Really? One tip-off (potentially anonymous or vindictive or malevolent) gets you on a watch list, and you're unconcerned. The management of the no-fly list does not inspire much confidence in how this watch list will be maintained.
<sarcasm>Why not? Our government created lists like this before and it worked just fine.</sarcasm>
And your children's names and schools, along with their complete class schedules and a list of their biggest fears.
And your mother's maiden name, your date of birth, the name of your kindergarten teacher, a list of every address you have ever lived at, and a list of every pet you have ever owned.
This makes no sense. I think your (sic) reversing the effect of the so-called "Streisand effect" here. It would be more popular BECAUSE it is being burned, not being burned BECAUSE it is popular to be a proper case of the Streisand effect. I don't think Ayn Rand is terribly popular among the population, though perhaps more so than she actually deserves.
No, the GP got it right. The GP's comment was that if you burn any piece of literature, the fact that it is taboo will inherently make it increase in popularity. Thus, you should only publicly burn ostensibly subversive or dangerous materials, and you should dispose of the truly subversive or dangerous materials surreptitiously so as not to draw attention to their existence.
Come on. You can't be serious? Even schoolchildren know that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. Censorship is wrong because it is attacking something that fundamentally cannot cause true harm (with very few narrow exceptions like libel, which are and should continue to be disallowed). And you're comparing this to preventing people from selling dangerous products that are known to kill people?
People put up with spam. People get violently angry at people who crack into their accounts. If they keep pulling these stunts, one of these days, somebody is going to lose it, track them down, buy a baseball bat, go to their address, and beat the ever-living s*** out of them. Fifteen bucks for a child-sized baseball bat is a small price to pay for such revenge.
Odds are, if someone bludgeoned a Facebook cracker, he/she would not even be charged with a crime because it would never get reported. After all, if the dirtbags reported it, their cybercrime would be uncovered, and they would rot in jail. In short, these people are basically taking their lives into their hands when they do this.
P.S. To the scumbag in Florida who cracked my Facebook account last month, do it again, and I swear I'll post your in situ address on/b/, then hire a crew to film your address and post clips on YouTube so that everyone you've hurt can watch and enjoy the carnage.
You really should be communicating with your profs during class, not dinking around on your laptop. Unless you type quite a bit faster than most hunt and peckers, you're going to take better notes with pen and paper anyway, and there are relatively few situations where you really need a computer during class as a tool.
Like most touch typists, I type several times faster than I write. Even still, taking notes with a laptop isn't the right answer. Even if you're using a laptop (or, for that matter, a pencil and paper) to take notes, you're still distracted from the lecture and are unable to fully absorb the material, much less be fully interactive. If you're still focusing on the last thing the professor said, you're missing the next thing. I make it a point to never take notes in class, meetings, etc. The few times I've broken that rule, I've invariably regretted it.
The right answer is for the professor to make lecture notes available for further study at the end of class so that students who want to review the material can do so without being distracted during the lecture. By doing so, students who need to go over the notes afterwards to refresh their memory can do so without being distracted during the lecture itself by doing something other than listening and interacting with the professor (and, ideally, simultaneously reading slides that drive home the main points).
Go read a dictionary. The United States government, although a republic, is also considered a constitutional democracy. Although it is architected in such a way that resists changing certain guiding principles. the government is still controlled by the people, albeit indirectly, and as such, it is a democracy.
Republic: a state in which the people or some portion thereof retain control over government and the head of state is not a monarch. In effect, this means it has a governing body, though that body need not be elected. As such, a republic may be a democracy, but is not necessarily so.
Democracy: government is ruled by the people and its power is derived from the consent of the governed.
If you draw a venn diagram of democracies and republics, in practice, democracies would be a proper subset of republics. It is not possible for a government to derive ics power from the consent of the governed if the people to not retain control over the government; such a government would be contradictory by its very nature. Similarly, it is not possible for a government to simultaneously be ruled by the people and still be ruled by a monarch. Well, okay, if you consider the right to overthrow the monarch, maybe....
In short, quit with the anti-American crap. I know it's popular to badmouth the U.S. and claim that it isn't a democracy, but it is.
Wrong. There is another type. Companies who patent ideas they are using to keep patent trolls from patenting it later and suing them. These are "defensive" patents.
The problem with excusing such behavior is that those companies have a tendency to go out of business and get bought by patent trolls, and because they were the first company with the idea... you get the idea. Or the board decides the CEO isn't making enough money and replaces him/her with someone more litigious, who fires all the engineers, hires a dozen lawyers, and turns the company into a patent troll.
I don't care how big the company is; deliberately vague patents are inexcusable.
Would you mind uploading your email archive to a web server for the rest of us to look over? If you wouldn't do that, why would you want the US government to do the same thing?
Because we live in a democracy, and the public cannot make an informed decision about their elected leaders unless they know what those leaders are really doing. The government and government officials acting in their official capacity (and even in their private lives, where conflicts of interest are concerned) should have essentially zero expectation of privacy except for temporary secrecy to protect the safety of undercover police, military, etc. in the field, and even then, only to the minimum extent necessary to ensure that safety. This is absolutely necessary for the proper functioning of a representative democracy.
By contrast, there is no compelling reason for any private citizen's privacy to be violated without probable cause. We don't work for the government. They work for us.
Apple is a bit confused about what exactly Carbon is.
Sadly, this is almost inevitable when you have something that is both a marketing term that dates back to the Mac OS 8/Copland era and a technical term for a specific framework in Mac OS X. In effect, the terminology has morphed to more accurately reflect the structure of the underlying OS.
The classic Mac OS definition for Carbon was much broader because it referred to the entire set of APIs that were expected to be compatible with Copland whenever it eventually came out (which it never did) and subsequently Rhapsody (which morphed into Mac OS X). Those APIs were in something called CarbonLib.
The modern Mac OS X definition refers to a specific framework that contains only a fraction of what was originally in CarbonLib. The other bits of former Carbon API (the ones that were not deprecated en masse) are now in the CoreServices framework, and should no longer be described as "Carbon". If you see places where those APIs are still called "Carbon", feel free to file a bug through Bug Reporter.
To add somewhat to the confusion, Carbon is sometimes used (incorrectly) to describe all the deprecated C APIs in all frameworks (or worse, all the C APIs including the fully supported APIs). Again, if you see such terminology abuse in any Apple documentation, you should file a bug through Bug Reporter.
English on the other hand is a nightmare to learn to speak and to read/write. The spelling system is screwed up. There's 600,000 to 1,000,000 million words depending on who you ask. There's a dozen or more dialects, each with their own exclusive set of idioms. The south africans are almost unintelligible. We have crazy grammar rules. We have 273 irregular verbs. (only latin and italian have more iirc) And native speakers abuse the language like you wouldn't believe. Even our grandparents often use different idioms and pronunciations than we do. I'd hate to have to learn english as a second language.
Yes and no. English is a nightmare to learn to speak or write as well as a native speaker. It's not necessarily that hard to understand, though, so long as communication is limited to the core vocabulary. As a nonnative speaker, you might have a hard time getting some of the tenses right or remembering some of the irregular variations in spelling, but that doesn't necessarily hamper recognizing those variations when you see them. For example, one of the most frequent things I see nonnative speakers getting wrong is the difference between countable and uncountable terms. You can have some sugar, and you have many bicycles, but you cannot have many sugar, and you should not have some bicycles, though that is one of the places where native speakers are often a little sloppy. Either way, as long as the person understands that both of those have the same basic meaning, when someone asks them, "do you want some sugar", they won't be confused even though they might have trouble constructing that sentence.
And idioms exist in pretty much every language (including Chinese). Although common in conversation, one of the first things they teach you when writing for the general public is to avoid using them. They'll be a problem no matter what language you pick as your standard language.
BTW, there are way more than 273 irregular verbs in English. EnglishPage.com lists over 470 if you include archaic and antiquated forms. Most of them are either not in common use or are minor variants of other irregular verbs (e.g. "backslide" forms its tenses in the same way as "slide"), though. Also, most of the verbs that form their tenses "irregularly" do so in a handful of fairly similar ways (changing an ending "de" to "d" or replacing the last couple of letters with a "t" to form various past tenses). And there would usually be very little confusion if you mis-conjugated them as regular verbs. It would be wrong, but still understandable.
In spite of the large number of irregular verbs, English has one advantage that somewhat makes up for it. There are many, many fewer verb forms than in many European languages. Future tense is "will" or "shall" plus the present tense. With the exception of the verb "to be", the same verb form is used regardless of the subject with the exception of third-person singular, which typically just adds an "s" or "es". This makes English conjugation for regular verbs trivial by comparison with many other languages (French, for example).
Hong Kong considers English an official language, so I think you'll find that a significant percentage of the Internet-using, learned Chinese people are at least functional in English by necessity. According to Newsweek, English is very popular among school-aged folks, with some 175 million Chinese students actively learning it in school as of 2007. More than a quarter of the Chinese people have studied English at some point in their lives. By contrast, only about one in every 6,000 people in the United States have studied Chinese. The number of people learning Chinese as a second language pales compared with the number of people learning English worldwide, and given that I think the majority of new Chinese graduates are learning it, as the older population dies off and the younger folks grow up, within at most two generations, it will probably be as easy to use English in China as it is to use it in most parts of Western Europe now.
It's a lot easier to get somebody hired at a company that supplies sandwiches than at an airline. The fact that fuel tankers must bring flammable liquids through security doesn't mean that it's not a security hole so big you can drive a truck through it. Literally.
Sabotaging a plane in such a way that it fails in the sky instead of on the ground before takeoff is harder than it sounds, and it sounds pretty hard. Much easier to smuggle something onto the aircraft and let someone onboard do the deed.
But by MPAA logic, commercial skipping is piracy, so watching streaming video on Hulu without watching the cable-company-provided ads is also piracy....:-)
Yeah, I know. There's no "+1 Sad, but true" moderation. Such is life.
Why would everyone be having sex with trolls in the future? Was there some sort of nuclear holocaust that mutated the entire gene pool in a freakish way or something?
It's still almost two orders of magnitude lower than state-of-the-art photovoltaics (currently just over 42%). Even their ideal theoretical goal is less than half what PVs can do, though it is somewhat interesting in that it provides one possible solution to the "power at night" problem. So yeah, we really need to improve on 0.07%. A lot.
I realize that storage for PV systems is hard, but that doesn't mean we should necessarily abandon the concept in favor of a completely different means of power production. Maybe, maybe not. Time and the market will decide.:-)
Mod parent up. This anonymous coward is the first person who actually gets it. All the sites they are suing are for print ordering online, and it is entirely possible that Kodak did that first. Their patents likely stem from their acquisition of Ofoto, which started doing online print photo sales back in 1999. Shutterfly dates back to the same year. So it's going to come down to the careful study of the dates involved to know whether these patents are valid. That is, of course, assuming that any of these patents are valid in light of Bilski.
Either way, this is a prime example of why all "on the Internet" patents should be immediately invalidated en masse by a court ruling. Someone will come up with a way to do everything on the Internet, and for the most part, those techniques will not be particularly insightful or interesting. Thus, almost without exception, any patent whose primary difference from an existing practice is that it is "on the Internet" is a bad patent and should be tossed out. The burden of proof for such a patent should be very high.
Slashdot Mirror
<sarcasm>Why not? Our government created lists like this before and it worked just fine.</sarcasm>
I'm not even sure I'd go that far. More like "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
And your children's names and schools, along with their complete class schedules and a list of their biggest fears.
And your mother's maiden name, your date of birth, the name of your kindergarten teacher, a list of every address you have ever lived at, and a list of every pet you have ever owned.
*shivers*
Palin/Jeb Bush versus Boxer/Clinton. Result: independent Presidency. Would be a good start, anyway.
I always vote against the incumbent unless the alternative is considerably worse. Unfortunately, the alternative is always considerably worse.
No, the GP got it right. The GP's comment was that if you burn any piece of literature, the fact that it is taboo will inherently make it increase in popularity. Thus, you should only publicly burn ostensibly subversive or dangerous materials, and you should dispose of the truly subversive or dangerous materials surreptitiously so as not to draw attention to their existence.
Come on. You can't be serious? Even schoolchildren know that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. Censorship is wrong because it is attacking something that fundamentally cannot cause true harm (with very few narrow exceptions like libel, which are and should continue to be disallowed). And you're comparing this to preventing people from selling dangerous products that are known to kill people?
People put up with spam. People get violently angry at people who crack into their accounts. If they keep pulling these stunts, one of these days, somebody is going to lose it, track them down, buy a baseball bat, go to their address, and beat the ever-living s*** out of them. Fifteen bucks for a child-sized baseball bat is a small price to pay for such revenge.
Odds are, if someone bludgeoned a Facebook cracker, he/she would not even be charged with a crime because it would never get reported. After all, if the dirtbags reported it, their cybercrime would be uncovered, and they would rot in jail. In short, these people are basically taking their lives into their hands when they do this.
P.S. To the scumbag in Florida who cracked my Facebook account last month, do it again, and I swear I'll post your in situ address on /b/, then hire a crew to film your address and post clips on YouTube so that everyone you've hurt can watch and enjoy the carnage.
Like most touch typists, I type several times faster than I write. Even still, taking notes with a laptop isn't the right answer. Even if you're using a laptop (or, for that matter, a pencil and paper) to take notes, you're still distracted from the lecture and are unable to fully absorb the material, much less be fully interactive. If you're still focusing on the last thing the professor said, you're missing the next thing. I make it a point to never take notes in class, meetings, etc. The few times I've broken that rule, I've invariably regretted it.
The right answer is for the professor to make lecture notes available for further study at the end of class so that students who want to review the material can do so without being distracted during the lecture. By doing so, students who need to go over the notes afterwards to refresh their memory can do so without being distracted during the lecture itself by doing something other than listening and interacting with the professor (and, ideally, simultaneously reading slides that drive home the main points).
Uh, no. The United States is a representative democracy, which is a type of constitutional republic.
Go read a dictionary. The United States government, although a republic, is also considered a constitutional democracy. Although it is architected in such a way that resists changing certain guiding principles. the government is still controlled by the people, albeit indirectly, and as such, it is a democracy.
Republic: a state in which the people or some portion thereof retain control over government and the head of state is not a monarch. In effect, this means it has a governing body, though that body need not be elected. As such, a republic may be a democracy, but is not necessarily so.
Democracy: government is ruled by the people and its power is derived from the consent of the governed.
If you draw a venn diagram of democracies and republics, in practice, democracies would be a proper subset of republics. It is not possible for a government to derive ics power from the consent of the governed if the people to not retain control over the government; such a government would be contradictory by its very nature. Similarly, it is not possible for a government to simultaneously be ruled by the people and still be ruled by a monarch. Well, okay, if you consider the right to overthrow the monarch, maybe....
In short, quit with the anti-American crap. I know it's popular to badmouth the U.S. and claim that it isn't a democracy, but it is.
The problem with excusing such behavior is that those companies have a tendency to go out of business and get bought by patent trolls, and because they were the first company with the idea... you get the idea. Or the board decides the CEO isn't making enough money and replaces him/her with someone more litigious, who fires all the engineers, hires a dozen lawyers, and turns the company into a patent troll.
I don't care how big the company is; deliberately vague patents are inexcusable.
Because we live in a democracy, and the public cannot make an informed decision about their elected leaders unless they know what those leaders are really doing. The government and government officials acting in their official capacity (and even in their private lives, where conflicts of interest are concerned) should have essentially zero expectation of privacy except for temporary secrecy to protect the safety of undercover police, military, etc. in the field, and even then, only to the minimum extent necessary to ensure that safety. This is absolutely necessary for the proper functioning of a representative democracy.
By contrast, there is no compelling reason for any private citizen's privacy to be violated without probable cause. We don't work for the government. They work for us.
Sadly, this is almost inevitable when you have something that is both a marketing term that dates back to the Mac OS 8/Copland era and a technical term for a specific framework in Mac OS X. In effect, the terminology has morphed to more accurately reflect the structure of the underlying OS.
The classic Mac OS definition for Carbon was much broader because it referred to the entire set of APIs that were expected to be compatible with Copland whenever it eventually came out (which it never did) and subsequently Rhapsody (which morphed into Mac OS X). Those APIs were in something called CarbonLib.
The modern Mac OS X definition refers to a specific framework that contains only a fraction of what was originally in CarbonLib. The other bits of former Carbon API (the ones that were not deprecated en masse) are now in the CoreServices framework, and should no longer be described as "Carbon". If you see places where those APIs are still called "Carbon", feel free to file a bug through Bug Reporter.
To add somewhat to the confusion, Carbon is sometimes used (incorrectly) to describe all the deprecated C APIs in all frameworks (or worse, all the C APIs including the fully supported APIs). Again, if you see such terminology abuse in any Apple documentation, you should file a bug through Bug Reporter.
Yes and no. English is a nightmare to learn to speak or write as well as a native speaker. It's not necessarily that hard to understand, though, so long as communication is limited to the core vocabulary. As a nonnative speaker, you might have a hard time getting some of the tenses right or remembering some of the irregular variations in spelling, but that doesn't necessarily hamper recognizing those variations when you see them. For example, one of the most frequent things I see nonnative speakers getting wrong is the difference between countable and uncountable terms. You can have some sugar, and you have many bicycles, but you cannot have many sugar, and you should not have some bicycles, though that is one of the places where native speakers are often a little sloppy. Either way, as long as the person understands that both of those have the same basic meaning, when someone asks them, "do you want some sugar", they won't be confused even though they might have trouble constructing that sentence.
And idioms exist in pretty much every language (including Chinese). Although common in conversation, one of the first things they teach you when writing for the general public is to avoid using them. They'll be a problem no matter what language you pick as your standard language.
BTW, there are way more than 273 irregular verbs in English. EnglishPage.com lists over 470 if you include archaic and antiquated forms. Most of them are either not in common use or are minor variants of other irregular verbs (e.g. "backslide" forms its tenses in the same way as "slide"), though. Also, most of the verbs that form their tenses "irregularly" do so in a handful of fairly similar ways (changing an ending "de" to "d" or replacing the last couple of letters with a "t" to form various past tenses). And there would usually be very little confusion if you mis-conjugated them as regular verbs. It would be wrong, but still understandable.
In spite of the large number of irregular verbs, English has one advantage that somewhat makes up for it. There are many, many fewer verb forms than in many European languages. Future tense is "will" or "shall" plus the present tense. With the exception of the verb "to be", the same verb form is used regardless of the subject with the exception of third-person singular, which typically just adds an "s" or "es". This makes English conjugation for regular verbs trivial by comparison with many other languages (French, for example).
Hong Kong considers English an official language, so I think you'll find that a significant percentage of the Internet-using, learned Chinese people are at least functional in English by necessity. According to Newsweek, English is very popular among school-aged folks, with some 175 million Chinese students actively learning it in school as of 2007. More than a quarter of the Chinese people have studied English at some point in their lives. By contrast, only about one in every 6,000 people in the United States have studied Chinese. The number of people learning Chinese as a second language pales compared with the number of people learning English worldwide, and given that I think the majority of new Chinese graduates are learning it, as the older population dies off and the younger folks grow up, within at most two generations, it will probably be as easy to use English in China as it is to use it in most parts of Western Europe now.
You mean all those former 3dfx graphics card users are still mad about the lack of Mac support?
It's a lot easier to get somebody hired at a company that supplies sandwiches than at an airline. The fact that fuel tankers must bring flammable liquids through security doesn't mean that it's not a security hole so big you can drive a truck through it. Literally.
Sabotaging a plane in such a way that it fails in the sky instead of on the ground before takeoff is harder than it sounds, and it sounds pretty hard. Much easier to smuggle something onto the aircraft and let someone onboard do the deed.
But by MPAA logic, commercial skipping is piracy, so watching streaming video on Hulu without watching the cable-company-provided ads is also piracy.... :-)
Yeah, I know. There's no "+1 Sad, but true" moderation. Such is life.
Why would everyone be having sex with trolls in the future? Was there some sort of nuclear holocaust that mutated the entire gene pool in a freakish way or something?
It's still almost two orders of magnitude lower than state-of-the-art photovoltaics (currently just over 42%). Even their ideal theoretical goal is less than half what PVs can do, though it is somewhat interesting in that it provides one possible solution to the "power at night" problem. So yeah, we really need to improve on 0.07%. A lot.
I realize that storage for PV systems is hard, but that doesn't mean we should necessarily abandon the concept in favor of a completely different means of power production. Maybe, maybe not. Time and the market will decide. :-)
Mod parent up. This anonymous coward is the first person who actually gets it. All the sites they are suing are for print ordering online, and it is entirely possible that Kodak did that first. Their patents likely stem from their acquisition of Ofoto, which started doing online print photo sales back in 1999. Shutterfly dates back to the same year. So it's going to come down to the careful study of the dates involved to know whether these patents are valid. That is, of course, assuming that any of these patents are valid in light of Bilski.
Either way, this is a prime example of why all "on the Internet" patents should be immediately invalidated en masse by a court ruling. Someone will come up with a way to do everything on the Internet, and for the most part, those techniques will not be particularly insightful or interesting. Thus, almost without exception, any patent whose primary difference from an existing practice is that it is "on the Internet" is a bad patent and should be tossed out. The burden of proof for such a patent should be very high.
Err... bothered to upgrade their gear. I'm not sure how I managed to edit a space into the middle of a word like that....