If civilization collapsed and needed to be rebuilt with only stored knowledge and what can be found outside, don't you think we'd start by finding flint and making knives & axes?
No, actually, I think we'd start by getting ready-made axes from looted Walmart stores, and figuring out how to make new handles for them once the handles broke.
But it's that last 10% or 5% of things that you need to jump through a thousand different hoops to get going that drive people away.
I think I'd say Linux either just works, or it just doesn't. There's very little ground here. I remember pissing around for days trying to get some stupid wireless driver working, for instance. I decided to solve problems by spending money for more compatible hardware a long time ago, but even that is a crap shoot. I bought a printer once with Tux right on the box, but it was some of the worst driver hell I ever experienced, because it worked with Linux sure enough, if you had some three-year-old version of Red Hat. For other stuff, it's frequently the case that manufacturers change chipsets without changing model numbers or packaging, so you think you're buying something on the known good list, and you get something that might work a year from now, if the developers get the driver fixed. Then there's stuff that worked, and then it stops working, and then a year later it starts working again for no rhyme or reason.
I think hardware is one of the biggest single problems for Linux on the desktop, and there's nothing the community can really do to solve these problems. Manufacturers either play ball, or they don't, and it's such a fragmented target market a lot of them just don't want to be bothered.
I've been doing desktop Linux for nine years, and I'm still doing desktop Linux, but when the time comes to buy a new computer, I'm probably not going to bother going to the effort to procure something that doesn't have an OS pre-loaded, and I'm probably just going to buy something off the shelf from some big box store with Windows 7 on it, and leave Windows 7 on it. I predict not more than a couple years before I finally move on.
As big of a troll as that article is, I can't fundamentally disagree with its underlying point. No, we had a chance, we thought, but it does seem that chance has passed us by. The best thing to come out of Linux on the desktop is all the FOSS apps that were originally developed for Linux, and have now migrated across all platforms; software like the GIMP and Inkscape, for instance.
(Yes, yes, some pedant will point out that the GIMP wasn't originally developed on Linux, and Inkscape might not have been either. That's not really my point. The point is the best stuff to come out of graphical end-user-oriented FOSS stuff is that it runs on normal desktop operating systems too, not just the weirdo lunatic fringe stuff.)
Where are you from that it is not understood that "America" is the abbreviated form of The United States of America?
People in South America get especially pissed off about this. From their perspective, they're Americans (americanos) and so are we in the USA. We're all Americans, not just people in the USA. They call us estadounidense instead of americano. If you translate that back into literal English, it would be something like Unitedstatesian.
I tried pointing out to some of my friends that calling us Unitedstatesian is a bit strange when there are other United States in the world besides the USA, but they stuck to their estadounidense guns.
Personally, I submit that a lot of bad blood between our people could be alleviated if everyone understood "American" (pertaining to the USA) != "americano" (pertaining to anything in the continental western hemisphere, more or less) the same way "actually" (really; in fact) != "actualmente" (right now) and so on like that. That argument didn't get much traction either, and my friends south of the equator pretty much think I'm an asshole for calling myself an American.
Oh well. I'm an American. Doesn't the world expect me to be an asshole anyway?
I have seen an explosion of bumble bees and other interesting native bee species...
Me too. I'm not sure if their numbers really have grown, or if they're simply more obvious now. Either way, I have a very plentiful and diverse population of bees. Most of them I can't even identify off hand. I love the little ones that sleep in my sunflowers most of all.
The greatest danger to humans is that we overbreed like crazy...
We breed just fine, it's just we've become largely (although not entirely) unaffected by predation, disease, and famine, so we're a lot harder to kill off than we used to be.
Even a generation ago, just about every family had some story about the baby they lost to some unavoidable tragedy. Those stories are growing increasingly rare.
I figure the pendulum will swing the other way soon enough though. Some super bug pandemic, some extinction event, or the species just collapsing under the weight of its impact on the ecosystem. In the meantime, have a margarita and get laid and enjoy what is probably the least dangerous and most fun time to be a human in our long history.
take an existing Qt application, compile and test it first
An existing Qt application to do what, exactly? Just because most of the core code compiles doesn't mean it's a cakewalk. Any app of any consequence that has its origins in the desktop world does not just drop in to compile for mobile. There are serious problems with missing build dependencies (ie. anything outside Qt itself is a crapshoot), and even more serious problems with having to perform extremely major surgery on the GUI to make it work with the totally non-standard dialog and menu implementation found on Maemo (and presumably everywhere else, and presumably to vary by device too).
You don't have to start completely from scratch, but it represents an enormous amount of work. I have every expectation that the Symbian-specific diddling that would have to be done vs. the Maemo/MeeGo diddling really means you have to have two compile targets in your code too, with two very distinct ways of managing this that and the other. I haven't developed for Qt on Symbian, so that is speculative, but I've done enough Qt on Maemo to have a very strong sense that even the move to MeeGo is going to require a lot of revamping, and I expect every new device out there is going to require device-specific diddling in many ways.
Qt is great, but I don't think Qt is a panacea. Especially not since you can't deploy Qt on Android or iOS phones, which is severely crippling.
All in all, I think Qt is the fantastic idea that's going to fail, along with Nokia. They seem completely doomed to me, and should probably just start making Android devices.
I think Alzheimer's sufferers should consider euthanizing while they still have the capacity to make a rational decision. I would, under those circumstances...
That's my plan too. I'm not at all suicidal, but I've been through this with my grandparents, and I very much hope I have enough presence of mind left to know when to eat the bullet or whatever to avoid ending up like that. It's just nasty for everyone, including the disease sufferer. They may not be fully aware of what's going on, but it doesn't stop them from being pissed off all the time, and seriously hateful and nasty to live with.
One thing all the whiners overlook is that while Canonical and the Ubuntu community have done diddly squat to contribute anything back to my project, my project actually gets developed primarily on Ubuntu boxes. We have a few people running other odd distros, but all our core people are on Ubuntu.
We have a mild preference for our users to be running Ubuntu, because that makes it much easier to repeat bugs. We get a lot of weird, unrepeatable reports from Slack and Gentoo users, for example, and what do you want me to do about it? I don't have time to dick around with every distro in the world. I need a distro I can install and have my development environment up and running in short order, and Ubuntu is the best I've found so far.
I'm a Debian guy originally, and I love Debian, but it's just too hard to develop on, because the stable version is always out of date. It's almost impossible to stay with Ubuntu LTS too, but their interim releases seem to be a lot less trouble than trying to run an un-released Debian.
Most people who learn a new language as a teen or adult find it easiest to count or do maths in the first language learnt.
I'm an example of that assertion. I'd also point out that numbers written out with digits are always English unless I'm really thinking about it. Reading a book or something in my head, I can read Spanish directly, but the numbers come out in English. Something like Cristobal Colón viajó en fourteen ninety-two. It definitely takes a little extra conscious nudge to translate 1492 into mil cuatrocientos noventa y dos if I'm reading the passage aloud, for example.
I had never thought about whether this was a common phenomenon or not, and it's kind of interesting to examine this fact about myself.
Do people drink more Coca Cola (or eat more Twinkies) than they did 10 years ago?
When I was a kid in the '70s, soft drinks came in those six-packs of 16-oz. bottles that you could turn back in to collect your deposit. We'd get a couple six-packs every other week or so, and drinking one really was a treat.
The 16-oz. bottles became plastic, and they evolved into 20-oz. bottles. Two-liter bottles became common and cheap. By the time I was in high school, I was probably drinking a good 2 L of soda a day, but I managed to stay fairly thin until after college. Now I'm fat, and I'm definitely drinking vastly more soda than I did 30 years ago. It's delicious, and cheap. Hell, if you want to grab a portable drink to take with you at the gas station, it's a lot cheaper to buy soda than plain water.
I'd say this phenomenon has almost certainly contributed to the obesity problem. These drinks are a staple instead of a treat, and we're drinking a lot more of them than we used to.
Not really. Kill and restart plasma-desktop once a week or so, and maybe log all the way out and back in every couple of months. I agree the new KDE is not stable enough to run indefinitely, but it doesn't take the entire system down when it screws up, and only a few components are notoriously unstable. I've been running the same KDE login since early May. FWIW.
...had visited Brazil and was thinking of visiting the US. He wanted to know where various people he knew lived so he could decide if he was going to try and visit.
Yeah, that's always funny. I had a British friend visiting the US a bit ago who figured he could just jot down and see me while he was in the country. Well, sure, if you don't mind driving six hours. Or flying for 10 hours, I think it turned out. It was a lot slower to fly, since you had to get from here to there by way of a hub a thousand miles away, and change flights six times.
Trains? The last passenger train stopped in this town back in the '70s. Maybe you'd like to take the 12-hour bus ride instead?
This is part of the reason why we all have to have cars. Unless you live in one of a handful of huge metropolitan areas, you just can't get around in this country unless you drive.
Most people get paid for the work they do, not the work that they did. If a construction worker wants some more money, he has to build another house.
OK, so what about authors? Am I supposed to write books live on stage? Or just do away with books entirely, and we should say whatever we have to say in live lectures. That's it.
The other side of this whole coin that you're not considering is that construction workers get paid for their time, and what they manage to accomplish in that time is incidental to the payment model. If they sit around half the day waiting on the concrete truck to show up (I've been there; I hate construction work), they're on the clock getting paid. It's entirely possible for a construction worker to get paid for a significant number of hours without accomplishing a thing in that time. Sure, the worker will get fired eventually, but the hours have been worked, and will have to be paid out regardless.
This is all in sharp contrast to writing a book. I spent two years and perhaps 2,000 hours up front before I saw the first penny for my work. It's not possible to get paid for something you did until you've completed it, and all the time invested in that product up to that point is pure speculation. It's nothing at all like working on a clock.
Making music and writing books are similar in many ways, and neither one has a payment model anything like construction work. Comparing the latter to live concert performances is the closest to being a reasonable comparison, but it fails to account for the difference between getting paid to sit around waiting on the asphalt truck and not getting paid for all the endless hours of rehearsal necessary to keep one's chops up. Construction workers get to practice on the job and get paid for it, but music is a demanding bitch. I'm a musician, but by no means anywhere good enough to be a pro, and that's because I am not remotely motivated enough to practice long enough and hard enough to get myself into that kind of shape.
I mean look, I hate the RIAA as much as any noble pirate anarchist, but it annoys me when people blow artistic pursuit off as something trivial to do just because it's perceived as being "fun" by people.
That's a pretty vanilla 3-clause BSD licence just like you'd see anywhere else, I don't see a problem with it.
Yup. The only thing different about it is that somebody actually bothered to change "The Regents of the University of California" to something else, and put in a date and so on.
That's actually fairly rare to see. Most people who license code under BSD do so very poorly, just copying the boilerplate and never filling in the blanks.
There's nothing wrong with using an apostrophe on a pronoun to indicate possession.
That depends on how you define "right" and "wrong" with respect to changing language over time.
Modern English has shed most of the case system that was present in Old English, but a few old pronouns have held onto these vestiges.
"Thee," "thou," and "thine" have all but disappeared, and are often used incorrectly by people trying to sound archaic (eg. T'Pau in Star Trek TOS using "thee" as a subject pronoun).
The reason "me" in "Bob and me went to the store" is incorrect is because "me" is an object case pronoun, rather than a subject case pronoun. These pronoun cases are also found in "he" (subject) "him" (object) and "his" (possessive) and so on like that.
"Its" is a little more tricky. "Him's" appears to be unattested balderdash, but "it's" seems to have entered the language in that form in the late 16th century, as an alternative to using "his" for the neuter possessive pronoun. In that regard, you are correct in asserting that there's nothing wrong with using "it's" to show possession. No, there isn't, so long as you are not writing modern English.
However, you assert that anyone educated from the '80s onward has the world's shittiest grasp of grammar. Where do we draw the line in time between the 1500s and the 1900s in determining what constitutes correct grammar today in the 21st century? Considering that the language is evolving (some would say devolving), almost anything can be justified, including your current assertion. We are heading for a time when "me," "their," "there," and "your" are all legitimate subject pronouns, because usage eventually defines what the norms are.
Be that as it may, I don't think we've reached that point yet, and we certainly hadn't reached that point in the 1980s, the age of the shittiest grasp of grammar. Let's take a trip back in time then to an English grammar text from 1896, which is a little on the modern side of the middle, yet still somewhere in between. In 1896 they explained:
LESSON 125.
CASE FORMS—PRONOUNS.
The pronouns I, thou, he, she, and who are the only words in the language that have each three different case forms.
+Direction+.—Study the Declensions, and correct these errors:—
--Higher Lessons in English, Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, 1896
Take note that "it's" is pulled out as an error to be corrected in this context.
This is good supporting evidence that while the "its vs. it's" convention has changed since its entry into the language, the rules as they are currently enforced by grammar Nazis have been in place in the current form for more than 100 years.
Not for long. As predicted, the Cablecos have already started nixing analog 'expanded basic'. As soon as the OTA digital switch was over (and thus their opportunity to claim that "you won't need to switch anything with cable!!!!!!"), they start dropping analog asap.
Yep. When I finally caved in to get a set top box, the line at Comcast wrapped halfway around the building with people showing up to get set top boxes. At $10 a month rental for the stupid piece of crap (and it's supposedly not possible to just buy one straight up), Comcast says "$$$Cha-ching$$$"
They're also hugely inconsistent about their pricing. Online says one thing, sales staff in India say something else, and then the local people at the office say yet a third entirely different thing. How big is the bill going to be? Nobody can figure it out for sure ahead of time, but you can bet it will be a lot bigger than what you thought you were signing up for.
In exchange for which, you don't have to struggle so much against the irritation of having developers lose their patience with you when you keep filing bug reports against some application that's five years out of date. Sure, the Debian Way(tm) is to let the maintainers deal with this, because the obsolete code is in their package, and it's their problem, but in practice the users come straight upstream.
"I have this horrible bug. You must fix it yesterday!" "What distro are you running?" "Debian Stable." "You mean the one that released with version 0.0.1 of our app that is now at 2.5.6? Why are you wasting my time!? I did fix it yesterday! I fixed it four years ago!" "Linux sucks! Developers are mean!"
I love Debian, but I hate it when our users run Debian. I'm glad most of the Debian fans gravitated toward Ubuntu, as I did myself. I have no idea what Debian Stable looks like these days, but Woody was 40,000 years old and completely obsolete when they finally replaced it.
I don't think "the one that's based on Debian" is so insulting to Debian itself. What Debian gets right is stability, stability, stability. The problem is end users don't have the patience to wait that long, and they start messing around with Testing or Sid, and then you wind up with all these completely bizarre interactions that just piss everyone off at every level of the process. "Your app doesn't work on my Debian that's a mixture from three different repositories and has some custom hacking. Why can't you repeat and fix my issue? You suck."
I think Ubuntu and all the other things that followed along the same lines as "the Debian normal people at home can actually use every day" have really been a good development for Linux.
I've been using Ubuntu myself for quite some time now (the third LTS?) and yet I still think of myself as a Debian fan. None of these spin-offs would be where they are today without Debian. They're not forks. They're not divided permanently from the mother distro.
He pretty much hits the nail on the head with every single problem I've had with Linux audio.
He doesn't even mention JACK in any of this. JACK is the fly in the ointment for most Linux users who try to do anything the slightest bit non-trivial with audio. I hate Linux audio, and go for months at a time with my speakers turned off. It's easier that way.
Not everything needs to be about 1984; especially since such photos were already being made. Now they can show more places, and be more current, something which people certainly want.
Now all they need is to capture more hot chicks sunbathing naked in their private back yards, and it's a win for everyone.
More or less.
Well, except for hot chicks who want privacy behind tall fences while roaming around naked outdoors anyway, but hey, who expects privacy behind a tall fence in this day and age.
Slashdot Mirror
If civilization collapsed and needed to be rebuilt with only stored knowledge and what can be found outside, don't you think we'd start by finding flint and making knives & axes?
No, actually, I think we'd start by getting ready-made axes from looted Walmart stores, and figuring out how to make new handles for them once the handles broke.
But it's that last 10% or 5% of things that you need to jump through a thousand different hoops to get going that drive people away.
I think I'd say Linux either just works, or it just doesn't. There's very little ground here. I remember pissing around for days trying to get some stupid wireless driver working, for instance. I decided to solve problems by spending money for more compatible hardware a long time ago, but even that is a crap shoot. I bought a printer once with Tux right on the box, but it was some of the worst driver hell I ever experienced, because it worked with Linux sure enough, if you had some three-year-old version of Red Hat. For other stuff, it's frequently the case that manufacturers change chipsets without changing model numbers or packaging, so you think you're buying something on the known good list, and you get something that might work a year from now, if the developers get the driver fixed. Then there's stuff that worked, and then it stops working, and then a year later it starts working again for no rhyme or reason.
I think hardware is one of the biggest single problems for Linux on the desktop, and there's nothing the community can really do to solve these problems. Manufacturers either play ball, or they don't, and it's such a fragmented target market a lot of them just don't want to be bothered.
I've been doing desktop Linux for nine years, and I'm still doing desktop Linux, but when the time comes to buy a new computer, I'm probably not going to bother going to the effort to procure something that doesn't have an OS pre-loaded, and I'm probably just going to buy something off the shelf from some big box store with Windows 7 on it, and leave Windows 7 on it. I predict not more than a couple years before I finally move on.
As big of a troll as that article is, I can't fundamentally disagree with its underlying point. No, we had a chance, we thought, but it does seem that chance has passed us by. The best thing to come out of Linux on the desktop is all the FOSS apps that were originally developed for Linux, and have now migrated across all platforms; software like the GIMP and Inkscape, for instance.
(Yes, yes, some pedant will point out that the GIMP wasn't originally developed on Linux, and Inkscape might not have been either. That's not really my point. The point is the best stuff to come out of graphical end-user-oriented FOSS stuff is that it runs on normal desktop operating systems too, not just the weirdo lunatic fringe stuff.)
Where are you from that it is not understood that "America" is the abbreviated form of The United States of America?
People in South America get especially pissed off about this. From their perspective, they're Americans (americanos) and so are we in the USA. We're all Americans, not just people in the USA. They call us estadounidense instead of americano. If you translate that back into literal English, it would be something like Unitedstatesian.
I tried pointing out to some of my friends that calling us Unitedstatesian is a bit strange when there are other United States in the world besides the USA, but they stuck to their estadounidense guns.
Personally, I submit that a lot of bad blood between our people could be alleviated if everyone understood "American" (pertaining to the USA) != "americano" (pertaining to anything in the continental western hemisphere, more or less) the same way "actually" (really; in fact) != "actualmente" (right now) and so on like that. That argument didn't get much traction either, and my friends south of the equator pretty much think I'm an asshole for calling myself an American.
Oh well. I'm an American. Doesn't the world expect me to be an asshole anyway?
I have seen an explosion of bumble bees and other interesting native bee species...
Me too. I'm not sure if their numbers really have grown, or if they're simply more obvious now. Either way, I have a very plentiful and diverse population of bees. Most of them I can't even identify off hand. I love the little ones that sleep in my sunflowers most of all.
The greatest danger to humans is that we overbreed like crazy...
We breed just fine, it's just we've become largely (although not entirely) unaffected by predation, disease, and famine, so we're a lot harder to kill off than we used to be.
Even a generation ago, just about every family had some story about the baby they lost to some unavoidable tragedy. Those stories are growing increasingly rare.
I figure the pendulum will swing the other way soon enough though. Some super bug pandemic, some extinction event, or the species just collapsing under the weight of its impact on the ecosystem. In the meantime, have a margarita and get laid and enjoy what is probably the least dangerous and most fun time to be a human in our long history.
a guy who wanted to farm kiwis as food
Soylent Green?
take an existing Qt application, compile and test it first
An existing Qt application to do what, exactly? Just because most of the core code compiles doesn't mean it's a cakewalk. Any app of any consequence that has its origins in the desktop world does not just drop in to compile for mobile. There are serious problems with missing build dependencies (ie. anything outside Qt itself is a crapshoot), and even more serious problems with having to perform extremely major surgery on the GUI to make it work with the totally non-standard dialog and menu implementation found on Maemo (and presumably everywhere else, and presumably to vary by device too).
You don't have to start completely from scratch, but it represents an enormous amount of work. I have every expectation that the Symbian-specific diddling that would have to be done vs. the Maemo/MeeGo diddling really means you have to have two compile targets in your code too, with two very distinct ways of managing this that and the other. I haven't developed for Qt on Symbian, so that is speculative, but I've done enough Qt on Maemo to have a very strong sense that even the move to MeeGo is going to require a lot of revamping, and I expect every new device out there is going to require device-specific diddling in many ways.
Qt is great, but I don't think Qt is a panacea. Especially not since you can't deploy Qt on Android or iOS phones, which is severely crippling.
All in all, I think Qt is the fantastic idea that's going to fail, along with Nokia. They seem completely doomed to me, and should probably just start making Android devices.
I think Alzheimer's sufferers should consider euthanizing while they still have the capacity to make a rational decision. I would, under those circumstances...
That's my plan too. I'm not at all suicidal, but I've been through this with my grandparents, and I very much hope I have enough presence of mind left to know when to eat the bullet or whatever to avoid ending up like that. It's just nasty for everyone, including the disease sufferer. They may not be fully aware of what's going on, but it doesn't stop them from being pissed off all the time, and seriously hateful and nasty to live with.
Everyone loses.
You hear that? SOUND! From the flash plugin! I haven't heard a peep out of this damn thing in a couple of years now. This is awesome!
I need to go write Adobe a nice note.
One thing all the whiners overlook is that while Canonical and the Ubuntu community have done diddly squat to contribute anything back to my project, my project actually gets developed primarily on Ubuntu boxes. We have a few people running other odd distros, but all our core people are on Ubuntu.
We have a mild preference for our users to be running Ubuntu, because that makes it much easier to repeat bugs. We get a lot of weird, unrepeatable reports from Slack and Gentoo users, for example, and what do you want me to do about it? I don't have time to dick around with every distro in the world. I need a distro I can install and have my development environment up and running in short order, and Ubuntu is the best I've found so far.
I'm a Debian guy originally, and I love Debian, but it's just too hard to develop on, because the stable version is always out of date. It's almost impossible to stay with Ubuntu LTS too, but their interim releases seem to be a lot less trouble than trying to run an un-released Debian.
Most people who learn a new language as a teen or adult find it easiest to count or do maths in the first language learnt.
I'm an example of that assertion. I'd also point out that numbers written out with digits are always English unless I'm really thinking about it. Reading a book or something in my head, I can read Spanish directly, but the numbers come out in English. Something like Cristobal Colón viajó en fourteen ninety-two. It definitely takes a little extra conscious nudge to translate 1492 into mil cuatrocientos noventa y dos if I'm reading the passage aloud, for example.
I had never thought about whether this was a common phenomenon or not, and it's kind of interesting to examine this fact about myself.
Do people drink more Coca Cola (or eat more Twinkies) than they did 10 years ago?
When I was a kid in the '70s, soft drinks came in those six-packs of 16-oz. bottles that you could turn back in to collect your deposit. We'd get a couple six-packs every other week or so, and drinking one really was a treat.
The 16-oz. bottles became plastic, and they evolved into 20-oz. bottles. Two-liter bottles became common and cheap. By the time I was in high school, I was probably drinking a good 2 L of soda a day, but I managed to stay fairly thin until after college. Now I'm fat, and I'm definitely drinking vastly more soda than I did 30 years ago. It's delicious, and cheap. Hell, if you want to grab a portable drink to take with you at the gas station, it's a lot cheaper to buy soda than plain water.
I'd say this phenomenon has almost certainly contributed to the obesity problem. These drinks are a staple instead of a treat, and we're drinking a lot more of them than we used to.
yes they do. in kde. seriously.
Not really. Kill and restart plasma-desktop once a week or so, and maybe log all the way out and back in every couple of months. I agree the new KDE is not stable enough to run indefinitely, but it doesn't take the entire system down when it screws up, and only a few components are notoriously unstable. I've been running the same KDE login since early May. FWIW.
...had visited Brazil and was thinking of visiting the US. He wanted to know where various people he knew lived so he could decide if he was going to try and visit.
Yeah, that's always funny. I had a British friend visiting the US a bit ago who figured he could just jot down and see me while he was in the country. Well, sure, if you don't mind driving six hours. Or flying for 10 hours, I think it turned out. It was a lot slower to fly, since you had to get from here to there by way of a hub a thousand miles away, and change flights six times.
Trains? The last passenger train stopped in this town back in the '70s. Maybe you'd like to take the 12-hour bus ride instead?
This is part of the reason why we all have to have cars. Unless you live in one of a handful of huge metropolitan areas, you just can't get around in this country unless you drive.
Most people get paid for the work they do, not the work that they did. If a construction worker wants some more money, he has to build another house.
OK, so what about authors? Am I supposed to write books live on stage? Or just do away with books entirely, and we should say whatever we have to say in live lectures. That's it.
The other side of this whole coin that you're not considering is that construction workers get paid for their time, and what they manage to accomplish in that time is incidental to the payment model. If they sit around half the day waiting on the concrete truck to show up (I've been there; I hate construction work), they're on the clock getting paid. It's entirely possible for a construction worker to get paid for a significant number of hours without accomplishing a thing in that time. Sure, the worker will get fired eventually, but the hours have been worked, and will have to be paid out regardless.
This is all in sharp contrast to writing a book. I spent two years and perhaps 2,000 hours up front before I saw the first penny for my work. It's not possible to get paid for something you did until you've completed it, and all the time invested in that product up to that point is pure speculation. It's nothing at all like working on a clock.
Making music and writing books are similar in many ways, and neither one has a payment model anything like construction work. Comparing the latter to live concert performances is the closest to being a reasonable comparison, but it fails to account for the difference between getting paid to sit around waiting on the asphalt truck and not getting paid for all the endless hours of rehearsal necessary to keep one's chops up. Construction workers get to practice on the job and get paid for it, but music is a demanding bitch. I'm a musician, but by no means anywhere good enough to be a pro, and that's because I am not remotely motivated enough to practice long enough and hard enough to get myself into that kind of shape.
I mean look, I hate the RIAA as much as any noble pirate anarchist, but it annoys me when people blow artistic pursuit off as something trivial to do just because it's perceived as being "fun" by people.
That's a pretty vanilla 3-clause BSD licence just like you'd see anywhere else, I don't see a problem with it.
Yup. The only thing different about it is that somebody actually bothered to change "The Regents of the University of California" to something else, and put in a date and so on.
That's actually fairly rare to see. Most people who license code under BSD do so very poorly, just copying the boilerplate and never filling in the blanks.
There's nothing wrong with using an apostrophe on a pronoun to indicate possession.
That depends on how you define "right" and "wrong" with respect to changing language over time.
Modern English has shed most of the case system that was present in Old English, but a few old pronouns have held onto these vestiges.
"Thee," "thou," and "thine" have all but disappeared, and are often used incorrectly by people trying to sound archaic (eg. T'Pau in Star Trek TOS using "thee" as a subject pronoun).
The reason "me" in "Bob and me went to the store" is incorrect is because "me" is an object case pronoun, rather than a subject case pronoun. These pronoun cases are also found in "he" (subject) "him" (object) and "his" (possessive) and so on like that.
"Its" is a little more tricky. "Him's" appears to be unattested balderdash, but "it's" seems to have entered the language in that form in the late 16th century, as an alternative to using "his" for the neuter possessive pronoun. In that regard, you are correct in asserting that there's nothing wrong with using "it's" to show possession. No, there isn't, so long as you are not writing modern English.
However, you assert that anyone educated from the '80s onward has the world's shittiest grasp of grammar. Where do we draw the line in time between the 1500s and the 1900s in determining what constitutes correct grammar today in the 21st century? Considering that the language is evolving (some would say devolving), almost anything can be justified, including your current assertion. We are heading for a time when "me," "their," "there," and "your" are all legitimate subject pronouns, because usage eventually defines what the norms are.
Be that as it may, I don't think we've reached that point yet, and we certainly hadn't reached that point in the 1980s, the age of the shittiest grasp of grammar. Let's take a trip back in time then to an English grammar text from 1896, which is a little on the modern side of the middle, yet still somewhere in between. In 1896 they explained:
LESSON 125.
CASE FORMS—PRONOUNS.
The pronouns I, thou, he, she, and who are the only words in the language that have each three different case forms.
+Direction+.—Study the Declensions, and correct these errors:—
Our's, your's, hi's, her's, it's, their's, yourn, hisn, hern, theirn.
--Higher Lessons in English, Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, 1896
Take note that "it's" is pulled out as an error to be corrected in this context.
This is good supporting evidence that while the "its vs. it's" convention has changed since its entry into the language, the rules as they are currently enforced by grammar Nazis have been in place in the current form for more than 100 years.
Not for long. As predicted, the Cablecos have already started nixing analog 'expanded basic'. As soon as the OTA digital switch was over (and thus their opportunity to claim that "you won't need to switch anything with cable!!!!!!"), they start dropping analog asap.
Yep. When I finally caved in to get a set top box, the line at Comcast wrapped halfway around the building with people showing up to get set top boxes. At $10 a month rental for the stupid piece of crap (and it's supposedly not possible to just buy one straight up), Comcast says "$$$Cha-ching$$$"
They're also hugely inconsistent about their pricing. Online says one thing, sales staff in India say something else, and then the local people at the office say yet a third entirely different thing. How big is the bill going to be? Nobody can figure it out for sure ahead of time, but you can bet it will be a lot bigger than what you thought you were signing up for.
Three cheers for Comcast!
And less uptime!
In exchange for which, you don't have to struggle so much against the irritation of having developers lose their patience with you when you keep filing bug reports against some application that's five years out of date. Sure, the Debian Way(tm) is to let the maintainers deal with this, because the obsolete code is in their package, and it's their problem, but in practice the users come straight upstream.
I love Debian, but I hate it when our users run Debian. I'm glad most of the Debian fans gravitated toward Ubuntu, as I did myself. I have no idea what Debian Stable looks like these days, but Woody was 40,000 years old and completely obsolete when they finally replaced it.
I don't think "the one that's based on Debian" is so insulting to Debian itself. What Debian gets right is stability, stability, stability. The problem is end users don't have the patience to wait that long, and they start messing around with Testing or Sid, and then you wind up with all these completely bizarre interactions that just piss everyone off at every level of the process. "Your app doesn't work on my Debian that's a mixture from three different repositories and has some custom hacking. Why can't you repeat and fix my issue? You suck."
I think Ubuntu and all the other things that followed along the same lines as "the Debian normal people at home can actually use every day" have really been a good development for Linux.
I've been using Ubuntu myself for quite some time now (the third LTS?) and yet I still think of myself as a Debian fan. None of these spin-offs would be where they are today without Debian. They're not forks. They're not divided permanently from the mother distro.
He pretty much hits the nail on the head with every single problem I've had with Linux audio.
He doesn't even mention JACK in any of this. JACK is the fly in the ointment for most Linux users who try to do anything the slightest bit non-trivial with audio. I hate Linux audio, and go for months at a time with my speakers turned off. It's easier that way.
Not everything needs to be about 1984; especially since such photos were already being made. Now they can show more places, and be more current, something which people certainly want.
Now all they need is to capture more hot chicks sunbathing naked in their private back yards, and it's a win for everyone.
More or less.
Well, except for hot chicks who want privacy behind tall fences while roaming around naked outdoors anyway, but hey, who expects privacy behind a tall fence in this day and age.
So what's the risk of gene transfer giving us "Roundup Ready" kudzu, poison ivy, etc. in the near future?
We already have it, more or less. Roundup isn't very effective at killing either plant.
Anyway, didn't the people at Monsanto read Jurassic Park? When you start dicking around with amino acid synthesis, nature finds a way.
You know what this means of course. Fields of GM rapeseed teeming with VELOCIRAPTORS!
Is there any reason why money made from drugs and money made from fraud should be treated differently by the state?
Yes, obviously. Drugs are bad, m'kay?
Yeesh.
Hey it's not his fault he was born while Pink Floyd's 'Money' was playing. Blame it on the nurse who had the radio blaring!
Uhhhh... Jobs was born in 1955, and "Money" was released in 1973.
May I introduce you to the Real Touch. Most definitely NSFW.
Meh. Only works with Windows.