I agree wholeheartedly. There is something in a performance that records will never be able to match, for the existence of imperfections actually makes a work of art "better" in a way. The human component, the interactions between the actors and the audience, makes each performance unique, while a machine will do it the same each time. However, I was trying to approach the problem in an alternative way, since this argument about the "human" nature of art is so cliche (in my opinion, at least). Take theater and film for example. A film can create a "perfect" performance (well, relatively), yet in its presentation, it lacks the whole organic nature of the theater. That isn't to say that film isn't lacking of any advantages--it can incorporate elements that cannot be done due to the physical limitations of a live performance--it's just different. A camera (which, by the way, is a machine) can make a perfect replica of an image, so is painting now dead? Far from it. In fact, the camera was the impetus for the impressionist and surrealist movements of art. (If you ever asked why we don't have any more DaVinci's around, it's because of the camera. Why spend so much time trying to make something look realistic when you can just click a button? But that still doesn't make Leonardo's work any less valuable, or kill realism for that matter) We still value the human talent that goes into making a picture. At the same time, we don't shun the "machine generated" art of photographs. In fact, we recognize the talent of the artist behind the lens, both still and moving pictures. In the same way, we should value the talent of the programmer behind the code. When a machine is able to do something well, I don't understand why there is always such a backlash. Maybe people think that the machine is somehow cheating when it does something, but it was the work of humans that allowed the machine to achieve that feat, and that work should be celebrated. People usually try to say that a machine/computer will never be able to do x as well as a human, whether it be play chess or play an instrument. Well, why not? One day it's going to be an eventuality. Don't try to think of it as a failure of a human against a machine, but as the success of a human through a machine.
Well, it isn't exactly the same thing, but MIDI with good synths has been used to "perfectly" play a composition. Especially for instruments with simple timbres like drums and piano, a synth can sound very close to the real thing. Even with these ways to create a "perfect" performance, people still find a human performance impressive. It's kind of like meeting a person who can compute logarithms in their head, or find all the factors of a number without a calculator. Sure, a computer can do it--it may even do it faster, but I don't think that the fact that a machine can do something makes the feat less impressive when accomplished by a human. I'm still impressed when someone can run a marathon, even if a machine could do it just as easily, if not better. I don't see why there is so much concern that robotic performances will cheapen the value of human performances. Besides, if a programmer is able to write a program that is able to take a piece of music and interpret it beautifully, then it is still a human achievement in that a programmer was brilliant enough to decipher not only decipher the subtle psychology of what makes one performance sound emotional and powerful and the another sound mechanical, but also codify an algorithm that would imitate that interpretation. Kind of like designing a conversation bot to beat the Turing test. It's still a human accomplishment. Remember, the machine is us/ing us.
All the package managers do is copy, move and delete files, keep a list of what files/packages are installed and keep a list of where packages can be obtained. The reason why Ubuntu "just works" is because: 1) The Ubuntu team keep a tight(er) reign on the repositories, so there is very little need (if any "need") to use 3rd party repos. 2) More stuff that people need it in the repositories so you do not get A. Newbie trying to install an ancient RPM on a modern system and having it screw wverything up.
Um, I missed the part where this is a bad thing. Is this not a good thing?
Well, I'd have to say that with most software projects, they provide a makefile. Yes, I know that it's a little bit steeper of a learning curve, but come on, it's not THAT much more work. Now, if the user is not savvy enough to go through the make process (which is usually only 2 commands long), then I don't think that they should be installing that stuff anyways. Just think, the stuff that's in the repositories are the packages least likely to cause problems with the installation. I've found most everything I've ever wanted in the repositories. The stuff that's not in there usually shouldn't be there. The amount of hassle that I have with make pre-installation (library problems, etc.) is usually indicative of the amount of trouble I'll have post-installation. Once the package is massaged enough by the repo managers to fit, then it is both more accessible and less likely to cough up errors. I'd say that it's not so much the vendor's job to get into a repository so much as to provide a suitable makefile from which a user could install their program, and thus a base from which a repo manager could work.
Personally, I think the repository system is brilliant. It sure beats running to the story to buy software, and being able to just randomly do a search for packages is great. I can do a search for "video editor," and it brings up Kino, Cinelerra, MPlayer, and a myriad of other things. That's how I found inkscape. One day, I needed a vector illustrator, and I did a search. You can't beat the convenience of that. It's a lot better that what you'd get if you went up to Wal Mart complaining they didn't have something. Their response would be, "Why would you want software that isn't in the store?" The thing is, most people don't even know software outside the store exists. They live in the Windows Bubble. But the Linuxen are different, which is what makes us harder to please. It's like when a doctor gets sick--it's hard for them to step back and become the patient again.
Hear hear! I have mod points, but I'd rather post.
Circular dependencies, aka RPM hell, is what actually prompted me to make the switch from the Red Hat family to the Debian family. I used to be a pretty die hard Red Hat user. It used to be that Fedora was the cutting edge, back in the core 2 and 3 days. I would have those days when I would wrestle with the packages, but I just took my hits and moved on. Then Ubuntu came along, and I realized how much time I was wasting with that stuff. It "just works." APT is great (it's a pity POSIX decided to go for RPM). Gentoo's portage is really cool too, but IALAB (I'm a lazy bum--if you can't reconcile the acronym, then you probably shouldn't know what the missing word is).
It's called the inner ear. We know it's exact shape, we know it's filled with fluid and we know that's how we can tell with our eyes closed if we're upside-down, sideways, etc. The iner ear is our balance mechanism and we don't need three axises when we can have a spiral canal filled with fluid do the same thing with proper sensors attached.
Wrong. As someone else pointed out, the inner ear depends on gravity a great deal. Why do they call the zero-grav training plane the "vomit rocket?" There's also a flight training exercise where an instructor and a student go together into a plane with an obscured canopy so they can't see outside. The instructor flips the plane upside down at a speed so that the centripetal force of the plane remains at 1 G. When they change the controls to the student, a lot of them end up never realizing they are upside down until the instructor tells them. The point is to trust your instruments. If you're flying in bad weather, you can't trust your inner ear, but you can trust the gyroscope.
Because, um, we can't? I doubt organic computing has advanced far enough. Last I heard, a mouse brain could auto-pilot a plane, but I don't think that is what scientists are really worried about. A few brief glitches doesn't justify making the enormous investment to create not only wholly organic computers, but completely organic sensors (like gyroscopes. How are we going to make an organic version of that?) We don't have the knowledge or the means to do it. Besides, I have a feeling that an organic satellite would have more problems in space than a mechanical one. A mechanical one would have to worry about a few solar storms and collisions, both of which are only intermittent concerns. Organic satellites would have to worry about a lot of things, like solar wind which would be constantly ablating the surface (think sunburn). An organic satellite would need to feed itself. The only organic means of converting sunlight into energy that I can think of requires a steady supply of water and carbon dioxide. Out of curiosity, how would we communicate with it? Moving on, I guess you could say that an organic satellite could heal itself. A big plus, until you realize that means that it can also develop cancer. I know, it sounds retarded, but there's a lot of radiation in space. Even with shielding, that's a lot of exposure. Instead of having to go on missions to replace a faulty sensor or transmitter, we'll need to send missions to perform surgeries in zero gravity. Sounds fun.
Anyways, all of these concerns are a little academic, especially considering the fact that they don't exist!
Hrm, I'm curious. I could say that I don't pay attention to the rules that a Mafia sets up. I'd hardly call that wise though. I'd pay a lot of attention and take action (like, um, move away?). The thing is, any organization that has the potential to have a significant impact on your life (let's say, arrest you) shouldn't be straight up ignored.
I find anarcho-capitalism intriguing. What you want is for capitalism to extend into the public utilities, law enforcement, etc. should be run on a capitalist model. I just think there are some things where more money shouldn't equal more power. Or, money shouldn't be involved at all, like libraries. I can see that it would be an excellent way of life (like communism if it ever worked at the way it was supposed to), but it's too dependent on human perfection. As much aversion you may have to government, I find democracy is the best place where our leaders can be placed in a "free market" and each person (well, citizen) can vote equally regardless of whether they're rich or poor. I believe humans are generally good, but shouldn't be trusted. Because of the state that the world is in and the existence of human flaws like racism, it's hard for me to believe more good would come out than bad. People will form corporations and people will form mafias. I can see how things could become very efficient, but with the existence of off-shoring, very little trickle-down will take place and the masses will tend to suffer. Monopolies and cartels form without the urging of government, and American history alone demonstrates how negative of an effect these have. And the capitalization of public utilities is not efficient. What will happen is that each company will create it's own highway/rail/etc. And some things, like air traffic control, have no real market. Who sets the monetary standard by the way?
Law enforcement is similar. I really don't ever see rent-a-cops in malls and neighborhood watches ever do anything more than call the "real" cops. And that's a GOOD thing. A law enforcement without laws is a little scary, especially if that is blended with capitalism meaning money is involved. A great place to look is Sicily. It's been occupied so many times over the years that the constant changing has created a place with virtually no government (well, not anymore really, but historically). During that long unstable time, a fairly stable society rose up. A sort of neighborhood rule. I find that unnecessarily divisive. Neighborhood rule, Mafia rule, gang rule, are all the same in principle, and that is what will happen. There are too many cases in history to ignore the dangerous possibility.
You talk about how you dislike the RIAA's practices. So do I. I would be REALLY scared if they could employ their own law enforcers. All of the jokes about the RIAA police would come to life!
I find it odd that you are also Christian. Will there be free market religion as well? Religion is one of the most hierarchical organizations on earth. It's a step beyond autocracy. Did you ever get to choose your leader? What makes it right for him to rule? Why does he have that power? Do you know that he's perfect, or just take his word for it?
I really respect your views. They fact that you are brave enough to come out and talk about them really shines in my eyes. You have one of the most impressive and logical thought processes I've seen on Slashdot (does that say anything much?). I don't know whether you'd appreciate this, but I'd think you would make an excellent senator or representative. I like to think of Democracy as structured anarchy. It's the best way I can think of letting individual's express themselves without degenerating into complete chaos. Well, we still have problems, but the great thing is, there actually is a way of fixing them. I agree that there are many things that should be commercialized--like space exploration. But stuff like this isn't a zero-sum game. There's room for concurrency.
But my Windows Millennium Edition has a better feature! It keeps me from even turning on my computer! Within moments of pressing the power button, the operating system drops into an aesthetically pleasing blue screen. I can report that due to this feature I have never experienced any problems with malware or viruses! Microsoft is definitely ahead of the pack in sacrificing everything in the name of security.
It's not like we haven't been exposed to nanoparticles all the time. Just set a stick on fire. Right before your eyes, thousands of nanoparticles are being created. If you examined the soot, you'd find buckyballs and tubes. And when you smell smoke, OMG, you're inhaling nanoparticles! Plus, your body even has the ability to deal with self-replicating invasive nanoparticles (technically they are not "alive).
Well, I guess we shouldn't go barreling blindly though, we don't want another asbestos.
Please don't listen to anyone who tries to tell you that just because something is easy to use makes it less powerful and for "n00bs." I used to be a viligant Fedora advocate, until one day I finally broke down and installed Ubuntu. It was like dying and going to heaven. Personally I'd rather be running a composition I wrote in Noteedit through ZynAddSubFx and Hydrogen, piping the audio through the Jack Audio Server to Ardour, mastering the tracks through Jamin, using the resulting music as background for my Blender animation, bringing it all together using Cinelerra and integrating live action footage fetched with Kino, creating nice cover art with Inkscape and Gimp, authoring the DVD with Dvdauthor and soundtrack CD using Serpentine, and uploading the content to my Apache server (ok, I don't have an Apache server) than crying over rpm-hell and pounding config files into submission. Through experience, Ubuntu is truly easier to set up, and I spend less time actually doing what I want than trying to get my computer to do what I need (other than Wine, which has always been a mean horse). There's two types of geeks in this world, those that learn things because they concern themselves with elitism, and those that learn to use their knowledge for something useful.
A brilliant idea! Dibs on outsourcing my Cayman Island headquarters to Antarctica!
Re:GTK+/GNOME file chooser disaster.
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Let me start off with a disclaimer: I hate KDE. (Now, now, it's not the time for a flame way!:P)
Personally, I don't mind that interface. Besides, if that's your only problem with GNOME, then we must have it pretty good! I "strongly dislike" KDE's browsing system (one arrow left, one arrow right, one arrow up, one arrow is a crazy swirl, all so close together and so similar in appearance that it really gets frustrating at times.) And why the default is set to open folders with one click is beyond me. I have one program (Noteedit) that uses the KDE interface, and because of that, I didn't bother downloading all of the customization crap, so I'm stuck with it (if someone has a solution, tell me please!). Also, the taskbar/menu at the bottom always looks too cluttered to me. And the clock is just ugly. And why do they stack the window list in two rows? I came over from the Windows world, and was introduced to GNOME and KDE at the same time (I was playing around with SUSE and Fedora). I liked both the same and eventually my final decision came down to the GUI. KDE just hurt my eyes to use. It's a little hard to explain. All of the icons were so...BIG, and pixilated. And despite the fact that KDE looked a lot like XP's UI, I went to GNOME.
From what I can tell, people are about evenly divided on this issue. It's just whatever appeals to you. No, GNOME is not paradise incarnate, but to me, it's better. Besides, I sure you can customize that path chooser;)
But isn't that the beauty of FOSS? The fact that you can actually choose? Sort of like democracy, it's all the arguments that actually let you know it's working.
You really should read Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion. It's all about growing clones for transplants. It even talks about drug lords and even has a less than savory solution to the US's illegal immigrant problem! All for only $12.21!
In all honesty, it's a good book. Go check it out at the library. I commmand you!
I can see you're trying to be funny, but you don't understand a few things about the US government. Congress and the NSA are in two separate and idependent branches of govenment. The Congress is part of the Legislative Branch, and the NSA is an Executive Branch organization. The NSA may have been spying, but Congress is looking at that, as well as HP's actions. So, the Government may have been illegally spying on people, but because of the way that the government is structured, Congress is not being hypocritical if it punishes HP for spying.
Well, at least you actually know what 'eft' means, but for non-native English speakers (like me), Ubuntu codenames are a nightmare. They're hard to pronounce and hard to remember. I've had to look every frikin' fancy codename up in the dictionary, and then I was disappointed to know what they mean.
They should use more common words ('longhorn' is not too bad). It's like I release a program and I call it 'El Guepardo Guarrete". Would you remember that name?
Erm, you actually bothered to look it up? If you did, would you mind telling us what the heck an eft is? I'm pretty sure almost nobody here knows, so no, it really doesn't matter. I could care less what the name of a release is. You realize that the name of the "program" is Ubuntu--not Edgy Eft. If you named your program 'El Guepardo Guarrete', sure I would be pretty confused. If they named the next release of Ubuntu as "Ubuntu: Guepardo Guarrete", I'd just think of it as Ubuntu, and I'd probably remember it just because it was an odd name. Besides, um, Ubuntu is not an English word. Furthermore, the point of the name is kind of to be hard to pronounce. Have you ever heard of tongue twisters? It's usually an alliteration (a series of words that start with the same consonant sound) meant to be very difficult to say, but they end up being very memorable for that very reason.
For being a non-native speaker, you seem to have an extensive familiarity with English. Your grammer is better than most of the posts here (and that's not sarcasm), and you have an uncanny knowledge of idioms (like frikin')
I agree that just because Schmidt is on the board that this is an all-out agreement. Don't dismiss this though. Given some time, something could come up--or maybe nothing at all. I can still be pretty sure that Redmond isn't yawning over this. I'd say a few chairs are being thrown around (It's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic--er, I mean the board room)
DRM will feast on the bones of your children! It will send your soul to the firey depths of hellfire, as its deadly claws of DEATH drink your brains through your eyeballs! The D in DRM is for DEVIL!! (not sure what the R and the M stand for...) It is the Dread Pirate Roberts, here for your SOOOUUUUULLLS....
I'm not sure whether or not you're joking with the Gnome part, but you know that you can change everything from startup sounds, and splash screens to ui themes? Why else are there sites like http://www.gnome-look.org/? And if you don't like it, if you're using X, you can always change it to something else. Maybe I've been out of the loop and missed something, but would you mind explaining?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree wholeheartedly. There is something in a performance that records will never be able to match, for the existence of imperfections actually makes a work of art "better" in a way. The human component, the interactions between the actors and the audience, makes each performance unique, while a machine will do it the same each time. However, I was trying to approach the problem in an alternative way, since this argument about the "human" nature of art is so cliche (in my opinion, at least). Take theater and film for example. A film can create a "perfect" performance (well, relatively), yet in its presentation, it lacks the whole organic nature of the theater. That isn't to say that film isn't lacking of any advantages--it can incorporate elements that cannot be done due to the physical limitations of a live performance--it's just different. A camera (which, by the way, is a machine) can make a perfect replica of an image, so is painting now dead? Far from it. In fact, the camera was the impetus for the impressionist and surrealist movements of art. (If you ever asked why we don't have any more DaVinci's around, it's because of the camera. Why spend so much time trying to make something look realistic when you can just click a button? But that still doesn't make Leonardo's work any less valuable, or kill realism for that matter) We still value the human talent that goes into making a picture. At the same time, we don't shun the "machine generated" art of photographs. In fact, we recognize the talent of the artist behind the lens, both still and moving pictures. In the same way, we should value the talent of the programmer behind the code. When a machine is able to do something well, I don't understand why there is always such a backlash. Maybe people think that the machine is somehow cheating when it does something, but it was the work of humans that allowed the machine to achieve that feat, and that work should be celebrated. People usually try to say that a machine/computer will never be able to do x as well as a human, whether it be play chess or play an instrument. Well, why not? One day it's going to be an eventuality. Don't try to think of it as a failure of a human against a machine, but as the success of a human through a machine.
Well, it isn't exactly the same thing, but MIDI with good synths has been used to "perfectly" play a composition. Especially for instruments with simple timbres like drums and piano, a synth can sound very close to the real thing. Even with these ways to create a "perfect" performance, people still find a human performance impressive. It's kind of like meeting a person who can compute logarithms in their head, or find all the factors of a number without a calculator. Sure, a computer can do it--it may even do it faster, but I don't think that the fact that a machine can do something makes the feat less impressive when accomplished by a human. I'm still impressed when someone can run a marathon, even if a machine could do it just as easily, if not better. I don't see why there is so much concern that robotic performances will cheapen the value of human performances. Besides, if a programmer is able to write a program that is able to take a piece of music and interpret it beautifully, then it is still a human achievement in that a programmer was brilliant enough to decipher not only decipher the subtle psychology of what makes one performance sound emotional and powerful and the another sound mechanical, but also codify an algorithm that would imitate that interpretation. Kind of like designing a conversation bot to beat the Turing test. It's still a human accomplishment. Remember, the machine is us/ing us.
You know, now that you've said that, everyone is going to use it.
On another note, it would be entertaining wouldn't it. Kind of like making your password "OMFG, how did you guess my password!?"
He's fucking dead, you insensitive clod!
Well, I'd have to say that with most software projects, they provide a makefile. Yes, I know that it's a little bit steeper of a learning curve, but come on, it's not THAT much more work. Now, if the user is not savvy enough to go through the make process (which is usually only 2 commands long), then I don't think that they should be installing that stuff anyways. Just think, the stuff that's in the repositories are the packages least likely to cause problems with the installation. I've found most everything I've ever wanted in the repositories. The stuff that's not in there usually shouldn't be there. The amount of hassle that I have with make pre-installation (library problems, etc.) is usually indicative of the amount of trouble I'll have post-installation. Once the package is massaged enough by the repo managers to fit, then it is both more accessible and less likely to cough up errors. I'd say that it's not so much the vendor's job to get into a repository so much as to provide a suitable makefile from which a user could install their program, and thus a base from which a repo manager could work.
Personally, I think the repository system is brilliant. It sure beats running to the story to buy software, and being able to just randomly do a search for packages is great. I can do a search for "video editor," and it brings up Kino, Cinelerra, MPlayer, and a myriad of other things. That's how I found inkscape. One day, I needed a vector illustrator, and I did a search. You can't beat the convenience of that. It's a lot better that what you'd get if you went up to Wal Mart complaining they didn't have something. Their response would be, "Why would you want software that isn't in the store?" The thing is, most people don't even know software outside the store exists. They live in the Windows Bubble. But the Linuxen are different, which is what makes us harder to please. It's like when a doctor gets sick--it's hard for them to step back and become the patient again.
Actually, rpm and yum are a reinvention of apt/deb and synaptic.
Hear hear! I have mod points, but I'd rather post.
Circular dependencies, aka RPM hell, is what actually prompted me to make the switch from the Red Hat family to the Debian family. I used to be a pretty die hard Red Hat user. It used to be that Fedora was the cutting edge, back in the core 2 and 3 days. I would have those days when I would wrestle with the packages, but I just took my hits and moved on. Then Ubuntu came along, and I realized how much time I was wasting with that stuff. It "just works." APT is great (it's a pity POSIX decided to go for RPM). Gentoo's portage is really cool too, but IALAB (I'm a lazy bum--if you can't reconcile the acronym, then you probably shouldn't know what the missing word is).
Because, um, we can't? I doubt organic computing has advanced far enough. Last I heard, a mouse brain could auto-pilot a plane, but I don't think that is what scientists are really worried about. A few brief glitches doesn't justify making the enormous investment to create not only wholly organic computers, but completely organic sensors (like gyroscopes. How are we going to make an organic version of that?) We don't have the knowledge or the means to do it. Besides, I have a feeling that an organic satellite would have more problems in space than a mechanical one. A mechanical one would have to worry about a few solar storms and collisions, both of which are only intermittent concerns. Organic satellites would have to worry about a lot of things, like solar wind which would be constantly ablating the surface (think sunburn). An organic satellite would need to feed itself. The only organic means of converting sunlight into energy that I can think of requires a steady supply of water and carbon dioxide. Out of curiosity, how would we communicate with it? Moving on, I guess you could say that an organic satellite could heal itself. A big plus, until you realize that means that it can also develop cancer. I know, it sounds retarded, but there's a lot of radiation in space. Even with shielding, that's a lot of exposure. Instead of having to go on missions to replace a faulty sensor or transmitter, we'll need to send missions to perform surgeries in zero gravity. Sounds fun.
Anyways, all of these concerns are a little academic, especially considering the fact that they don't exist!
Hrm, I'm curious. I could say that I don't pay attention to the rules that a Mafia sets up. I'd hardly call that wise though. I'd pay a lot of attention and take action (like, um, move away?). The thing is, any organization that has the potential to have a significant impact on your life (let's say, arrest you) shouldn't be straight up ignored.
I find anarcho-capitalism intriguing. What you want is for capitalism to extend into the public utilities, law enforcement, etc. should be run on a capitalist model. I just think there are some things where more money shouldn't equal more power. Or, money shouldn't be involved at all, like libraries. I can see that it would be an excellent way of life (like communism if it ever worked at the way it was supposed to), but it's too dependent on human perfection. As much aversion you may have to government, I find democracy is the best place where our leaders can be placed in a "free market" and each person (well, citizen) can vote equally regardless of whether they're rich or poor. I believe humans are generally good, but shouldn't be trusted. Because of the state that the world is in and the existence of human flaws like racism, it's hard for me to believe more good would come out than bad. People will form corporations and people will form mafias. I can see how things could become very efficient, but with the existence of off-shoring, very little trickle-down will take place and the masses will tend to suffer. Monopolies and cartels form without the urging of government, and American history alone demonstrates how negative of an effect these have. And the capitalization of public utilities is not efficient. What will happen is that each company will create it's own highway/rail/etc. And some things, like air traffic control, have no real market. Who sets the monetary standard by the way?
Law enforcement is similar. I really don't ever see rent-a-cops in malls and neighborhood watches ever do anything more than call the "real" cops. And that's a GOOD thing. A law enforcement without laws is a little scary, especially if that is blended with capitalism meaning money is involved. A great place to look is Sicily. It's been occupied so many times over the years that the constant changing has created a place with virtually no government (well, not anymore really, but historically). During that long unstable time, a fairly stable society rose up. A sort of neighborhood rule. I find that unnecessarily divisive. Neighborhood rule, Mafia rule, gang rule, are all the same in principle, and that is what will happen. There are too many cases in history to ignore the dangerous possibility.
You talk about how you dislike the RIAA's practices. So do I. I would be REALLY scared if they could employ their own law enforcers. All of the jokes about the RIAA police would come to life!
I find it odd that you are also Christian. Will there be free market religion as well? Religion is one of the most hierarchical organizations on earth. It's a step beyond autocracy. Did you ever get to choose your leader? What makes it right for him to rule? Why does he have that power? Do you know that he's perfect, or just take his word for it?
I really respect your views. They fact that you are brave enough to come out and talk about them really shines in my eyes. You have one of the most impressive and logical thought processes I've seen on Slashdot (does that say anything much?). I don't know whether you'd appreciate this, but I'd think you would make an excellent senator or representative. I like to think of Democracy as structured anarchy. It's the best way I can think of letting individual's express themselves without degenerating into complete chaos. Well, we still have problems, but the great thing is, there actually is a way of fixing them. I agree that there are many things that should be commercialized--like space exploration. But stuff like this isn't a zero-sum game. There's room for concurrency.
I'v
John, is that you?
But my Windows Millennium Edition has a better feature! It keeps me from even turning on my computer! Within moments of pressing the power button, the operating system drops into an aesthetically pleasing blue screen. I can report that due to this feature I have never experienced any problems with malware or viruses! Microsoft is definitely ahead of the pack in sacrificing everything in the name of security.
It's not like we haven't been exposed to nanoparticles all the time. Just set a stick on fire. Right before your eyes, thousands of nanoparticles are being created. If you examined the soot, you'd find buckyballs and tubes. And when you smell smoke, OMG, you're inhaling nanoparticles! Plus, your body even has the ability to deal with self-replicating invasive nanoparticles (technically they are not "alive).
Well, I guess we shouldn't go barreling blindly though, we don't want another asbestos.
Please don't listen to anyone who tries to tell you that just because something is easy to use makes it less powerful and for "n00bs." I used to be a viligant Fedora advocate, until one day I finally broke down and installed Ubuntu. It was like dying and going to heaven. Personally I'd rather be running a composition I wrote in Noteedit through ZynAddSubFx and Hydrogen, piping the audio through the Jack Audio Server to Ardour, mastering the tracks through Jamin, using the resulting music as background for my Blender animation, bringing it all together using Cinelerra and integrating live action footage fetched with Kino, creating nice cover art with Inkscape and Gimp, authoring the DVD with Dvdauthor and soundtrack CD using Serpentine, and uploading the content to my Apache server (ok, I don't have an Apache server) than crying over rpm-hell and pounding config files into submission. Through experience, Ubuntu is truly easier to set up, and I spend less time actually doing what I want than trying to get my computer to do what I need (other than Wine, which has always been a mean horse). There's two types of geeks in this world, those that learn things because they concern themselves with elitism, and those that learn to use their knowledge for something useful.
No, no. Minesweeper on 8x8 with 63 mines. Thats mindless.
A brilliant idea! Dibs on outsourcing my Cayman Island headquarters to Antarctica!
Let me start off with a disclaimer: I hate KDE. (Now, now, it's not the time for a flame way! :P)
;)
Personally, I don't mind that interface. Besides, if that's your only problem with GNOME, then we must have it pretty good! I "strongly dislike" KDE's browsing system (one arrow left, one arrow right, one arrow up, one arrow is a crazy swirl, all so close together and so similar in appearance that it really gets frustrating at times.) And why the default is set to open folders with one click is beyond me. I have one program (Noteedit) that uses the KDE interface, and because of that, I didn't bother downloading all of the customization crap, so I'm stuck with it (if someone has a solution, tell me please!). Also, the taskbar/menu at the bottom always looks too cluttered to me. And the clock is just ugly. And why do they stack the window list in two rows? I came over from the Windows world, and was introduced to GNOME and KDE at the same time (I was playing around with SUSE and Fedora). I liked both the same and eventually my final decision came down to the GUI. KDE just hurt my eyes to use. It's a little hard to explain. All of the icons were so...BIG, and pixilated. And despite the fact that KDE looked a lot like XP's UI, I went to GNOME.
From what I can tell, people are about evenly divided on this issue. It's just whatever appeals to you. No, GNOME is not paradise incarnate, but to me, it's better. Besides, I sure you can customize that path chooser
But isn't that the beauty of FOSS? The fact that you can actually choose? Sort of like democracy, it's all the arguments that actually let you know it's working.
You really should read Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion. It's all about growing clones for transplants. It even talks about drug lords and even has a less than savory solution to the US's illegal immigrant problem! All for only $12.21!
In all honesty, it's a good book. Go check it out at the library. I commmand you!
I can see you're trying to be funny, but you don't understand a few things about the US government. Congress and the NSA are in two separate and idependent branches of govenment. The Congress is part of the Legislative Branch, and the NSA is an Executive Branch organization. The NSA may have been spying, but Congress is looking at that, as well as HP's actions. So, the Government may have been illegally spying on people, but because of the way that the government is structured, Congress is not being hypocritical if it punishes HP for spying.
Erm, you actually bothered to look it up? If you did, would you mind telling us what the heck an eft is? I'm pretty sure almost nobody here knows, so no, it really doesn't matter. I could care less what the name of a release is. You realize that the name of the "program" is Ubuntu--not Edgy Eft. If you named your program 'El Guepardo Guarrete', sure I would be pretty confused. If they named the next release of Ubuntu as "Ubuntu: Guepardo Guarrete", I'd just think of it as Ubuntu, and I'd probably remember it just because it was an odd name. Besides, um, Ubuntu is not an English word. Furthermore, the point of the name is kind of to be hard to pronounce. Have you ever heard of tongue twisters? It's usually an alliteration (a series of words that start with the same consonant sound) meant to be very difficult to say, but they end up being very memorable for that very reason.
For being a non-native speaker, you seem to have an extensive familiarity with English. Your grammer is better than most of the posts here (and that's not sarcasm), and you have an uncanny knowledge of idioms (like frikin')
I agree that just because Schmidt is on the board that this is an all-out agreement. Don't dismiss this though. Given some time, something could come up--or maybe nothing at all. I can still be pretty sure that Redmond isn't yawning over this. I'd say a few chairs are being thrown around (It's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic--er, I mean the board room)
DRM will feast on the bones of your children! It will send your soul to the firey depths of hellfire, as its deadly claws of DEATH drink your brains through your eyeballs! The D in DRM is for DEVIL!! (not sure what the R and the M stand for...) It is the Dread Pirate Roberts, here for your SOOOUUUUULLLS....
I'm not sure whether or not you're joking with the Gnome part, but you know that you can change everything from startup sounds, and splash screens to ui themes? Why else are there sites like http://www.gnome-look.org/? And if you don't like it, if you're using X, you can always change it to something else. Maybe I've been out of the loop and missed something, but would you mind explaining?