I do, yeah. It was a war that was worth fighting. It's just that it was poorly fought. The people who had to live and die under the past 30 years of communist totalitarianism in Vietnam suffered needlessly.
You just don't know what you're talking about, Anonymous Coward. I spent a year in Vietnam as a young man, and there was no way to win that war. Like Iraq, the war was based on deceit and betrayal. Ho Chi Minh fought the Japanese for us during WWII and expected us to support his nationalistic ambitions. We gave his country back to the French and forced him into the arms of Vietnam's historic enemy, China. Eventually, LBJ lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and we were at war on behalf of a corrupt puppet regime which did not enjoy popular support.
In order for us to "win" the war, we would have had to kill a majority of the population, since clearly our side was a minority and the Vietnamese are, it turns out, extremely tough people. A reasonable person might wonder if by our support of kleptocratic puppet regimes we actually prevented capitalism from making a comeback sooner. Capitalism is an obviously superior economic system, and if we hadn't pushed them into bed with Red China, the Vietnamese, an eminently practical people, would never have wasted 30 years on an ideological boondoggle. They're coming around now, it seems, just like every other formerly communist country.
In other words, 50,000 Americans died so that the politicians of the era could posture against the Soviets and the Chinese. Just like 500 Americans have died to promote Bush's chances for re-election. If we allow democratic elections in Iraq, we're likely to get a radical Islamic state, fundamentally hostile to the West. That isn't worth a drop of American blood, and you can prattle all you like about the wonderfulness of deposing Saddam.
all we can conclude is that about half of the people in the country right now think the president is doing a good job and plan to vote to re-elect him.
Yet another confirmation of the unfortunate fact that half the people in America are below average in intelligence.
Even if there not written by interested partys, the chances of them being written by someone clueful are scant
It's pretty easy to tell who's a "clueful" reviewer, because reviewing a book is an act of writing. If the reviewer likes the book but is illiterate, the book might still be good, but if the reviewer writes well, you can give her opinion more weight.
Of course, that gives sneaky authors reviewing their own dogs a little bit of an advantage, because even the lamest hack has to write a little better than average to get widely published. But life ain't fair. That's probably why I have excellent karma, in spite of my cranky personality.
There's an annoyingly inevitable quality to these accusations. It's the sort of thing you always suspect about any issue involving ruthlessly ego-driven professions like writing.
Here's how dumb I am: it never occurred to me to write glowing reviews of my books. Evidently I am not a marketing genius. On the other hand, I was too obscure for rivals to bother trashing me, so maybe that's why I never thought about it.
Anyway, no matter how depressing these revelations are, I don't think the solution is to strip away the anonymity of reviewers. In almost every case, the best solution to bad information is not to restrict the free flow of information. Far better to increase the flow of information so as to drown the bad information in a sea of better information. In this instance, making people verify their identities before reviewing a book is just going to discourage people from taking the time to share their thoughts. Better to put a disclaimer up for visitors to let them know that a great review might have been written by the author, and then let them react if they find a bad book with a glorifying review. That'll be far more effective in promoting actual opinions about books than restricting reviewers to the group that's willing to put up with intrusive registering requirements. Besides, authors, being both clever and desperate, will quickly find ways to circumvent any identity check, so that their bad information will gain prominence in comparison with everyone else, who will not be as likely to take the trouble to post.
I don't know if information wants to be free, but it seems obvious that the world works better when information is free.
this program's killer app is in evading law enforcement... copyright and homeland security implications be damned.
Oh for heaven's sake. Do you really believe that terrorists are using P2P to transmit secret plans? Why in the world would they do this? The thing about P2P is that you can't really control who gets your files. Does that really sound like something that would appeal to a terrorist?
Still, it feels like clay is closer to where it was 10,000 years ago in Jiangxi than, say, agriculture or transportation.
Yeah, you're right. I'm just quibbling. I don't know about the Roman pipe deal, but it sounds plausible. I used to extrude with nothing but a tube, a die, and a lever.
Slashpot? I like it. And you know, there are all sorts of correspondences between the industry based on making useful things out of formless mud and the industry based on making useful information out of formless bits. Both Protean endeavors, and I suppose there was a time when having clay pots (or not) made as big a difference in daily life as having computers does now. Or bigger-- but we haven't seen the end of the computer's effects on daily life. Or even the end of the beginning.
I'd disagree slightly. Clay once dried out has to be slaked before you can modify it by any plastic process, and once slaked, it's been "undone" all the way back to the empty file level.
Also, I'd have to disagree that the last major upgrade was 2000 years ago. Certain useful techniques have evolved more recently. Die extrusion, for example. Electroformed metal. Or hydraulic pressing using damp powder. Thixotropic clay. Or even such admittedly trivial techniques as upside-down wheels. Certain colors are available now that weren't even 50 years ago, such as encapsulated cadmium reds for high-temp work. And what about fiberfrax armatures and other products of recent ceramic advances?
But basically, you're right. The basic technology hasn't changed in a long time. It's the headspace that's really changed.
I wonder if we're the only potters who visit slashdot.
Oh please. Usability is THE REASON (well, ok, marketing too, to a lesser degree) that Windows runs 90%+ of the world's PC's.
Oh please, can anyone really be this stupid? Windows runs on so many PCs because it was pretty much the only OS available for the x86 architecture for many years. If you wanted to compute with relatively cheap hardware that you could upgrade yourself, you had to use Dos or Windows. Except for Apple and OS2 there were no challengers to MS supremacy until Linux came along and caught the attention of geeks wanting the same sort of reliability and capability on their x86 boxes that they'd had on big iron back in the day.
Mafia-type tactics would be difficult to pull off on a scale large enough to shift an important election. One of the guys you'd try to coerce will turn out to be a loon with poor impulse control who will blow away your enforcer and bring your scheme to the attention of the authorities. It's not practical.
Far more practical to coerce the politicians who get elected, or just pay them off. Then you only need a single point of leverage to thwart the people's will.
Oh, fuck off. David Koresh is the sole person responsible for what happened to him and the gullible fucks who died under his watch.
Some of those "gullible fucks" were small children. In the unlikely event that you ever find a woman gullible enough and ugly enough to accept you, and if you actually succeed in breeding, I wonder if you will regard your own children as "gullible fucks."
You desperately need a course in Remedial Logic, my young compatriot. And since I was actually in the military and understand how poorly information travels up the chain of command, I must still regard you as a credulous fool.
Also, you seem quite confused by the verbiage in Article 1, which provides that Congress
shall chastise any evil pirates which might happen along, not the President or his Attorney General. If you're going to cite the Constitution in an argument, have the grace to have actually read it. And you might want to read up a bit on Thomas Jefferson as well, since he was a man who well understood the problems that might arise from an uninformed and blindly patriotic citizenry.
Sadly, you have no actual facts with which to make your argument, despite your undoubtedly heartfelt claims to the contrary. Tell us again why we should accept the word of a pack of venal politicians that they are ignoring the Constitution for Real Good Reasons. Tell us again how you know that every person detained at Gitmo deserves to be there. Did God tell you? Psychic emanations? Or are you actually John Ashcroft in a clever disguise? Even if you are, I have to tell you that you don't have a lot of credibility with me, or any other "thinking person." Which, apparently, you're not, or you wouldn't believe every fairy tale the Bushites spin for you.
If you're going to accept the idea of molecular assemblers, why not accept the idea of atomic assemblers? Then there will be no rare element shortages.
##It doesn't disturb you that your government is perfectly willing to imprison people for extended periods without trial, etc?
#If they were common criminals it would, but that is not the case here.
Here's the thing, Bucky. You don't actually know what they are. All you actually know for sure is that your government has chosen to arrest and hold without trial a group of people they have labeled "unlawful combatants." Because your credulity is only exceeded by your jingoism, you are happy to accept that definition.
The Founding Fathers would regard you as a trusting fool. Here's a clue: the term "unlawful combatant" is not to be found anywhere in the Bill of Rights.
Please, give us a reason to believe that imprisoning "unlawful combatants" outside the legal system of the United States is in any moral sense different from doing the same to "political agitators" or "enemies of the state." You are supporting a use of power by politicians and unelected bureaucrats that is not specifically permitted under the Constitution. You are supporting the abandonment of our government of laws in favor of a government of men. If the President can say, "Our legal system does not apply to Hassan the Assassin, because I say so," then he can just as easily say that it does not apply to you.
We are talking about well over 100,000 users and probably closer to 5x that amount that use it part time, not 10,000. It is a big deal.
Okay, so it's only 1 in a 1000 instead of 1 in 10,000 who need those capacities. That means 999 out of 1000 don't need them. Still not a big deal, except for that tiny minority of which you are a member. As I recall, it wasn't that many years ago that you needed big iron to do worthwhile graphics work. Times change, and I'll be astonished if CMYK capabilities and a Quark-like program aren't available under Linux in a short while. And no one is upset with you for using Windows to do your work, just as no one was upset with Mac users in that brief period when Photoshop was not yet available for Windows.
Still, you should not dismiss the moral dimensions of open source software. Morality is, after all, most important in the "real world" of which you speak. Most of us who use Linux do so despite the fact that we can afford to buy closed source software like Photoshop (which I still use, on occasion.) And in the context of the linux desktop discussion, most users will be just as happy with a Linux desktop, unless they are gamers, or unless their work demands the use of specialized tools not yet available as open source products.
Also frequently left out of such discussions is the perfectly reasonable tactic of dual-booting Linux and Windows. Most people don't build their own boxes, so they get Windows pre-installed. There's nothing immoral about buying another hard drive and sticking Linux on it. Then the gamers and commercial graphics artists and page designers have what they need, and those who like the simplicity and security of the Linux desktop for everything else can have that luxury. Who wouldn't prefer to browse the web, email, and use the open standards word processors under Linux? With fast modern systems, booting up a new OS doesn't take long enough to be much of an inconvenience, and keeping the internet away from Windows is a major safety issue. You can send Quark files just as well from Linux as from Windows, after all.
Why should the necessity of using Windows for certain purposes preclude the safety and convenience of using Linux for everything else?
Learning to learn on your own, without an instructor, is more valuable than any single item an instructor could teach you.
This may well be true in a philosophical sense, but it unfortunately is not true in a financial sense. I flunked out of college (sex, drugs, rocknroll yada yada) spent a glorious year in Vietnam, taught myself to be a pretty good potter, took up writing, published dozens of short stories and several novels, was translated into many languages (my novels were published twice in Russia). As a result my publication record is far more impressive than anything on the resumes of most creative writing instructors. And I've coached several once-marginal writers to publication, while participating in various writers groups, so I have some teaching skills. Am I ever going to be offered a job as a writing instructor? Noooooo. Not unless I go back to school, which at 55 is sort of a low-return investment.
Since probably fewer than 1 in 10,000 users require CMYK graphics capability and Quark, this hardly seems a valid argument against the Linux desktop.
As far as the "granny test" goes, my mother is 80 and she's equally at sea with Linux and Windows. What I'm saying here is that it would be just as easy to teach her Linux as to teach her Windows. There would be a major advantage to Linux in that I could keep the root password to myself, and she'd never be able to hose the whole system, in the way that Windows users can.
She doesn't have much interest in computers, but finally my sister gave her an old Pentium 120 system she had laying around, and asked me to set it up for our mother. I finally decided to install Win98 on it, because it didn't have the power for a modern Linux distro, and because she expressed an interest in taking computer literacy classes at the local college, and those kind of classes use Windows exclusively.
But I've often thought some sort of small footprint linux would be a better bet for her, because all she does with it is email.
Good points. Still I have to wonder how well "the lowest common denominator of users" does with Windows. One of the posters up the line opined that the reason I found Linux adequate as a desktop was that I didn't do much with it. I think I probably do a lot more than the average lowest common denominator does-- email, web browsing and site construction, usenet, music playing and editing, graphics work, statistical analysis and a bunch more I can't think of right now.
About the only time I have to reboot into Windows is when I have to scan something-- I'm stuck with a USB scanner that isn't yet supported under sane.
Most folks would be better off using a simple Linux desktop, in my opinion, particularly if economics enter into the decision. They'd have everything they need, at a very low cost, and be much less vulnerable to the disruptions that currently plague Windows users.
Folks who claim Linux isn't ready for the desktop are poorly informed. I've been using Linux as my main OS for several years now, and for my work (writing) it is much better than Windows.
Why? Well, here's a little personal history. I started writing oh so many years ago on an Atari ST. When the time finally came to admit that Atari was never going to overtake the PC clone, I bought a Pentium 60 and Wordperfect. I kept Wordperfect through a succession of clones, since it was perfectly adequate for writing professionally.
As an sf writer and general techfreak, I was almost immediately intrigued with Linux and the open source model. Also, when the web first appeared, you had to know a little Unix to put up a site (my first site was hosted by UNC, like a lot of web pioneers.) So I experimented with a Slackware installation, but at that time, Linux really wasn't ready for the desktop.
Time passed, Windows progressed, I started building my own boxes and had to actually start paying actual money to put Windows on them. I kept reusing Wordperfect in each new box, even though I worried that someday the big box of floppies might not work. Eventually I tried Redhat 6.1 and discovered that Linux was now ready for the desktop, or at least the desktop of a writer who wasn't much interested in games. I found a copy of Wordperfect for Linux and thought I was set for life. But it got even better when I started using OpenOffice, and knew that my files would be eternally transportable to new machines.
Couple that eternal transportability with the worry-free nature of Linux online (much less danger of virii, worms, etc.) and with the flexibility of Linux (I can run an Atari emulator and access files from 15 years ago written on the ST) and with the availability of all kinds of software to play with that would cost me an arm and a leg in a Windows environment. It's more fun for me to use Linux on my desktop and more practical.
Hey, Pollyanna, if we'd found any Weapons of Mass Destruction (tm), I wouldn't have to have access to Top Secret Intelligence (tm) to know about it. Unless you believe the Shrub found a whole passel of nukes and he's keeping it under his hat. For some reason. Is that your theory?
Get a clue. If you cannot afford one, one will be provided for you.
I think it's not so much that there's a "liberal" or "conservative" bias to popular media. It's that there's a "statist" bias. Currently folks calling themselves conservatives hold the reins of power, therefore the media suck up to them. If Dean gets in, FAIR may become critical of liberal bias in the news. Lying is not the sole prerogative of conservatives-- it just seems that way at the moment.
In that vein, here's an interesting piece on the so-called liberal media.
This is a study of the bias of sources used by the major broadcast media in the run-up to the Iraq war. FAIR classified sources as pro-war or anti-war on the basis of their affiliation with the administration, publicly expressed opinions about the war, and so on.
What I found surprising was that not even PBS gave equal time to those who opposed the war.
An excerpt: "The FAIR study found just 3 percent of U.S. sources represented or expressed opposition to the war. With more than one in four U.S. citizens opposing the war and much higher rates of opposition in most countries where opinion was polled, none of the networks offered anything resembling proportionate coverage of anti-war voices. The anti-war percentages ranged from 4 percent at NBC, 3 percent at CNN, ABC, PBS and FOX, and less than 1 percent--one out of 205 U.S. sources--at CBS."
I know you didn't RTFA, but couldn't you tell just from context that this was an issue of the magazine that sold whatever it sold many years ago? So "selling more magazines" is irrelevant to the discussion.
By the way, the current President seems to have had access to all kinds of information that his father did not have. Unfortunately that information has largely proven to be false.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think Vietnam was a justified war?
I do, yeah. It was a war that was worth fighting. It's just that it was poorly fought. The people who had to live and die under the past 30 years of communist totalitarianism in Vietnam suffered needlessly.
You just don't know what you're talking about, Anonymous Coward. I spent a year in Vietnam as a young man, and there was no way to win that war. Like Iraq, the war was based on deceit and betrayal. Ho Chi Minh fought the Japanese for us during WWII and expected us to support his nationalistic ambitions. We gave his country back to the French and forced him into the arms of Vietnam's historic enemy, China. Eventually, LBJ lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and we were at war on behalf of a corrupt puppet regime which did not enjoy popular support.
In order for us to "win" the war, we would have had to kill a majority of the population, since clearly our side was a minority and the Vietnamese are, it turns out, extremely tough people. A reasonable person might wonder if by our support of kleptocratic puppet regimes we actually prevented capitalism from making a comeback sooner. Capitalism is an obviously superior economic system, and if we hadn't pushed them into bed with Red China, the Vietnamese, an eminently practical people, would never have wasted 30 years on an ideological boondoggle. They're coming around now, it seems, just like every other formerly communist country.
In other words, 50,000 Americans died so that the politicians of the era could posture against the Soviets and the Chinese. Just like 500 Americans have died to promote Bush's chances for re-election. If we allow democratic elections in Iraq, we're likely to get a radical Islamic state, fundamentally hostile to the West. That isn't worth a drop of American blood, and you can prattle all you like about the wonderfulness of deposing Saddam.
I do not expect you to understand this.
Yet another confirmation of the unfortunate fact that half the people in America are below average in intelligence.
If a big un comes before we get into space on a routine basis, we're doomed. And we don't even have much of anyone looking for big uns. Double doom.
It's pretty easy to tell who's a "clueful" reviewer, because reviewing a book is an act of writing. If the reviewer likes the book but is illiterate, the book might still be good, but if the reviewer writes well, you can give her opinion more weight.
Of course, that gives sneaky authors reviewing their own dogs a little bit of an advantage, because even the lamest hack has to write a little better than average to get widely published. But life ain't fair. That's probably why I have excellent karma, in spite of my cranky personality.
There's an annoyingly inevitable quality to these accusations. It's the sort of thing you always suspect about any issue involving ruthlessly ego-driven professions like writing.
Here's how dumb I am: it never occurred to me to write glowing reviews of my books. Evidently I am not a marketing genius. On the other hand, I was too obscure for rivals to bother trashing me, so maybe that's why I never thought about it.
Anyway, no matter how depressing these revelations are, I don't think the solution is to strip away the anonymity of reviewers. In almost every case, the best solution to bad information is not to restrict the free flow of information. Far better to increase the flow of information so as to drown the bad information in a sea of better information. In this instance, making people verify their identities before reviewing a book is just going to discourage people from taking the time to share their thoughts. Better to put a disclaimer up for visitors to let them know that a great review might have been written by the author, and then let them react if they find a bad book with a glorifying review. That'll be far more effective in promoting actual opinions about books than restricting reviewers to the group that's willing to put up with intrusive registering requirements. Besides, authors, being both clever and desperate, will quickly find ways to circumvent any identity check, so that their bad information will gain prominence in comparison with everyone else, who will not be as likely to take the trouble to post.
I don't know if information wants to be free, but it seems obvious that the world works better when information is free.
this program's killer app is in evading law enforcement... copyright and homeland security implications be damned.
Oh for heaven's sake. Do you really believe that terrorists are using P2P to transmit secret plans? Why in the world would they do this? The thing about P2P is that you can't really control who gets your files. Does that really sound like something that would appeal to a terrorist?
Yeah, you're right. I'm just quibbling. I don't know about the Roman pipe deal, but it sounds plausible. I used to extrude with nothing but a tube, a die, and a lever.
Slashpot? I like it. And you know, there are all sorts of correspondences between the industry based on making useful things out of formless mud and the industry based on making useful information out of formless bits. Both Protean endeavors, and I suppose there was a time when having clay pots (or not) made as big a difference in daily life as having computers does now. Or bigger-- but we haven't seen the end of the computer's effects on daily life. Or even the end of the beginning.
I'd disagree slightly. Clay once dried out has to be slaked before you can modify it by any plastic process, and once slaked, it's been "undone" all the way back to the empty file level.
Also, I'd have to disagree that the last major upgrade was 2000 years ago. Certain useful techniques have evolved more recently. Die extrusion, for example. Electroformed metal. Or hydraulic pressing using damp powder. Thixotropic clay. Or even such admittedly trivial techniques as upside-down wheels. Certain colors are available now that weren't even 50 years ago, such as encapsulated cadmium reds for high-temp work. And what about fiberfrax armatures and other products of recent ceramic advances?
But basically, you're right. The basic technology hasn't changed in a long time. It's the headspace that's really changed.
I wonder if we're the only potters who visit slashdot.
Oh please, can anyone really be this stupid? Windows runs on so many PCs because it was pretty much the only OS available for the x86 architecture for many years. If you wanted to compute with relatively cheap hardware that you could upgrade yourself, you had to use Dos or Windows. Except for Apple and OS2 there were no challengers to MS supremacy until Linux came along and caught the attention of geeks wanting the same sort of reliability and capability on their x86 boxes that they'd had on big iron back in the day.
Mafia-type tactics would be difficult to pull off on a scale large enough to shift an important election. One of the guys you'd try to coerce will turn out to be a loon with poor impulse control who will blow away your enforcer and bring your scheme to the attention of the authorities. It's not practical.
Far more practical to coerce the politicians who get elected, or just pay them off. Then you only need a single point of leverage to thwart the people's will.
Some of those "gullible fucks" were small children. In the unlikely event that you ever find a woman gullible enough and ugly enough to accept you, and if you actually succeed in breeding, I wonder if you will regard your own children as "gullible fucks."
You desperately need a course in Remedial Logic, my young compatriot. And since I was actually in the military and understand how poorly information travels up the chain of command, I must still regard you as a credulous fool.
Also, you seem quite confused by the verbiage in Article 1, which provides that Congress shall chastise any evil pirates which might happen along, not the President or his Attorney General. If you're going to cite the Constitution in an argument, have the grace to have actually read it. And you might want to read up a bit on Thomas Jefferson as well, since he was a man who well understood the problems that might arise from an uninformed and blindly patriotic citizenry.
Sadly, you have no actual facts with which to make your argument, despite your undoubtedly heartfelt claims to the contrary. Tell us again why we should accept the word of a pack of venal politicians that they are ignoring the Constitution for Real Good Reasons. Tell us again how you know that every person detained at Gitmo deserves to be there. Did God tell you? Psychic emanations? Or are you actually John Ashcroft in a clever disguise? Even if you are, I have to tell you that you don't have a lot of credibility with me, or any other "thinking person." Which, apparently, you're not, or you wouldn't believe every fairy tale the Bushites spin for you.
If you're going to accept the idea of molecular assemblers, why not accept the idea of atomic assemblers? Then there will be no rare element shortages.
##It doesn't disturb you that your government is perfectly willing to imprison people for extended periods without trial, etc?
#If they were common criminals it would, but that is not the case here.
Here's the thing, Bucky. You don't actually know what they are. All you actually know for sure is that your government has chosen to arrest and hold without trial a group of people they have labeled "unlawful combatants." Because your credulity is only exceeded by your jingoism, you are happy to accept that definition.
The Founding Fathers would regard you as a trusting fool. Here's a clue: the term "unlawful combatant" is not to be found anywhere in the Bill of Rights.
Please, give us a reason to believe that imprisoning "unlawful combatants" outside the legal system of the United States is in any moral sense different from doing the same to "political agitators" or "enemies of the state." You are supporting a use of power by politicians and unelected bureaucrats that is not specifically permitted under the Constitution. You are supporting the abandonment of our government of laws in favor of a government of men. If the President can say, "Our legal system does not apply to Hassan the Assassin, because I say so," then he can just as easily say that it does not apply to you.
Geeze, where can I get some of your Pollyanna pills? Sure, let's all trust Microsoft. They've never steered us wrong yet.
Have they?
Okay, so it's only 1 in a 1000 instead of 1 in 10,000 who need those capacities. That means 999 out of 1000 don't need them. Still not a big deal, except for that tiny minority of which you are a member. As I recall, it wasn't that many years ago that you needed big iron to do worthwhile graphics work. Times change, and I'll be astonished if CMYK capabilities and a Quark-like program aren't available under Linux in a short while. And no one is upset with you for using Windows to do your work, just as no one was upset with Mac users in that brief period when Photoshop was not yet available for Windows.
Still, you should not dismiss the moral dimensions of open source software. Morality is, after all, most important in the "real world" of which you speak. Most of us who use Linux do so despite the fact that we can afford to buy closed source software like Photoshop (which I still use, on occasion.) And in the context of the linux desktop discussion, most users will be just as happy with a Linux desktop, unless they are gamers, or unless their work demands the use of specialized tools not yet available as open source products.
Also frequently left out of such discussions is the perfectly reasonable tactic of dual-booting Linux and Windows. Most people don't build their own boxes, so they get Windows pre-installed. There's nothing immoral about buying another hard drive and sticking Linux on it. Then the gamers and commercial graphics artists and page designers have what they need, and those who like the simplicity and security of the Linux desktop for everything else can have that luxury. Who wouldn't prefer to browse the web, email, and use the open standards word processors under Linux? With fast modern systems, booting up a new OS doesn't take long enough to be much of an inconvenience, and keeping the internet away from Windows is a major safety issue. You can send Quark files just as well from Linux as from Windows, after all.
Why should the necessity of using Windows for certain purposes preclude the safety and convenience of using Linux for everything else?
This may well be true in a philosophical sense, but it unfortunately is not true in a financial sense. I flunked out of college (sex, drugs, rocknroll yada yada) spent a glorious year in Vietnam, taught myself to be a pretty good potter, took up writing, published dozens of short stories and several novels, was translated into many languages (my novels were published twice in Russia). As a result my publication record is far more impressive than anything on the resumes of most creative writing instructors. And I've coached several once-marginal writers to publication, while participating in various writers groups, so I have some teaching skills. Am I ever going to be offered a job as a writing instructor? Noooooo. Not unless I go back to school, which at 55 is sort of a low-return investment.
Stay in school. Get that paper.
Since probably fewer than 1 in 10,000 users require CMYK graphics capability and Quark, this hardly seems a valid argument against the Linux desktop.
As far as the "granny test" goes, my mother is 80 and she's equally at sea with Linux and Windows. What I'm saying here is that it would be just as easy to teach her Linux as to teach her Windows. There would be a major advantage to Linux in that I could keep the root password to myself, and she'd never be able to hose the whole system, in the way that Windows users can.
She doesn't have much interest in computers, but finally my sister gave her an old Pentium 120 system she had laying around, and asked me to set it up for our mother. I finally decided to install Win98 on it, because it didn't have the power for a modern Linux distro, and because she expressed an interest in taking computer literacy classes at the local college, and those kind of classes use Windows exclusively.
But I've often thought some sort of small footprint linux would be a better bet for her, because all she does with it is email.
Unless, of course, you actually have a sense of humor. Then it makes a great deal of sense.
Good points. Still I have to wonder how well "the lowest common denominator of users" does with Windows. One of the posters up the line opined that the reason I found Linux adequate as a desktop was that I didn't do much with it. I think I probably do a lot more than the average lowest common denominator does-- email, web browsing and site construction, usenet, music playing and editing, graphics work, statistical analysis and a bunch more I can't think of right now.
About the only time I have to reboot into Windows is when I have to scan something-- I'm stuck with a USB scanner that isn't yet supported under sane.
Most folks would be better off using a simple Linux desktop, in my opinion, particularly if economics enter into the decision. They'd have everything they need, at a very low cost, and be much less vulnerable to the disruptions that currently plague Windows users.
Exactly.
Folks who claim Linux isn't ready for the desktop are poorly informed. I've been using Linux as my main OS for several years now, and for my work (writing) it is much better than Windows.
Why? Well, here's a little personal history. I started writing oh so many years ago on an Atari ST. When the time finally came to admit that Atari was never going to overtake the PC clone, I bought a Pentium 60 and Wordperfect. I kept Wordperfect through a succession of clones, since it was perfectly adequate for writing professionally.
As an sf writer and general techfreak, I was almost immediately intrigued with Linux and the open source model. Also, when the web first appeared, you had to know a little Unix to put up a site (my first site was hosted by UNC, like a lot of web pioneers.) So I experimented with a Slackware installation, but at that time, Linux really wasn't ready for the desktop.
Time passed, Windows progressed, I started building my own boxes and had to actually start paying actual money to put Windows on them. I kept reusing Wordperfect in each new box, even though I worried that someday the big box of floppies might not work. Eventually I tried Redhat 6.1 and discovered that Linux was now ready for the desktop, or at least the desktop of a writer who wasn't much interested in games. I found a copy of Wordperfect for Linux and thought I was set for life. But it got even better when I started using OpenOffice, and knew that my files would be eternally transportable to new machines.
Couple that eternal transportability with the worry-free nature of Linux online (much less danger of virii, worms, etc.) and with the flexibility of Linux (I can run an Atari emulator and access files from 15 years ago written on the ST) and with the availability of all kinds of software to play with that would cost me an arm and a leg in a Windows environment. It's more fun for me to use Linux on my desktop and more practical.
Hey, Pollyanna, if we'd found any Weapons of Mass Destruction (tm), I wouldn't have to have access to Top Secret Intelligence (tm) to know about it. Unless you believe the Shrub found a whole passel of nukes and he's keeping it under his hat. For some reason. Is that your theory?
Get a clue. If you cannot afford one, one will be provided for you.
I think it's not so much that there's a "liberal" or "conservative" bias to popular media. It's that there's a "statist" bias. Currently folks calling themselves conservatives hold the reins of power, therefore the media suck up to them. If Dean gets in, FAIR may become critical of liberal bias in the news. Lying is not the sole prerogative of conservatives-- it just seems that way at the moment.
In that vein, here's an interesting piece on the so-called liberal media.
This is a study of the bias of sources used by the major broadcast media in the run-up to the Iraq war. FAIR classified sources as pro-war or anti-war on the basis of their affiliation with the administration, publicly expressed opinions about the war, and so on.
What I found surprising was that not even PBS gave equal time to those who opposed the war.
An excerpt: "The FAIR study found just 3 percent of U.S. sources represented or expressed opposition to the war. With more than one in four U.S. citizens opposing the war and much higher rates of opposition in most countries where opinion was polled, none of the networks offered anything resembling proportionate coverage of anti-war voices. The anti-war percentages ranged from 4 percent at NBC, 3 percent at CNN, ABC, PBS and FOX, and less than 1 percent--one out of 205 U.S. sources--at CBS."
I know you didn't RTFA, but couldn't you tell just from context that this was an issue of the magazine that sold whatever it sold many years ago? So "selling more magazines" is irrelevant to the discussion.
By the way, the current President seems to have had access to all kinds of information that his father did not have. Unfortunately that information has largely proven to be false.