Civil disobedience may well be the way to go about it, but you have to stand for something good as well. Gandhi was disobedient, but stood for a lawful society, just not one ruled by British. TPB stands for... I don't know. The right to do whatever they want?
I don't think it is fair to Gandhi to compare him to TPB.. But they are part of the movement, which includes thousands of artists, musicians, software developers, politicians and debaters. Of course if you only look at TPB, then that is all you will see. But behind it there is a huge debate on better ways to distribute content and compensate the producers of it.
Ever tried voting? Forming a political party? To my knowledge, the Pirate Party of Sweden is the first of its kind, so this can't have been tried.
And if you don't want to vote for PP (I don't) - ever tried talking to people, convincing them about the rightness of your cause? Done some good old-fashioned debating? I mean you, yourself?
Um.. yes, yes and yes. I do vote, have emailed parliament members, have participated in some of the dozen rallies in support of piracy, have released free software so I can say that a practice what I preach and have debated copyright with lots of people. A huge number of people have. Now you tell me, what options other than violating the law is left? Especially when these politicians create laws that are in direct contradiction of the will of the majority such as IPRED and FRA?
The more I read about the PB guys, the more they appear to be a bunch of arrogant bastards who want a blank check to do whatever they want. There is certainly enough wrong with copyright law in Sweden as it stands now, but this Internet mob mentality is not the way to go about it.
Then smart ass, what is the way to go about it? You see, every other idea you may have, have already been tried. When the politicians ignore the will of the people, civil disobedience is a perfectly valid method.
You want to cyber bully some one, go for it. But if that person commits suicide due to your actions, we'll hold you accountable for it.
No you wont. The bill is obviously a direct response to that case, in which a womans cyber harassing was a clear trigger to a girls suicide. I don't see any philosophical reasons why one would not want to curb behavior that is just plain old bullying. The bill is probably misguided as laws seldom improve things, but the problem does exist.
If Sun's marketing were so bad, then Java wouldn't be the worlds most used programming language today. I think they have done a bang up job with that. Remember all those job ads from 97-99 sometime requiring 5+ years of Java experience? That's successful marketing.
Java wasn't and isn't something revolutionary but they managed to convince every PHB in the world to believe that. From a technical perspective, there is nothing special about the language. In almost all situations where it is used there are better languages and technologies to use. But they aren't and Java is deployed virtually everywhere and on a few hundred million handsets to boot.
IMHO, Sun's doom was that they were completely unable to monetize Java. For a company it doesn't matter how successful your products are if you are unable to make money on them and they failed to do that.
How come Africans with pipes fat enough to watch streaming video are to poor to buy whatever crap that is advertised? Bandwith can't be that cheap in the 3rd world. Will adblock users be next? After all, we're just freeloading on the content and don't even see the ads.
Well, praise the Lord! I think we have found our Sion. Where the government doesn't intervene with the free markets. Where your property is yours and yours alone. Where no government confiscates your hard earned currency only to hand it out to those who think they are entitled to it without having to work for it, which is the greatest injustice of them all. This blessed place on earth, Somalia be it's name, also known as "Randland," will be our Eden. Emigrate today, only 144000 can reach salvation.
I had the same issue. Compiz + 8.04 + nVidia proprietary drivers + not antialiased fonts and the fonts would look terrible. Especially italicized glyphs. But switching to Metacity solved those problems (and some others too, related to Compiz or nVidia driver instability).
Um.. That article explicitly refutes that rumor. Although they used weasel words to deny the suspicions in such a way that the suspicion seems more plausible to a casual reader. E.g. AT&T has not identified any suspects and does not believe Bruce Perens sabotaged their fiber like others have suggested. Although he did post a slashdot article about it two weeks after the incident...
Well, of course almost all of it is subsidized. Stockholm has about 800000 households so even if 25% of those sign up, at 11$/month that's only a measly 2,2 million revenue/month. Obviously, there's not enough profit there to recoup the investments needed for building all that fiber that is probably counted in billions.
Instead, what is happening is that tax payers pay for the government to lay the fiber. Then the government leases the bandwith to ISP:s at a much lower rate than it cost to build who can then take out a low price and still maintain a high profit margin. In effect, my tax money is subsidizing fast internet which I approve of and subsidizing profits to companies who doesn't deserve it which I do not approve of.
I guess it's still better than the American model because I have fast and "cheap" internet access. But I'm still paying for it twice. There's no "road service providers" so why does the government feel that private Internet service providers are needed?
There's no need for ethics, it's all about efficiency. Let's say people enjoy movies and each movie gains you 1 point of happiness. Let's also say that you can download any movie you want, for free and that each person is able to do that 5 times per week. That gives a total happiness value of 5 for each person each week. In contrast if you have to pay for each movie you watch then on average each person can only afford to watch 1 movie per week, totalling 1 happyness point. Therefore society as a whole is better of with free unlimited availability of movies.
Then we have the problem of how to compensate you. There are a number of ways to do that. For example, it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a broadband tax if (and only if) some of that money went to content providers such as yourself. Neither would it be unreasonable to have an increased general income tax if the money was spent on free media.
The system would be orders of magnitudes more efficient than what we have today and would benefit everyone involved. No overhead for you like payment providers, credit card processing, advertising and less book keeping. I could quit my day job and focus on writing the software I really like. Artists and writers wouldn't need annoying labels and publishers etc. And unlimited media for everyone. Win win.
We've got tons of coal that's (relatively) easy to mine and (if not clean) not nearly as bad as it used to be and its environmental impact isn't all that much worse than a lot of the "green" sources.
Nonsense. If that was true, then why don't we have a state-sanctioned monopoly on all foodstuffs so we don't run the risk of 'unreliable' supply? I mean, food is so crucial.
We do! In the form of billions in subsidies to farmers. Most agriculture isn't very profitable so the state pays them to keep going. While you can import food now, you don't want to risk running out of it in wartime.
When I started my business I didn't know the rules either. So I went to some seminars arranged by Skatteverket (the tax department in Sweden) which explained a lot of things about taxes. I also went to their website www.skatteverket.se and phoned their toll-free help line and asked lots of stupid questions which they were more than happy to answer. I'm still making mistakes of course because the tax forms are damn hard to understand.
But the "I'm to stupid to know the rules" defense really doesn't hold, considering the wealth of information that is available out there. If you are smart enough to know how to get men to pay you for getting naked on a web cam, then you are also smart enough to know that, duh, you have to pay tax for it.
No one gives a shit about network transparency. It is a totally meaningless buzzword engineers like to tout but doesn't mean anything in the real world. X is mostly network transparent, X clients aren't. You have to be very careful to avoid unnecessary round-trips which introduces latency and makes your application dog slow. The Windows shell is decidedly not network transparent, but RemoteDesktop and VNC still works with it.
To understand why people are complaining about X, try resizing a window quickly. Do the same operation on windows. It doesn't matter what computer you are using, on X you get flicker. Try opening a bunch of apps on one workspace, then move away and to that workspace. Notice how each window is redrawn one by one, first the frame and then the window contents. That is also an effect of X's client-server architecture. If you use some other OS than Linux so you have something to compare with, it is easy to understand why people complain on X.
The reason people gave for sticking with OS X was that it saved them time and effort managing configurations that were not necessary to their tasks. One manager proposed a standardized Linux desktop for his group and the engineers raised hell until the idea was dropped. His proposal was not helped by the fact that he couldn't get more than two Linux fans to agree on a vision as to what that standard should look like. The cost of Apple machines over IBM was negligible and the new employee configuration time as measured by IT was about 20 hours less. They also had a lower hardware failure rate.
What weird company did this occur on? It makes no sense. First you say that OS X saved people effort in managing configurations, then you say that the IT department configured users computers. I also find it very hard to believe that OS X saved IT 20 hours in configuration time. That's 2 and a half full working day and not even Windows takes that long to configure. So how the hell could OS X SAVE them 20 hours compared to Linux?
At a previous job all engineers used SLED10, with machines remotely ghost-installed by the IT department. The whole process from start to ready-configured machine took less than an hour.
I've been running Ubuntu longer than that and Kubuntu before that.
It can't have been that long, Kubuntu was released in 2005. Kubuntu is a derivate of Ubuntu, not the other way around.
It's rather newish (2006) but IMO PowerShell generally blows bash and all other Unix shells out of the water. Arguably, PowerShell is much better for Windows, as more APIs in Windows are object-oriented and thus fit better with PowerShell.
Take a look at my sig...
Usually if people want to do things along the lines of your sig they'll use perl or python, and yes, that can and does mean as one-liners on the command line with "perl -e" or "python -c".
The code in the sig downloads and displays all stories in the/. rss feed while filtering out those posted by kdawson. That just can't (practically) be done with a oneliner in perl, python or ruby. I've been using Linux for eight years, but the GP is right, that blows all other shells out of the water.
Absolute paths don't seem to be working on my Ubuntu install? I have to change dirs one at a time.
I just verified this doesn't work:
cd/etc/X11
If you know why, let me know. It's very annoying.
Oh - I wouldn't type in "cd Windows" - I'd type in cd %windir% - and yes, it'd go there instantly.
Check if you have the CDPATH environment variable set. "echo $CDPATH" if so, that can explain why you have problems with absolute paths. Incidentally, the CDPATH feature is what would allow you to type "cd x11" from any directory and have bash figure out the correct location by itself. Unfortunately, the feature is quirky and breaks scripts (such as autotools) in subtle ways so it is best not to use it.
Someone made a survey of Holocaust survivors and found a disproportional large percentage of religious people among them. Realistically, the odds of surviving a concentration camp incarceration must have been very low. But those with a belief fared better overall.
The monotheistic view is that life is sacred and that your life is a gift from God. It is your task to preserve it as well as possible, e.g. throwing yourself down a cliff and relying on a miracle from God to save you is sin. In contrast to the atheist view in which you are merely an organism that dies and rots and that the end of it. From that perspective it makes perfect sense to try and prolong your life as much as possible. There is a God so there is a chance of a miracle. There is also the question about what is the right thing to do. Your actions affect your afterlife. Does God want me to die now or does he want me to try and live longer? Second guessing God is hard, but I think the latter option is the safer bet. For an atheist, none of that is relevant. There are fewer variables involved so it becomes less difficult to choose the most convenient/easiest option.
Maybe your degree wasn't advanced. Mine was. If kids with MBAs wants to become programmers, then good for them. There's plenty of work to go around for everyone where I am.
Actually, engineers are among the least affected by the downturns in the economy. Just RTFS, 1.6% unemployment rate in 2008. While the number may not be as good now they are still several percentage units below the average. Engineering is still one of the safest careers you can have. The more technology you have the more engineers you need and it's a given that there will be more technology in the future.
If you only know how to manage Active Directory domains on Windows servers, then yes, you may someday be obsolete or outsourced. On the other hand, if you are able to learn new things, put together a script or two and think analytically then I can guarantee that your skill will always be in very high demand.
Oh come on. Either most web developers are just unusually incompetent or just lazy bums. It isn't that hard to abstract out platform differences and to build your site using those abstractions. Developers have been doing exactly that for decades. They have been working around OS incompatibilities, C standard library incompatibilities, JVM incompatibilities, shell incompatibilities, hardware incompatibilities and a whole host of other stupid and annoying things that wouldn't exist in an ideal world. All that code you have to write and fix even though YOUR code is correct because someone else screwed up.
But somehow, for web developers it is to hard to develop for multiple browsers.
That's silly. When you change the data model you must change the views too. Then you could as well have changed how the application uses the database instead and avoid a whole layer of indirection. Plus, views are read-only so the client application still needs direct access to the tables to update data. Views are useful and very under appreciated, but not in the way you suggest.
Isn't that exactly what they do when you fail to pay the bills? Maybe the situation is different in the US, but in most countries service providers can cut you off without a court order when you break the contract.
Slashdot Mirror
Civil disobedience may well be the way to go about it, but you have to stand for something good as well. Gandhi was disobedient, but stood for a lawful society, just not one ruled by British. TPB stands for... I don't know. The right to do whatever they want?
I don't think it is fair to Gandhi to compare him to TPB.. But they are part of the movement, which includes thousands of artists, musicians, software developers, politicians and debaters. Of course if you only look at TPB, then that is all you will see. But behind it there is a huge debate on better ways to distribute content and compensate the producers of it.
Ever tried voting? Forming a political party? To my knowledge, the Pirate Party of Sweden is the first of its kind, so this can't have been tried. And if you don't want to vote for PP (I don't) - ever tried talking to people, convincing them about the rightness of your cause? Done some good old-fashioned debating? I mean you, yourself?
Um.. yes, yes and yes. I do vote, have emailed parliament members, have participated in some of the dozen rallies in support of piracy, have released free software so I can say that a practice what I preach and have debated copyright with lots of people. A huge number of people have. Now you tell me, what options other than violating the law is left? Especially when these politicians create laws that are in direct contradiction of the will of the majority such as IPRED and FRA?
The more I read about the PB guys, the more they appear to be a bunch of arrogant bastards who want a blank check to do whatever they want. There is certainly enough wrong with copyright law in Sweden as it stands now, but this Internet mob mentality is not the way to go about it.
Then smart ass, what is the way to go about it? You see, every other idea you may have, have already been tried. When the politicians ignore the will of the people, civil disobedience is a perfectly valid method.
You want to cyber bully some one, go for it. But if that person commits suicide due to your actions, we'll hold you accountable for it.
No you wont. The bill is obviously a direct response to that case, in which a womans cyber harassing was a clear trigger to a girls suicide. I don't see any philosophical reasons why one would not want to curb behavior that is just plain old bullying. The bill is probably misguided as laws seldom improve things, but the problem does exist.
If Sun's marketing were so bad, then Java wouldn't be the worlds most used programming language today. I think they have done a bang up job with that. Remember all those job ads from 97-99 sometime requiring 5+ years of Java experience? That's successful marketing.
Java wasn't and isn't something revolutionary but they managed to convince every PHB in the world to believe that. From a technical perspective, there is nothing special about the language. In almost all situations where it is used there are better languages and technologies to use. But they aren't and Java is deployed virtually everywhere and on a few hundred million handsets to boot.
IMHO, Sun's doom was that they were completely unable to monetize Java. For a company it doesn't matter how successful your products are if you are unable to make money on them and they failed to do that.
How come Africans with pipes fat enough to watch streaming video are to poor to buy whatever crap that is advertised? Bandwith can't be that cheap in the 3rd world. Will adblock users be next? After all, we're just freeloading on the content and don't even see the ads.
Well, praise the Lord! I think we have found our Sion. Where the government doesn't intervene with the free markets. Where your property is yours and yours alone. Where no government confiscates your hard earned currency only to hand it out to those who think they are entitled to it without having to work for it, which is the greatest injustice of them all. This blessed place on earth, Somalia be it's name, also known as "Randland," will be our Eden. Emigrate today, only 144000 can reach salvation.
I had the same issue. Compiz + 8.04 + nVidia proprietary drivers + not antialiased fonts and the fonts would look terrible. Especially italicized glyphs. But switching to Metacity solved those problems (and some others too, related to Compiz or nVidia driver instability).
Um.. That article explicitly refutes that rumor. Although they used weasel words to deny the suspicions in such a way that the suspicion seems more plausible to a casual reader. E.g. AT&T has not identified any suspects and does not believe Bruce Perens sabotaged their fiber like others have suggested. Although he did post a slashdot article about it two weeks after the incident...
Blaming those damn commie unions sure is popular.
See Hotcaptcha which did exactly that. The site where it was hosted is gone though.
Well, of course almost all of it is subsidized. Stockholm has about 800000 households so even if 25% of those sign up, at 11$/month that's only a measly 2,2 million revenue/month. Obviously, there's not enough profit there to recoup the investments needed for building all that fiber that is probably counted in billions.
Instead, what is happening is that tax payers pay for the government to lay the fiber. Then the government leases the bandwith to ISP:s at a much lower rate than it cost to build who can then take out a low price and still maintain a high profit margin. In effect, my tax money is subsidizing fast internet which I approve of and subsidizing profits to companies who doesn't deserve it which I do not approve of.
I guess it's still better than the American model because I have fast and "cheap" internet access. But I'm still paying for it twice. There's no "road service providers" so why does the government feel that private Internet service providers are needed?
There's no need for ethics, it's all about efficiency. Let's say people enjoy movies and each movie gains you 1 point of happiness. Let's also say that you can download any movie you want, for free and that each person is able to do that 5 times per week. That gives a total happiness value of 5 for each person each week. In contrast if you have to pay for each movie you watch then on average each person can only afford to watch 1 movie per week, totalling 1 happyness point. Therefore society as a whole is better of with free unlimited availability of movies.
Then we have the problem of how to compensate you. There are a number of ways to do that. For example, it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a broadband tax if (and only if) some of that money went to content providers such as yourself. Neither would it be unreasonable to have an increased general income tax if the money was spent on free media.
The system would be orders of magnitudes more efficient than what we have today and would benefit everyone involved. No overhead for you like payment providers, credit card processing, advertising and less book keeping. I could quit my day job and focus on writing the software I really like. Artists and writers wouldn't need annoying labels and publishers etc. And unlimited media for everyone. Win win.
We've got tons of coal that's (relatively) easy to mine and (if not clean) not nearly as bad as it used to be and its environmental impact isn't all that much worse than a lot of the "green" sources.
Bullshit.
Nonsense. If that was true, then why don't we have a state-sanctioned monopoly on all foodstuffs so we don't run the risk of 'unreliable' supply? I mean, food is so crucial.
We do! In the form of billions in subsidies to farmers. Most agriculture isn't very profitable so the state pays them to keep going. While you can import food now, you don't want to risk running out of it in wartime.
When I started my business I didn't know the rules either. So I went to some seminars arranged by Skatteverket (the tax department in Sweden) which explained a lot of things about taxes. I also went to their website www.skatteverket.se and phoned their toll-free help line and asked lots of stupid questions which they were more than happy to answer. I'm still making mistakes of course because the tax forms are damn hard to understand.
But the "I'm to stupid to know the rules" defense really doesn't hold, considering the wealth of information that is available out there. If you are smart enough to know how to get men to pay you for getting naked on a web cam, then you are also smart enough to know that, duh, you have to pay tax for it.
How so? It just means he's running windows.
No one gives a shit about network transparency. It is a totally meaningless buzzword engineers like to tout but doesn't mean anything in the real world. X is mostly network transparent, X clients aren't. You have to be very careful to avoid unnecessary round-trips which introduces latency and makes your application dog slow. The Windows shell is decidedly not network transparent, but RemoteDesktop and VNC still works with it.
To understand why people are complaining about X, try resizing a window quickly. Do the same operation on windows. It doesn't matter what computer you are using, on X you get flicker. Try opening a bunch of apps on one workspace, then move away and to that workspace. Notice how each window is redrawn one by one, first the frame and then the window contents. That is also an effect of X's client-server architecture. If you use some other OS than Linux so you have something to compare with, it is easy to understand why people complain on X.
The reason people gave for sticking with OS X was that it saved them time and effort managing configurations that were not necessary to their tasks. One manager proposed a standardized Linux desktop for his group and the engineers raised hell until the idea was dropped. His proposal was not helped by the fact that he couldn't get more than two Linux fans to agree on a vision as to what that standard should look like. The cost of Apple machines over IBM was negligible and the new employee configuration time as measured by IT was about 20 hours less. They also had a lower hardware failure rate.
What weird company did this occur on? It makes no sense. First you say that OS X saved people effort in managing configurations, then you say that the IT department configured users computers. I also find it very hard to believe that OS X saved IT 20 hours in configuration time. That's 2 and a half full working day and not even Windows takes that long to configure. So how the hell could OS X SAVE them 20 hours compared to Linux?
At a previous job all engineers used SLED10, with machines remotely ghost-installed by the IT department. The whole process from start to ready-configured machine took less than an hour.
I've been running Ubuntu longer than that and Kubuntu before that.
It can't have been that long, Kubuntu was released in 2005. Kubuntu is a derivate of Ubuntu, not the other way around.
It's rather newish (2006) but IMO PowerShell generally blows bash and all other Unix shells out of the water. Arguably, PowerShell is much better for Windows, as more APIs in Windows are object-oriented and thus fit better with PowerShell. Take a look at my sig...
Usually if people want to do things along the lines of your sig they'll use perl or python, and yes, that can and does mean as one-liners on the command line with "perl -e" or "python -c".
The code in the sig downloads and displays all stories in the /. rss feed while filtering out those posted by kdawson. That just can't (practically) be done with a oneliner in perl, python or ruby. I've been using Linux for eight years, but the GP is right, that blows all other shells out of the water.
Absolute paths don't seem to be working on my Ubuntu install? I have to change dirs one at a time. I just verified this doesn't work: cd /etc/X11
If you know why, let me know. It's very annoying.
Oh - I wouldn't type in "cd Windows" - I'd type in cd %windir% - and yes, it'd go there instantly.
Check if you have the CDPATH environment variable set. "echo $CDPATH" if so, that can explain why you have problems with absolute paths. Incidentally, the CDPATH feature is what would allow you to type "cd x11" from any directory and have bash figure out the correct location by itself. Unfortunately, the feature is quirky and breaks scripts (such as autotools) in subtle ways so it is best not to use it.
Someone made a survey of Holocaust survivors and found a disproportional large percentage of religious people among them. Realistically, the odds of surviving a concentration camp incarceration must have been very low. But those with a belief fared better overall.
The monotheistic view is that life is sacred and that your life is a gift from God. It is your task to preserve it as well as possible, e.g. throwing yourself down a cliff and relying on a miracle from God to save you is sin. In contrast to the atheist view in which you are merely an organism that dies and rots and that the end of it. From that perspective it makes perfect sense to try and prolong your life as much as possible. There is a God so there is a chance of a miracle. There is also the question about what is the right thing to do. Your actions affect your afterlife. Does God want me to die now or does he want me to try and live longer? Second guessing God is hard, but I think the latter option is the safer bet. For an atheist, none of that is relevant. There are fewer variables involved so it becomes less difficult to choose the most convenient/easiest option.
Maybe your degree wasn't advanced. Mine was. If kids with MBAs wants to become programmers, then good for them. There's plenty of work to go around for everyone where I am.
Actually, engineers are among the least affected by the downturns in the economy. Just RTFS, 1.6% unemployment rate in 2008. While the number may not be as good now they are still several percentage units below the average. Engineering is still one of the safest careers you can have. The more technology you have the more engineers you need and it's a given that there will be more technology in the future.
If you only know how to manage Active Directory domains on Windows servers, then yes, you may someday be obsolete or outsourced. On the other hand, if you are able to learn new things, put together a script or two and think analytically then I can guarantee that your skill will always be in very high demand.
Oh come on. Either most web developers are just unusually incompetent or just lazy bums. It isn't that hard to abstract out platform differences and to build your site using those abstractions. Developers have been doing exactly that for decades. They have been working around OS incompatibilities, C standard library incompatibilities, JVM incompatibilities, shell incompatibilities, hardware incompatibilities and a whole host of other stupid and annoying things that wouldn't exist in an ideal world. All that code you have to write and fix even though YOUR code is correct because someone else screwed up.
But somehow, for web developers it is to hard to develop for multiple browsers.
That's silly. When you change the data model you must change the views too. Then you could as well have changed how the application uses the database instead and avoid a whole layer of indirection. Plus, views are read-only so the client application still needs direct access to the tables to update data. Views are useful and very under appreciated, but not in the way you suggest.
Isn't that exactly what they do when you fail to pay the bills? Maybe the situation is different in the US, but in most countries service providers can cut you off without a court order when you break the contract.