ICANN is really a perfect example of where a bunch of wise-beard Unix hacker types could do a better job than the corporate whores currently doing it could.
Almost everything in the world currently being done by corporate whores could better be done by wise-beard Unix hacker types; the tiny number of things that couldn't, aren't worth being done at all.
... that Chrome's protocol-hiding will cause similar problems one of these days. I don't know how, I don't know when, I don't know where -- but I do know that someone's going to use it to cause harm.
Remember when Apple's stock plummeted because Jobs was sick?
That had nothing to do with fandom. Rightly or wrongly, Jobs is identified with Apple's success; the company's fortunes started declining shortly after he left, and it was only after he came back that it became possible to read a news story about Apple without seeing the word "beleaguered" immediately preceding the company name. Personally I think that at this point, the company would probably keep going fine without him, but the market is understandably jittery about the prospect.
Even Bill Gates never had that kind of recognition - his was solely limited to the tech and business communities.
Bullshit. There was a period in the late 90's and early 00's when Gates was almost universally lionized, pretty much the same period when "beleaguered Apple" was a stock phrase. The mass media has yet to give Jobs that kind of quasi-deification, which is probably a good thing.
Notice how Jobs almost always says 'we think this solution is the best' and 'we think this phone is the best ever'. The whole manipulation of words is amazing to watch.
Um... how is that manipulation, exactly? Most companies just say "this product is better than everything else" without the "we think" qualifier. In this respect, at least, Jobs is being unusually honest by CEO standards.
The development of "technology which can do a humans work... without causing any further harm to your soldiers" has been pretty much the entire point of military technology since we first chipped spearheads out of flint. Most of that technology, of course, has been designed to do the work of causing death rather than preventing it, but the fundamental idea is the same: make it as easy as possible to accomplish the mission and come home alive.
Anyone who uses Linux, BSD, OS X, or any other Unix or Unix-like OS* should care, since the SCO insanity showed that there are numerous bottom-feeders out there who will try to use "owenership of Unix" -- whether or not they actually own it -- as a weapon. It doesn't matter if there's any infringing IP to go after, either; they'll still cause loads of trouble. I have no idea what Attachmate's business practices are like, but Microsoft being able to claim any kind of Unix ownership would be a guaranteed disaster.
*Which, of course, means anyone who uses the internet, even if they don't know it.
I always thought that paying punitive damages to the plaintiff was just asking for the system to be abused. I'm not saying that's the case here, but in general surely we'd see a fraction of the number of frivolous claims if they weren't a potential ticket to lifelong financial security.
Particularly when the defendant has deep pockets and the plaintiff doesn't, punitive damages are very often the only way to see justice done. You have to make the punishment mean something, or else there's no reason not to just do it again -- if Seagate's bean-counters decide that they can make more money following this fake-job practice than they'll lose in court when they get caught, then it will remain their standard way of doing business. And an individual plaintiff is taking a significant risk by going up against a giant corporation, and should be compensated accordingly, or people who are similarly screwed over in the future will be much less likely to do something about it.
I am sure Seagate wasn't trying to personally jerk around this one guy.
No, it was worse. They didn't know him from Adam and they didn't care; there was no malice in it. Instead, they quite impersonally wrecked his career by hiring him for a job that didn't exist. Like a natural disaster, only with human intelligence behind it. You can't get much scummier than that.
the cameras we have today (even the point and shoots) are MILES above the top of the line film cameras from even a couple decades ago
Then that explains why my fiancee, who is a photographer, is holding on to her 1967 Pentax SLR for dear life?
There are a lot more widgets on modern cameras, to be sure, and they're very helpful to people who take shots kind of at random. And of course not having to worry about burning through rolls of film -- so you can, for instance, take ten shots of the same thing and hope one of them turns out well -- is great. But the quality of the optics is no better than it used to be.
Also, until very recently, the resolution on the types of CCDs that get put into cameras wasn't as good as that of film. They've just about caught up now, but quality control on dense CCDs isn't that great -- you're a lot more likely to get dead pixels than you are dead spots on high-quality film. It will probably be several years before this is really resolved.
It depends. If a "cyberwar" could do real damage to our infrastructure -- shutting down the power grid is the most commonly used example -- then it's definitely a real war, just as real as if enemy planes are dropping bombs on our power plants. The use of new technology which permits new tactics doesn't make it "not real war," else you could claim that there hasn't been a real war since the invention of the bow! But it's a pretty big "if," and the would be "cyberwarriors" are spending a lot of time pumping up the threat without a lot of real evidence.
Very true. The War on (Some) Drugs is also clearly a lost cause... which doesn't keep us from annually spending tens of billions of dollars on it and ruining millions of people's lives. This bill won't stop piracy, won't even slow it down to any appreciable degree; you know that, I know that, and anyone with more than half a brain who spends more than five minutes thinking about the issue knows that. It doesn't matter.
Now that he's become one of the media industry's bet friends in Washington, he gets a bunch of media donations, which could explain his continued advocacy on the subject. But how did a Senator from VT end up in that position in the first place?
Being a Senator is sufficient; where he's from is pretty much irrelevant. DC is absolutely packed with lobbyists whose job it is to find out which politicians can be bribed, and if you're vulnerable to corruption on any issue, they'll find you and get you in their pockets. They don't care where you're from; a vote from Vermont counts exactly the same as one from California. It may actually be easier to do this with Senators from small states than from large ones, since I'd expect it costs a lot less to run a senate campaign in Vermont than it does in California (or Florida, or New York, or Texas) and so the value to the Senator of a given campaign contribution is proportionally greater.
The majority of the population almost certainly have no idea that this bill exists, and therefore can't really care one way or the other if it passes. And I have to say it, but I strongly suspect that if they were aware of it, most people would probably think it was fine and dandy, at least on first hearing about it. Slashdotters are, to say the least, not a representative sample of the population on issues like this.
We can only hope that (a) it doesn't pass the House before the recess, and (b) in the interim, groups like the EFF can do a good enough job raising public awareness of what a terrible bill it really is that it faces significant opposition if and when it's re-introduced. But don't count on it.
Well, you can't get a court order for something unless the law provides for it. It's not like courts can issue orders for the hell of it -- the cops can't just go to a court requesting an order to throw you in prison, for example. Up until now, the DOJ has had no authority to block access to websites at all, AFAIK. This law would allow them to do so if a judge goes along with it.
I have no trouble believing that the translation is accurate, because it sounds exactly like the kind of thing you'd expect an English-speaking Microsoft exec to say. Bizspeak is a universal language: MBAs around the world spout the same meaningless crap no matter what language it sounds like they're speaking.
Your interpretation of "life cycle" is entirely reasonable, but it's not what MBA types mean when they use the phrase. Business schools teach all kinds of subtle warping of the language (any language: English, Russian, whatever.) The bizspeak meaning of "at the end of its life cycle" is "this is Old And Busted and we can't make any money off it -- check out our New Hotness!"
Kinetic-kill weapons would be very effective at taking out tanks, bunkers, and even ships, but they wouldn't be particularly effective at destroying things over a wide area unless either you had a lot of them, or what you were dropping was really big.
Well, as I've said before, "There's nothing dorkier than a bunch of nerds and geeks arguing over the proper definition of a dweeb." IOW, I think the argument over what distinguishes geeks from nerds, etc., is a fundamentally silly one -- they're all slang terms without strict definitions, and the main reason "news for nerds" has more of a ring than "news for geeks" is the alliteration in the former.
That being said, I've had plenty of "honest, non-pedant discussion of interesting technology and deeds" here on Slashdot, and I expect to continue doing so. Actually, that kind of discussion is the norm. It's just that sometimes, the discussion gets hijacked by the kind of anoraks who give the rest of us nimrods such a bad name. There's no reason that, when that happens, we shouldn't try to keep our fellow wonks in line.
Oh yeah, this good-hearted adult people that created a completely useless, obsolete piece of technology that helps getting money inside their pockets. People from the developed always think they can solve other people's problems without even getting to know the real problems. But of course, they can make a profit out of it. I stick with the nerds...
Um, I'm pretty sure it was nerds who built the thing. But they're nerds who actually want to do something, instead of just trying to score points off other people. You may sneer at the idea of making a profitable product that is also useful, but it's a hell of a lot better way to spend your time than sitting around making comments that you think make you look smart but serve only to show the world what a jackass you are.
GPP is right: nerd pedantry like OP's is a large part of what gives nerds a bad name in the first place, and it stands in the way of the nerds who make the modern world work being recoginized for their very real achievements.
Okay, seriously, why does pedantry like this get modded up? Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at the summary understands what "no external power supply" means in this context, and it's a perfectly good phrase for what they're describing. There was nothing insightful about OP's comment, just oh-look-how-smart-I-am snark.
If you think that religious fanaticism doesn't have anything to do with the (relative) decline in US scientific productivity, you haven't been paying attention.
Slashdot Mirror
ICANN is really a perfect example of where a bunch of wise-beard Unix hacker types could do a better job than the corporate whores currently doing it could.
Almost everything in the world currently being done by corporate whores could better be done by wise-beard Unix hacker types; the tiny number of things that couldn't, aren't worth being done at all.
... that Chrome's protocol-hiding will cause similar problems one of these days. I don't know how, I don't know when, I don't know where -- but I do know that someone's going to use it to cause harm.
Remember when Apple's stock plummeted because Jobs was sick?
That had nothing to do with fandom. Rightly or wrongly, Jobs is identified with Apple's success; the company's fortunes started declining shortly after he left, and it was only after he came back that it became possible to read a news story about Apple without seeing the word "beleaguered" immediately preceding the company name. Personally I think that at this point, the company would probably keep going fine without him, but the market is understandably jittery about the prospect.
Even Bill Gates never had that kind of recognition - his was solely limited to the tech and business communities.
Bullshit. There was a period in the late 90's and early 00's when Gates was almost universally lionized, pretty much the same period when "beleaguered Apple" was a stock phrase. The mass media has yet to give Jobs that kind of quasi-deification, which is probably a good thing.
Notice how Jobs almost always says 'we think this solution is the best' and 'we think this phone is the best ever'. The whole manipulation of words is amazing to watch.
Um ... how is that manipulation, exactly? Most companies just say "this product is better than everything else" without the "we think" qualifier. In this respect, at least, Jobs is being unusually honest by CEO standards.
Man, you must have received a serious bulk discount on all that straw.
The development of "technology which can do a humans work ... without causing any further harm to your soldiers" has been pretty much the entire point of military technology since we first chipped spearheads out of flint. Most of that technology, of course, has been designed to do the work of causing death rather than preventing it, but the fundamental idea is the same: make it as easy as possible to accomplish the mission and come home alive.
... should of course be Firefox.
Your arguments are logical, well-thought-out, and eminently fair.
Which is why they would be utterly irrelevant to Microsoft.
Because open source sucks.
He says, on Slashdot, on the web, on the internet ...
Anyone who uses Linux, BSD, OS X, or any other Unix or Unix-like OS* should care, since the SCO insanity showed that there are numerous bottom-feeders out there who will try to use "owenership of Unix" -- whether or not they actually own it -- as a weapon. It doesn't matter if there's any infringing IP to go after, either; they'll still cause loads of trouble. I have no idea what Attachmate's business practices are like, but Microsoft being able to claim any kind of Unix ownership would be a guaranteed disaster.
*Which, of course, means anyone who uses the internet, even if they don't know it.
I always thought that paying punitive damages to the plaintiff was just asking for the system to be abused. I'm not saying that's the case here, but in general surely we'd see a fraction of the number of frivolous claims if they weren't a potential ticket to lifelong financial security.
Particularly when the defendant has deep pockets and the plaintiff doesn't, punitive damages are very often the only way to see justice done. You have to make the punishment mean something, or else there's no reason not to just do it again -- if Seagate's bean-counters decide that they can make more money following this fake-job practice than they'll lose in court when they get caught, then it will remain their standard way of doing business. And an individual plaintiff is taking a significant risk by going up against a giant corporation, and should be compensated accordingly, or people who are similarly screwed over in the future will be much less likely to do something about it.
I am sure Seagate wasn't trying to personally jerk around this one guy.
No, it was worse. They didn't know him from Adam and they didn't care; there was no malice in it. Instead, they quite impersonally wrecked his career by hiring him for a job that didn't exist. Like a natural disaster, only with human intelligence behind it. You can't get much scummier than that.
the cameras we have today (even the point and shoots) are MILES above the top of the line film cameras from even a couple decades ago
Then that explains why my fiancee, who is a photographer, is holding on to her 1967 Pentax SLR for dear life?
There are a lot more widgets on modern cameras, to be sure, and they're very helpful to people who take shots kind of at random. And of course not having to worry about burning through rolls of film -- so you can, for instance, take ten shots of the same thing and hope one of them turns out well -- is great. But the quality of the optics is no better than it used to be.
Also, until very recently, the resolution on the types of CCDs that get put into cameras wasn't as good as that of film. They've just about caught up now, but quality control on dense CCDs isn't that great -- you're a lot more likely to get dead pixels than you are dead spots on high-quality film. It will probably be several years before this is really resolved.
It depends. If a "cyberwar" could do real damage to our infrastructure -- shutting down the power grid is the most commonly used example -- then it's definitely a real war, just as real as if enemy planes are dropping bombs on our power plants. The use of new technology which permits new tactics doesn't make it "not real war," else you could claim that there hasn't been a real war since the invention of the bow! But it's a pretty big "if," and the would be "cyberwarriors" are spending a lot of time pumping up the threat without a lot of real evidence.
Very true. The War on (Some) Drugs is also clearly a lost cause ... which doesn't keep us from annually spending tens of billions of dollars on it and ruining millions of people's lives. This bill won't stop piracy, won't even slow it down to any appreciable degree; you know that, I know that, and anyone with more than half a brain who spends more than five minutes thinking about the issue knows that. It doesn't matter.
Now that he's become one of the media industry's bet friends in Washington, he gets a bunch of media donations, which could explain his continued advocacy on the subject. But how did a Senator from VT end up in that position in the first place?
Being a Senator is sufficient; where he's from is pretty much irrelevant. DC is absolutely packed with lobbyists whose job it is to find out which politicians can be bribed, and if you're vulnerable to corruption on any issue, they'll find you and get you in their pockets. They don't care where you're from; a vote from Vermont counts exactly the same as one from California. It may actually be easier to do this with Senators from small states than from large ones, since I'd expect it costs a lot less to run a senate campaign in Vermont than it does in California (or Florida, or New York, or Texas) and so the value to the Senator of a given campaign contribution is proportionally greater.
The majority of the population almost certainly have no idea that this bill exists, and therefore can't really care one way or the other if it passes. And I have to say it, but I strongly suspect that if they were aware of it, most people would probably think it was fine and dandy, at least on first hearing about it. Slashdotters are, to say the least, not a representative sample of the population on issues like this.
We can only hope that (a) it doesn't pass the House before the recess, and (b) in the interim, groups like the EFF can do a good enough job raising public awareness of what a terrible bill it really is that it faces significant opposition if and when it's re-introduced. But don't count on it.
Well, you can't get a court order for something unless the law provides for it. It's not like courts can issue orders for the hell of it -- the cops can't just go to a court requesting an order to throw you in prison, for example. Up until now, the DOJ has had no authority to block access to websites at all, AFAIK. This law would allow them to do so if a judge goes along with it.
I have no trouble believing that the translation is accurate, because it sounds exactly like the kind of thing you'd expect an English-speaking Microsoft exec to say. Bizspeak is a universal language: MBAs around the world spout the same meaningless crap no matter what language it sounds like they're speaking.
Your interpretation of "life cycle" is entirely reasonable, but it's not what MBA types mean when they use the phrase. Business schools teach all kinds of subtle warping of the language (any language: English, Russian, whatever.) The bizspeak meaning of "at the end of its life cycle" is "this is Old And Busted and we can't make any money off it -- check out our New Hotness!"
Kinetic-kill weapons would be very effective at taking out tanks, bunkers, and even ships, but they wouldn't be particularly effective at destroying things over a wide area unless either you had a lot of them, or what you were dropping was really big.
Well, as I've said before, "There's nothing dorkier than a bunch of nerds and geeks arguing over the proper definition of a dweeb." IOW, I think the argument over what distinguishes geeks from nerds, etc., is a fundamentally silly one -- they're all slang terms without strict definitions, and the main reason "news for nerds" has more of a ring than "news for geeks" is the alliteration in the former.
That being said, I've had plenty of "honest, non-pedant discussion of interesting technology and deeds" here on Slashdot, and I expect to continue doing so. Actually, that kind of discussion is the norm. It's just that sometimes, the discussion gets hijacked by the kind of anoraks who give the rest of us nimrods such a bad name. There's no reason that, when that happens, we shouldn't try to keep our fellow wonks in line.
Oh yeah, this good-hearted adult people that created a completely useless, obsolete piece of technology that helps getting money inside their pockets. People from the developed always think they can solve other people's problems without even getting to know the real problems. But of course, they can make a profit out of it. I stick with the nerds...
Um, I'm pretty sure it was nerds who built the thing. But they're nerds who actually want to do something, instead of just trying to score points off other people. You may sneer at the idea of making a profitable product that is also useful, but it's a hell of a lot better way to spend your time than sitting around making comments that you think make you look smart but serve only to show the world what a jackass you are.
GPP is right: nerd pedantry like OP's is a large part of what gives nerds a bad name in the first place, and it stands in the way of the nerds who make the modern world work being recoginized for their very real achievements.
Okay, seriously, why does pedantry like this get modded up? Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at the summary understands what "no external power supply" means in this context, and it's a perfectly good phrase for what they're describing. There was nothing insightful about OP's comment, just oh-look-how-smart-I-am snark.
If you think that religious fanaticism doesn't have anything to do with the (relative) decline in US scientific productivity, you haven't been paying attention.