My favourite in this genre comes from a physics DPhil student I knew in Oxford: He insisted that it was permissible for him to work in the lab on Shabbat because after all he was really just studying the works of God and so it was no different in character from reading the Torah.
I'm not sure entirely how serious this argument was, but he wasn't entirely unobservant; he made a point of not playing in orchestra on Friday evenings (after dusk).
Just asked my wife about this, who grew up Jewish and also loves debating these things as she's a programmer. Apparently the rules describe certain activities that one is not allowed to do, which in practice block most people from doing their profession. Reading books is not on that list, but nowhere does it say that the book needs to be the Torah. So it would definitely be allowed to read research papers, as long as you don't take notes (because writing is forbidden). Even a book critic could be reading books during shabat without any issues.
Operating a particle accelerator (ie actually pressing the buttons) would probably be a no-go, but if you set it up beforehand and it runs through the weekend without interaction then that would be fine.
Yes. But not if you set up a timer to do it automatically. (As long as you set up the timer before shabat obviously)
There is also apparently a slightly more technologically minded sub-sect of Judaism which considers only electricity generators that actually burn things (coal, oil, gas, biomass, etc) to be "fire". Battery powered devices are therefore OK, as would be things purely powered by solar power (as the sun is technically not "on fire") nucear power or even hydroelectric power. For the vast majority of electricity grids though, at least a percentage of generation will be from fueled generators and so forbidden on shabat.
I'm pretty sure 99.999% of observant Jewish people would consider this work but there is a lot of room for interpretation in Judaism and in the end it's between you, your belief, and God. An interesting piece of trivia there is that in Yom Kippur you can atone for sins to god but you can not atone for sins to other people without getting reconciliation.
In general a lot of scientists who are followers of theistic religions do think there is a religious motivation in their work, it that it is the study of God's creation so I would take it seriously.
I would argue that even a non-believer who studies the sciences in pursuit or truth and appreciates the beauty they reveal is doing God's work.
I mean, you might be able to make some kind of argument about the good outdoing the evil (I think it would be hard, but hey, I won’t call a line of argument impossible until I see it happen). But, the idea that it would be challenging to name a country that did less evil than GB is pretty ridiculous, right?
Most countries didn’t have colonial empires, so GB is pretty high up there (arguably not at the top) in the evil rankings.
Sure. The UK has done a lot, both Good and Evil. There are lots of countries which have done less Evil than the UK. There are some countries which have done more Good than the UK. I can't think of any country which is on both lists.
I don’t think it is really quantifiable. Like if I say France, how would anyone adjudicate that? In terms of “good,” both contributed in WW2, both made some contributions to the concept of liberal democracy…
Having a colonial empire involves countless horrible acts of evil.
GB was a little bit ahead of the curve on ending the slave trade (at least compared to particularly shitty countries on this issue, like the US). But is it also a problem that they themselves contributed massively toward, so kind of a mixed bag there.
Those empires didn't build that infrastructure out of the kindness of their hearts, they did so to more efficiently enslave the locals and extract their resources and to make life more comfortable for the colonizers occupying the territories.
Absolutely not one bit of it was done to improve the quality of life of colonized people. That it did regardless is a statement about the neutral moral dimension of technology, not the relative good of imperialism.
The USSR was terrible. Remarkably, the Nazis still managed to be substantially worse.
As one example there's the Hunger Plan. Hitler's defeat stopped him from executing it, though they had started. He planned to kill 35-41 million people in eastern europe via starvation and take the land for Germany.
The USSR equivalent, Holomodor, killed 3-5 million, and was fully executed. Horrendous. Not as bad as the hunger plan.
And that was not the only Nazi mass death plan....
That's a fair point. USSR soldiers did mass rape women in conquered territories (and even their own). And the Brits did have that famine in India that killed a lot as well.
Maybe the Nazis were worse, but wasn't really a good vs evil war.
Fair enough, but I'd say that half of Europe being free is better than none of Europe being free. I don't think there's much the UK could have done to help Eastern Europe.
The Europeans invented modern science and technology, with England contributing the most (particularly during the 19th Century).
Maybe most nations of the world would've followed a course of colonization and empire if they had been as dominant in wealth, technology and organizational ability as England was.
I can't remember exactly but it was a few hours. I already knew which week the issue arose (from comparing weekly snapshots) so that gave me a head start.
But yes, I built a lot of AMIs. And launched new EC2 instances for each of them -- it wasn't just a matter of rebooting since the first time an AMI launches there's different behaviour (both from FreeBSD, e.g. growing the root disk, and from EC2, e.g. disk caching).
I can tell you some financial services I have worked for do use FreeBSD on EC2 as well as on the metal in data centers to do millions of transactions a month.
I like the OS, thanks for your work.
I'm not sure where you're getting the "Apple holds soft power over FreeBSD" thing from. Netflix is probably at the top of the list given all their performance and stability work -- and, you know, the fact they push a large chunk of all Internet traffic using FreeBSD -- and NetApp and Juniper are somewhere up there, but I'm not convinced Apple would even be in the top 10.
> I'm not sure where you're getting the "Apple holds soft power over FreeBSD" thing from.
The only thing I've ever heard from FreeBSD-land, not paying attention to users, but the maintainers and the tools. Apple comes up. In the same manner that RedHat and others come up for Linux. How to explain? It's an abstract pattern. Transparent, understandable.
I mentioned somewhere about the connection through ix systems. And honestly to project, if I was a maintainer of something used between Netflix and Apple, I'd prioritize Apple. Apple has outlived IBM. If you know your history, you know how serious that is. If you've got authority over something as large as FreeBSD? Yeah, you don't ignore that kind of actual power especially when it's personal. Like I say, all based on guesses. But some things are hard to mistake.
Apple did very important work making LLVM happen, but that was a long time ago. At this point there are lots of companies involved in that project.
As far as "power" is concerned... speaking as release engineer, I don't give special treatment to anyone; nor have I even been asked to. If anyone has a special relationship it's Netflix but if anything that's the opposite way around: "Can you please throw 10% of all Internet traffic at this TCP stack patch and let us know if anything breaks" is a thing. They're incredibly helpful with Q/A.
Consider me convinced. Like I say, it was never anything but empirical skepticism. Neither for or against until sufficient evidence has been collected, as painful as that can be. Thank you for your work on scrypt.
Just to give another data point. LLVM is a good example. Where FreeBSD and Apple may still interface quiet a bit, and this isn't exclusive to FreeBSD, I think Apple is still a primary contributor/maintainer of CUPS and a few other systems like that.
I know some maintainers of the userland and apple never comes up. Most maintainers have no commercial ties to anyone so they don't really care abour corporate influence anyway. They just maintain the software because they like using it. This is exactly the kind of thing I like, in Linux there are too many companies putting money into it because they want to make money back (usually not from normal users but from cloud instances, steering the project in a direction away from its grassroots origins).
I'm sure if Apple wants something it would be considered but there would be a strong validation of "what's in it for us" on the freebsd side. There's also some pretty bad experiences with corporate influence and this is reviewed a lot more independently since the netgate wireguard disaster. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...
Unlike in the Linux world where RedHat and canonical are so embedded due to most of the devs working for them that there will be a lot less questions. And not just those two, also companies like Huawei are heavy kernel contributors.
I'm not saying it's bad to have such commercial influence. But it's not what I want for the OS I run.
I may be wrong about OPs intention, but AFAICT, because no encoding is specified, the client gets to choose. For someone not using a default encoding that's a superset of ASCII (like ISO-2022-KR) the page appears as a �.
Current practice is to put a meta tag with your encoding, use a Unicode BOM, or less favorably, send the charset attribute in the Content-type header.
I'm not sure entirely how serious this argument was, but he wasn't entirely unobservant; he made a point of not playing in orchestra on Friday evenings (after dusk).
reply