The Romans (at least the wealthy ones) had a nice solution to this problem: they had multiple beds, each dedicated to some activity. They had beds for sleeping, sex, eating, work, and partying. If they had had TVs and laptops, they'd probably have had separate beds for those, too.
I live in the US. I have 24 Mbps service at home (unless it has gotten faster again while I haven't been looking). My city also has free wireless access, but I don't even bother.
You have to keep in mind that when people say "in Denmark" or "in the UK", that doesn't mean universal availability, it means that in some places, you can get that. You also have to keep in mind that nations like Denmark or the UK have a larger middle class than the US as percentage of the population, so that, across the whole population, they may be better off, but the actual group for whom things like Internet access matters, may be served about equally in both places.
A church is a private organization, while elementary school is a branch of the government.
Yes, and that is why elementary schools teach science and not religion. The teaching of science includes the teaching of evolution.
If we allowed the religious convictions of parents to influence what is taught in elementary school, then we'd be violating the establishment clause. That's true even if a majority of parents decided, democratically, that based on their religious convictions, evolution should not be taught in public school. Of course, as a practical matter, if the majority of parents did decide this, there is little we could do about it; but other democracies have destroyed themselves before that way, and it may, of course, happen in the US as well.
Parents do not get to decide arbitrarily what their students are taught in school; that's not an accident, it's an essential part of what has made this society work. If most parents had full control over the ideas that their kids did or did not get exposed to, we couldn't function as a society. Parents have enough control over their kids at home already as it is, giving them any more would be bad.
Many tax payers have religious beliefs and feel they should have some say in what is taught there.
But the same tax payers want shiny new toys, medicines, and weapons, and they aren't going to get them if they don't let scientists teach science to the next generation.
Evolution isn't some minor, obscure philosophical subject about the origin of man, understanding evolution is at the very core of biology, medicine, and, increasingly, technology.
This is an invalid comparison because the church is a private institution. It is funded by people who choose to take part in it and therefore they get the right to decide what's taught.
Well, in the US, we have settled on the middle ground that parents get to decide what children learn at home, and society gets to decide what children learn in public school. That keeps some of the nuttier ideas that religions attempt to instill in children's minds in check.
It's an imperfect compromise, but it's a compromise that we have had to adopt because having government bureaucrats sit in judgement of religious practice is impractical. However, religions shouldn't take that as an indication that "anything goes". If religions stray too far outside the bounds of acceptable behavior in a free, democratic society, then a democratic government has no choice but to interfere in their practice in order to stay democratic, distasteful as that may be.
Giving parents complete control over what children learn both at home and in school radically would change that balance, and there is neither a right of parents to do that, nor is it in any way desirable.
I believe the constitution precludes any case the scientist would have against what is taught in a church
Contrary to what you may believe, the Constitution doesn't give religions freedom to do whatever they choose. The only thing the Constitution prevents is government interference in the practice of religion. Additional laws give some protections against discrimination.
The Constitution does not guarantee that you can practice your religion free from criticism or free from any interference whatsoever.
Ah, the old "I'm right and you're wrong, so nyahh!" argument. Well, I guess that solves everything then!
When it comes to creationism, he is stating scientific fact; the facts are documented in a century of scientific publications. If you care to look them up, please go there.
Furthermore, if creationism is an essential part of your religion, then your religion is factually wrong.
You're saying that Fedora actually uses volume groups? Other Linux distributions ship with the kernel module, but they use physical devices by default.
In my experience, logical volumes are a really lousy idea in so many ways that I think any Linux distribution that enables them by default is simply broken.
IIRC, you can't have any disk which isn't ultimately handled by the AIX LVM system in some way - even the root "partition" is held as a logical volume.
I believe you could; LVM just took physical devices and presented another set of virtual block devices. It was up to you if you wanted to make your file systems on the physical device or the logical device.
The fact that LVM was a module that stayed within the standard UNIX framework of devices, rather than an all-encompassing replacement of everything, meant that it was easy to port to Linux and that Linux users ended up having a choice whether to use it or not. As it turns out, the functionality is probably not all that useful and it is pretty universally not used. And that's a good thing. Once you adopt ZFS, you're stuck with the whole thing, even if it turns out that parts of it are useless or harmful.
If people admit to having done something, in particular something that would otherwise go undetected, they have expressed remorse and almost certainly realized that their action was wrong, which means they are likely not going to do it again. Therefore, a good part of the purpose of any consequences has already been achieved. So, in that case, "accepting responsibility" does indeed mean that the people involved should face significantly less severe consequences than people who lied and were found out.
That's an entirely different situation many politicians and corporate leaders are in: they often "accept responsibility" for things simply because they can't hide them anymore, and there is usually no remorse or realization involved that their actions were wrong. In those cases, "accepting responsibility" is a meaningless gesture.
I find your cynical attitude and unthinking approach to ethics reprehensible.
ZFS is putting lots of functionality into one big package, and doing that is generally bad software design. In the case of Linux, there are separate packages for partition management, volume management, RAID, core file system, and high-level file system functionality like encryption, versioning, and distribution, that users can mix and match as needed. Furthermore, that functionality isn't going to become redundant, at least for Apple: no matter how much they might like the world to move to ZFS, they'll still have to deal with Windows, Linux, and Mac partitions and file systems for decades.
What OS X really needs much more than ZFS is built-in ext3 support and something like FUSE.
If Time Machine was not only backup software but a way for the OS to automatically handle version control, holy crap.
You don't need ZFS for that--any file system will do.
Furthermore, lots of operating systems have these capabilities already, but they are not popular and are generally not enabled. It may be that it's the right thing for Apple's consumer OS to do, but in most other settings, universal version control and automatic restore simply aren't desirable features.
While SCO asked for this, the order comes from a judge and he had discretion in what to do. Looks to me like the judge had an ax to grind and has been taking out his personal issues on the witness.
No, it's not "equivalent", but he is closer to the truth than you are and something like this is widely used in practice. Look for "Triple DES" on Wikipedia for a longer description of the consequences of encrypting multiple times with the same algorithm.
Microsoft has claimed that their various licenses are pretty open, and it makes sense to put that to the test. The OSI is the natural organization to do that. There is a good chance that there are hidden traps in their licenses and potential users need to know about that. And, of course, it is just the case where a company has deliberately hidden something in their licenses that they would object to having their license reviewed by OSI.
OSI's decision erodes confidence in OSI. If they want to be seen as a dependable arbiter of whether licenses comply with open source principles, they must evaluate licenses that have some importance in the market, no matter who actually submits the license for review. Asking the original author of the license for permission is not acceptable.
The classification of planets and moons has been worked out in the 21st and 22nd centuries; you can find it here.
Seriously, it may be fiction, but the Star Trek classification system ain't so bad, and it may well be what we're heading for. I just hope that there are enough life-bearing planets in the solar system to fill the K, L, M, O, P, and Q classifications.
And science, as a rational process, has to separate facts and well-supported theory from guesses. In fact, you could define science as a method for turning mere guesses into actual knowledge by testing them.
You have this notion that there is a progression from "guess" to "hypothesis" to "fact" or "correct hypothesis". While real-world scientists have their prejudices and preferences and clearly apply them in practice, such distinctions are not part of the scientific method. The only facts in science are verified experimental results and repeatable observations.
Scientists may sometimes refer to a scientific hypothesis as a "fact", but that's a shorthand for "it hasn't been disproven yet and there is no known consistent alternative hypothesis".
No, the correct statement is "if you want your claim to get serious consideration, get some evidence".
That is a perfectly valid response to some claims. But in many other cases, the response is "your claim sounds quite interesting, I better test my existing hypothesis" or "I don't think your claim sounds reasonable, but the question is important enough so that I better test my existing hypothesis". There are many examples of that, e.g., general relativity and the cause of AIDS.
So, sometimes, people making a claim, as a practical matter, have to carry out experiments attempting to disprove existing dogma, sometimes, people with a vested interest in existing hypotheses carry out those experiments, and sometimes, it's neutral third parties. There simply is no principle in science that specific people always have a "burden of proof". Who does the proof depends on many circumstances: funding, significance of the claim, difficulty of testing it, collaborations, ego, arrogance, etc.
And science, as a rational process, has to separate facts and well-supported theory from guesses. In fact, you could define science as a method for turning mere guesses into actual knowledge by testing them.
You're making the same mistake as the other poster: you treat science as a debating club, a college of bishops, or a court of law. Those organizations are concerned with "truth"; science is something much more rational: it's concerned with repeatable experiments and testable predictions, nothing more.
Shifting the burden of proof is a subcase of the logical fallacy known as 'argumentum ad ignorantiam' ('you can't prove me wrong therefore I am right').
Scientific claims and hypotheses are never "right", they are only "not known to be wrong". Therefore, the correct statement is "you can't prove me wrong, therefore both of our hypotheses remain valid until someone finds experimental data that decides the matter". That may seem like a logical fallacy to you, but it's the way the scientific method works.
(The problem with your claims about "God" and "I once saw" is that they fail to be scientific hypotheses--they don't make testable predictions--not that you fail to provide "evidence to support them".)
All science is wrong - God told me so. Prove me wrong.
What's there to disprove? You're probably right that God told you that all science is wrong. However, there are no testable predictions that follow from your claim.
Attempting to reverse the burden of proof is a logical fallacy.
You're confusing science with a court of law. In a court of law, the person making the claim has the burden of proof. In science, there is no such concept.
You'll find that scientists rarely waste breath on people trying to reverse the burden of proof. If evidence is provided suggesting that the hypothesis is incorrect then they will address the issues raised.
You're quite right that that's what scientists do, both because many claims scientists encounter are not scientific claims (e.g., your claim above) and hence don't require considerations, or because they find it more convenient to ignore claims they don't understand or that threaten their own position.
Another problem is that many scientists were never taught the scientific method and just muddle through.
None of that alters what the scientific method actually is and how scientific facts actually get established.
If the claims is unsubstantiated then you can safely dismiss it.
If I claim that I put a poison pill into the drink you just consumed, it's not at all safe for you to dismiss that claim. What you can "safely dismiss" depends on what's being dismissed and who has an interest in it.
Placing the burden of proof on the individual making the claim is scientific.
That's not how science works. If you have a hypothesis and someone makes a claim that conflicts with your hypothesis, then the burden is on you to disprove their claim. Good scientific hypotheses are those for which people have made the effort to disprove all conflicting claims and hypotheses.
In fact, a large part of the scientific literature, and many scientific breakthroughs, consist of entirely unsupported claims challenging existing theories in interesting ways.
If you look at the documentation of the UNIX operating system and the POSIX standard, the kernel interface is only a small part of it.
"GNU/Linux" is just RMS ego-stoking - you don't *have* to use the GNU utilities with the Linux kernel.
What matters in practice is why people use "Linux", and I can tell you: it's not for the kernel. If, for some reason, the Linux kernel stopped being available tomorrow, all the "Linux" distributions would switch to the BSD, Darwin, or Solaris kernel and the impact would be negligible.
And, if my experience is any indication, the reason people picked Linux over BSD is the userland (and maybe the license): until a few years ago, the BSD kernel was better than the Linux kernel, but the BSD userland has always sucked compared to the GNU userland.
On the other is Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. He and others in his open-source camp believe that freely sharing code simply produces the best software, but if other people want to hide their code, that's fine, too."
If that's truly Linus's opinion, then Linus should have picked the BSD license for his kernel, not GPLv2.
In any case, look at the relative success of the BSD and Linux kernels. The BSD kernel was much further advanced when Linux first came out, yet the Linux kernel is much more popular. At the very least, its GPLv2 license doesn't seem to have been in the way.
And, frankly, personally I really don't care about Linus's opinion anyway; the only part Linus provides for the "Linux" operating system is the kernel. If the Linux kernel project fell apart for whatever reason, the impact on Ubuntu, RedHat, Fedora, SuSE, etc. would be small since the Linux kernel would be replaced fairly quickly.
You don't need evidence to dismiss an unsupported (and let's face it, completely implausbile sounding) claim.
Of course, you need evidence to dismiss a claim. You may choose not to bother dismissing it, but in that case, the claim simply remains unresolved.
I hope that was a joke. If not then it supports everything he said about the sorry state of the education system.
It's unscientific thinking like yours--dismissing claims for "sounding implausible" and placing "burdens of evidenc on people on a whim--that illustrates how poor our science education is.
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The Romans (at least the wealthy ones) had a nice solution to this problem: they had multiple beds, each dedicated to some activity. They had beds for sleeping, sex, eating, work, and partying. If they had had TVs and laptops, they'd probably have had separate beds for those, too.
I live in the US. I have 24 Mbps service at home (unless it has gotten faster again while I haven't been looking). My city also has free wireless access, but I don't even bother.
You have to keep in mind that when people say "in Denmark" or "in the UK", that doesn't mean universal availability, it means that in some places, you can get that. You also have to keep in mind that nations like Denmark or the UK have a larger middle class than the US as percentage of the population, so that, across the whole population, they may be better off, but the actual group for whom things like Internet access matters, may be served about equally in both places.
The question for me is: How did they proved the data was destroyed after the defendant receivced the court order?
Isn't it obvious? They couldn't find any pirated files, so she must have wiped it clean!
A church is a private organization, while elementary school is a branch of the government.
Yes, and that is why elementary schools teach science and not religion. The teaching of science includes the teaching of evolution.
If we allowed the religious convictions of parents to influence what is taught in elementary school, then we'd be violating the establishment clause. That's true even if a majority of parents decided, democratically, that based on their religious convictions, evolution should not be taught in public school. Of course, as a practical matter, if the majority of parents did decide this, there is little we could do about it; but other democracies have destroyed themselves before that way, and it may, of course, happen in the US as well.
Parents do not get to decide arbitrarily what their students are taught in school; that's not an accident, it's an essential part of what has made this society work. If most parents had full control over the ideas that their kids did or did not get exposed to, we couldn't function as a society. Parents have enough control over their kids at home already as it is, giving them any more would be bad.
Many tax payers have religious beliefs and feel they should have some say in what is taught there.
But the same tax payers want shiny new toys, medicines, and weapons, and they aren't going to get them if they don't let scientists teach science to the next generation.
Evolution isn't some minor, obscure philosophical subject about the origin of man, understanding evolution is at the very core of biology, medicine, and, increasingly, technology.
This is an invalid comparison because the church is a private institution. It is funded by people who choose to take part in it and therefore they get the right to decide what's taught.
Well, in the US, we have settled on the middle ground that parents get to decide what children learn at home, and society gets to decide what children learn in public school. That keeps some of the nuttier ideas that religions attempt to instill in children's minds in check.
It's an imperfect compromise, but it's a compromise that we have had to adopt because having government bureaucrats sit in judgement of religious practice is impractical. However, religions shouldn't take that as an indication that "anything goes". If religions stray too far outside the bounds of acceptable behavior in a free, democratic society, then a democratic government has no choice but to interfere in their practice in order to stay democratic, distasteful as that may be.
Giving parents complete control over what children learn both at home and in school radically would change that balance, and there is neither a right of parents to do that, nor is it in any way desirable.
I believe the constitution precludes any case the scientist would have against what is taught in a church
Contrary to what you may believe, the Constitution doesn't give religions freedom to do whatever they choose. The only thing the Constitution prevents is government interference in the practice of religion. Additional laws give some protections against discrimination.
The Constitution does not guarantee that you can practice your religion free from criticism or free from any interference whatsoever.
Ah, the old "I'm right and you're wrong, so nyahh!" argument. Well, I guess that solves everything then!
When it comes to creationism, he is stating scientific fact; the facts are documented in a century of scientific publications. If you care to look them up, please go there.
Furthermore, if creationism is an essential part of your religion, then your religion is factually wrong.
You're saying that Fedora actually uses volume groups? Other Linux distributions ship with the kernel module, but they use physical devices by default.
In my experience, logical volumes are a really lousy idea in so many ways that I think any Linux distribution that enables them by default is simply broken.
IIRC, you can't have any disk which isn't ultimately handled by the AIX LVM system in some way - even the root "partition" is held as a logical volume.
I believe you could; LVM just took physical devices and presented another set of virtual block devices. It was up to you if you wanted to make your file systems on the physical device or the logical device.
The fact that LVM was a module that stayed within the standard UNIX framework of devices, rather than an all-encompassing replacement of everything, meant that it was easy to port to Linux and that Linux users ended up having a choice whether to use it or not. As it turns out, the functionality is probably not all that useful and it is pretty universally not used. And that's a good thing. Once you adopt ZFS, you're stuck with the whole thing, even if it turns out that parts of it are useless or harmful.
If people admit to having done something, in particular something that would otherwise go undetected, they have expressed remorse and almost certainly realized that their action was wrong, which means they are likely not going to do it again. Therefore, a good part of the purpose of any consequences has already been achieved. So, in that case, "accepting responsibility" does indeed mean that the people involved should face significantly less severe consequences than people who lied and were found out.
That's an entirely different situation many politicians and corporate leaders are in: they often "accept responsibility" for things simply because they can't hide them anymore, and there is usually no remorse or realization involved that their actions were wrong. In those cases, "accepting responsibility" is a meaningless gesture.
I find your cynical attitude and unthinking approach to ethics reprehensible.
ZFS is putting lots of functionality into one big package, and doing that is generally bad software design. In the case of Linux, there are separate packages for partition management, volume management, RAID, core file system, and high-level file system functionality like encryption, versioning, and distribution, that users can mix and match as needed. Furthermore, that functionality isn't going to become redundant, at least for Apple: no matter how much they might like the world to move to ZFS, they'll still have to deal with Windows, Linux, and Mac partitions and file systems for decades.
What OS X really needs much more than ZFS is built-in ext3 support and something like FUSE.
If Time Machine was not only backup software but a way for the OS to automatically handle version control, holy crap.
You don't need ZFS for that--any file system will do.
Furthermore, lots of operating systems have these capabilities already, but they are not popular and are generally not enabled. It may be that it's the right thing for Apple's consumer OS to do, but in most other settings, universal version control and automatic restore simply aren't desirable features.
While SCO asked for this, the order comes from a judge and he had discretion in what to do. Looks to me like the judge had an ax to grind and has been taking out his personal issues on the witness.
No, it's not "equivalent", but he is closer to the truth than you are and something like this is widely used in practice. Look for "Triple DES" on Wikipedia for a longer description of the consequences of encrypting multiple times with the same algorithm.
Microsoft has claimed that their various licenses are pretty open, and it makes sense to put that to the test. The OSI is the natural organization to do that. There is a good chance that there are hidden traps in their licenses and potential users need to know about that. And, of course, it is just the case where a company has deliberately hidden something in their licenses that they would object to having their license reviewed by OSI.
OSI's decision erodes confidence in OSI. If they want to be seen as a dependable arbiter of whether licenses comply with open source principles, they must evaluate licenses that have some importance in the market, no matter who actually submits the license for review. Asking the original author of the license for permission is not acceptable.
Well, so it's really just like war in real life: costly, drawn out, and tedious.
The classification of planets and moons has been worked out in the 21st and 22nd centuries; you can find it here.
Seriously, it may be fiction, but the Star Trek classification system ain't so bad, and it may well be what we're heading for. I just hope that there are enough life-bearing planets in the solar system to fill the K, L, M, O, P, and Q classifications.
And science, as a rational process, has to separate facts and well-supported theory from guesses. In fact, you could define science as a method for turning mere guesses into actual knowledge by testing them.
You have this notion that there is a progression from "guess" to "hypothesis" to "fact" or "correct hypothesis". While real-world scientists have their prejudices and preferences and clearly apply them in practice, such distinctions are not part of the scientific method. The only facts in science are verified experimental results and repeatable observations.
Scientists may sometimes refer to a scientific hypothesis as a "fact", but that's a shorthand for "it hasn't been disproven yet and there is no known consistent alternative hypothesis".
No, the correct statement is "if you want your claim to get serious consideration, get some evidence".
That is a perfectly valid response to some claims. But in many other cases, the response is "your claim sounds quite interesting, I better test my existing hypothesis" or "I don't think your claim sounds reasonable, but the question is important enough so that I better test my existing hypothesis". There are many examples of that, e.g., general relativity and the cause of AIDS.
So, sometimes, people making a claim, as a practical matter, have to carry out experiments attempting to disprove existing dogma, sometimes, people with a vested interest in existing hypotheses carry out those experiments, and sometimes, it's neutral third parties. There simply is no principle in science that specific people always have a "burden of proof". Who does the proof depends on many circumstances: funding, significance of the claim, difficulty of testing it, collaborations, ego, arrogance, etc.
And science, as a rational process, has to separate facts and well-supported theory from guesses. In fact, you could define science as a method for turning mere guesses into actual knowledge by testing them.
You're making the same mistake as the other poster: you treat science as a debating club, a college of bishops, or a court of law. Those organizations are concerned with "truth"; science is something much more rational: it's concerned with repeatable experiments and testable predictions, nothing more.
Shifting the burden of proof is a subcase of the logical fallacy known as 'argumentum ad ignorantiam' ('you can't prove me wrong therefore I am right').
Scientific claims and hypotheses are never "right", they are only "not known to be wrong". Therefore, the correct statement is "you can't prove me wrong, therefore both of our hypotheses remain valid until someone finds experimental data that decides the matter". That may seem like a logical fallacy to you, but it's the way the scientific method works.
(The problem with your claims about "God" and "I once saw" is that they fail to be scientific hypotheses--they don't make testable predictions--not that you fail to provide "evidence to support them".)
All science is wrong - God told me so. Prove me wrong.
What's there to disprove? You're probably right that God told you that all science is wrong. However, there are no testable predictions that follow from your claim.
Attempting to reverse the burden of proof is a logical fallacy.
You're confusing science with a court of law. In a court of law, the person making the claim has the burden of proof. In science, there is no such concept.
You'll find that scientists rarely waste breath on people trying to reverse the burden of proof.
If evidence is provided suggesting that the hypothesis is incorrect then they will address the issues raised.
You're quite right that that's what scientists do, both because many claims scientists encounter are not scientific claims (e.g., your claim above) and hence don't require considerations, or because they find it more convenient to ignore claims they don't understand or that threaten their own position.
Another problem is that many scientists were never taught the scientific method and just muddle through.
None of that alters what the scientific method actually is and how scientific facts actually get established.
If the claims is unsubstantiated then you can safely dismiss it.
If I claim that I put a poison pill into the drink you just consumed, it's not at all safe for you to dismiss that claim. What you can "safely dismiss" depends on what's being dismissed and who has an interest in it.
Placing the burden of proof on the individual making the claim is scientific.
That's not how science works. If you have a hypothesis and someone makes a claim that conflicts with your hypothesis, then the burden is on you to disprove their claim. Good scientific hypotheses are those for which people have made the effort to disprove all conflicting claims and hypotheses.
In fact, a large part of the scientific literature, and many scientific breakthroughs, consist of entirely unsupported claims challenging existing theories in interesting ways.
The OS *is the kernel*.
If you look at the documentation of the UNIX operating system and the POSIX standard, the kernel interface is only a small part of it.
"GNU/Linux" is just RMS ego-stoking - you don't *have* to use the GNU utilities with the Linux kernel.
What matters in practice is why people use "Linux", and I can tell you: it's not for the kernel. If, for some reason, the Linux kernel stopped being available tomorrow, all the "Linux" distributions would switch to the BSD, Darwin, or Solaris kernel and the impact would be negligible.
And, if my experience is any indication, the reason people picked Linux over BSD is the userland (and maybe the license): until a few years ago, the BSD kernel was better than the Linux kernel, but the BSD userland has always sucked compared to the GNU userland.
On the other is Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. He and others in his open-source camp believe that freely sharing code simply produces the best software, but if other people want to hide their code, that's fine, too."
If that's truly Linus's opinion, then Linus should have picked the BSD license for his kernel, not GPLv2.
In any case, look at the relative success of the BSD and Linux kernels. The BSD kernel was much further advanced when Linux first came out, yet the Linux kernel is much more popular. At the very least, its GPLv2 license doesn't seem to have been in the way.
And, frankly, personally I really don't care about Linus's opinion anyway; the only part Linus provides for the "Linux" operating system is the kernel. If the Linux kernel project fell apart for whatever reason, the impact on Ubuntu, RedHat, Fedora, SuSE, etc. would be small since the Linux kernel would be replaced fairly quickly.
Just think for a moment: how long would any animal with only a 3-second memory survive? How long would you survive?
Many animals don't have memory of any kind (they still have learning and adaptation, but that's something different).
You don't need evidence to dismiss an unsupported (and let's face it, completely implausbile sounding) claim.
Of course, you need evidence to dismiss a claim. You may choose not to bother dismissing it, but in that case, the claim simply remains unresolved.
I hope that was a joke. If not then it supports everything he said about the sorry state of the education system.
It's unscientific thinking like yours--dismissing claims for "sounding implausible" and placing "burdens of evidenc on people on a whim--that illustrates how poor our science education is.