In my opinion this is great news. And I mean that in all seriousness.
This case sets the precedent that digital items are no different then there analog counter parts. Which is GREAT! Because investigators have avoided holding themselves to the same standards for respecting the privacy of digital mail and digital files that they have for their analog equivalent. So when you get dragged to court to reveal the key for your files that the government would have no business in if they were physical files, then the second the judge says you have to give it over because it's no different then a physical key, you can just argue that you shouldn't be compelled to give over the key because the government has no business being all up in your files.
Ok, so this only good in an unreasonable search and seizure sort of way. But quite frankly that's the area of personal privacy that I care about. If they have a valid reason to be all up in your junk, I'm glad that you get to be held in contempt if you don't provide them a key.
I am not a lawyer and I am not in this case. But I suspect there are two things coming into play here.
1.) These phones CAN work on all those networks. So this restriction is completely artificial.
2.) People already complain about the locking of iTunes to Apple Portable Players (iPod, iPhone). People complain about locking phones to networks. So the expansion to Itunes locked to apple players locked to AT&Ts network, probably just takes it a step to far, especially in light of reason 1.
Let's look at what's been changing in the download industry that might justify the change.
Is the cost per track for the end user going up: No, it's holding stable and in some situations going down.
Is the distribution cost for the track going down: Track bit-rates have gone up, and the size of overall catalogue has gone up, so there is more to hold and distribute per track.
Have the copyright holders done anything to enhance the value of their existing copyrights: No.
The only remaining justification is inflation, which in this case is an Ouroboros. Raise the royalties because of inflation, that will raise the cost of tracks for end-users further diminishing the purchasing power of the dollar, which leads to more inflation. Yipee. Way to destroy our economy!!!!
...I mean by their logic at this point most people should be calling it Mozilla-Gnome-Sun-Gnu/Linux...
A simple test for you. If you can remove the software and the computer still operates then it is being run by the operating system, it is not part of it.
Wait, so you think that there are irreplaceable/irremovable gnu components in Linux?
Duh! No, you could use other components to make it work, such as the fictional UNG tools. Then you would have UNG/Linux. Just as you could use a different kernel with GNU tools such as the Hurd kernel and have GNU/Hurd.
And we've come full circle, because by that Logic it should be Mozilla-Gnome-Sun-Gnu/Linux because for me and many people X11, a browser, sun java (the gnu one is just a little too broken) are as necessary as any of the gnu stuff.
But maybe I am wrong. please point me at something that is uniquely GNU that's required for Linux, that changes how the machine behaves so much that it merits re-branding the operating system. Yes, most linux distros use a gnu sh clone, but if someone replaced it you wouldn't notice the difference, so I don't really think that counts, and while on the command line people might notice the difference between the feature added shells like bash, tcsh, ksh, dash, and zsh, using a feature added shell on the command line isn't any more mandatory then X or a web browser.
A simple test for you. If you can remove the software and the computer still operates then it is being run by the operating system, it is not part of it.
Wait, so you think that there are irreplaceable/irremovable gnu components in Linux?
Which should be obvious given that they're using GNU/Linux.
You sir are a troll.
Either that or you live in a delusional world where Al Gore really did invent the internet, John McCain gets royalties from RIM for his work to make the blackberry possible and the famous Linus Tovalds sound bite is him saying "GNU/Linux is pronounced GNU/Linux".
They won't admit it but the GNU project probably owes about as much to Linux and Linux does to it. If it wasn't for Linux we could have ended up with BSD like open source being more dominant and the GNU project moldering for lack of developer time and a release of the hurd that is worth developing for. And how do they repay linux, they fanatically try to re-brand it and change their license to fix problems with Linux usage that the main developers of linux don't think is a problem.
So they can shut up about how you should call Linux GNU/Linux. I mean by their logic at this point most people should be calling it Mozilla-Gnome-Sun-Gnu/Linux.
I know, in some circles it's cool to listen what RMS and his Open Hardware Foundation say. (Oops I forgot that they call their foundation the Free Software Foundation even though they are more concerned with opening hardware for end user development then actually getting good free software). But you should think critically. When you hear them talk you should be able to spot where they are being inconsistent and not perpetuate any such stupidity. It's just like how you don't necessary pay attention to the political beliefs of actors or singers, even though you might admire their acting or singing.
This is just speculation, but isn't much of new mexico rather arid? So this study is not actually useful for people who need to build data centers in more humid places then new mexico which I think includes most of the places there are actually people.
But if you are going to allow for an arbitrarily re-locatable data center, what does it matter that it can handle 90 degree whether when you can move it somewhere cold enough that you can have a humidity controlled room that gets passive cooling from the exterior.
Wow slashdot's amazing, if you are to be believed and this is a dupe to an post made on 08/10/2008, then slashdot can see the future of the internet because the article linked to in this post is dated 09/11/2008. Freaky.
Don't dismiss new articles on previously covered topics out of hand. If you read what the ancient greeks wrote about the sky and stopped there, you would be pretty ignorant about the things we've learned since.
This isn't a dupe. It's a new article about a topic that has previously been discussed, and that's what your comment should say, instead of just calling it out as a dupe. Because by that logic your comment is a dupe because other people have posted other dupe comments for other topics.
Yup, that's why congress didn't actually meet until 1876 when those were finally published.
A lot of the stupid shit we go through in the US, are because of things that were thought to be understood by all and were thus left unspecified.So while those might be understood by some to be the rules (and really it is the rules that the authoring of the book was an attempt to codify, that are understood to be the rules), since they are not officially the rule they will be ignored whenever convenient.
But I do kind of hope that there is a reason for an emergency (but not a real life threatening one) and that the republicans get to complain then, after all the motion to adjourn for 5 weeks passed with a majority and who is nancy pelosi to contradict a motion that passed the house.
Re:I believe you mean freedom # -1
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A Year of GPLv3
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· Score: 2, Interesting
No Freedom -1, is the freedom to be a douche, declare that you are rebranding another's project because your parallel project effectively failed and then refuse to talk to anyone that doesn't adhere to your rebranding. And RMS executes it everyday.
For some people Free software is about the software. They don't care what TiVo does with it as long as everyone get's the improvements they get to the code, or in other words they get to use the best of breed code. For others it's about using software as a trojan horse to open hardware. They intend to write such good code so that people who would normally release closed hardware will use release open hardware instead to take advantage of the good code. And of course for some it's about both and for some it's about neither.
Both opinions are fine to have. But the FSF is mostly about the hardware and RMS will get up in the face of any one who just cares about the software. When really what needs to happen is the FSF needs to change their name to the FHF, openly state their mission of opening hardware, and stop creating division and confusion amoungst two groups of people that should be able to mostly get long.
I really, REALLY wish you people would learn to use an apostrophe, damn it! And more importantly, when NOT to use one.
Are you in the U.S.? If so then you need to stop with the angry flower. English isn't a well defined standard. Don't believe me? Ask a American and Brit to spell color, and you will get to different answers.
If you try to counter by trotting out experts, then I will simply ask you who certified them as experts. The answer will be that other older experts did, and so I could ask again who certified them as experts. It could repeat like that for a long time, and probably in the end the authority of all the experts could be traced back to some monarch, most likely the monarch of England. Since many of us are outside the authority of all such monarchs, we are also outside the all of the authority that is bestowed by them. Which means that your experts mean nothing to many of us.
At best there are multiple dialects of English, with different degrees of standardization, but since it's been observed that new words get added to official standards for the language from being used, there must either be an unstandardized dialect, or room in some of the dialects for people to experiment with new usages. So, since Slashdot has no official dialect of english, it can't be assumed that anyone is using a strictly standardized one. As a result there is no room to rant about grammar.
The hard truth of the matter is that the there is are new constructs in use in the English language, that will require some modifications to the rules of grammar. One construct I am talking about is the non-punctuated mixed case abbreviation, which unlike acronyms are not fully pronounced like words, and can be generic nouns. CPU is a common example of this. However because these abbreviations can end in a lowercase s, just adding a lowercase s to the end of them for pluralization, can cause ambiguity so people have searched for a new way to express that pluralization and have latched onto is apostrophe s. Another construct is the repeatable named processes, such as a command. An example of this is "du -k" if you wanted to refer to multiple of these commands by just tacking on a lower case s, you'd make something highly ambiguous. So again people have tried apostrophe s, and found it to their liking. Also the apostrophe-s pluralization leads to more clear pronunciation. Everyone knows that apostrophe-s means tack on the sound the letter makes not the name of the letter, and since the pronunciation of these constructs often involves speaking the names of the characters involved, the apostrophe makes it clear that once should transition from saying the names of the characters to making the sounds they produce. This is also why apostophe-ed is used for the past tense when these constructs are verbs.
So the new usage is out there. Since people tend to like it, I suggest getting used to it, or finding a better solution, because at this point I think that hoping for lowercase s pluralization of these constructs is not going to be very fruitful.
Does Florida have a freedom of information act? The lectures are a work product for the university. This is the university of Florida, which I think makes it a stat university, so the university is the state, and the state (I hope) has no secrets. So the lecture contents can't be secret.
>Now, the WoW subscriber agreement is enforceable and may cover the updated binaries that come through the WoW updater.
Yes, but out of deference for the notion that comments are worth while, I ignore any closing sentences that render the whole rest of the comment moot. So for example, If you posted a comment saying "If the Earth were further from the sun the Jupiter then all life on Earth would die. However the earth will never be further from the sun then Jupiter.", I'm going to ignore the "However the earth will never be further from the sun then Jupiter.", because then the only point of the comment is to nitpick people who try to actually respond to the content of the message, and I assume that any given slashdot poster is better then that, because if I didn't I would have to assume that slashdot comments have stopped being a real discussion and are now just a bizarre method for establishing pedantic-ocracy, that only rules over the method of establishing it itself. And that just makes me sad and make my head hurt
You have to aggree to a license that you get to read, before you login. You have to login to patch. So you have to patch to play. So it's not just a shrink wrap license, It's a license that you have to take an action to agree to, the entire contents of which are available to you at the time of agreement.
Also isn't this what eventually got napster. Ignoring that they can't develop without WoW, even though they aren't make these unauthorized copies, the program exists to make those unauthorized copies.
Then there is the unauthorized copies they make of WoW when they are working on development.
Anyone who has looked at that page will see that they have awarded 1/5 of the delegates, and the winning numbers for clinton assume a state wide popular vote. If clinton won her delegates in a 80/20 split and obama won his with a 51/49, obama could have won more delegates.
The media has done a poor job of reflecting the actual electoral mechanics. In fact delegate wise all Clinton's early "wins" as reported by the media were delegate wise, ties or loses. It's like declaring a football game based on offensive yards gained rather then points. Often one is an indicator of the other but the one that matters as far as the contest is concerned is the points, or in the case of the election, the delegates.
One could in fact raise the issue of momentum and question whether or not clinton would still be in the race if she had not been given that artificial momentum. Which is kind of an interesting twist on the whole topic of media bias.
I'm going to wait until I see the final delegate counts from tonights actions before I crown a winner. But of course we all know that at this point the super delegates are going to decide it. And when they do maybe I'll toy with the idea of suing the autocrates for false advertising in the form of calling themselves democrates.
Gee, to me the obvious way to fight the sort of bullying that the offerer of the first bounty is to counter bully by offering a bounty on evidence of unethical activities by the guy that would get him disbarred or a bounty on prior art for patents specifically held by his company, and make the bounty good only as long as the first bounty is valid.
Energy can neither be created or destroyed.
However there is a lot of it, perhaps more then we could ever imagine using, and there is a lot of new room for finding ways to turn it into a useful form.
The question we need to ask our self is what is the real energy source, and is it something that we want to feed off of? I'm sure that someone who was very clever could setup a contraption that the earth's magnetic field kept rotating. However this would over time diminish the earth's magnetic field which apparently protects us from harmful radiation, so I don't want to diminish it.
Looking at CNN, a lot of the delegate counts are still short for the democrats, based on the total number of delegates they've assigned for a lot of the super tuesday states and a the number of delegates tha they say the state has tied to yesterdays elections and caucuses. So the balance could still shift some.
Generally I've been disappointed with the reporting on the elections so far. Before super tuesday, Obama had gotten the most pledged delegates or tied with clinton in all the contests, but there were a few were they called Clinton the winner. It would be like declaring the the super bowl winner based on the number completed passes and not the score, which according to espn would make the Patriots the winner, which we all understand they are not.
Beyond my general dismay at the misrepresentation of the democratic primary results, I am frustrated with the confusion that this type of reporting causes. The outlets glaze over the actual electoral mechanics and come as close as they can to portraying each contest as a statewide popular vote. Then when the presidential election comes around they will do their best to portray it as a national popular election. First in the US not all votes are equal, electoral votes are based on # of members of both houses of congress from the state so because of each state getting two senators, the ratio of electoral votes to population, means that they people in low populace states have votes that are worth more of an electoral vote each. After that because most states are winner take all when it come to electoral votes if a candidate wins 100% of the vote in states that make up 40% of the electoral college and loses the other 60% of the electoral vote worth of states in a 48%/52% split then he would lose the election but would have won the make believe nationwide popular election by a pretty good margin, and people would be pissed, and feel cheated. And most of the time they would blame it on the disparity of the states in the electoral college.
The worst part about all this electoral confusion is that blaming the electoral college is how you make sure the system never changes. The electoral college is based on squarely in the constitution and would be a major undertaking to change. However the constitution has nothing at all to do with how each state allocates there votes. That can be addressed on a state by state level. Currently most states are winner take all. Which means that a thousand or so voters (or the fraud perpetrated on a thousand or so voters) can decide millions of peoples worth of vote. If all the states switched to proportional voting then the margins for how much the popular vote can differ from the results would decrease. It would also severely reduce the rewards for disenfranchising voters, and candidates would have to do a better job of appealing to the majority. If you don't like the elections don't bitch about the electoral college, work for change at the state level. Once we have the state elections behaving more inline with our expectations and at this point our desired system, we can see if we really need to tinker with the much harder to tinker with constitution.
Wait, what did IBM do that was unethical. Lobbying is not inherently unethical. To unethically lobby you have to lie, or rather then trying to convince someone of something pay them to take your position, whether or not it is sound.
The arguments against what IBM is doing are logically fallacy. To attack the validity of the position that IBM is promoting because IBM might also stand to benefit from it, is not logically valid. Many people promote true and valid arguments for reasons that are self serving. It's only when you present inconsistent or known false arguments and do so for a self serving reason that there is anything to talk about.
But maybe Microsoft hasn't put forth any arguments for anything that were true or valid, in so long they just assume that all arguments are invalid and knowingly false, and that some of the time you're just fucking with people for no good reason and other times it's really bad and you are doing it out of your own self interest.
You break the law, your service gets terminated. Simple, to the point. I'm sure breaking the law violates your TOS with your ISP in the first place. All we need to do is make the repercussions of that TOS violation clearly defined. Download illegal music, no more Internet. The only problem is that music downloads AREN'T ILLEGAL. It's music uploads that are illegal.
Kids who aren't smart enough to come up with an email address that their parents don't know genuinely do need to be protected from online predators, who will abuse their ignorance.
Also this way, rather then imposing arbitrary restriction based on age, their is a built in opt out based on a child's actual readiness to dis-regard their parents tech ignorance.
I can't say I'm 100% up to date on the current batch of p2p clients but with many of the earlier generation there were common issues of false advertising:
1. Mis-labeled song. Say it's something it's not.
2. Clients set to not allow downloads. A lot of the older clients would let you set the maximum number of downloads to 0. Your stuff would still end up indexed, but no one could download.
3. Host that were fire-walled off from letting people download. The communication for a lot of these networks isn't on one port from one host. So you can have clients advertising content that you can't actually get because of firewalls.
I'm not actually pro-copyright infringement, but a demonstration of advertised content being un-downloadable really swaying a jury. Or better yet I would love the RIAA to sue someone who wasn't sharing because of firewalls and who had meticulous firewall logs, so that they could get roasted.
I really think that the only reason for such a device to exist is to make a list of all the self centered arrogant people who buy one to purge them from society.
The device is designed to turn off other people's TVs. If you don't like TV, or televised sports, avoid those places that have them on. Be a discerning consumer and create a market for places that will provide and pleasant atmosphere for you. Don't be a petulant child and turn the TVs off. I don't come into your place and turn your computer, or stereo off, or slam shut the book you are reading. If I did you'd take great offense, and would feel violated. Well the world is not all about you. Get over it. Don't do things whose analog you wouldn't like done to yourself.
This might have been a rant. It might be a troll. But I really would love to hear a justification of this device that does not amount to a fascist imposition of one person's will upon others. And these things do not have enough buttons to really validate the rudimentary universal remote argument, and they are targeted at individuals not institutions, so I won't buy that some institutions with large numbers of TVs might find it useful for start/end of day stuff.
I know kids on an airplane can be annoying but to reform national ID law against the will of the states, and many of the people just to avoid that annoyance, seems a bit harsh.
So the RMS position pre-supposes his software is the best in which case the point of the GPL is to have hardware makers adopt it, which will give him access to the code running his hardware. So when the closed hardware people starting using non-code secrets to keep their hardware closed, instead of relying on the secrets of proprietary code, this didn't go down well, cause that's why they offered up their superior code in the first place.
People like Linus, have a non-trivial code base out there, but don't think it's the best. For them the GPL serves to get people who want/need better code to use the existing code base as a foundation and to then share their improvements with Linus and friends. As long as they share their improvements people with this mind set don't really care what the code is being used for, and want to encourage people to improve it.
So one set of people care about open hardware, one set of people care about open code. Ironically it is the open hardware people that run the "Free Software Foundation", which controls the path of the GPL. Since the two goals are somewhat divergent it makes sense that newer versions of the GPL would suit people with a different mindset and goals less.
Personally I think the FSF has been indirect in stating their goals and got a lot of people behind their banner that didn't truly support what they did and now you have this perceived dissension. When really you have two parallel efforts that share a lot, and should collaborate a lot but should also acknowledge their differences when doing so, so that when one effort does something to serve some of their separate interests the other group doesn't take it like a betrayal.
Slashdot Mirror
In my opinion this is great news. And I mean that in all seriousness.
This case sets the precedent that digital items are no different then there analog counter parts. Which is GREAT! Because investigators have avoided holding themselves to the same standards for respecting the privacy of digital mail and digital files that they have for their analog equivalent. So when you get dragged to court to reveal the key for your files that the government would have no business in if they were physical files, then the second the judge says you have to give it over because it's no different then a physical key, you can just argue that you shouldn't be compelled to give over the key because the government has no business being all up in your files.
Ok, so this only good in an unreasonable search and seizure sort of way. But quite frankly that's the area of personal privacy that I care about. If they have a valid reason to be all up in your junk, I'm glad that you get to be held in contempt if you don't provide them a key.
I am not a lawyer and I am not in this case. But I suspect there are two things coming into play here.
1.) These phones CAN work on all those networks. So this restriction is completely artificial.
2.) People already complain about the locking of iTunes to Apple Portable Players (iPod, iPhone). People complain about locking phones to networks. So the expansion to Itunes locked to apple players locked to AT&Ts network, probably just takes it a step to far, especially in light of reason 1.
Let's look at what's been changing in the download industry that might justify the change.
Is the cost per track for the end user going up: No, it's holding stable and in some situations going down.
Is the distribution cost for the track going down: Track bit-rates have gone up, and the size of overall catalogue has gone up, so there is more to hold and distribute per track.
Have the copyright holders done anything to enhance the value of their existing copyrights: No.
The only remaining justification is inflation, which in this case is an Ouroboros. Raise the royalties because of inflation, that will raise the cost of tracks for end-users further diminishing the purchasing power of the dollar, which leads to more inflation. Yipee. Way to destroy our economy!!!!
...I mean by their logic at this point most people should be calling it Mozilla-Gnome-Sun-Gnu/Linux...
A simple test for you. If you can remove the software and the computer still operates then it is being run by the operating system, it is not part of it.
Wait, so you think that there are irreplaceable/irremovable gnu components in Linux?
Duh! No, you could use other components to make it work, such as the fictional UNG tools. Then you would have UNG/Linux. Just as you could use a different kernel with GNU tools such as the Hurd kernel and have GNU/Hurd.
And we've come full circle, because by that Logic it should be Mozilla-Gnome-Sun-Gnu/Linux because for me and many people X11, a browser, sun java (the gnu one is just a little too broken) are as necessary as any of the gnu stuff.
But maybe I am wrong. please point me at something that is uniquely GNU that's required for Linux, that changes how the machine behaves so much that it merits re-branding the operating system. Yes, most linux distros use a gnu sh clone, but if someone replaced it you wouldn't notice the difference, so I don't really think that counts, and while on the command line people might notice the difference between the feature added shells like bash, tcsh, ksh, dash, and zsh, using a feature added shell on the command line isn't any more mandatory then X or a web browser.
A simple test for you. If you can remove the software and the computer still operates then it is being run by the operating system, it is not part of it.
Wait, so you think that there are irreplaceable/irremovable gnu components in Linux?
Which should be obvious given that they're using GNU/Linux.
You sir are a troll.
Either that or you live in a delusional world where Al Gore really did invent the internet, John McCain gets royalties from RIM for his work to make the blackberry possible and the famous Linus Tovalds sound bite is him saying "GNU/Linux is pronounced GNU/Linux".
They won't admit it but the GNU project probably owes about as much to Linux and Linux does to it. If it wasn't for Linux we could have ended up with BSD like open source being more dominant and the GNU project moldering for lack of developer time and a release of the hurd that is worth developing for. And how do they repay linux, they fanatically try to re-brand it and change their license to fix problems with Linux usage that the main developers of linux don't think is a problem.
So they can shut up about how you should call Linux GNU/Linux. I mean by their logic at this point most people should be calling it Mozilla-Gnome-Sun-Gnu/Linux.
I know, in some circles it's cool to listen what RMS and his Open Hardware Foundation say. (Oops I forgot that they call their foundation the Free Software Foundation even though they are more concerned with opening hardware for end user development then actually getting good free software). But you should think critically. When you hear them talk you should be able to spot where they are being inconsistent and not perpetuate any such stupidity. It's just like how you don't necessary pay attention to the political beliefs of actors or singers, even though you might admire their acting or singing.
This is just speculation, but isn't much of new mexico rather arid? So this study is not actually useful for people who need to build data centers in more humid places then new mexico which I think includes most of the places there are actually people.
But if you are going to allow for an arbitrarily re-locatable data center, what does it matter that it can handle 90 degree whether when you can move it somewhere cold enough that you can have a humidity controlled room that gets passive cooling from the exterior.
Wow slashdot's amazing, if you are to be believed and this is a dupe to an post made on 08/10/2008, then slashdot can see the future of the internet because the article linked to in this post is dated 09/11/2008. Freaky.
Don't dismiss new articles on previously covered topics out of hand. If you read what the ancient greeks wrote about the sky and stopped there, you would be pretty ignorant about the things we've learned since.
This isn't a dupe. It's a new article about a topic that has previously been discussed, and that's what your comment should say, instead of just calling it out as a dupe. Because by that logic your comment is a dupe because other people have posted other dupe comments for other topics.
Yup, that's why congress didn't actually meet until 1876 when those were finally published.
A lot of the stupid shit we go through in the US, are because of things that were thought to be understood by all and were thus left unspecified.So while those might be understood by some to be the rules (and really it is the rules that the authoring of the book was an attempt to codify, that are understood to be the rules), since they are not officially the rule they will be ignored whenever convenient.
But I do kind of hope that there is a reason for an emergency (but not a real life threatening one) and that the republicans get to complain then, after all the motion to adjourn for 5 weeks passed with a majority and who is nancy pelosi to contradict a motion that passed the house.
No Freedom -1, is the freedom to be a douche, declare that you are rebranding another's project because your parallel project effectively failed and then refuse to talk to anyone that doesn't adhere to your rebranding. And RMS executes it everyday. For some people Free software is about the software. They don't care what TiVo does with it as long as everyone get's the improvements they get to the code, or in other words they get to use the best of breed code. For others it's about using software as a trojan horse to open hardware. They intend to write such good code so that people who would normally release closed hardware will use release open hardware instead to take advantage of the good code. And of course for some it's about both and for some it's about neither. Both opinions are fine to have. But the FSF is mostly about the hardware and RMS will get up in the face of any one who just cares about the software. When really what needs to happen is the FSF needs to change their name to the FHF, openly state their mission of opening hardware, and stop creating division and confusion amoungst two groups of people that should be able to mostly get long.
Are you in the U.S.? If so then you need to stop with the angry flower. English isn't a well defined standard. Don't believe me? Ask a American and Brit to spell color, and you will get to different answers.
If you try to counter by trotting out experts, then I will simply ask you who certified them as experts. The answer will be that other older experts did, and so I could ask again who certified them as experts. It could repeat like that for a long time, and probably in the end the authority of all the experts could be traced back to some monarch, most likely the monarch of England. Since many of us are outside the authority of all such monarchs, we are also outside the all of the authority that is bestowed by them. Which means that your experts mean nothing to many of us.
At best there are multiple dialects of English, with different degrees of standardization, but since it's been observed that new words get added to official standards for the language from being used, there must either be an unstandardized dialect, or room in some of the dialects for people to experiment with new usages. So, since Slashdot has no official dialect of english, it can't be assumed that anyone is using a strictly standardized one. As a result there is no room to rant about grammar.
The hard truth of the matter is that the there is are new constructs in use in the English language, that will require some modifications to the rules of grammar. One construct I am talking about is the non-punctuated mixed case abbreviation, which unlike acronyms are not fully pronounced like words, and can be generic nouns. CPU is a common example of this. However because these abbreviations can end in a lowercase s, just adding a lowercase s to the end of them for pluralization, can cause ambiguity so people have searched for a new way to express that pluralization and have latched onto is apostrophe s. Another construct is the repeatable named processes, such as a command. An example of this is "du -k" if you wanted to refer to multiple of these commands by just tacking on a lower case s, you'd make something highly ambiguous. So again people have tried apostrophe s, and found it to their liking. Also the apostrophe-s pluralization leads to more clear pronunciation. Everyone knows that apostrophe-s means tack on the sound the letter makes not the name of the letter, and since the pronunciation of these constructs often involves speaking the names of the characters involved, the apostrophe makes it clear that once should transition from saying the names of the characters to making the sounds they produce. This is also why apostophe-ed is used for the past tense when these constructs are verbs.
So the new usage is out there. Since people tend to like it, I suggest getting used to it, or finding a better solution, because at this point I think that hoping for lowercase s pluralization of these constructs is not going to be very fruitful.
Does Florida have a freedom of information act? The lectures are a work product for the university. This is the university of Florida, which I think makes it a stat university, so the university is the state, and the state (I hope) has no secrets. So the lecture contents can't be secret.
>Now, the WoW subscriber agreement is enforceable and may cover the updated binaries that come through the WoW updater.
Yes, but out of deference for the notion that comments are worth while, I ignore any closing sentences that render the whole rest of the comment moot. So for example, If you posted a comment saying "If the Earth were further from the sun the Jupiter then all life on Earth would die. However the earth will never be further from the sun then Jupiter.", I'm going to ignore the "However the earth will never be further from the sun then Jupiter.", because then the only point of the comment is to nitpick people who try to actually respond to the content of the message, and I assume that any given slashdot poster is better then that, because if I didn't I would have to assume that slashdot comments have stopped being a real discussion and are now just a bizarre method for establishing pedantic-ocracy, that only rules over the method of establishing it itself. And that just makes me sad and make my head hurt
shrinkwrap Eula doesn't matter.
You have to aggree to a license that you get to read, before you login. You have to login to patch. So you have to patch to play. So it's not just a shrink wrap license, It's a license that you have to take an action to agree to, the entire contents of which are available to you at the time of agreement.
Also isn't this what eventually got napster. Ignoring that they can't develop without WoW, even though they aren't make these unauthorized copies, the program exists to make those unauthorized copies.
Then there is the unauthorized copies they make of WoW when they are working on development.
Anyone who has looked at that page will see that they have awarded 1/5 of the delegates, and the winning numbers for clinton assume a state wide popular vote. If clinton won her delegates in a 80/20 split and obama won his with a 51/49, obama could have won more delegates.
The media has done a poor job of reflecting the actual electoral mechanics. In fact delegate wise all Clinton's early "wins" as reported by the media were delegate wise, ties or loses. It's like declaring a football game based on offensive yards gained rather then points. Often one is an indicator of the other but the one that matters as far as the contest is concerned is the points, or in the case of the election, the delegates.
One could in fact raise the issue of momentum and question whether or not clinton would still be in the race if she had not been given that artificial momentum. Which is kind of an interesting twist on the whole topic of media bias.
I'm going to wait until I see the final delegate counts from tonights actions before I crown a winner. But of course we all know that at this point the super delegates are going to decide it. And when they do maybe I'll toy with the idea of suing the autocrates for false advertising in the form of calling themselves democrates.
Gee, to me the obvious way to fight the sort of bullying that the offerer of the first bounty is to counter bully by offering a bounty on evidence of unethical activities by the guy that would get him disbarred or a bounty on prior art for patents specifically held by his company, and make the bounty good only as long as the first bounty is valid.
Energy can neither be created or destroyed. However there is a lot of it, perhaps more then we could ever imagine using, and there is a lot of new room for finding ways to turn it into a useful form. The question we need to ask our self is what is the real energy source, and is it something that we want to feed off of? I'm sure that someone who was very clever could setup a contraption that the earth's magnetic field kept rotating. However this would over time diminish the earth's magnetic field which apparently protects us from harmful radiation, so I don't want to diminish it.
Looking at CNN, a lot of the delegate counts are still short for the democrats, based on the total number of delegates they've assigned for a lot of the super tuesday states and a the number of delegates tha they say the state has tied to yesterdays elections and caucuses. So the balance could still shift some.
Generally I've been disappointed with the reporting on the elections so far. Before super tuesday, Obama had gotten the most pledged delegates or tied with clinton in all the contests, but there were a few were they called Clinton the winner. It would be like declaring the the super bowl winner based on the number completed passes and not the score, which according to espn would make the Patriots the winner, which we all understand they are not.
Beyond my general dismay at the misrepresentation of the democratic primary results, I am frustrated with the confusion that this type of reporting causes. The outlets glaze over the actual electoral mechanics and come as close as they can to portraying each contest as a statewide popular vote. Then when the presidential election comes around they will do their best to portray it as a national popular election. First in the US not all votes are equal, electoral votes are based on # of members of both houses of congress from the state so because of each state getting two senators, the ratio of electoral votes to population, means that they people in low populace states have votes that are worth more of an electoral vote each. After that because most states are winner take all when it come to electoral votes if a candidate wins 100% of the vote in states that make up 40% of the electoral college and loses the other 60% of the electoral vote worth of states in a 48%/52% split then he would lose the election but would have won the make believe nationwide popular election by a pretty good margin, and people would be pissed, and feel cheated. And most of the time they would blame it on the disparity of the states in the electoral college.
The worst part about all this electoral confusion is that blaming the electoral college is how you make sure the system never changes. The electoral college is based on squarely in the constitution and would be a major undertaking to change. However the constitution has nothing at all to do with how each state allocates there votes. That can be addressed on a state by state level. Currently most states are winner take all. Which means that a thousand or so voters (or the fraud perpetrated on a thousand or so voters) can decide millions of peoples worth of vote. If all the states switched to proportional voting then the margins for how much the popular vote can differ from the results would decrease. It would also severely reduce the rewards for disenfranchising voters, and candidates would have to do a better job of appealing to the majority. If you don't like the elections don't bitch about the electoral college, work for change at the state level. Once we have the state elections behaving more inline with our expectations and at this point our desired system, we can see if we really need to tinker with the much harder to tinker with constitution.
Wait, what did IBM do that was unethical. Lobbying is not inherently unethical. To unethically lobby you have to lie, or rather then trying to convince someone of something pay them to take your position, whether or not it is sound.
The arguments against what IBM is doing are logically fallacy. To attack the validity of the position that IBM is promoting because IBM might also stand to benefit from it, is not logically valid. Many people promote true and valid arguments for reasons that are self serving. It's only when you present inconsistent or known false arguments and do so for a self serving reason that there is anything to talk about.
But maybe Microsoft hasn't put forth any arguments for anything that were true or valid, in so long they just assume that all arguments are invalid and knowingly false, and that some of the time you're just fucking with people for no good reason and other times it's really bad and you are doing it out of your own self interest.
Kids who aren't smart enough to come up with an email address that their parents don't know genuinely do need to be protected from online predators, who will abuse their ignorance.
Also this way, rather then imposing arbitrary restriction based on age, their is a built in opt out based on a child's actual readiness to dis-regard their parents tech ignorance.
I can't say I'm 100% up to date on the current batch of p2p clients but with many of the earlier generation there were common issues of false advertising:
1. Mis-labeled song. Say it's something it's not.
2. Clients set to not allow downloads. A lot of the older clients would let you set the maximum number of downloads to 0. Your stuff would still end up indexed, but no one could download.
3. Host that were fire-walled off from letting people download. The communication for a lot of these networks isn't on one port from one host. So you can have clients advertising content that you can't actually get because of firewalls.
I'm not actually pro-copyright infringement, but a demonstration of advertised content being un-downloadable really swaying a jury. Or better yet I would love the RIAA to sue someone who wasn't sharing because of firewalls and who had meticulous firewall logs, so that they could get roasted.
I really think that the only reason for such a device to exist is to make a list of all the self centered arrogant people who buy one to purge them from society.
The device is designed to turn off other people's TVs. If you don't like TV, or televised sports, avoid those places that have them on. Be a discerning consumer and create a market for places that will provide and pleasant atmosphere for you. Don't be a petulant child and turn the TVs off. I don't come into your place and turn your computer, or stereo off, or slam shut the book you are reading. If I did you'd take great offense, and would feel violated. Well the world is not all about you. Get over it. Don't do things whose analog you wouldn't like done to yourself.
This might have been a rant. It might be a troll. But I really would love to hear a justification of this device that does not amount to a fascist imposition of one person's will upon others. And these things do not have enough buttons to really validate the rudimentary universal remote argument, and they are targeted at individuals not institutions, so I won't buy that some institutions with large numbers of TVs might find it useful for start/end of day stuff.
I know kids on an airplane can be annoying but to reform national ID law against the will of the states, and many of the people just to avoid that annoyance, seems a bit harsh.
So the RMS position pre-supposes his software is the best in which case the point of the GPL is to have hardware makers adopt it, which will give him access to the code running his hardware. So when the closed hardware people starting using non-code secrets to keep their hardware closed, instead of relying on the secrets of proprietary code, this didn't go down well, cause that's why they offered up their superior code in the first place.
People like Linus, have a non-trivial code base out there, but don't think it's the best. For them the GPL serves to get people who want/need better code to use the existing code base as a foundation and to then share their improvements with Linus and friends. As long as they share their improvements people with this mind set don't really care what the code is being used for, and want to encourage people to improve it.
So one set of people care about open hardware, one set of people care about open code. Ironically it is the open hardware people that run the "Free Software Foundation", which controls the path of the GPL. Since the two goals are somewhat divergent it makes sense that newer versions of the GPL would suit people with a different mindset and goals less.
Personally I think the FSF has been indirect in stating their goals and got a lot of people behind their banner that didn't truly support what they did and now you have this perceived dissension. When really you have two parallel efforts that share a lot, and should collaborate a lot but should also acknowledge their differences when doing so, so that when one effort does something to serve some of their separate interests the other group doesn't take it like a betrayal.