwin would be a good idea. You may even wish to run KDE under cygwin on Windows (see http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
For development tools you should cover the creating programs from the command line using make, etc., but also cover OSS IDE's -- Eclipse in particular would be a good one. And of course use g++ for C++ and Sun's java (I am not a purist so I think Java's Sun will suffice but Sun's Java is not regarded as true OSS, so you may need to find something else for Java.)
If you use g++ with cygwin on windows, then also consider introducing them to minGW so they can make their programs run natively on windows.
I run both windows and Linux at home, and prefer Linux. But at work I have to use a window box. I have cygwin with X installed and use both firefox and OpenOffice as replacements with no problems. I am posting to let you know about the windows possibilities because I beleive that you may encounter some resistance if you require your student's to run Linux. OSS on windows is a good way to introduce those who are new to OSS and Unix like file systems and tools to newbies.
Microsoft does not need to win any lawsuits -- all they need to do is to drag out the lawsuits in the courts for years until technological obsolesence has rendered the issue moot, or until they can buy off enough politicians to gut the law.
The irony here, is that they just might have a strong enough case to win, but Google's tactic of dragging out the lawsuit will render any future judgment years down the road moot.
I am a Christian. I don't speak for all Christians by any means.
I favor stem-cell research because I do not regard the embryo as human life until it has a functioning brain and nervous system. I regard "ensoulment" as occurring at that time. This can only occur well after the point when a zygote can be twinned or cloned. As a practical matter, I oppose abortion anytime after the zygote has become implanted in the mother's uterus. This position allows for stem cell research and in vitro fertilization -- even cloning.
An online article that discusses these issues is available at Cloning, Aquinas, and the Embryonic Person.