> "Commit"? Or are they disproportionately stopped and searched?
Rapes, murders and other violent crime aren't dependent on "unfair stops and searches" though, which leads me to believe unfair stops and searches are probably not the root cause of the other cases either.
There are a lot of posts here about scary legal problems for the router owner. But what if the routers allowed access to the Internet only through Tor, for example, so the router owner is not in danger of what people do with it? Couldn't the router help by running an internal Tor relay to help that network too?
I love how there is an article that has first hand accounts of why actual people are leaving Google to work at Microsoft and there still seems to be argument against Microsoft.
There really is an unsurprising argument against Microsoft to be found here in the article. First, it reeks of propaganda, who else calls a mystery number over 8 people coming back to work at Microsoft an "exodus"? Why is Google suddenly so much worse to work for? Couldn't it simply be related to the latest push to hire workers to bolster Microsoft's search engine development? They have just recently run ads trying to hire disgruntled Yahoo workers too because they couldn't buy them out. It seems a pretty obvious attempt to attract competitor workers, or it's really conveniently timed.
Now a lot of people do frequently rush off to defend Microsoft for some strange reason, often one tied to a paycheck. But for most people, they have an understandably harder time wiping off the "dirty tricks Microsoft has pulled this month" slate and thinking maybe, just maybe, this time there are no tricks involved.
Please, don't be one of those guys who preach about open source in a RMS religious zealot style to end users who just want their goddamn iPod to work on their home machine (Oh, by the way, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my shuffle Just Worked when I attached it to Ubuntu 8.04). You're doing more harm than good.
I agree, if the preaching is out of place... But if it comes down to shunning those that advocate open source core principles (the principles that actually make it what it is) to gain joe sixpack's approval then that's too high a cost. Open source doesn't need dumb mainstream support. It's improving until and beyond the time that the dumb mainstream needs it! There's no rush to change how it's done, it already has all these wonderful things to show for it, and clearly stands on its own merits, and it's not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. What's more, even those that are so bizarrely put off by OSS evangelists that they have to drop OSS in disgust will eventually be using it later anyway. Evangelists are a critical resource, even though evangelizing out of place is annoying.
Microsoft has an extremely rich history of anticompetitive behavior, and it's certainly not illogical to assume what has generally applied still applies!
Indeed there's support for it in KDE as well. I use it in quite a few binds like:
Win-f for fullscreen toggle
Win-r for window resizes
Win-t for window translation
Win-m for mozilla firefox
Win-g/k for a terminal spawn
Win-cursor directions to move windows
Shift-Win-cursor directions to rapidly expand / contract them (contract acts a little weird for me)
Alt-Win cursor to move windows to other desktops
and several other miscellaneous things. It's nice to have a lot of free bindable keys there with full keyboard range, and shifts and alts give several extra layers to it. You can modify binds in KDE's "control center" -> Keyboard shortcuts and for other command like actions (terminal / shell invocations..) under -> Input Actions.
Why not just provide the direct link downloads of several common video formats off to the side and everybody on those platforms can use it?
Re:Goodness
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 2, Informative
... Meanwhile, I don't think Linux is as viable as a movement as it was at the beginning of this case. This for all I know has nothing to do with the SCO case itself, but it seems like five years ago people still thought Linux on the desktop had a future, now I don't hear anyone talking about that anymore.
There have been been tremendous advances for Linux and the things mentioned in your message there don't seem to jibe with all of the news that I've been keeping track of over the last 5 years. The beginnings of major party support for the desktop, many more developers have been working for Linux targets, and by some reports Microsoft has lost quite a few. Desktop progress seems significant. Major new things are measured in days now. You've got Beryl, virtualization, better driver support, and that whole Ubuntu thing that's being installed by new people daily, Microsoft is paying out many hundreds of millions to try to control open source software and Linux. Many industry giants are embracing it. There's been phenomenal progress in many of the packages. There's simply no doubt to me that it's moving at an incredible rate, but you seem to claim the opposite. That it's stagnant and the zeal and purpose is gone... My question is why? What have you seen to conclude this? I'd probably agree if all I read were Microsoft press releases, but seriously...
Requiring its use is unnecessary and wasteful. There are already free alternatives that do absolutely everything and beyond what is required in a highschool setting. It's straightforward to use them generally, there's no reason to "train" to know how to use a Microsoft product specifically in preparation for college and beyond. Pushing for a totally unnecessary product to be bought by parents will win over only an ill-informed populace.
I can address a few of these, but am unqualified to answer about the 2-D vector graphics Cairo library or GDC.
a) Remoting a Linux distro (X server) is not difficult. You can use vncserver through an ssh tunnel or pop whatever graphical application to your screen from a remote server. E.g. you can ssh -X into a machine, run vncserver on it (would advise use of -localhost and -nolisten tcp and set color-depth/resolution..). This isn't restricted to certain Linux distros, unlike Windows' remote desktop. You can also use rdesktop to view remote Windows machines I think (haven't used). b) 'borrowed' and 'looted' are "IP" concepts not indicative of quality. Restricting key methods from mass adoption holds back progress for everybody. Plus, keep in mind that Microsoft wouldn't even exist today without first cloning CP/M, or done as well if they hadn't later copied Xerox's GUI, and aquired as they went along. c) (me unqualified to answer) d) (me unqualified to answer): it probably could be organized better but I haven't encountered mega-difficulty in programming on this from in Linux, using OpenGL, GTK, SDL and some other components... (?) e) MS holds a monopoly position which attract more vendors. This doesn't imply the API and library is better or worse (as witnessed by your preference as well) f) 1995 was quite a few years back, things have improved tremendously since then. The Linux kernel was only 4 years old at the time too. g) Once you try a package manager that eliminates installation, dependency, upgrade annoyances, I think it extremely unlikely to still favor older-style Windows install and update methods.
Various distros of Linux (and Linux) are progressing at a phenomenal rate since they've already "got typing" worldwide, whereas the enormous benefit of being a monopoly dissipates over time unless there come along some major reasons to stick with it.
this whole "war" between science and religion is doing horrendous things to both sides
This is inaccurate, science is not being assaulted horrendously here except in the eyes of those that may be too far gone to see how ridiculous this exhibit really is. It will accomplish a few things: 1) increase agnosticism and atheism by shining a public light on the irrational implications of
the foundations of Christianity 2) support fundamentalist beliefs that science is still not the answer
The former [science] is bad because it misses the possible truths about God's universe.
The bible is rife with contradictions, it was written and edited by humans like every other religious material on Earth, but done many years after the supposed events occurred. It is spread mostly parent to child, by missionaries into poor and uneducated parts of the Earth, by greatly increasing psychological stress on one hand and offering to relieve the psychological stress on the other.
Science, on the other hand, spreads in all conditions without requiring any of these tricks. Furthermore, it does not discount a creator at all, it allows every possibility. But those possibilities require evidence before they can be addressed seriously. It is religion that severely limits the mind by training it to accept and apply a single irrational explanation of everything. A religion under these conditions, like all believed misinformation, is simply brain damage.
I've kept up with this issue for years, and I can't think of anyone who wants to abolish copyright outright.
Allow me to be the first to discuss this underrepresented side with you then!
Part of the intent of copyright law is to allow a content producer control over how the information they create is distributed. This is done so profit isn't "lost", and to prevent plagiarism, and in the case of GPL (article topic) to keep information open (among other things). But consider if those problems that were once solved by copyright could be solved by something else that additionally doesn't have to restrict information sharing to accomplish them. Surely having all of the benefits with none of the detriments is the best case scenario!
The benefits are immediate, fair use of information extends to cover entire works (full novels, movies, news articles, journals, tv shows, etc.) and they could be sharable, commonly accessible and searchable. There could be a totally legal Google on steroids that contains the body of all known information produced by humanity. Things that hinder information distribution, DRM, DMCA,... fall into disuse since their benefit is lost.
Now the methods to accomplish this are many and varied. Freely shared information for example can be done via a buffet-like information access system. If a chunk of federal taxes pays for information, and the people (citizens, people specializing in various fields, reputation networks, etc) can still decide which information content producers should get more profits than others, then capitalism influences are still at work. In this method the information is still treated as information and not some limited "product" by limiting the actions of everybody that comes in contact with it. The content producers are paid, people can share it all the want, there can be a great online system to automate much of this. In my mind if such a system could be worked out without the people balking at the prices for the buffet then it would easily trump any system built on artificial restrictions to information.
What if I want to be generous and WANT to share my connection?
Agreed! That should be what is concentrated from now on technically here. There should be something to indicate one way or another if random users are welcome or not to use any service. Consider web sites which so far we all just assume we're free to use because it's generally not preventing us from access when we click on links to various hosts. If some sites decide to still allow the requests and responses to go through and yet the owners call it "trespassing" because "they never gave permission in the first place" to use it then the WWW quickly becomes a giant legal train wreck! The easiest minimal thing to solve these problems in the legal domain would appear to be some open standard that specifies a default bit that says if a network is intended for public access or not. This would help give it the varying legal distinctions in the real world of entering a public space, say, vs. a private residence.
If the gunman had pulled his psycho bullshit in a crowded Virginia mall, the shooter's life may have ended a lot quicker, but that does not mean that fewer people would be dead.
I evidently don't ascribe such tremendous idiocy to people defending against a gunman as you. Of course there's panic, and chaos but there's also the intent to hit the correct target. It is not that people defending against an attack would just pick someone at random in the group and start firing away, that's just asinine.
Furthermore, if a gunman is shooting people in the mall then I'll go out on a limb saying it is morally correct that the shooter be stopped as soon as possible with whatever means. Deadly force is encouraged and not immoral in the slightest if it can save even one more life (not the gunman's of course). Not every killing is immoral which I think you're using as a base assumption leading to the kind of moral psychosis you describe.
As for the shooting at Virginia Tech, if anyone nearby had been able to toast that bastard doing the shooting then they would get cheers from me. Worse is that I would be happy that he was shot or killed. Dozens of lives could have been saved. If that makes me evil or immoral to celebrate the killing of someone that is otherwise killing students at a college then I'm as unapologetically evil as they come.
I remember playing Another World, it was a remarkable game and I'm glad to see it on this list. It looked and played very differently than every other game style I'd seen to date, the fluid animation and bizarre alien utopian city and tech future art really did give an "Another World" feel to it. But I remember it being far too short playing it from start to finish. To me it actually did easily surpass most of the games in this list. Syndicate was great and Populous should be on the list too along with a dozen or so others (even though calling it a top ten then would be a hard sell). I'd also like to add Dungeon Master and the X-com UFO game into the list..
Theo isn't saying HE's the one pulling up the driver, he is talking about the driver's writer who essentially got publicly shamed by this -- he was saying that he wouldn't be surprised if the driver's maintainer took his ball and went home from the grief from this.
The way this was handled from the very first message was extremely counterproductive. Emotional outbursts are not unexpected when the first you hear of an issue is in a very public volley against you. Even if an issue cannot be worked out first privately and fixed, there could have at least been a simple "heads up" sent between friends first before the shit hit the public fan. This has to be there somewhere in Common Sense Diplomacy 101.
Understand that breaking this rule always strains relations and is an often used tactic by those who want to draw attention specifically to themselves at expense of others, or otherwise have an agenda against the target. So if it was just not knowing any better then it should not happen again in the future. I'd never work with anyone who thought otherwise unless I was forced to.
If you skip the step of private communications to the appropriate people first or minimally sending a heads up letter you will generally see PR fallout of people working out these issues publicly with far hotter heads. This is not the best way to handle technical things that benefit us all since generally only inferior or just temporarily "sufficient" solutions are found in a panic.
Without the proofs presented in the discussion then maybe I can get away with writing this:
There probably wasn't nothing to begin with since "nothing" implies that you can put "something" into it by our everyday experience. That's a lot of functionality to begin with for free. Instead assume it starts from a void which can't hold any information.
Rules (i.e. X interacts with Y by doing A when C occurs) for a computer are data that tells the system which actions it should take. It is no coincidence that data (information) is required since every explicitly chosen action requires an informational constraint to pick it over every other possible action. Without this constraint any one of the possible rules may be selected according to whatever probable bias exists in that context. So information is saved (not required) if the system doesn't have to choose a specific rule.
The structure of the system determines what rules it can enact at this higher level (as opposed to actions at a particle level...). Structural form is also a particular selection over all possible structural forms and thus requires an informational constraint to specify. If structural form is unspecified then the amount of information required to represent the various configurations is saved.
Existence of a represented object is specification and simulation of its state and behaviors, where choosing to represent it or not takes information in terms of selecting the rules and state to represent it or not. If this is left unspecified then this particular information is saved.
If the universe is indefinite about existence of things, about specifying any of the parameters discussed and others then no informational constraints are required, which is no more or less than what is allowed or disallowed by a void. Remember in quantum physics the unspecifiability of particle behaviors except after measurement? About the infinite futures and/or pasts, and schrodenger's cat and infinite universes and so on? There is unspecified things even in our perceptions but this is not the undecideability of the void but rather the rules that allows us to exist in the domain it supports. In our case it is our perceptions as entities based on rules and state in only one of the possible forms that allow us to observe the stateful events to happen in this subset to the whole of all possible things.
We're living in one of the infinite possible universes under one of the infinite conditions that our particular consciousnesses could manifest in or at least interact with from somewhere else. That is the basis of how things "exist" from our perspectives and that we're able to interact with them and share the space with others and so on.
The void by its simple nature is unchangeable, it's timeless, it can't be found, seen or interacted with and it supports everything by being indecisive about everything. Ok! The above is really half assed, but it seems reasonable except several glaring omissions and I'm not sure how one would go about proving it unless one can assume the void and find out one of a set of possible ways that "we" got "here".
Water being frozen in "deep dark places", isn't from black body radiation (some things emit and other things absorb would tend to equal things out) but rather kinetic energy reduction through evaporative process of water. (unless you're talking about ground freeze and thus conductive heat transfer?) You'll achieve better results with that level of technology using a porous material container (clay pot) through which some water can evaporate overnight cooling the container down during the process (i.e. insulator and evaporation chill layer). Better is probably the container in a container method with continually dampened sand between the containers to cool the inner one while insulating it at the same time and giving a bonus that the stuff you're storing in there remains dry without rigging.
As for freezing in space, if you're a dandy and wore a thinly layered gold body suit then that would reduce radiation emissions and incoming radiation. In a sense this converts you into a half Thermos (tm) with an unneeded secondary layer since there is already a near vacuum outside. Your suit reflectivity also helps with radiation based heating of an infrared emission source like the sun.
It is really the social skills of the other person that makes your interactions appear to be more normal. They are working very hard at fitting you in.
Well whoopty do! Why would this matter to an aspie if as you seem to be claiming they're so devoid of all social capabilities to feel or even detect normalcy to begin with? You seem to be implying them to be "soulless" or sociopathic or something. It seems it does matter to them if they're trying to get it right. If the more social-capable set can't deal with the seemingly "off" interaction and that they're working oh so hard at it then maybe that's their problem? Your statements about the inability to empathize with Asperger's people and putting them somewhere below the animal kingdom or inside and like sharks or worse in empathizability indicates you have a far more serious problem than they do! That is assuming you correctly conveyed that information as I understand it via shat-ting through your keyboard. Maybe also consider that if both sides are working hard at achieving something "normal" then maybe both sides will benefit from it in different ways.
I will always be outside of your world; and you will always be outside of mine.
If your desktop is covered with xterms then you won't notice the clutter underneath anymore right?;-)
In KDE you can add or get rid of as much clutter as you like. I use KDE also for the customizable key presses and shift-numlock mousekey mode to run arbitrary code and manipulate windows. Plus the "toolbar" doesn't have to take up screen real estate by configurement through a shockingly thorough configure dialog. After configuring it, I switched from enlightenment (and windowmaker and sawfish and a number of other window managers) and haven't looked back. I've been using linux for quite a few years now and it's just a fantastic environment to use, plus it's far in advance of anything I've ever seen windows do.
but I don't believe that Linux is an "advanced operating system" for a single moment.
My whole point was to find out why this belief is held? What is it about Linux that causes people to claim it isn't advanced? Pointing out something better would cinch it.
How does being Open Source make an OS advanced?
Well I wouldn't think it alone would, but given the same something that is closed vs. open, then open is certainly a better state to be in. It is better in that it enables more freedom to do with it what you will. Things that limit your options seem less advanced to me (or maybe just "worse" is a better term). "Worse" things seem more primitive, so, however the semantics work out..
System/360 is currently in the public domain would you call it advanced too?
versus a closed source version of the same then I'd count the open source version as more "advanced", or better at least.
Finally, please define customizable. That could mean so many things it isn't even funny.
By customizable, I mean standard everyday customizable dictionary term. Check out the kernel options you can alter when you build your own kernel, check out the ability to get in there and change nearly everything about the kernel's behavior that you'd ever want to. Write your own modules, use or modify others', install or remove modules from a live running kernel. And there's nothing more customizable than allowing you to get in the source code and alter the kernel into absolutely any form you wish.
Well, for all of us here under the impression that Linux is an advanced operating system (maybe as you say due to the dismal affairs created by Microsoft) then can you cite any specific thing that's not advanced about it? Maybe you know about some super secret OS that runs on nearly all hardware in existence? Oh wait, that's Linux. Or maybe some super secret OS that allows anyone to look at its source, compile it, redistribute it, modify it, install it on as many computers as they want? Or an OS that's reliable, safe, highly customizable, and free? Oh wait, all of that is Linux too. I guess what I'm trying to say is, WTF are you talking about?
I hate them because I can see the detriment they've caused over the field of computing from using their market position to hold others back. Early lucky breaks and skillful business practices have kept them on top, not a superior product and not innovation. The examples are everywhere in the comments to the story, vendor lock-in, embrace & extend, deals with PC sellers to auto-bundle it (difficult to not buy it sometimes), patent hoarding and leverage and FUD against open source, forced online authentication or OS-to-PC lock, explaining yourself when you upgrade your machine, hidden API issues, serious artificial limitations on their OS, secrecy of what their OS is actually doing to your machine, drivers produced explicitly toward MS products due to high market share target giving them tremendous benefit over other OS's, their fight against open source (it's a cancer right?), deals to provide discounts as long as competitors detriment, inspections of installations to check compliance to ensure those discounts continue, lack of freedom, EULAs, in deals with media industry to support various DRM schemes, and whatever heinous thing TC with DRM in combination with DMCA will lead to. The restriction of freedoms and rights and essentially the loss of control over your PC leading to people answering to them instead of the other way around. Again, they provide the weaker OS product and use their monopoly to hold everybody else back. I hate 'em, we simply need more people exposed to the freeing wonderment of open source to understand why these things must be fought.
Agreed AC, it's quite clear that a society that profits by keeping public information secret is ultimately crippling themselves. And when they punish those who transmit these public "secrets" then it's just backwards and sad. Judging by the nature of comments all around here though it looks like it will take many years to convince the masses of even the most obvious better ways to handle this.
Slashdot Mirror
> "Commit"? Or are they disproportionately stopped and searched?
Rapes, murders and other violent crime aren't dependent on "unfair stops and searches" though, which leads me to believe unfair stops and searches are probably not the root cause of the other cases either.
There are a lot of posts here about scary legal problems for the router owner. But what if the routers allowed access to the Internet only through Tor, for example, so the router owner is not in danger of what people do with it? Couldn't the router help by running an internal Tor relay to help that network too?
I love how there is an article that has first hand accounts of why actual people are leaving Google to work at Microsoft and there still seems to be argument against Microsoft.
There really is an unsurprising argument against Microsoft to be found here in the article. First, it reeks of propaganda, who else calls a mystery number over 8 people coming back to work at Microsoft an "exodus"? Why is Google suddenly so much worse to work for? Couldn't it simply be related to the latest push to hire workers to bolster Microsoft's search engine development? They have just recently run ads trying to hire disgruntled Yahoo workers too because they couldn't buy them out. It seems a pretty obvious attempt to attract competitor workers, or it's really conveniently timed.
Now a lot of people do frequently rush off to defend Microsoft for some strange reason, often one tied to a paycheck. But for most people, they have an understandably harder time wiping off the "dirty tricks Microsoft has pulled this month" slate and thinking maybe, just maybe, this time there are no tricks involved.
Please, don't be one of those guys who preach about open source in a RMS religious zealot style to end users who just want their goddamn iPod to work on their home machine (Oh, by the way, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my shuffle Just Worked when I attached it to Ubuntu 8.04). You're doing more harm than good.
I agree, if the preaching is out of place... But if it comes down to shunning those that advocate open source core principles (the principles that actually make it what it is) to gain joe sixpack's approval then that's too high a cost. Open source doesn't need dumb mainstream support. It's improving until and beyond the time that the dumb mainstream needs it! There's no rush to change how it's done, it already has all these wonderful things to show for it, and clearly stands on its own merits, and it's not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. What's more, even those that are so bizarrely put off by OSS evangelists that they have to drop OSS in disgust will eventually be using it later anyway. Evangelists are a critical resource, even though evangelizing out of place is annoying.
Microsoft has an extremely rich history of anticompetitive behavior, and it's certainly not illogical to assume what has generally applied still applies!
Indeed there's support for it in KDE as well. I use it in quite a few binds like:
Win-f for fullscreen toggle
Win-r for window resizes
Win-t for window translation
Win-m for mozilla firefox
Win-g/k for a terminal spawn
Win-cursor directions to move windows
Shift-Win-cursor directions to rapidly expand / contract them (contract acts a little weird for me)
Alt-Win cursor to move windows to other desktops
and several other miscellaneous things. It's nice to have a lot of free bindable keys there with full keyboard range, and shifts and alts give several extra layers to it. You can modify binds in KDE's "control center" -> Keyboard shortcuts and for other command like actions (terminal / shell invocations..) under -> Input Actions.
Why not just provide the direct link downloads of several common video formats off to the side and everybody on those platforms can use it?
... Meanwhile, I don't think Linux is as viable as a movement as it was at the beginning of this case. This for all I know has nothing to do with the SCO case itself, but it seems like five years ago people still thought Linux on the desktop had a future, now I don't hear anyone talking about that anymore.
There have been been tremendous advances for Linux and the things mentioned in your message there don't seem to jibe with all of the news that I've been keeping track of over the last 5 years. The beginnings of major party support for the desktop, many more developers have been working for Linux targets, and by some reports Microsoft has lost quite a few. Desktop progress seems significant. Major new things are measured in days now. You've got Beryl, virtualization, better driver support, and that whole Ubuntu thing that's being installed by new people daily, Microsoft is paying out many hundreds of millions to try to control open source software and Linux. Many industry giants are embracing it. There's been phenomenal progress in many of the packages. There's simply no doubt to me that it's moving at an incredible rate, but you seem to claim the opposite. That it's stagnant and the zeal and purpose is gone... My question is why? What have you seen to conclude this? I'd probably agree if all I read were Microsoft press releases, but seriously...
Requiring its use is unnecessary and wasteful. There are already free alternatives that do absolutely everything and beyond what is required in a highschool setting. It's straightforward to use them generally, there's no reason to "train" to know how to use a Microsoft product specifically in preparation for college and beyond. Pushing for a totally unnecessary product to be bought by parents will win over only an ill-informed populace.
I can address a few of these, but am unqualified to answer about the 2-D vector graphics Cairo library or GDC.
..). This isn't restricted to certain Linux distros, unlike Windows' remote desktop. You can also use rdesktop to view remote Windows machines I think (haven't used).
a) Remoting a Linux distro (X server) is not difficult. You can use vncserver through an ssh tunnel or pop whatever graphical application to your screen from a remote server. E.g. you can ssh -X into a machine, run vncserver on it (would advise use of -localhost and -nolisten tcp and set color-depth/resolution
b) 'borrowed' and 'looted' are "IP" concepts not indicative of quality. Restricting key methods from mass adoption holds back progress for everybody. Plus, keep in mind that Microsoft wouldn't even exist today without first cloning CP/M, or done as well if they hadn't later copied Xerox's GUI, and aquired as they went along.
c) (me unqualified to answer)
d) (me unqualified to answer): it probably could be organized better but I haven't encountered mega-difficulty in programming on this from in Linux, using OpenGL, GTK, SDL and some other components... (?)
e) MS holds a monopoly position which attract more vendors. This doesn't imply the API and library is better or worse (as witnessed by your preference as well)
f) 1995 was quite a few years back, things have improved tremendously since then. The Linux kernel was only 4 years old at the time too.
g) Once you try a package manager that eliminates installation, dependency, upgrade annoyances, I think it extremely unlikely to still favor older-style Windows install and update methods.
Various distros of Linux (and Linux) are progressing at a phenomenal rate since they've already "got typing" worldwide, whereas the enormous benefit of being a monopoly dissipates over time unless there come along some major reasons to stick with it.
this whole "war" between science and religion is doing horrendous things to both sides
This is inaccurate, science is not being assaulted horrendously here except in the eyes of those that may be too far gone to see how ridiculous this exhibit really is. It will accomplish a few things:
1) increase agnosticism and atheism by shining a public light on the irrational implications of
the foundations of Christianity
2) support fundamentalist beliefs that science is still not the answer
The former [science] is bad because it misses the possible truths about God's universe.
The bible is rife with contradictions, it was written and edited by humans like every other religious material on Earth, but done many years after the supposed events occurred. It is spread mostly parent to child, by missionaries into poor and uneducated parts of the Earth, by greatly increasing psychological stress on one hand and offering to relieve the psychological stress on the other.
Science, on the other hand, spreads in all conditions without requiring any of these tricks. Furthermore, it does not discount a creator at all, it allows every possibility. But those possibilities require evidence before they can be addressed seriously. It is religion that severely limits the mind by training it to accept and apply a single irrational explanation of everything. A religion under these conditions, like all believed misinformation, is simply brain damage.
I've kept up with this issue for years, and I can't think of anyone who wants to abolish copyright outright.
... fall into disuse since their benefit is lost.
Allow me to be the first to discuss this underrepresented side with you then!
Part of the intent of copyright law is to allow a content producer control over how the information they create is distributed. This is done so profit isn't "lost", and to prevent plagiarism, and in the case of GPL (article topic) to keep information open (among other things). But consider if those problems that were once solved by copyright could be solved by something else that additionally doesn't have to restrict information sharing to accomplish them. Surely having all of the benefits with none of the detriments is the best case scenario!
The benefits are immediate, fair use of information extends to cover entire works (full novels, movies, news articles, journals, tv shows, etc.) and they could be sharable, commonly accessible and searchable. There could be a totally legal Google on steroids that contains the body of all known information produced by humanity. Things that hinder information distribution, DRM, DMCA,
Now the methods to accomplish this are many and varied. Freely shared information for example can be done via a buffet-like information access system. If a chunk of federal taxes pays for information, and the people (citizens, people specializing in various fields, reputation networks, etc) can still decide which information content producers should get more profits than others, then capitalism influences are still at work. In this method the information is still treated as information and not some limited "product" by limiting the actions of everybody that comes in contact with it. The content producers are paid, people can share it all the want, there can be a great online system to automate much of this. In my mind if such a system could be worked out without the people balking at the prices for the buffet then it would easily trump any system built on artificial restrictions to information.
What if I want to be generous and WANT to share my connection?
Agreed! That should be what is concentrated from now on technically here. There should be something to indicate one way or another if random users are welcome or not to use any service. Consider web sites which so far we all just assume we're free to use because it's generally not preventing us from access when we click on links to various hosts. If some sites decide to still allow the requests and responses to go through and yet the owners call it "trespassing" because "they never gave permission in the first place" to use it then the WWW quickly becomes a giant legal train wreck! The easiest minimal thing to solve these problems in the legal domain would appear to be some open standard that specifies a default bit that says if a network is intended for public access or not. This would help give it the varying legal distinctions in the real world of entering a public space, say, vs. a private residence.
If the gunman had pulled his psycho bullshit in a crowded Virginia mall, the shooter's life may have ended a lot quicker, but that does not mean that fewer people would be dead.
I evidently don't ascribe such tremendous idiocy to people defending against a gunman as you. Of course there's panic, and chaos but there's also the intent to hit the correct target. It is not that people defending against an attack would just pick someone at random in the group and start firing away, that's just asinine.
Furthermore, if a gunman is shooting people in the mall then I'll go out on a limb saying it is morally correct that the shooter be stopped as soon as possible with whatever means. Deadly force is encouraged and not immoral in the slightest if it can save even one more life (not the gunman's of course). Not every killing is immoral which I think you're using as a base assumption leading to the kind of moral psychosis you describe.
As for the shooting at Virginia Tech, if anyone nearby had been able to toast that bastard doing the shooting then they would get cheers from me. Worse is that I would be happy that he was shot or killed. Dozens of lives could have been saved. If that makes me evil or immoral to celebrate the killing of someone that is otherwise killing students at a college then I'm as unapologetically evil as they come.
I remember playing Another World, it was a remarkable game and I'm glad to see it on this list. It looked and played very differently than every other game style I'd seen to date, the fluid animation and bizarre alien utopian city and tech future art really did give an "Another World" feel to it. But I remember it being far too short playing it from start to finish. To me it actually did easily surpass most of the games in this list. Syndicate was great and Populous should be on the list too along with a dozen or so others (even though calling it a top ten then would be a hard sell). I'd also like to add Dungeon Master and the X-com UFO game into the list..
Theo isn't saying HE's the one pulling up the driver, he is talking about the driver's writer who essentially got publicly shamed by this -- he was saying that he wouldn't be surprised if the driver's maintainer took his ball and went home from the grief from this.
The way this was handled from the very first message was extremely counterproductive. Emotional outbursts are not unexpected when the first you hear of an issue is in a very public volley against you. Even if an issue cannot be worked out first privately and fixed, there could have at least been a simple "heads up" sent between friends first before the shit hit the public fan. This has to be there somewhere in Common Sense Diplomacy 101.
Understand that breaking this rule always strains relations and is an often used tactic by those who want to draw attention specifically to themselves at expense of others, or otherwise have an agenda against the target. So if it was just not knowing any better then it should not happen again in the future. I'd never work with anyone who thought otherwise unless I was forced to.
If you skip the step of private communications to the appropriate people first or minimally sending a heads up letter you will generally see PR fallout of people working out these issues publicly with far hotter heads. This is not the best way to handle technical things that benefit us all since generally only inferior or just temporarily "sufficient" solutions are found in a panic.
It's also the best day to invade unsuspecting countries. Who'd believe it until April 2nd!
Without the proofs presented in the discussion then maybe I can get away with writing this:
There probably wasn't nothing to begin with since "nothing" implies that you can put "something" into it by our everyday experience. That's a lot of functionality to begin with for free. Instead assume it starts from a void which can't hold any information.
Rules (i.e. X interacts with Y by doing A when C occurs) for a computer are data that tells the system which actions it should take. It is no coincidence that data (information) is required since every explicitly chosen action requires an informational constraint to pick it over every other possible action. Without this constraint any one of the possible rules may be selected according to whatever probable bias exists in that context. So information is saved (not required) if the system doesn't have to choose a specific rule.
The structure of the system determines what rules it can enact at this higher level (as opposed to actions at a particle level...). Structural form is also a particular selection over all possible structural forms and thus requires an informational constraint to specify. If structural form is unspecified then the amount of information required to represent the various configurations is saved.
Existence of a represented object is specification and simulation of its state and behaviors, where choosing to represent it or not takes information in terms of selecting the rules and state to represent it or not. If this is left unspecified then this particular information is saved.
If the universe is indefinite about existence of things, about specifying any of the parameters discussed and others then no informational constraints are required, which is no more or less than what is allowed or disallowed by a void. Remember in quantum physics the unspecifiability of particle behaviors except after measurement? About the infinite futures and/or pasts, and schrodenger's cat and infinite universes and so on? There is unspecified things even in our perceptions but this is not the undecideability of the void but rather the rules that allows us to exist in the domain it supports. In our case it is our perceptions as entities based on rules and state in only one of the possible forms that allow us to observe the stateful events to happen in this subset to the whole of all possible things.
We're living in one of the infinite possible universes under one of the infinite conditions that our particular consciousnesses could manifest in or at least interact with from somewhere else. That is the basis of how things "exist" from our perspectives and that we're able to interact with them and share the space with others and so on.
The void by its simple nature is unchangeable, it's timeless, it can't be found, seen or interacted with and it supports everything by being indecisive about everything. Ok! The above is really half assed, but it seems reasonable except several glaring omissions and I'm not sure how one would go about proving it unless one can assume the void and find out one of a set of possible ways that "we" got "here".
Water being frozen in "deep dark places", isn't from black body radiation (some things emit and other things absorb would tend to equal things out) but rather kinetic energy reduction through evaporative process of water. (unless you're talking about ground freeze and thus conductive heat transfer?) You'll achieve better results with that level of technology using a porous material container (clay pot) through which some water can evaporate overnight cooling the container down during the process (i.e. insulator and evaporation chill layer). Better is probably the container in a container method with continually dampened sand between the containers to cool the inner one while insulating it at the same time and giving a bonus that the stuff you're storing in there remains dry without rigging.
As for freezing in space, if you're a dandy and wore a thinly layered gold body suit then that would reduce radiation emissions and incoming radiation. In a sense this converts you into a half Thermos (tm) with an unneeded secondary layer since there is already a near vacuum outside. Your suit reflectivity also helps with radiation based heating of an infrared emission source like the sun.
It is really the social skills of the other person that makes your interactions appear to be more normal. They are working very hard at fitting you in.
Well whoopty do! Why would this matter to an aspie if as you seem to be claiming they're so devoid of all social capabilities to feel or even detect normalcy to begin with? You seem to be implying them to be "soulless" or sociopathic or something. It seems it does matter to them if they're trying to get it right. If the more social-capable set can't deal with the seemingly "off" interaction and that they're working oh so hard at it then maybe that's their problem? Your statements about the inability to empathize with Asperger's people and putting them somewhere below the animal kingdom or inside and like sharks or worse in empathizability indicates you have a far more serious problem than they do! That is assuming you correctly conveyed that information as I understand it via shat-ting through your keyboard. Maybe also consider that if both sides are working hard at achieving something "normal" then maybe both sides will benefit from it in different ways.
I will always be outside of your world; and you will always be outside of mine.
thank the heavens!
If your desktop is covered with xterms then you won't notice the clutter underneath anymore right? ;-)
In KDE you can add or get rid of as much clutter as you like. I use KDE also for the customizable key presses and shift-numlock mousekey mode to run arbitrary code and manipulate windows. Plus the "toolbar" doesn't have to take up screen real estate by configurement through a shockingly thorough configure dialog. After configuring it, I switched from enlightenment (and windowmaker and sawfish and a number of other window managers) and haven't looked back. I've been using linux for quite a few years now and it's just a fantastic environment to use, plus it's far in advance of anything I've ever seen windows do.
but I don't believe that Linux is an "advanced operating system" for a single moment.
My whole point was to find out why this belief is held? What is it about Linux that causes people to claim it isn't advanced? Pointing out something better would cinch it.
How does being Open Source make an OS advanced?
Well I wouldn't think it alone would, but given the same something that is closed vs. open, then open is certainly a better state to be in. It is better in that it enables more freedom to do with it what you will. Things that limit your options seem less advanced to me (or maybe just "worse" is a better term). "Worse" things seem more primitive, so, however the semantics work out..
System/360 is currently in the public domain would you call it advanced too?
versus a closed source version of the same then I'd count the open source version as more "advanced", or better at least.
Finally, please define customizable. That could mean so many things it isn't even funny.
By customizable, I mean standard everyday customizable dictionary term. Check out the kernel options you can alter when you build your own kernel, check out the ability to get in there and change nearly everything about the kernel's behavior that you'd ever want to. Write your own modules, use or modify others', install or remove modules from a live running kernel. And there's nothing more customizable than allowing you to get in the source code and alter the kernel into absolutely any form you wish.
Well, for all of us here under the impression that Linux is an advanced operating system (maybe as you say due to the dismal affairs created by Microsoft) then can you cite any specific thing that's not advanced about it? Maybe you know about some super secret OS that runs on nearly all hardware in existence? Oh wait, that's Linux. Or maybe some super secret OS that allows anyone to look at its source, compile it, redistribute it, modify it, install it on as many computers as they want? Or an OS that's reliable, safe, highly customizable, and free? Oh wait, all of that is Linux too. I guess what I'm trying to say is, WTF are you talking about?
I hate them because I can see the detriment they've caused over the field of computing from using their market position to hold others back. Early lucky breaks and skillful business practices have kept them on top, not a superior product and not innovation. The examples are everywhere in the comments to the story, vendor lock-in, embrace & extend, deals with PC sellers to auto-bundle it (difficult to not buy it sometimes), patent hoarding and leverage and FUD against open source, forced online authentication or OS-to-PC lock, explaining yourself when you upgrade your machine, hidden API issues, serious artificial limitations on their OS, secrecy of what their OS is actually doing to your machine, drivers produced explicitly toward MS products due to high market share target giving them tremendous benefit over other OS's, their fight against open source (it's a cancer right?), deals to provide discounts as long as competitors detriment, inspections of installations to check compliance to ensure those discounts continue, lack of freedom, EULAs, in deals with media industry to support various DRM schemes, and whatever heinous thing TC with DRM in combination with DMCA will lead to. The restriction of freedoms and rights and essentially the loss of control over your PC leading to people answering to them instead of the other way around. Again, they provide the weaker OS product and use their monopoly to hold everybody else back. I hate 'em, we simply need more people exposed to the freeing wonderment of open source to understand why these things must be fought.
Agreed AC, it's quite clear that a society that profits by keeping public information secret is ultimately crippling themselves. And when they punish those who transmit these public "secrets" then it's just backwards and sad. Judging by the nature of comments all around here though it looks like it will take many years to convince the masses of even the most obvious better ways to handle this.