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User: bob.appleyard

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Comments · 309

  1. Re:The word 'Geek' is gender neutral on Linux To Be First OS To Support USB 3.0 · · Score: 1

    Somewhere along the line, political correctness and feminism got mixed up and decided that the male term would henceforth be used for both. So instead of the awards 'Best Actor' and 'Best Actress' we have abominably bloated misuse of the language with 'Best Male Actor' and 'Best Female Actor'. If the sanitization of the language were truly to treat women equal with men there would be no need for positive discrimination in having a separate award for an actress - i.e. Women would compete with men for the same trophy.

    Blowing hot and cold!

  2. Re:WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SLASHCODE?!?! on Saving Unix Heritage, One Kernel At a Time · · Score: 1

    Like this? http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g269/bob-appleyard/slashbug.png

    I tried submitting a bug report, but it placed too many obstacles in my path, and broke down before it could go anywhere.

    Messed up.

  3. Re:Not Industry -- Her Majesty's Government on Lies, Damned Lies, and the UK Copyright Industry · · Score: 1

    The gov't agency itself quoted the figure from a press release. This agency will be stuffed with industry lobbyists anyway. That's how you govern responsibly, after all.

  4. Hear hear on 9th Circuit Says Feds' Security Checks At JPL Go Too Far · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Offtopic? When this is what passes for a thread view, this comment is on topic for every conversation!

  5. Facebook redesign to blame on Time On Social Networks Almost Doubles In a Year · · Score: 1

    It now takes me twice as long to find anything!

  6. Re:FIST SPORT on Mozilla Jetpack and the Battle For the Web · · Score: 1
  7. Re:This is what happens whenever... on Students, the Other Unprotected Lab Animals · · Score: 2, Funny

    Posting from the 70s? WTF

  8. Re:I'm not a statistic! on More Americans Play Video Games Than Go To Movies · · Score: 1

    Australians use it as well, huh?

    A googling brought me this, which claims the term originated in the 1940s in the UK.

    Wow.

    Isn't the WWW amazing?

  9. Re:Good. on Craigslist Fights Back, Sues SC Atty General · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Criminalising prostitution means that if prostitutes are being mistreated, they have no-one to go to.

  10. Re:Huh? on Microsoft Patents the Crippling of Operating Systems · · Score: 1

    No codes in Doom, nor Quake as I recall. Quake 2 had something, I think, but that was for the whole game.

    What Doom did have was an admonition to "freeloaders:"

    If you haven't paid for DOOM, you are playing illegally. That means you owe us money. Of course, a guy like you probably owes a lot of people money--your friends, maybe even your parents. Stop being a freeloader and register DOOM.

  11. Re:Our economic and political systems on Schneier Says We Don't Need a Cybersecurity Czar · · Score: 1
  12. Re:Paying pirates on Cory Doctorow Says DIY Licensing Will Solve Piracy · · Score: 1

    The difference is that now, they're all linked up to the same thing, and they can be found out with much greater ease. People swapping tapes weren't pursued because the enforcement costs would be ridiculous. Not so ridiculous when it's all effectively happening on one network.

  13. Habeas, not Habeus on The Electronic Police State · · Score: 1

    One minor complaint, it's habeas (a 2nd person verb, "you (shall) have"), not habeus (which could be a 2nd declension noun in the nominative, or a 4th declension in several cases). Habeas corpus (corpus is a 4th declension noun, here in the accusative) means "you have the body." It should be pretty clear what it's about in that case -- it was traditionally used when someone felt they were being falsely imprisoned.

  14. Re:Adult Gaming? Hah! on On the Advent of Controversial Video Games · · Score: 1

    +1 informative

  15. Re:Fair beats Free on The "Dangers" of Free · · Score: 1

    This is certainly an issue. The problem with newspapers is that it doesn't really matter what you or I think of the rights and wrongs, they're probably going the way of the Dodo. Newspapers have been stuttering for ages, but the WWW is really doing them in. Many of them are openly panicking, and publish fretful pieces regarding their downfall (some of which are wildly off-base, such as the attacks on Google News). The year-on-year profit declines of some of the biggest players are pretty frightening.

    One can have an argument about what might replace them, but suffice to say that's all up in the air right now. Big changes are coming, but nobody knows what they might be exactly, because this WWW thing is all so new.

    People on slashdot talk about 'free' as a new business model as though its just an evolution of normal technology. It is *not*.

    It's impossible to deny the effects a technology has on society, though. A society with a printing press is a different kind of society from one without. A society with cars is a different kind of society from one without. A society with the Internet and the WWW is a different kind of society from one without.

    One of the properties of the Internet as it exists now is that everyone pays for the infrastructure, not the actual transmission of data. This is an entirely different way of distributing information than one based on a printing press or broadcasting equipment, where most of the costs are on a central entity doing the distributing. It's not exactly free to communicate over the Internet, just as it's not exactly free to watch commercial television (less so, in fact). The costing just works out differently.

    You do get freetards on Slashdot, and I agree that demanding people work without renumeration is not a reasonable proposition. However, the Internet does pose a question as to what will and will not make money with it. Many fashionable websites (naming no names) have yet to come up with a business model, let alone test it. Outside mail-order, tourism and some financial services, few proven moneymaking schemes exist, and the old stalwart "we'll pay with advertising" is looking ever less appetising as the years progress.

    As your initial query posed: what about investigative journalism?

    This is particularly vexing, as people really do need someone to dig into the issues and find answers, without having to take official sources at face value. There aren't enough journalists who are allowed to do this kind of thing as it is, and one of the more worrisome aspects of the decline of newspaper budgets is that this sort of journalism has been cut back in most organisations. The writers are often overworked and under-resourced, and commonly resort to official press releases, or the Internet, as sources of news and information. This can result in the unnerving experience of reading two different newspapers and many of the stories reading almost word-for-word, because they were both cribbed from the same press release.

    I don't have any answers, I don't think anyone does. Blogs are certainly not it. Some of them are excellent in their own way, but none have the resources to really dig into a story beyond what's already been published, in the general case. I also doubt the inclination is there to change. The next few decades are going to be filled with doubts like these about a wide range of issues connected to the Internet.

  16. Re:Dumpers on Digitizing Literary Treasures Leads To New Finds · · Score: 2, Funny

    Your UID is way too high for you to be making such grand claims.

  17. Re:Wake me when WoW has puking bears on A History of Rogue · · Score: 1

    Dwarf Fortress? Casual gamers? What horrible twisted parallel universe have I stepped into, and what do the games for serious players look like?

  18. Re:Product? I Thought It Was a Service! on Can Avatars Make Contracts? · · Score: 2, Funny

    Can I get it delivered to my house discretely?

    What, as in one at a time?

    I'll get my coat...

  19. Re:lack of downloadable materials? on Styling Web Pages With CSS · · Score: 1

    Yeah, if you did that it might be in Latex or something (I don't know what the cool kids use). Definitely not HTML, anyway.

  20. Re:Insightful fact... on Competition Seeks Best Approaches To Detecting Plagiarism · · Score: 2, Informative

    When I was at university, one of the lecturers showed us the plagiarism detection tool. Sure, it gave you a percentage, but it also gave you some output showing the passages in the text vs. what the program thought those passages had been taken from. He showed that most of the things that the tool had detected there were inconsequential, on the paper he was using for the demonstration.

  21. Re:Newsflash on How Tor Helps Both Dissidents and the Police · · Score: 1

    People say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but what about puns?

  22. Re:Great on Tesla Roadster Runs For 241 Miles In E-Rally · · Score: 1

    Maxwell? A poor man's Tesla?

  23. Re:An unfair fight is the point of war on Konami Announces a Game Based On a 2004 Battle In Fallujah · · Score: 1

    Taliban were the government. People associated with Al-Qaeda did 9/11. Taliban were harbouring Al-Qaeda members because they asked for some evidence of their involvement in the attacks. There was more to it than that, of course. Those were the actors though.

  24. Why? on Chrome EULA Reserves the Right To Filter Your Web · · Score: 1

    The source is BSD. Why isn't that enough?

  25. Re:Sorry, but I have to consider the source on UN Attacks Free Speech · · Score: 1

    Next up: inciting hatred against the UN. "Too late!" -- Anon