At what point is it a good idea to attempt to regulate thoughts,
feeling and their expression? At what point does it become bad? I find
myself asking that question at every turn when I see laws regulating
"morality."
How about when exposure to those expressions becomes no longer a moral
issue, but a scientifically reproducible psychological or even
physiological issue? Fast food makes you fat, duh (or maybe not, for the
less educated) -- it would be stupid to need a label on your burger to tell
you that. But how about the TV and
autism correlation ? How about chemically observable effects of
viewing pornography and/or violence, producing changes in the brain or
addiction (if/when the technology gets good enough to show it one way or the other)?
As we discover more about this, I have to think this may
move out of the morality arena and into the public health and/or disease
arena, to be classified alongside (but not the same as) addictive behaviors
or drug dependency -- at which point freedom of expression may have another
label on it (warning: may reinforce addictive behavior in slashdot
readers).
and be up and responding very well to the user, while (new concept, brace yourselves) the computer carefully brings up other hardware subsystems and makes them available as they become functional
I never understood why I couldn't get a fast terminal prompt and have the remainder of the daemons start up in the background, all reniced to low priority during the initialization process, or maybe slowly started up to avoid disk contention. I personally amortize the bootup time by buying a bunch of ram, and dd'ing all the files in/usr/bin,/usr/lib/*.so,/lib/*.so,/etc and maybe/usr/share/apps, depending on how much ram I have. This pulls everything into the buffer cache and improves KDE startup significantly.
I'm sure I could optimize this by running some kind of kernel auditor that tracked every file that was run (executable) or loaded (.so), wrote out a list at shutdown, and reused that list to precache on reboot.
The polymer that Australian Bank Notes are made from
I can't believe nobody mentioned the best part of having polymer bills -- get a nylon wallet and you can launder your money while you launder your clothes -- no more emptying your pockets on laundry day!
Just in case you were wondering, RTFM is very rarely a flame. If someone says RTFM, chances are they know what they are talking about and the information you are seeking is in TFM. So go read it. By providing a pointer to the information, they have in fact answered your question.
If that's what ESR has to say about asking questions, give me the cathedral instead. At least I'll be given a chapter and verse reference in TFM:-)
Also, have you read that 'smart-questions.html' page? While thorough, it makes me wonder if it doesn't come off as self-serving rather than genuinely helpful to someone who would read the whole thing in the first place.
Did you really just compare Gandhi's fight for freedom from British rule in India to the OS "wars"?
You've never seen this comparison? You must be new here. Plus, perhaps the more apt comparison is the fight for freedom from the British rule to the fight for freedom from proprietary software.
From http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html:
[person] himself had been of the first to identify the problem and the first to suggest a remedy. Years before, when the lab was still using its old printer, [person] had solved a similar problem by opening up the software program that regulated the printer on the lab's PDP-11 machine. [person] couldn't eliminate paper jams, but he could insert a software command that ordered the PDP-11 to check the printer periodically and report back to the PDP-10, the lab's central computer. To ensure that one user's negligence didn't bog down an entire line of print jobs, [person] also inserted a software command that instructed the PDP-10 to notify every user with a waiting print job that the printer was jammed. The notice was simple, something along the lines of "The printer is jammed, please fix it," and because it went out to the people with the most pressing need to fix the problem, chances were higher that the problem got fixed in due time.
As fixes go, [person]'s was oblique but elegant. It didn't fix the mechanical side of the problem, but it did the next best thing by closing the information loop between user and machine. Thanks to a few additional lines of software code, AI Lab employees could eliminate the 10 or 15 minutes wasted each week in running back and forth to check on the printer. In programming terms, [person]'s fix took advantage of the amplified intelligence of the overall network.
Similar situation, embedded-system style issue for a printer, ability to fix software was useful mostly to customers. Check the URL to find out who the person was. He quotes this situation when describing his particular interest in open source.
the league of women voters does a good job of consolidating all the information i needed.
If I'm not going to do the research myself, I personally trust them to do the research for me. When it comes to their position statements on the individual ballot measures, I at least trust their analysis of the measures, even when it leads me to vote in the other direction.
This brings up another point; if you don't feel you know enough about the candidates, don't vote in the elections. Quickly read up on the ballot measures, and just vote on those. Stem cell research funding? Medicine good (grunt). Fingerlician or Tastycrat? Tougher choice, pass.
Slashdot Mirror
How about when exposure to those expressions becomes no longer a moral issue, but a scientifically reproducible psychological or even physiological issue? Fast food makes you fat, duh (or maybe not, for the less educated) -- it would be stupid to need a label on your burger to tell you that. But how about the TV and autism correlation ? How about chemically observable effects of viewing pornography and/or violence, producing changes in the brain or addiction (if/when the technology gets good enough to show it one way or the other)?
As we discover more about this, I have to think this may move out of the morality arena and into the public health and/or disease arena, to be classified alongside (but not the same as) addictive behaviors or drug dependency -- at which point freedom of expression may have another label on it (warning: may reinforce addictive behavior in slashdot readers).
I never understood why I couldn't get a fast terminal prompt and have the remainder of the daemons start up in the background, all reniced to low priority during the initialization process, or maybe slowly started up to avoid disk contention. I personally amortize the bootup time by buying a bunch of ram, and dd'ing all the files in /usr/bin, /usr/lib/*.so, /lib/*.so, /etc and maybe /usr/share/apps, depending on how much ram I have. This pulls everything into the buffer cache and improves KDE startup significantly.
I'm sure I could optimize this by running some kind of kernel auditor that tracked every file that was run (executable) or loaded (.so), wrote out a list at shutdown, and reused that list to precache on reboot.
A few interesting links: http://kerneltrap.org/node/2157 , http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0609 .2/2180/boot_linux_faster.pdf ,
http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bo otsystem/deliverable3.html ,
http://preload.sf.net/ ,
http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper-backports/admin/ readahead .
I can't believe nobody mentioned the best part of having polymer bills -- get a nylon wallet and you can launder your money while you launder your clothes -- no more emptying your pockets on laundry day!
Required reading (or it should be): http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
If that's what ESR has to say about asking questions, give me the cathedral instead. At least I'll be given a chapter and verse reference in TFM :-)
Also, have you read that 'smart-questions.html' page? While thorough, it makes me wonder if it doesn't come off as self-serving rather than genuinely helpful to someone who would read the whole thing in the first place.
You've never seen this comparison? You must be new here. Plus, perhaps the more apt comparison is the fight for freedom from the British rule to the fight for freedom from proprietary software.
As fixes go, [person]'s was oblique but elegant. It didn't fix the mechanical side of the problem, but it did the next best thing by closing the information loop between user and machine. Thanks to a few additional lines of software code, AI Lab employees could eliminate the 10 or 15 minutes wasted each week in running back and forth to check on the printer. In programming terms, [person]'s fix took advantage of the amplified intelligence of the overall network.
Similar situation, embedded-system style issue for a printer, ability to fix software was useful mostly to customers. Check the URL to find out who the person was. He quotes this situation when describing his particular interest in open source.
If I'm not going to do the research myself, I personally trust them to do the research for me. When it comes to their position statements on the individual ballot measures, I at least trust their analysis of the measures, even when it leads me to vote in the other direction.
This brings up another point; if you don't feel you know enough about the candidates, don't vote in the elections. Quickly read up on the ballot measures, and just vote on those. Stem cell research funding? Medicine good (grunt). Fingerlician or Tastycrat? Tougher choice, pass.
Oh, I don't know. Give them some guns too, per the constitutional right to arm bears, and I think we'll get some action pretty quickly.
Well, at least somebody finally got around to this.