Then, as history teaches us, the next step is usually to kill the non-believer.
Yepp, that's history. (Albeit just 60 years ago in Germany). Let's try to not repeat it. Let's try to prevent religious groups from terrorizing non-believers. (And from terrorizing believers, for that matter.)
Also, if an organization wants to copyright their material or mark it as a trade secret, that's their business.
Business. Precisely. That's what they are treated like in Germany: a business.
(Emphasis in quotation mine.)
Believe what you want and shut up. I believe I'll have another beer.
Early on, an encoded date wasn't a serious option; you had to store the date you wanted as you wanted it--converting a binary digit to two decimal digits still had noticable costs.
While I buy your argument that it could be more work for whoever punches the cards, the increase in workload for the computer is neglectible: it's just some shifts and a binary and -- operations which where cheap in CPU time ever since, because they're easy to build in hardware.
And it wouldn't take a huge amount in resources to just prepend "19" to all two-digit dates on punch cards. This way, the full year would be stored efficiently and your card puncher could avoid building calluses:-)
Furthermore the two-digit year bug wasn't invented to save memory in the first place - it is much older. Probably it stemmed from laziness when scribbling dates on paper. The German ID cards *still* have two-digit years printed on them, and I'm pretty sure that's not because they want to save a few drops of ink.
Two-year digits are just laziness, and nothing else. Let's try not to glorify it as the idea of some kind of genius, okay?
Not to knock the work being done in China, but they are not the first Maglev.
Birmingham (UK) isn't the first maglev either. To quote from the Transrapid web site:
1979
Operation of the world's first maglev train with longstator propulsion (Transrapid 05) to be licensed for passenger transportation occurs at the International Transportation Exhibition (IVA 79) in Hamburg.
Check out the Transrapid web site (English and German) at transrapid.de
I know some people will cry about Chernobyl, but that incident really just goes to show you the drawbacks of communism
So Three Miles Island shows you the drawbacks of capitalism? Yeah, right!
An intelligent reactor design (such as Candu) operated by well-trained individuals would never suffer such a catastrophe.
It's not about these catastrophies but about normal, regular use. Where do you put the waste, for the next ump-ty thousand years? (Which will probably see devastating wars, an ice age, rising oceans and other neat things.)
Also please remember that our supplies of Uranium 235 is rather limited.
electric cars are a stupid idea if the electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels
Primitive generalization. It might as well be much easier to filter one big power plant rather than filter some million cars. Upgrade the power plant's filter system, and you get the "upgrade" of the millions of electric cars for free.
Our only way out of this mess is to consume less energy. Period.
It is accurate on macroscopic level, too. It's just an effect far too small to notice.
For instance, because of the energy they store, the batteries of your notebook are in fact heavier when full -- by about 10^-16 kg. So you won't really feel the difference:-)
In high energy physics (admittedly subatomic), the effect is enormous. By cranking up the energy (read: velocity) of e.g. an electron, we can produce particles like muons which are 200x heavier than electrons. E=mc^2 applied. (Where m is of course the relativistic mass...)
Perhaps because the US has approx. 260 millions residents, whereas Canada has less than 29 million (source: Encyclopedia.com: Canada)? You might be able to get away with that sort of system there. We're just a touch bigger.
Well it works like a charm for 81 million Germany, and should scale well for a factor of 3. This job is perfectly distributable. Just triple the number of counters -- and get your new president the very next day:-)
If I was a US resident I was more concerned with the inherent "winner-takes-all" scheme: (almost) one half of e.g. Florida voters are completely ignored.
Disclaimer: I code in C++ mostly and am generally positive towards OOP... as long as it's done pragmatically! (As opposed to those religious OOP nuts.)
Some of the major benefit of OOP, and specifically C++'s objects, are:
o It is a clean module packaging mechanism that encourages cleaner interfaces between modules
Which is definately a Good Thing if done properly. Point is, in my observation, for most people it seems to be MUCH easier to define proper procedural interfaces than to design proper OOP ones.
o It encourages opaque data interfaces (method access vs public access) which results in less
bugs
Only it the accessors do any check! In our current project (high energy physics) we have lots of objects which consist largely of floating point numbers, and you can't do much checks. So accessors make no sense here. If the data structures change, the client code has to be changed anyway because we can't take a performance hit. (This happened exactly once in more than a year, so what?)
o It makes use of self-initialization/cleanup (constructors/deconstructirs) that avoid a whole slew of programmer errors.
Granted, they are very useful indeed, but, as you say, not necessarily OOP.
o The self-containedness of objects does make code reuse simpler and less bug prone.
I don't buy that one. A well-designed C module is just as easy to maintain and reuse. Basically classes (without inheritance) are just structs with syntactic sugar (i.e. the first parameter, "this" in C++, is written in front of the function name).
So, if the Higgs is lighter than about 140GeV, it will be discovered by the Tevatron long before LHC turns on.
Not really. The detectors operating at the Tevatron, CDF and D0, will need roughly five years of operation to collect the luminosity necessary for Higgs discovery, and still could only find a Higgs below 120 GeV with 3 sigma confidence level. In five years, LHC is scheduled to start operations.
Combined CDF and D0 limits after roughly five years of operation (integrated luminosity 10 fb^-1) would allow for a 3 sigma evidence below 120 GeV or 5 sigma discovery below 100 GeV. The latter is already excluded by LEP.
So chances for a Higgs discovery at Tevatron are not too good, really. It's possible, though not very likely.
so, if you have a text file, you don't need to put.tif on the end of it, simply, you would have the type and creator of the file set to: 'TIFF' and '8BIM' which would mean that its a TIFF file, and it should be opened by photoshop if in a GUI you go and double-click it.
Why would this information belong to the file system?
IMHO generating a huge number of arbitrary file "types" in filesystem space (read: kernel space) when it can be painlessly done in user space is a Bad Thing(tm). I mean, these types had to registered in an/etc/services-style database anyway, which (again IMHO) is *way* more registry-like than a naming convention. And don't forget that it IS just a convention -- you can name your files whatever you like. Store an image without any extension, and xv will still get things right, for example.
this approach makes it much more difficult for any accidental SEPARATING of the file type info from the info that determines which app should open it
On my account, I alone determine what application should open TIFF files. Thus a system-wide mapping of type app on a multi user O/S is simply inacceptable. (It's a typical single-user line of thought, after all.) Even if you go with file system-integrated file types, you would still need per-user mappings.
Anyway, there's no real need for this meta-information, be it in the file name or in the inode. man file(1).
5. All languages are on equal footing. They all share the same GC
Please direct me to the chapter in Stroustrup where it says that C++ uses a GC.
Why would I want to develop speed-critial parts in C or C++ when the program gets compiled into bloody byte-code for a VM?
10. With Java, you have to learn Java. Plus, statistics show that 70% of all Java
developers target APIs that are native to their platform. Thus, the "write once, run
anywhere" promise never comes true except in the most simple of situations. With.NET,
you can write in *any* of over 15 already-announced languages.
You're mixing up language-independence and platform-independence here. While I agree that language-independence and fast and efficient language mixing is a great thing, I've yet to hear of any platform-independence for.NET. Where is that link to the Linux executable?
Besides, I seriously doubt that TogetherSoft's development tools qualify as "most simple"...
Given the fact that both English and German belong to the family of Germanic languages
Indo-Germanic, to be precise. Never mind that this kind of linguistic relationship is hardly sufficient to make a language easy to learn; do you consider Hindi an easy learn??
Just nitpicking...
calling Mandarin and Szechuan "Chinese".
Not to omit Cantonese. BTW, I didn't know there was such a language Szechuan?
It's the economic and political power of the US, nothing more.
History proofs you wrong. I guess it's a bit US-centric to believe the influence of English is due to the US, because it isn't -- it's inherited from the British Commonwealth. Until after WW I, the US wasn't that important, neither politically nor economically. Furthermore the US itself was but a part of the Commonwealth, and didn't like it: just remember the Boston tea party.
During my childhood, I have learned three foreign languages (Latin, English, and Classic Greek, in that order; German being my native language), and I've made (pretty lame, I must admit) attempts at French, Italian and Russian.
English was by far easiest to learn. Period.
It was even easier than Italian, after 6 years of Latin in school! The grammar is amazingly simple yet powerful. You can actually communicate with a comparatively small vocabulary. I figure this makes it the perfect choice for a second language to learn.
Quite frankly, I find learning a language as complicated as e.g. Russian (or German, I guess:-) really painful.
Re:One good point -- too much C in open software
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
we've expended tremendous effort doing things like [...] fixing memory bugs
What -- in C? Now that's new to me. The C projects I've been involved with rarely had any problems with memory management. Now with C++ finding them is a major industry (just think of Purify++).
Does the project you mention have many programmers grown up with C++ or even Java, and few C old-timers? I'm pretty much worried about our current C++ project because it seems to me that I'm actually the only one who understands dynamic memory allocation (sort of; what the ROOT package does is really beyond me). I attribute this knowledge to C.
And don't get me started about Java. Someone who learned Java as his/her first programming language is likely to have immense trouble switching "back" to C++ (or even C). It seems a bit like switching to stick shift after 10yrs automatic...
That said, I think Java is actually a nice lil' language to start with... if you don't need to go "back" to C/C++.
Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.
That's funny, because Digital UNIX doesn't feel BSD-ish at all: SysV startup, with runlevels and all; PID 1 is init(8); no/stand (in fact the whole fs layout feels SysV-ish); BSD-ish flags to commands like ps(1) are listed under "compatibility syntax" whereas the SysV-ish flags are considered default; no such thing as pagedaemon; etc.
Whenever I read about these incredibly complex theories, like 11 dimensional superstrings, the M-theory, "sparticles", and what have you, it just reminds me of the "theories of planetary motion" that people used to come up with before they realized the earth goes around the sun.
Actually, SUSY (supersymmetry, that's where the sparticles come from) would simplify a great deal of things! For instance, it would unify the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces. It would also explain dark matter. SUSY is really pretty elegant. The big drawback, however, is that it hasn't been observed yet... But due to the nature of the theory, SUSY is very hard to rule out by current experiments.
You might want to check the web page of one of our professors, he's got some talks on SUSY there.
I don't know much about string theories, but we had a speaker here for a seminar lately and from what I understand, string theories aren't fully understood yet.
Since the early days of relativity and quantum mechanics, physics in general has the problem that it's no longer "intuitive" as it was in Newton's days. Our everyday experience doesn't help us in understanding quantum phenomena. But just because it's no longer "graphic" it's far from being unsatisfactory.
How many of you really look over a binary before you install it? Do you just rpm a package and then run it? What do you have to lose from running this random binary? No more than if you downloaded the rpm and ran the binaries contained therein.
Running a completely unknown, downloaded executable as root is plain stupid. While certainly not the non-plus-ultra in packaging software, with RPM you must install the package as root, but you can run/test the executables as a dummy user, so it won't do much damage.
And don't even bother to tell me about the pre-/postinstall scripts - just use the --noscripts option, and do the stuff by hand (or check the scripts beforehand using -q --scripts).
BTW, how do you uninstall self-extracted packages? Does every package have to provide its own uninstaller?
So, there is a preexisting product in the German software market called 'SAMBA', and the company that makes it wants to protect it's investment in that name. I think they're right.
Well, obviously they are not just upholding their trademark but trying to make revenue by "Abmahnung" lawsuits. I mean, they basically sent bills to all subscribers of the SAMBA/FreeSMB mailing list. If they would just wanted to protect their trademark they just would have contacted the authors, probably via the mailing lists.
This is just another Abmahnung ripp off, as it is pretty common in Germany these days, and our government is still sound asleep...
I mean, protecting your brand name - fair enough. Sueing the Samba team if they refuse to - they have been warned. But that this kind of behaviour is legal practice is just embarrassing for German law and judges!
Their habits probably changed since the Black Album...
IMHO Metallica stopped being artists when their first MTV video appeared.
Since then, they're just another company producing and selling tunes. Nothing more, nothing less. And as a company, they try to defend their profits, as all companies do. What's so special about that?
Counterproof: there were plenty of killers before the first computer, let alone FPS game.
consider if it cannot be considered a sign of a sick culture that oftentimes the only contact friends make with each other is to kill one another in a virtual world
Definitely. That's why I meet my friends in Real Live(tm), have real vis-a-vis conversations, have real beer together, doing real martial arts etc. My friends have similar opinions on that subject, obviously. (I mean, I meet them, so they in turn meet me.)
This doesn't keep me from playing Quake.
The source of violence has been discovered, and it is resentment, which is in turn founded in thought.
Actually, resentment is even more often found in lack of thought, i.e. dumbness. In my experience, dump people are far more prone to resentment than intelligent people. That's because intelligent people can reflect resentment, understand it, and often remove the course; or will understand the deeper meaning of the situation that initially lead to resentment. Dumb people have no defence against resentment.
Another huge potential for resentment is the feeling of powerlessness, of being at someone's mercy.
So the solution you provide (which basically boils down to everybody being at the mercy of some industrialists), is the best way to actually increase resentment and thus violence.
BTW: since resentment is the root of violence, Quake should actually decrease violence, since it decreases resentment. Works fine for me.
Censorship is a slippery slope; once you start down it, everything is vulnerable.
The biggest effort in censorship these days is in fact "political correctness" -- banning arbitrary terms and claiming to protect people. German law makes one specific lie illegal. Furthermore this article about denying the Holocaust is 50+ years old now and has not been extended to any other subjects, so the slope is in fact not that slippery.
One holds it out for the world to see... and ridicule and spit upon and point and laugh and use as an object lesson for your kids when they're old enough to handle it.
... and until then? As in most cases, the good is weaker than the evil, and neo-Nazis don't wait til your kids are old enough. BTW, in the US, Nazi propaganda is legal (AFAIK), and I've yet to ear an American to ridicule them.
The Germans want to censor. What really doesn't matter, we must do what we can to stop them, simply on principle.... because censorship leads to thoughtcrime, and everyone who has ever read 1984 knows where that leads.
Well, no. Nobody here in Germany is foolish enough to believe that neo-Nazi propaganda can be suppressed by making it illegal. That's not the point. The point is to make a specific kind of lie illegal, not to prevent this lie but to have a handle to punish people who spread this lie.
Yes, we (Germans) are pretty sensitive to Nazi propaganda, for a specific reason you already stated:
Slashdot Mirror
Then, as history teaches us, the next step is usually to kill the non-believer.
:)
Yepp, that's history. (Albeit just 60 years ago in Germany). Let's try to not repeat it. Let's try to prevent religious groups from terrorizing non-believers. (And from terrorizing believers, for that matter.)
Also, if an organization wants to copyright their material or mark it as a trade secret, that's their business.
Business. Precisely. That's what they are treated like in Germany: a business.
(Emphasis in quotation mine.)
Believe what you want and shut up. I believe I'll have another beer.
I'm not going to argue with that believe
Early on, an encoded date wasn't a serious option; you had to store the date you wanted as you wanted it--converting a binary digit to two decimal digits still had noticable costs.
:-)
While I buy your argument that it could be more work for whoever punches the cards, the increase in workload for the computer is neglectible: it's just some shifts and a binary and -- operations which where cheap in CPU time ever since, because they're easy to build in hardware.
And it wouldn't take a huge amount in resources to just prepend "19" to all two-digit dates on punch cards. This way, the full year would be stored efficiently and your card puncher could avoid building calluses
Furthermore the two-digit year bug wasn't invented to save memory in the first place - it is much older. Probably it stemmed from laziness when scribbling dates on paper. The German ID cards *still* have two-digit years printed on them, and I'm pretty sure that's not because they want to save a few drops of ink.
Two-year digits are just laziness, and nothing else. Let's try not to glorify it as the idea of some kind of genius, okay?
Not to knock the work being done in China, but they are not the first Maglev.
Birmingham (UK) isn't the first maglev either. To quote from the Transrapid web site:
1979
Operation of the world's first maglev train with longstator propulsion (Transrapid 05) to be licensed for passenger transportation occurs at the International Transportation Exhibition (IVA 79) in Hamburg.
Check out the Transrapid web site (English and German) at transrapid.de
I know some people will cry about Chernobyl, but that incident really just goes to show you the drawbacks of communism
So Three Miles Island shows you the drawbacks of capitalism? Yeah, right!
An intelligent reactor design (such as Candu) operated by well-trained individuals would never suffer such a catastrophe.
It's not about these catastrophies but about normal, regular use. Where do you put the waste, for the next ump-ty thousand years? (Which will probably see devastating wars, an ice age, rising oceans and other neat things.)
Also please remember that our supplies of Uranium 235 is rather limited.
electric cars are a stupid idea if the electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels
Primitive generalization. It might as well be much easier to filter one big power plant rather than filter some million cars. Upgrade the power plant's filter system, and you get the "upgrade" of the millions of electric cars for free.
Our only way out of this mess is to consume less energy. Period.
E=mc2 is only accurate on a subatomic level.
:-)
It is accurate on macroscopic level, too. It's just an effect far too small to notice.
For instance, because of the energy they store, the batteries of your notebook are in fact heavier when full -- by about 10^-16 kg. So you won't really feel the difference
In high energy physics (admittedly subatomic), the effect is enormous. By cranking up the energy (read: velocity) of e.g. an electron, we can produce particles like muons which are 200x heavier than electrons. E=mc^2 applied. (Where m is of course the relativistic mass...)
Perhaps because the US has approx. 260 millions residents, whereas Canada has less than 29 million (source: Encyclopedia.com: Canada)? You might be able to get away with that sort of system there. We're just a touch bigger.
:-)
Well it works like a charm for 81 million Germany, and should scale well for a factor of 3. This job is perfectly distributable. Just triple the number of counters -- and get your new president the very next day
If I was a US resident I was more concerned with the inherent "winner-takes-all" scheme: (almost) one half of e.g. Florida voters are completely ignored.
Disclaimer: I code in C++ mostly and am generally positive towards OOP... as long as it's done pragmatically! (As opposed to those religious OOP nuts.)
Some of the major benefit of OOP, and specifically C++'s objects, are:
o It is a clean module packaging mechanism that encourages cleaner interfaces between modules
Which is definately a Good Thing if done properly. Point is, in my observation, for most people it seems to be MUCH easier to define proper procedural interfaces than to design proper OOP ones.
o It encourages opaque data interfaces (method access vs public access) which results in less
bugs
Only it the accessors do any check! In our current project (high energy physics) we have lots of objects which consist largely of floating point numbers, and you can't do much checks. So accessors make no sense here. If the data structures change, the client code has to be changed anyway because we can't take a performance hit. (This happened exactly once in more than a year, so what?)
o It makes use of self-initialization/cleanup (constructors/deconstructirs) that avoid a whole slew of programmer errors.
Granted, they are very useful indeed, but, as you say, not necessarily OOP.
o The self-containedness of objects does make code reuse simpler and less bug prone.
I don't buy that one. A well-designed C module is just as easy to maintain and reuse. Basically classes (without inheritance) are just structs with syntactic sugar (i.e. the first parameter, "this" in C++, is written in front of the function name).
Cheers, patrick
[...] in 2010, by which time it, and Unix, will be obsolete.
Yeah, and 640k are enough for everybody, dammit!
So, if the Higgs is lighter than about 140GeV, it will be discovered by the Tevatron long before LHC turns on.
Not really. The detectors operating at the Tevatron, CDF and D0, will need roughly five years of operation to collect the luminosity necessary for Higgs discovery, and still could only find a Higgs below 120 GeV with 3 sigma confidence level. In five years, LHC is scheduled to start operations.
Combined CDF and D0 limits after roughly five years of operation (integrated luminosity 10 fb^-1) would allow for a 3 sigma evidence below 120 GeV or 5 sigma discovery below 100 GeV. The latter is already excluded by LEP.
So chances for a Higgs discovery at Tevatron are not too good, really. It's possible, though not very likely.
Cheers, patrick
so, if you have a text file, you don't need to put
Why would this information belong to the file system?
IMHO generating a huge number of arbitrary file "types" in filesystem space (read: kernel space) when it can be painlessly done in user space is a Bad Thing(tm). I mean, these types had to registered in an
this approach makes it much more difficult for any accidental SEPARATING of the file type info from the info that determines which app should open it
On my account, I alone determine what application should open TIFF files. Thus a system-wide mapping of type app on a multi user O/S is simply inacceptable. (It's a typical single-user line of thought, after all.) Even if you go with file system-integrated file types, you would still need per-user mappings.
Anyway, there's no real need for this meta-information, be it in the file name or in the inode. man file(1).
Cheers, patrick
5. All languages are on equal footing. They all share the same GC
.NET,
.NET. Where is that link to the Linux executable?
Please direct me to the chapter in Stroustrup where it says that C++ uses a GC.
Why would I want to develop speed-critial parts in C or C++ when the program gets compiled into bloody byte-code for a VM?
10. With Java, you have to learn Java. Plus, statistics show that 70% of all Java
developers target APIs that are native to their platform. Thus, the "write once, run
anywhere" promise never comes true except in the most simple of situations. With
you can write in *any* of over 15 already-announced languages.
You're mixing up language-independence and platform-independence here. While I agree that language-independence and fast and efficient language mixing is a great thing, I've yet to hear of any platform-independence for
Besides, I seriously doubt that TogetherSoft's development tools qualify as "most simple"...
Cheers, patrick
Given the fact that both English and German belong to the family of Germanic languages
Indo-Germanic, to be precise. Never mind that this kind of linguistic relationship is hardly sufficient to make a language easy to learn; do you consider Hindi an easy learn??
Just nitpicking...
calling Mandarin and Szechuan "Chinese".
Not to omit Cantonese. BTW, I didn't know there was such a language Szechuan?
It's the economic and political power of the US, nothing more.
History proofs you wrong. I guess it's a bit US-centric to believe the influence of English is due to the US, because it isn't -- it's inherited from the British Commonwealth. Until after WW I, the US wasn't that important, neither politically nor economically. Furthermore the US itself was but a part of the Commonwealth, and didn't like it: just remember the Boston tea party.
During my childhood, I have learned three foreign languages (Latin, English, and Classic Greek, in that order; German being my native language), and I've made (pretty lame, I must admit) attempts at French, Italian and Russian.
:-) really painful.
English was by far easiest to learn. Period.
It was even easier than Italian, after 6 years of Latin in school! The grammar is amazingly simple yet powerful. You can actually communicate with a comparatively small vocabulary. I figure this makes it the perfect choice for a second language to learn.
Quite frankly, I find learning a language as complicated as e.g. Russian (or German, I guess
we've expended tremendous effort doing things like [...] fixing memory bugs
What -- in C? Now that's new to me. The C projects I've been involved with rarely had any problems with memory management. Now with C++ finding them is a major industry (just think of Purify++).
Does the project you mention have many programmers grown up with C++ or even Java, and few C old-timers? I'm pretty much worried about our current C++ project because it seems to me that I'm actually the only one who understands dynamic memory allocation (sort of; what the ROOT package does is really beyond me). I attribute this knowledge to C.
And don't get me started about Java. Someone who learned Java as his/her first programming language is likely to have immense trouble switching "back" to C++ (or even C). It seems a bit like switching to stick shift after 10yrs automatic...
That said, I think Java is actually a nice lil' language to start with... if you don't need to go "back" to C/C++.
Parents, teachers, etc need to get off their fat lazy asses and pay attention to what their kids are doing.
German libraries have a guideline to position Internet PC's in a way that the librarians can always have a look at the screen.
They do pay attention. I think that's way better than having Bess filtering your traffic. And they won't fall for "This tip is sure to not work."
Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.
/stand (in fact the whole fs layout feels SysV-ish); BSD-ish flags to commands like ps(1) are listed under "compatibility syntax" whereas the SysV-ish flags are considered default; no such thing as pagedaemon; etc.
That's funny, because Digital UNIX doesn't feel BSD-ish at all: SysV startup, with runlevels and all; PID 1 is init(8); no
Whenever I read about these incredibly complex theories, like 11 dimensional superstrings, the M-theory, "sparticles", and what have you, it just reminds me of the "theories of planetary motion" that people used to come up with before they realized the earth goes around the sun.
Actually, SUSY (supersymmetry, that's where the sparticles come from) would simplify a great deal of things! For instance, it would unify the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces. It would also explain dark matter. SUSY is really pretty elegant. The big drawback, however, is that it hasn't been observed yet... But due to the nature of the theory, SUSY is very hard to rule out by current experiments.
You might want to check the web page of one of our professors, he's got some talks on SUSY there.
I don't know much about string theories, but we had a speaker here for a seminar lately and from what I understand, string theories aren't fully understood yet.
Since the early days of relativity and quantum mechanics, physics in general has the problem that it's no longer "intuitive" as it was in Newton's days. Our everyday experience doesn't help us in understanding quantum phenomena. But just because it's no longer "graphic" it's far from being unsatisfactory.
How many of you really look over a binary before you install it? Do you just rpm a package and then run it? What do you have to lose from running this random binary? No more than if you downloaded the rpm and ran the binaries contained therein.
Running a completely unknown, downloaded executable as root is plain stupid. While certainly not the non-plus-ultra in packaging software, with RPM you must install the package as root, but you can run/test the executables as a dummy user, so it won't do much damage.
And don't even bother to tell me about the pre-/postinstall scripts - just use the --noscripts option, and do the stuff by hand (or check the scripts beforehand using -q --scripts).
BTW, how do you uninstall self-extracted packages? Does every package have to provide its own uninstaller?
So, there is a preexisting product in the German software market called 'SAMBA', and the company that makes it wants to protect it's investment in that name. I think they're right.
Well, obviously they are not just upholding their trademark but trying to make revenue by "Abmahnung" lawsuits. I mean, they basically sent bills to all subscribers of the SAMBA/FreeSMB mailing list. If they would just wanted to protect their trademark they just would have contacted the authors, probably via the mailing lists.
This is just another Abmahnung ripp off, as it is pretty common in Germany these days, and our government is still sound asleep...
I mean, protecting your brand name - fair enough. Sueing the Samba team if they refuse to - they have been warned. But that this kind of behaviour is legal practice is just embarrassing for German law and judges!
More to the point, when the hell do we get Duke Nukem forever?
:-)
If id had it their way, probably never. That's because Duke Nukem is by Apogee, not by id...
Their habits probably changed since the Black Album...
IMHO Metallica stopped being artists when their first MTV video appeared.
Since then, they're just another company producing and selling tunes. Nothing more, nothing less. And as a company, they try to defend their profits, as all companies do. What's so special about that?
A company, but not artists.
The subject is obviously completely wrong.
Counterproof: there were plenty of killers before the first computer, let alone FPS game.
consider if it cannot be considered a sign of a sick culture that oftentimes the only contact friends make with each other is to kill one another in a virtual world
Definitely. That's why I meet my friends in Real Live(tm), have real vis-a-vis conversations, have real beer together, doing real martial arts etc. My friends have similar opinions on that subject, obviously. (I mean, I meet them, so they in turn meet me.)
This doesn't keep me from playing Quake.
The source of violence has been discovered, and it is resentment, which is in turn founded in thought.
Actually, resentment is even more often found in lack of thought, i.e. dumbness. In my experience, dump people are far more prone to resentment than intelligent people. That's because intelligent people can reflect resentment, understand it, and often remove the course; or will understand the deeper meaning of the situation that initially lead to resentment. Dumb people have no defence against resentment.
Another huge potential for resentment is the feeling of powerlessness, of being at someone's mercy.
So the solution you provide (which basically boils down to everybody being at the mercy of some industrialists), is the best way to actually increase resentment and thus violence.
BTW: since resentment is the root of violence, Quake should actually decrease violence, since it decreases resentment. Works fine for me.
Censorship is a slippery slope; once you start down it, everything is vulnerable.
The biggest effort in censorship these days is in fact "political correctness" -- banning arbitrary terms and claiming to protect people. German law makes one specific lie illegal. Furthermore this article about denying the Holocaust is 50+ years old now and has not been extended to any other subjects, so the slope is in fact not that slippery.
One holds it out for the world to see... and ridicule and spit upon and point and laugh and use as an object lesson for your kids when they're old enough to handle it.
... and until then? As in most cases, the good is weaker than the evil, and neo-Nazis don't wait til your kids are old enough. BTW, in the US, Nazi propaganda is legal (AFAIK), and I've yet to ear an American to ridicule them.
The Germans want to censor. What really doesn't matter, we must do what we can to stop them, simply on principle.... because censorship leads to thoughtcrime, and everyone who has ever read 1984 knows where that leads.
Well, no. Nobody here in Germany is foolish enough to believe that neo-Nazi propaganda can be suppressed by making it illegal. That's not the point. The point is to make a specific kind of lie illegal, not to prevent this lie but to have a handle to punish people who spread this lie.
Yes, we (Germans) are pretty sensitive to Nazi propaganda, for a specific reason you already stated:
Never Again. At all costs.
And we do take means towards that goal.