So how do you divide 356 by 10? Or is a year now 1000 days
I personally like the planck units approach, which would result in the day being 1602720 ticks long, or about 1.6 Mticks, though as I pondered in another post, it might be kind of cool to refine this into a base 120 system (actually, base 60 would probably be better and have all, or nearly all, the same advantages of base 120, with half as many characters to learn).
In any event, even if we go decimal, we could easilly measure time in terms of days, dekadays, hectodays, kilodays, decidays (hours-m), millidays (minutes-m) and microdays (seconds-m) and let the farmer's alminac tell the farmers when the earthly seasons change, which will be very different from when the martian seasons change anyway (assuming we'd like a system that will be usable in space and on other worlds, rather than limited to this one rather insignificant planet).
It would be a time system usable on any planet, convertable to local calendars as needed, and reasonably elegant (though I still think the planck units are cooler).
You try doing 1/5 of 12 vs 10 quickly in your head. Your point was? Is 3 much better than 5? Perhaps we should use base15 (3*5), base105 (3*5*7) or base1155 (3*5*7*11)?
3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, 8ths, 10ths, 12ths all work out smoothly.
This is nice because it gives us tenths (which is friendly to our ten-fingured counters), 3rds and 4ths (good for navigation), and numbers in general require less digits to write, reducing writer's cramp. I toyed with base pi and base e, but if we use planck units, base e comes out of it anyway, and base pi just made me hungry. [ok, I'm only partly joking. As I joke about this I find myself actually growing to like base 120 more and more, so that by the end of this post I suspect I'll have myself half conviced of something I'd started out mocking. But then again, maybe it's just the beer.]
Of course, coming up with 120 unique, immediately recognizable and sufficiently different characters to make numbers quickly readable won't be quite as much fun as coming up with 1155 of 'em, but it does yield a pretty elegant numbering system that would be fairly managable, and would map nicely to a 12 hour, 120 minute, 120 second clock.
Of course, the ideal would be to use planck units in a base 120 system instead of a base 10 system, but lets come up with 120 unique numerical digits before we get too carried away.:-)
As for it being too much trouble to change numbering systems, I say what the hell? Every comp sci major had to learn binary anyway, which as you'll not maps to base 120 rather nicely, either as binary or octal (sorry, hex advocates, your mapping is a little less elegant. It's an imperfect universe, but should we ever move to balanced trinary, that'll map out nicely as well). Time for the uneducated masses to get educated, or left behind, I say. Flexible minds should not be held back by their society's calcified least-common-demoninators.
In all seriousness, planck units in a base 120 numerical system would absolutely rock. Enough counting on our fingers already.
Without a payment source, you're going to see a lot of online gambling (both legit, and the scam artists) disappear. That's going to cut into HavenCo's bottom line, since I doubt they get much money from the exiled Tibetan Government.
I have never used paypal, and I do not know anyone who has. It is far easier to use an "internet friendly" credit card, with throw-away numbers (unique numbers for each purchase, use 'em up like you would a coupon book), or even a traditional credit card, for online purchases. As someone who has made a great number of online purchases, and who knows a couple of dozen other people who have likewise, I would be surprised if paypal accounts for any significant percentage of gambling, or other, online purchases.
I would imagine the vast majority of people prefer using a credit card, which has a liability limit of $50, rather than using a service that taps directly into their checkbook, where the customer enjoys no limitation on the amount of financial damange they can suffer due to fraud or theft.
All that aside, if their really is a demand for paypal-esque services that include such adult fun as gambling, marital aid purchases, pr0n, etc. I'm sure a competing service will arise and wipe the floor with eBay-PayPal.
I wonder what will happen if the British Government decides to collect taxes there?
It's not very likely, since Britain's own courts have recognized the sovereignty of Sealand.
Or have they been collecting taxes all along, and just don't care about the rest?
No, Britain hasn't been collecting taxes, and the royal family of Sealand (and presumably whatever citizens live there) haven't been paying any taxes to the UK.
Sealand has even fought a "war," and won, after which Germany ended up sending a diplomat to Sealand to negotiate the release of one of their citizens who was being held on charges of treason (the German also carried a Sealand passport). This amounted to a defacto recognition of Sealand's sovereignty (Germany first went to the British and were told that Britain made no claim to the territory of Sealand).
All of this information (and more) is available on the Sealand website, which is the first link that appears when you do a google search on the keyword "Sealand" (see the History section).
They do desing gas inlets so you can't put leaded gas (from a standard leaded gas pump) into a car with an engine for unleaded gas.
The "whateveritcalledinenglish" on the unleaded gas pump is smaller than the one on the leaded pump and so is the gas inlet of the unleaded car.
At least in Norway they are.
In the United States leaded gasoline for automobiles hasn't been sold (legally) for a number of years, but back in the day, during the transition to unleaded gas, we had the exact same discrepency in nozzle size you describe. You could put leaded gas into a car that took unleaded fuel with no trouble, but the other way around and you either needed a funnel, or did without.
There are literally thousands of examples of this kind of thing, where regulations are in place to protect consumers from costly, common, all too human mistakes that can occur even when the seller isn't trying to deceive the customer. I suspect the idiot you responded to is in fact trolling for just those examples, so he can whine about how much better things would be if the libertarians were in power and corporations could run roughshod over the rest of us with absolutely no restraints, rather than the minimalistic ones they have today.
Of course, the rest of us have the entire 19th and a good portion of the first half of the 20th century to learn from, in which the fallacy of lassaiz-faire capitalism, and all the suffering it results in, is exposed for all to see, along with all the countless corporate and marketing excesses of the day that led to consumer protection legislation (which has since been severely weakened) in the first place.
Consumer protection is a legitimate role for government to play, and one that is explicity allowed for in the constitution via the interstate trade clause. Interstate Trade is one area the government is constitutionally empowered to interfere in, even by the most conservative interpretation of the constitution, and consumer protection is certainly one of the more appropriate manifestations of such interference.
The reality is that extremists like that don't want constitutional government, so much as they want no government at all, at least when it comes to doing business. But of course nature abhors a vacuum, so where democratic rule is removed, despotic corporate rule is almost certain to set in.
Vitaligo is not "Contracted", it's inherited, and many who have it aren't born with the white splotches. Since it's an autoimmune disease, It can be set off by another infection or by getting immunity shots (rabies shot in my case), both of which trigger an immune response.
OK, if we're going to be pedantic you are correct. I should have said "set in" or "became active" at > 13 rather than "contracted." The point remains that the disease didn't become noticable, and the symptoms didn't become apparent, until Michael Jackson was a young adult, and the racist series of posts insinuating that he somehow "wanted to become white" to which I responded remain just as asinine, and profoundly idiotic, as before.
No one in this thread has said, or implied, this sort of nonsense. Spend all your spare time building strawmen, do you?
At this point you are either being deliberately obtuse, or didn't bother to read the context of the discussion.
The core software that makes up what we call the internet was written as free software under a variety of FreeBSDish (or, alternatively, X Window System-ish) licenses. The FreeBSD license does not predate the Free Software Foundation. I may be mistaken, but I believe the free license used by the X Window System doesn't predate the Free Software Foundation either.
Not that it matters. What is utterly obvious to anyone, such as myself, who was around at the time was that such programs (sendmail, bind, et. al.) were commonly referred to as Free Software. The Free Software Foundation has, over time, refined the definition of Free Software to prevent misuse of the term by deceptive persons out to capitalize on its fame, but these refinements in no way change the fact that the internet was built using Free Software. The argument was whether or not *BSD/X style licensed software is Free Software. The answer is a resounding yes, both from those who promote FreeBSD style licenses and those who promote the GPL.
As for what operating systems were in use at the time, NONE of them were remotely free. That was why the GNU project was created, and why the Linux kernel became so popular, so fast. In short, that is why we have GNU/Linux today, and likely played no small part in why we have FreeBSD today as well.
Oh yes. Jacko was complaining that the recording industry was racist (And we all know how proud he is of his black heritage, don't we.)
You ignornant fuck.
Michael Jackson suffers from a rare skin disorder that results in very pale splotches (like reverse birthmarks, big, ugly, and prominent) all over one's body and face. He had the rest of his skin lightened to hide the blotches, not because he had some desire to "be white." To insinuate such is bigotry at its most despicable.
Having said all this, I don't particularly care for Michael Jackson's music and his personal habits are, to put it mildly, questionable. I have no idea if the pedophile accusations had any merit or not, but the skin whitening accusations are totally bogus and profoundly racist.
He is very misguided IMHO to be solely emphesizing the racism of the music industry (though I'm sure it exists, it is clear that you can find labels that actively promote such black music as Hip Hop, Rap, Gangsta Rap, Blues, Jazz, etc. so where it does exist, it can be worked around). The "oppression" he is feeling is likely the oppression virtually every artist, black, white, green, or purple, who has dealt with the recording industry has felt: the cold certaintly that you have been forced into a form of indentured servitude and are being taken, firmly, to the cleaners. This form of artist misuse and abuse is so profound, so widespread, and so dramatic, that one wonders if any racial components aren't dwarfed in comparison.
Funny. I was under the impression that BSD software built the internet
Only in part
So, no. It wasn't built on Free Software, either. It was built on BSD.
BSD isfree software. Indeed, many of the BSD folks will argue that their software is "free-er" than GPLed software (it depends on your definition of freedom as to whether you agree with that stance or not, but either way it is irrelevant to this discussion).
I doubt you will find any BSD developer or proponent, anywhere on the face of the Earth, that would argue that their software isn't free software, and while FreeBSD predates Open Source by many, many years, FreeBSD does not predate the FSF, or the widespread, colloqual use of the term free software used to describe it, and many other projects all of which, taken together, formed the core of what we now call the Internet.
It is another very common myth that Free Software == GPLed software, and that is a myth that the Free Software Foundation, as well as the BSD folks, are at pains to dispell.
First, current technology has all but eliminated the need for million dollar studios, or million dollar equipment, in order to get production quality sound. Indeed, insisting on using such facilities is often one way the record companies rip off their artists and subsidize their own businesses.
The cost of printing CDs is also very low... witness the number of unsigned, independent artists who print their own CDs (and I'm not talking CDRs here, I'm talking true, silver, consumer-grade professionally pressed CDs).
I won't discuss how I can shoot better videos than much of what is out there, with a $2000 digital video camera and a couple of free software programs, except to note that the costs of making music videos are often as inflated as the costs of using a "recording studio" whose quality is easilly matched with about $10,000 worth of prosumer equipment and a PC.
I'm not saying that the artists shouldn't get paid more. I'm just saying that you have to understand that the record label has considerable expense in most of these situations.
It is an absolute myth that the recording companies pay these expenses. The front the money, but they do not pay the expenses.
All of those expenses are charged to the band, not paid by the record company, even while the record company pockets the lion's share of the profits. For details, see Courtney Love's detailed explanation of how the money breaks down, and how little the artists receive.
I fail to see how it is a good idea to ban the sales of copy protected CDs. The record comapnies are more than free to sell them as such, and I would hate to see the even more legislation from the government telling companies what they can and can't do, especialy when it is in a situation where no harm can come to the users of the products.
For the same reason the electronics industry is restricted from selling equipment which blacks out the radio reception in an entire building or neighborhood, or will tend to overheat wiring and start fires.
Copy protected CDs destroy expensive equipment, such as Macintosh computers and some high-end CD players. Banning their sale is minimalistic Consumer Protection, something is country is in sore need of, and something which is utterly appropriate for the government to be doing. Not everyone can be an expert on everything.
However, doing something like simply mandating a truth in advertiseing plan
I too would very much like to see a return to Truth in Advertising. Unfortunately, the courts have ruled the corporations are the same as living, breathing human beings, with all of their rights (but none of their vulnerabilities). This has been explicitly extended to include freedom of speech that is no more restricted than individual speech (go figure), so there is little if anything that can be done to coerce a company, much less a cartel, into not misrepresenting their incompatible disks as CDs.
If they want to sell a new, incompatible medium, they should be required to change its physical format such that it cannot accidentally be put into equipment it will damage. Requiring such disks to be 6" in diameter, instead of 4.5", for example, woud probably be sufficient.
The Compact Disk logo is a trademark issue, but frankly it is too subtle for most consumers to recognize, so while Phillips will likely not allow such copy protected CD-resembling media to bear their logo, the customer will likely only become aware of that discrepency after their incompatible drive has refused to play the music they purchased (at best), or has been damaged or destroyed by the disk.
This is not acceptable, and I am frankly amazed that anyone could argue that caveate emptor would be at all an acceptable standard of behavior, much less regulation, for something like this.
Because it did. All major server side software on the internet (major meaning leads its market), an Open Source application (as, of course, defined by the Open Source Definition) leads.
Well, that statement actually isn't be true, and the folks at the Free Software Foundation would likely (and correctly) take exception to that claim. There really isn't any reason to create more bad blood between the Free Software people and the Open Source people, and I would be very surprised if ESR would ever make such a claim, given that the entire process preceeded his movement by a number of years.
The internet was built using Free Software, by free software developers, back when it was still called Free Software, and the term "open source" had not yet been coined. NOTE that 'Free Software' isn't the same as GNU.
Free Software built the Internet. Not Open Source. Not GNU. Not the Free Software Foundation.
Open Source, on the other hand, provided an important bridge between corporate suits and the concept of using peer review and the scientific process to obtain better quality software. My only nit to pick with the open source folks is their shyness in discussing Software Freedom, but perhaps that is simply incompatible with their role, which is to extend the concepts of free source code availability to corporate Earth, to which the words Free Software and Freedom remain somewhat alien and mistrusted.
It is rather amazing that so many corporate types, who pride themselves on a deeper understanding of capitalism than the average person (though I suspect that pride is misplaced much of the time) are unable to recognize the importance of fundamental freedom which allows free markets to operate, and instead of understanding the deep pragmatism that underlies freedom in general, and software freedom in particular, they associate it with vague notions of "idealism" that they somehow assume are therefor incompatible with business. Freedom, and software freedom in particular, are incompatible with oligarchies and monopolies, not free markets and competetive capitalism. Quite the reverse, but I digress.
Open Source plays an important role in educating the public at large, and bringing them part way toward understanding what software freedom is about, which is why I personally regret the animosity I've seen between the OSI folks and the FSF. From my perspective OSI is the guy at the door saying "come into my shop and have a look" to someone who would have otherwise walked on by, while the FSF is the guy behind the counter explaining the fundamentals of what it is you are buying, and why.
The moral thing to do, of course, is to actually buy the CDs and put money towards the artist, to reimburse them for providing you with nice music.
No, the moral thing to do is to send the artist one or two dollars directly, rather than buying the CD.
Artists are generally at the mercy of the recording labels, and are typically paid $0.25 for each cd sold, while the recording label pockets the vast, vast majority of the profits. Supporting those institutions which are ripping off the artists, of which the recording industry is by far the worst offendor, is a very immoral act. Your $1.00 to the artist for downloading their entire CD off of whatever p2p or distributed service you use puts a great deal more money in their pocket than buying the CD legally does.
When it comes to buying the music online, where artists are paid fractions of a penny per song, the difference is even more pronounced and the artist treated even less fairly by the recording label. Download the ogg or mp3 file for free and pay the artist via fairtunes, or directly, instead. You will be doing a great deal more to support the artist than you will be if you go and buy their CD legally.
Note: I say this is the moral thing to do, not the legal thing to do (for those too clue-challenged to tell the difference). IANAL and am giving moral, or ethical, not legal, advice.
But the vast majority of college students are just too selfish to realise that.
Hearing that from someone who is promoting a "support the music industry, it is your moral imperetive" shill is really precious. I would simply point out that, for anyone defending the RIAA on this tack, to ponder the following words:
In comparison to what the Recording Industry has done to artists over the last 70 years, the p2p services and the worst non-commercial copyright violators on the planet are saints, and that includes those college students you so deride.
Um, what? I wasn't aware of anyone trying to duplicate the functionality of the Xbox. Since they're being sold at a loss, that would be rather pointless.
The point is that it is irrelevant that Microsoft is selling the hardware at a loss.
They've taken their customer's money, therefor their customers own the box, period. The manner in which they lock down how their customers can USE their own property is unconscionable, and I for applaud the GNU and Linux folks for providing a Free and legal means for the customer to reacquire control of their own property, back from the hands of those who think nothing of designing a business model that requires and presupposes invasive violations of individual privacy and liberty in order to be successful.
And my grade? I got a D. Why? Because, in the words of the teacher, "I wasn't being cooperative and participating in a constructive manner.."
You should have gotten at least a B. Maybe not an "A" as ethics is a part of what any polisci education should include, even if our country has degenerated to the point where they are seldom, if ever, apparent (with economic results like Enron et. al. to show for it).
Why would I give you a B, and perhaps an A? Because you probably single handedly not only provided the rest of the class with a solid, realistic lesson in what politics in America has become, you also probably disillusioned most of that class and insured they would never consider a career in politics.
20-30 less potential politicians in the world...that alone would earn you an "A" in my gradebook.
Which part of he wants absolutely no Microsoft software anywhere near it didn't you understand?
Shilling Microsoft solutions in answer to an article asking specifically how to do something without Microsoft software is not only offtopic, it is insulting to the intelligence of any reader not in the partisan throes of the pro-microsoft zealotry camp.
Now, I'm not saying that there isn't something similar for Linux. But if Apple couldn't come up with anything more productive for MacOS 9, which was intended from the start to be a consumer-level, desktop, OS, I am highly doubtful that Linux developers can come up with anything better.
So basically you are using your ignorance of GNU/Linux as an excuse for posting an offtopic response promoting your partisan software when in fact the only cognizant answer you could have possibly given would have been "I don't know."
Indeed, even a fraction of research on your part would have allowed for a slightly more intelligent answer than "use Microsoft, it kicks Apple's ass and GNU/Linux can't possibly be any better than Apple, so it must suck!", for perhaps then you might have stumbled across the Linux Chinese HOWTO.
Interestingly enough, both the Chinese and Taiwanese governments do not share your pessimism... both are using and promoting GNU/Linux and discouraging further use of Microsoft Windows, and while it may or may not be as polished as Microsoft's Japanese IME implimentations, it should be noted that (a) Japanese' use of Kanji aside, Japanese isn't remotely the same as Chinese and (b) the Freedom (both financial and otherwise) afforded by using a Free operating system such as GNU/Linux, and actively taken away by submitting to a Microsoft based solution, vastly outweighs any amount of polish Microsoft could possibly offer.
The word "universal" actually never appears in my note.
Excellent point.
I read the article, then read the/. posts including the "this is too English-centric anti-American nonsense that always seems to get modded to +5 no matter how inappropriate it is (remarkable how provincially prejudiced many of those who accuse Americans of provincialism are, isn't it?), then rebbutted some of those arguments without going back to reread the article again. You're right... the criticisms wouldn't have held had you used the word 'universal', but in fact you did not, making their criticisms even more asinine, their +5 moderation even more idiotic, and my expression of annoyance at their attempted, and less appropriate than usual, policing of 'international political correctness', even more justified.
These are some very interesting insights, and I really hope you'll get together with the author of this piece and perhaps work out some optimized layouts based on these criteria.
1) I move my hands as well when I type (no formal typing education at all... completely self-taught by simply doing, and I'm the fastest typer I know), though not to strike different keys with different fingers like a pianist, but rather to make the reach for some of the more distant keys more comfortable.
This does result in typos, however, some of which people will doubtless see here on/.
2) Your insight on the natural position of the fingers is brilliant, if obvious (as most brilliant things tend to be, in retrospect).
A layout and typing regime based on home keys as awef and jio; would be very interesting to develop, one allowing hand movement a la a pianist and one (which I personally would prefer) assuming the fingers return to their home coordinates after each letter is typed.
Indeed, I would break the possibilities out into several options:
1) awef jio; homekeys, no laterial or vertical movement 2) awef jio; homekeys, vertical movement but no laternal movement 3) awef jio; homekeys, vertical and lateral movement 4) awef jio; homekeys, lateral movement but not vertical movement
and then see which of the 4 results in the easiest, and quickest, typing movement.
I would surmise that #1 would be preferred by many who already know how to type and might not be able to make the adjustment to MOVEMENT like a pianist might, while those starting from scratch would find one of the other three more natural and useful.
An improvement of this nature is something I would be willing to try a new keyboard layout and typing regime for... I played with dvorak once, but didn't find the improvement worth the trouble. This, on the other hand, would be more than worth the trouble.
A final aside to purists who are griping about the author's unfortunate use of the word Universal: with the exception of most physiscists and astronomers, virtually everyone misuses the world 'universal', be it a movie studio, a beauty pagent, a mechanic, or any number of other contexts.
It was obvious from the context of the discussion that the author was working on an optimized keyboard for use with the English language, so obvious as to not even warrant a comment. The fact that the author wrote the article in English, sampled English works (and programming languages) in his study, and published in that very same language, to a web site located in the heartland of America (Michigan) targeted at English speaking readers, should have provided a big enough clue even for those who are clue-challenged.
Non-english speakers screaming and yelling about how this (obviously) doesn't apply to their language are belaboring the painfully obvious, and come across more like that quintessential, insecure adolescent boy who, during a lecture on female sexuality stands up and declares "but boys are different!"
Of course an optimized german keyboard likely won't use the qwerz layout, but something very unlike qwertz, very unlike dvorak, and very unlike a keyboard optimized for English. Ditto for French, not to mention numerous languages that do not even use the Roman (or Cyrillic) alphabets, such as Hindi, Thai, Japanese, and Chinese. Pointing this out in the context of this discussion is akin to pointing out that a study on the aerodynamic properties of a piston-driven propeller don't map well to the art of flavoring a Hollondais sauce with the proper mix of spices, to which the 'universal' (in an earthly sense) response is generally something on the order of: No shit, Sherlock.
That's the problem with running a service that's (for the most part) black market...when someone starts fucking it all up with counter-attacks, there's really not a lot of recourse.
Copyright is irrelevant. This is a premeditated Denial of Service Attack against a service that may, or may not, be facilitating the sharing of copyrighted material (and is likely providing a conduit for both... not all artists trying to get exposure have signed recording contracts with the RIAA, or with anyone for that matter, and some use p2p networks to get their material heard by as many people as they can in the hopes of building name and brand recognition).
What if this attack were against the entire http protocol throughout the internet, taking down web pages everywhere because a few were trading copyrighted material illegally? Would we tolerate it? Absolutely not. Not even if for every legitimate, google or slashdot style website there were ten websites trading Warez and mp3s.
The act of DOSing a service is illegal (at least in some places), regardless of whether it is a copyright cartel dinasaur leading the attack to protect their outdated business model, or script kiddies and l337 h4x0rs defacing or DOSing their least favorite corporate website to express disdain.
Gentoo, Source Mage, Debian, and other GNU/Linux distributions that use the internet to display information may well adopt p2p methods to eliminate bandwidth bottlenecks, particularly during the release of new versions of popular packages like Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and Open Office. If Microsoft were performing such a DOS attack there would likely be people facing fines and perhaps jailtime.
This is an attack on the Internet itself. FTP, http, scp, all of these can be used to share copyrighted material. Shall we allow cartels a free hand in making those protocols unusable?
There are legal remedies for prosecuting copyright violation. There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of illegal activity in the name of 'protecting copyright', and while there will undoubtably be technical solutions to much of this kind of thing (anonymous GPG signatures and webs of trust, etc.), the bottom line is that you cannot have the majority of civilization constrained by one set of laws that make these sort of attacks illegal, while allowing another segment of society to engage in this sort of activity simply because they argue it protects their business interests.
I agree with the general sense of your post... the RIAA (and MPAA, who are the ones involved in the dummy DivX nonsense) will find themselves contributing to their own demise in any number of ways as they conduct attacks against basic internet protocols, be they p2p or client-server.
I must say I am _amazed_ by how big companies are allowed to cripple civil rights over there. A country previously recogniced as one of the greatest democracies.
Yesterday I attended a party in Evanston (a suburb of Chicago). My host asked that I bring a bottle of wine, so I took along a magnum of 2000 Yellow Tail Shiraz.
5 cops were guarding the entrance end of the platform, searching everyone. Apparently, in the Land of the Free, an adult American is no longer permitted to carry a sealed bottle of wine onto a train (even though I had no cork screw or wine glasses on my person). In other words, if you are too poor to own a car, you cannot transport alcohol, even in sealed form, over any significant distance in this country anymore, especially not on our "Independence" day.
Fortunately for me the El Train was far less stringently controlled, so while I was an hour late to my friend's 4th of July party, I was at least able to make it.
We have already lost most of our freedoms in this country.
We have lost the freedom from search and seizure without due process.
We have lost (much) of the separation of church and state, which means most minority religions (and non-religions such as agnostacism or athiesm) have essentially lost much of their religious freedom.
We have lost much of our right to bear arms. Not a personal pieve of mine, but relevant nevertheless since the act requred widespread violation of the constitution and judicial tolerance of those violations.
We have lost the right not to be detained without charges, without due process, and with access to an attourney. People are now routinely "disappeared" into our Gulag, always under the excuse of anti-terrorism, where they are held incommunicado for weeks or even months. Some may in fact be terrorists, but most are not.
We have lost numerous personal, daily freedoms (like the ability to take a bottle of wine over to a friend's home who doesn't live within walking distance), many within the last few months.
Now, through Palladium and/or Disney Holling's DRM efforts we are about to lose our very freedom of speech in the digital age. Based on all of the other lost freedoms, given up in the name of War on [drugs|sex offendors|terrorism], I do not hold out much of any hope for preserving the remaining tatters of the constitution as our illustrious leaders open up Yet Another War, this time on (cracking? viruses? copyright violation? technical savvy that surpasses the FBI's?) Whatever they end up calling this farce, I'm sure they'll find a term that evokes the proper level of fear and dread in the general public to justify the removal of these last, tattered freedoms from our all-too-willing hands, and as one of our founding fathers has warned, we will find in our haste to trade the last of our freedoms for the perception of a little security that we, in fact, have neither.
Certainly the police stopping me for wanting to take a bottle of wine to a friends weren't protecting anyone, for indeed these encroachments on our liberty have absolutely nothing to do with protection and security, and everything to do with simple Power.
Unfortunately, by the time the majority of the people understand that all of this nonsense is about an unprecendented Power grab by an unconstitutional secret police (FBI, ), it will be far too late to do much of anything about it. If it isn't already.
In regards to email, the original poster is correct. Feel free to look at the definition of SPAM in any anti-spam law.
The definition of SPAM predates any legislation on the subject by years. The fact that our corrupt government has drafted legislation (or, in some cases, allowed mass marketers to draft legislation) that changes the definition for the convinience of the SPAMMERs themselves in fact does nothing to legitimize the incorrect definition you are defending. It does serve, however, to delegitize the government that is redefining the term... the same government, perhaps, that defines the total destruction of a southeast Asian village as "liberation," fascist contra-revolutonaries as "freedom fighters," computer security crackers as "terrorists," and so forth.
From whatis:
Spam is unsolicited e-mail on the Internet. From the sender's point-of-view, it's a form of bulk mail, often to a list culled from subscribers to a Usenet discussion group or obtained by companies that specialize in creating e-mail distribution lists. To the receiver, it usually seems like junk e-mail. In general, it's not considered good netiquette to send spam. It's generally equivalent to unsolicited phone marketing calls except that the user pays for part of the message since everyone shares the cost of maintaining the Internet.
The most authoritative definitions are probably the following ones, offered by the Net Abuse FAQ (for USENET)
The term "spam" [...] means "the same article (or essentially the same article) posted an unacceptably high number of times to one or more newsgroups." CONTENT IS IRRELEVANT. 'Spam' doesn't mean "ads." It doesn't mean "abuse." It doesn't mean "posts whose content I object to." Spam is a funky name for a phenomenon that can be measured pretty objectively: did that post appear X times?
and the email abuse FAQ (for email)
Unsolicited email is any email message received where the recipient did not specifically ask to receive it.
Taken by itself, unsolicited email does not constitute abuse; not all unsolicited email is also undesired email. For example, receiving "unsolicited" email from a long-lost friend or relative is certainly not abuse. The reason that it is defined separately is that email abuse takes several forms, all of which begin with the fact that the email received is unsolicited.
Bulk email is any group of messages sent via email, with substantially identical content, to a large number of addresses at once.
First, a short lesson on the term "SPAM". Spam describes a particular kind of Usenet posting (and canned spiced ham), but is now often used to describe many kinds of inappropriate activities, including some email-related events. It is technically incorrect to use "spam" to describe email abuse, although attempting to correct the practice would amount to tilting at windmills. For more on the history of the term, look for "2.4) Where did the term 'Spam' come from?" in http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.htm l
UBE: Unsolicited Bulk Email
UCE: Unsolicited Commercial Email
MMF: Make Money Fast
MLM: Multi-Level Marketing
[ are all forms of abuse, commonly referred to as 'spam' ]
The only people who are defining SPAM in the self-serving, restricted manner as you are are the SPAMMERs themselves and the legislators they have bought (and, indeed, not even all of them).
Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail with a specific commercial pitch or advertisement including a price.
Wrong, and spoken like a true spammer. (I hope you are not a spammer, but your definition echos almost precisely that which is used by some Spammers to justify their bulk emails).
SPAM is Unsolicited Bulk Email. Period.
Whether it is promoting Salvation from the Lord Our God(tm), Senator Hollings Reelection Campaign, or the Latest Penis Extention scam, it is SPAM.
However, opt in mailing lists are NOT SPAM because the Opt In process itself is an act of solicitation.
Of course, if a vendor or web site changes your selection from 'not opting in' to 'opting in' then, of course it is SPAM, because in fact you never did opt in, and they have deliberately miscategorized their lists in order to decieve.
Any bulk email that arrives without your having asked to be included on a list (e.g. for notifications, etc.) is SPAM. Period.
All of that having been said, it is my understanding that Mandrake's Newsletter is opt in, which means by opting in you solicited it and it is therefor NOT SPAM.
Over the last few years of open source, why is it that when an open source company becomes successful financially (and by this, I mean is able to operate without going under), they become the source of evil-ness in the eyes of others?
This presumption isn't correct IMHO. Not even Richard Stallman (whos rhetoric, while often quite insightful, is about as feiery as it gets) is guilty of what you describe here, much less the majority of the GNU/Linux and Free Software/Open Source community at large.
Red Hat has done some great things for the community, and has given back a great deal to the community. I may not prefer their distro personally, but I have no trouble suggesting it (or Mandrake) to friends who want to install and play around with Linux.
What has RedHat done that is so bad?
They have encouraged proprietary software vendors to release their wares in a manner that is compatible with Red Hat and not other distributions, by falsely implying that they, Red Hat, set the standards and everyone else follows.
This is bad because (a) Red Hat does not (and shouldn't) set the standards and (b) it is quite possible, and vastly preferable, to package software in a distribution-agnostic form installable by evertyone. Blender did it, Loki did it, Id and several other proprietary vendors do it now.
This is my only real criticism of Red Hat, and if they would cease and desist this behavior (which IMHO does in fact do harm to the community as a whole, and to the vendors who are seduced by the erroneous notion they have to target one or two main distros) I would have absolutely nothing bad to say about them whatsoever.
UL, on the other hand, is an effort to exploit exactly this myth, mislead software vendors in the process (to their detriment and the detriment of the GNU/Linux community at large), all without giving even a fraction of what Red Hat has given back to the community, and that is a very real and serious problem. Actually, propogating the notion of commercially imposed standards (rather than standards formed by consensus) and forcing users to use a One True Distro (or forever chase and mimick a One True Distro) is a terrible disservice to the community, regardless of how much is "given back" to the community to compensate, and it is an effort that should be resisted and fought.
While your rhetoric sounds nice to a well-educated linux guru, it hold one major flaw: it assumes all Linux users know how to download, compile, and install all their own software.
That simply isn't true. It assumes the Distribution Creators know how to untar a tarball and install it into their own distribution.
There is nothing preventing Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, Debian, et. al. from creating their own RPM/deb wrapper utility that will take a binary tarball and install it onto their respective distribution, perhaps even parsing the list of required libraries and versions and mapping it to their dependency resolution mechanisms anyway.
This is a far more reasonable and equitable approach to take than to tell vendors they should target one or two "preferred" distros and leave everyone else groping on their own, denying people choice and undermining the diversity of the community in the process.
You make grand assumptions about where people are coming from without any reasonable or logical basis for doing so, and extrapolate from that (example: I am in the "GNU/Linux should be for everybody camp", but that doesn't imply what you erroneously think it does), but those underlying assumptions are as false as those being promoted by the likes of United Linux, and the conclusions thereby just as erroneous.
Slashdot Mirror
So how do you divide 356 by 10? Or is a year now 1000 days
I personally like the planck units approach, which would result in the day being 1602720 ticks long, or about 1.6 Mticks, though as I pondered in another post, it might be kind of cool to refine this into a base 120 system (actually, base 60 would probably be better and have all, or nearly all, the same advantages of base 120, with half as many characters to learn).
In any event, even if we go decimal, we could easilly measure time in terms of days, dekadays, hectodays, kilodays, decidays (hours-m), millidays (minutes-m) and microdays (seconds-m) and let the farmer's alminac tell the farmers when the earthly seasons change, which will be very different from when the martian seasons change anyway (assuming we'd like a system that will be usable in space and on other worlds, rather than limited to this one rather insignificant planet).
It would be a time system usable on any planet, convertable to local calendars as needed, and reasonably elegant (though I still think the planck units are cooler).
You try doing 1/5 of 12 vs 10 quickly in your head. Your point was? Is 3 much better than 5? Perhaps we should use base15 (3*5), base105 (3*5*7) or base1155 (3*5*7*11)?
:-)
Clearly, base 120 is the answer.
120/12 = 10
120/10 = 12
120/8 = 15
120/6 = 20
120/5 = 24
120/4 = 30
120/3 = 40
120/2 = 60
3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, 8ths, 10ths, 12ths all work out smoothly.
This is nice because it gives us tenths (which is friendly to our ten-fingured counters), 3rds and 4ths (good for navigation), and numbers in general require less digits to write, reducing writer's cramp. I toyed with base pi and base e, but if we use planck units, base e comes out of it anyway, and base pi just made me hungry. [ok, I'm only partly joking. As I joke about this I find myself actually growing to like base 120 more and more, so that by the end of this post I suspect I'll have myself half conviced of something I'd started out mocking. But then again, maybe it's just the beer.]
Of course, coming up with 120 unique, immediately recognizable and sufficiently different characters to make numbers quickly readable won't be quite as much fun as coming up with 1155 of 'em, but it does yield a pretty elegant numbering system that would be fairly managable, and would map nicely to a 12 hour, 120 minute, 120 second clock.
Of course, the ideal would be to use planck units in a base 120 system instead of a base 10 system, but lets come up with 120 unique numerical digits before we get too carried away.
As for it being too much trouble to change numbering systems, I say what the hell? Every comp sci major had to learn binary anyway, which as you'll not maps to base 120 rather nicely, either as binary or octal (sorry, hex advocates, your mapping is a little less elegant. It's an imperfect universe, but should we ever move to balanced trinary, that'll map out nicely as well).
Time for the uneducated masses to get educated, or left behind, I say. Flexible minds should not be held back by their society's calcified least-common-demoninators.
In all seriousness, planck units in a base 120 numerical system would absolutely rock. Enough counting on our fingers already.
Without a payment source, you're going to see a lot of online gambling (both legit, and the scam artists) disappear. That's going to cut into HavenCo's bottom line, since I doubt they get much money from the exiled Tibetan Government.
I have never used paypal, and I do not know anyone who has. It is far easier to use an "internet friendly" credit card, with throw-away numbers (unique numbers for each purchase, use 'em up like you would a coupon book), or even a traditional credit card, for online purchases. As someone who has made a great number of online purchases, and who knows a couple of dozen other people who have likewise, I would be surprised if paypal accounts for any significant percentage of gambling, or other, online purchases.
I would imagine the vast majority of people prefer using a credit card, which has a liability limit of $50, rather than using a service that taps directly into their checkbook, where the customer enjoys no limitation on the amount of financial damange they can suffer due to fraud or theft.
All that aside, if their really is a demand for paypal-esque services that include such adult fun as gambling, marital aid purchases, pr0n, etc. I'm sure a competing service will arise and wipe the floor with eBay-PayPal.
I wonder what will happen if the British Government decides to collect taxes there?
It's not very likely, since Britain's own courts have recognized the sovereignty of Sealand.
Or have they been collecting taxes all along, and just don't care about the rest?
No, Britain hasn't been collecting taxes, and the royal family of Sealand (and presumably whatever citizens live there) haven't been paying any taxes to the UK.
Sealand has even fought a "war," and won, after which Germany ended up sending a diplomat to Sealand to negotiate the release of one of their citizens who was being held on charges of treason (the German also carried a Sealand passport). This amounted to a defacto recognition of Sealand's sovereignty (Germany first went to the British and were told that Britain made no claim to the territory of Sealand).
All of this information (and more) is available on the Sealand website, which is the first link that appears when you do a google search on the keyword "Sealand" (see the History section).
They do desing gas inlets so you can't put leaded gas (from a standard leaded gas pump) into a car with an engine for unleaded gas.
The "whateveritcalledinenglish" on the unleaded gas pump is smaller than the one on the leaded pump and so is the gas inlet of the unleaded car.
At least in Norway they are.
In the United States leaded gasoline for automobiles hasn't been sold (legally) for a number of years, but back in the day, during the transition to unleaded gas, we had the exact same discrepency in nozzle size you describe. You could put leaded gas into a car that took unleaded fuel with no trouble, but the other way around and you either needed a funnel, or did without.
There are literally thousands of examples of this kind of thing, where regulations are in place to protect consumers from costly, common, all too human mistakes that can occur even when the seller isn't trying to deceive the customer. I suspect the idiot you responded to is in fact trolling for just those examples, so he can whine about how much better things would be if the libertarians were in power and corporations could run roughshod over the rest of us with absolutely no restraints, rather than the minimalistic ones they have today.
Of course, the rest of us have the entire 19th and a good portion of the first half of the 20th century to learn from, in which the fallacy of lassaiz-faire capitalism, and all the suffering it results in, is exposed for all to see, along with all the countless corporate and marketing excesses of the day that led to consumer protection legislation (which has since been severely weakened) in the first place.
Consumer protection is a legitimate role for government to play, and one that is explicity allowed for in the constitution via the interstate trade clause. Interstate Trade is one area the government is constitutionally empowered to interfere in, even by the most conservative interpretation of the constitution, and consumer protection is certainly one of the more appropriate manifestations of such interference.
The reality is that extremists like that don't want constitutional government, so much as they want no government at all, at least when it comes to doing business. But of course nature abhors a vacuum, so where democratic rule is removed, despotic corporate rule is almost certain to set in.
Vitaligo is not "Contracted", it's inherited, and many who have it aren't born with the white splotches. Since it's an autoimmune disease, It can be set off by another infection or by getting immunity shots (rabies shot in my case), both of which trigger an immune response.
OK, if we're going to be pedantic you are correct. I should have said "set in" or "became active" at > 13 rather than "contracted." The point remains that the disease didn't become noticable, and the symptoms didn't become apparent, until Michael Jackson was a young adult, and the racist series of posts insinuating that he somehow "wanted to become white" to which I responded remain just as asinine, and profoundly idiotic, as before.
Please don't tell me you think BSD == FreeBSD.
No one in this thread has said, or implied, this sort of nonsense. Spend all your spare time building strawmen, do you?
At this point you are either being deliberately obtuse, or didn't bother to read the context of the discussion.
The core software that makes up what we call the internet was written as free software under a variety of FreeBSDish (or, alternatively, X Window System-ish) licenses. The FreeBSD license does not predate the Free Software Foundation. I may be mistaken, but I believe the free license used by the X Window System doesn't predate the Free Software Foundation either.
Not that it matters. What is utterly obvious to anyone, such as myself, who was around at the time was that such programs (sendmail, bind, et. al.) were commonly referred to as Free Software. The Free Software Foundation has, over time, refined the definition of Free Software to prevent misuse of the term by deceptive persons out to capitalize on its fame, but these refinements in no way change the fact that the internet was built using Free Software. The argument was whether or not *BSD/X style licensed software is Free Software. The answer is a resounding yes, both from those who promote FreeBSD style licenses and those who promote the GPL.
As for what operating systems were in use at the time, NONE of them were remotely free. That was why the GNU project was created, and why the Linux kernel became so popular, so fast. In short, that is why we have GNU/Linux today, and likely played no small part in why we have FreeBSD today as well.
so these inverted birthmarks, appeared when he was > 13? hm.
Yes. That is what happens when you contract a disease at > 13. The symptoms (skin blotching in this case) set in at > 13.
Batting about 60 on the IQ test, aren't you.
Oh yes. Jacko was complaining that the recording industry was racist (And we all know how proud he is of his black heritage, don't we.)
You ignornant fuck.
Michael Jackson suffers from a rare skin disorder that results in very pale splotches (like reverse birthmarks, big, ugly, and prominent) all over one's body and face. He had the rest of his skin lightened to hide the blotches, not because he had some desire to "be white." To insinuate such is bigotry at its most despicable.
Having said all this, I don't particularly care for Michael Jackson's music and his personal habits are, to put it mildly, questionable. I have no idea if the pedophile accusations had any merit or not, but the skin whitening accusations are totally bogus and profoundly racist.
He is very misguided IMHO to be solely emphesizing the racism of the music industry (though I'm sure it exists, it is clear that you can find labels that actively promote such black music as Hip Hop, Rap, Gangsta Rap, Blues, Jazz, etc. so where it does exist, it can be worked around). The "oppression" he is feeling is likely the oppression virtually every artist, black, white, green, or purple, who has dealt with the recording industry has felt: the cold certaintly that you have been forced into a form of indentured servitude and are being taken, firmly, to the cleaners. This form of artist misuse and abuse is so profound, so widespread, and so dramatic, that one wonders if any racial components aren't dwarfed in comparison.
Funny. I was under the impression that BSD software built the internet
Only in part
So, no. It wasn't built on Free Software, either. It was built on BSD.
BSD is free software. Indeed, many of the BSD folks will argue that their software is "free-er" than GPLed software (it depends on your definition of freedom as to whether you agree with that stance or not, but either way it is irrelevant to this discussion).
I doubt you will find any BSD developer or proponent, anywhere on the face of the Earth, that would argue that their software isn't free software, and while FreeBSD predates Open Source by many, many years, FreeBSD does not predate the FSF, or the widespread, colloqual use of the term free software used to describe it, and many other projects all of which, taken together, formed the core of what we now call the Internet.
It is another very common myth that Free Software == GPLed software, and that is a myth that the Free Software Foundation, as well as the BSD folks, are at pains to dispell.
Just to play devil's advocate here
;-)
... witness the number of unsigned, independent artists who print their own CDs (and I'm not talking CDRs here, I'm talking true, silver, consumer-grade professionally pressed CDs).
Right back at ya, Satan
First, current technology has all but eliminated the need for million dollar studios, or million dollar equipment, in order to get production quality sound. Indeed, insisting on using such facilities is often one way the record companies rip off their artists and subsidize their own businesses.
The cost of printing CDs is also very low
I won't discuss how I can shoot better videos than much of what is out there, with a $2000 digital video camera and a couple of free software programs, except to note that the costs of making music videos are often as inflated as the costs of using a "recording studio" whose quality is easilly matched with about $10,000 worth of prosumer equipment and a PC.
I'm not saying that the artists shouldn't get paid more. I'm just saying that you have to understand that the record label has considerable expense in most of these situations.
It is an absolute myth that the recording companies pay these expenses. The front the money, but they do not pay the expenses.
All of those expenses are charged to the band, not paid by the record company, even while the record company pockets the lion's share of the profits. For details, see Courtney Love's detailed explanation of how the money breaks down, and how little the artists receive.
I fail to see how it is a good idea to ban the sales of copy protected CDs. The record comapnies are more than free to sell them as such, and I would hate to see the even more legislation from the government telling companies what they can and can't do, especialy when it is in a situation where no harm can come to the users of the products.
For the same reason the electronics industry is restricted from selling equipment which blacks out the radio reception in an entire building or neighborhood, or will tend to overheat wiring and start fires.
Copy protected CDs destroy expensive equipment, such as Macintosh computers and some high-end CD players. Banning their sale is minimalistic Consumer Protection, something is country is in sore need of, and something which is utterly appropriate for the government to be doing. Not everyone can be an expert on everything.
However, doing something like simply mandating a truth in advertiseing plan
I too would very much like to see a return to Truth in Advertising. Unfortunately, the courts have ruled the corporations are the same as living, breathing human beings, with all of their rights (but none of their vulnerabilities). This has been explicitly extended to include freedom of speech that is no more restricted than individual speech (go figure), so there is little if anything that can be done to coerce a company, much less a cartel, into not misrepresenting their incompatible disks as CDs.
If they want to sell a new, incompatible medium, they should be required to change its physical format such that it cannot accidentally be put into equipment it will damage. Requiring such disks to be 6" in diameter, instead of 4.5", for example, woud probably be sufficient.
The Compact Disk logo is a trademark issue, but frankly it is too subtle for most consumers to recognize, so while Phillips will likely not allow such copy protected CD-resembling media to bear their logo, the customer will likely only become aware of that discrepency after their incompatible drive has refused to play the music they purchased (at best), or has been damaged or destroyed by the disk.
This is not acceptable, and I am frankly amazed that anyone could argue that caveate emptor would be at all an acceptable standard of behavior, much less regulation, for something like this.
Is the following slogan:
Open Source built the Internet
Because it did. All major server side software on the internet (major meaning leads its market), an Open Source application (as, of course, defined by the Open Source Definition) leads.
Well, that statement actually isn't be true, and the folks at the Free Software Foundation would likely (and correctly) take exception to that claim. There really isn't any reason to create more bad blood between the Free Software people and the Open Source people, and I would be very surprised if ESR would ever make such a claim, given that the entire process preceeded his movement by a number of years.
The internet was built using Free Software, by free software developers, back when it was still called Free Software, and the term "open source" had not yet been coined. NOTE that 'Free Software' isn't the same as GNU.
Free Software built the Internet. Not Open Source. Not GNU. Not the Free Software Foundation.
Open Source, on the other hand, provided an important bridge between corporate suits and the concept of using peer review and the scientific process to obtain better quality software. My only nit to pick with the open source folks is their shyness in discussing Software Freedom, but perhaps that is simply incompatible with their role, which is to extend the concepts of free source code availability to corporate Earth, to which the words Free Software and Freedom remain somewhat alien and mistrusted.
It is rather amazing that so many corporate types, who pride themselves on a deeper understanding of capitalism than the average person (though I suspect that pride is misplaced much of the time) are unable to recognize the importance of fundamental freedom which allows free markets to operate, and instead of understanding the deep pragmatism that underlies freedom in general, and software freedom in particular, they associate it with vague notions of "idealism" that they somehow assume are therefor incompatible with business. Freedom, and software freedom in particular, are incompatible with oligarchies and monopolies, not free markets and competetive capitalism. Quite the reverse, but I digress.
Open Source plays an important role in educating the public at large, and bringing them part way toward understanding what software freedom is about, which is why I personally regret the animosity I've seen between the OSI folks and the FSF. From my perspective OSI is the guy at the door saying "come into my shop and have a look" to someone who would have otherwise walked on by, while the FSF is the guy behind the counter explaining the fundamentals of what it is you are buying, and why.
The moral thing to do, of course, is to actually buy the CDs and put money towards the artist, to reimburse them for providing you with nice music.
No, the moral thing to do is to send the artist one or two dollars directly, rather than buying the CD.
Artists are generally at the mercy of the recording labels, and are typically paid $0.25 for each cd sold, while the recording label pockets the vast, vast majority of the profits. Supporting those institutions which are ripping off the artists, of which the recording industry is by far the worst offendor, is a very immoral act. Your $1.00 to the artist for downloading their entire CD off of whatever p2p or distributed service you use puts a great deal more money in their pocket than buying the CD legally does.
When it comes to buying the music online, where artists are paid fractions of a penny per song, the difference is even more pronounced and the artist treated even less fairly by the recording label. Download the ogg or mp3 file for free and pay the artist via fairtunes, or directly, instead. You will be doing a great deal more to support the artist than you will be if you go and buy their CD legally.
Note: I say this is the moral thing to do, not the legal thing to do (for those too clue-challenged to tell the difference). IANAL and am giving moral, or ethical, not legal, advice.
But the vast majority of college students are just too selfish to realise that.
Hearing that from someone who is promoting a "support the music industry, it is your moral imperetive" shill is really precious. I would simply point out that, for anyone defending the RIAA on this tack, to ponder the following words:
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Mote. Beam. Eye.
Glass Houses. Stones.
In comparison to what the Recording Industry has done to artists over the last 70 years, the p2p services and the worst non-commercial copyright violators on the planet are saints, and that includes those college students you so deride.
Um, what? I wasn't aware of anyone trying to duplicate the functionality of the Xbox. Since they're being sold at a loss, that would be rather pointless.
The point is that it is irrelevant that Microsoft is selling the hardware at a loss.
They've taken their customer's money, therefor their customers own the box, period. The manner in which they lock down how their customers can USE their own property is unconscionable, and I for applaud the GNU and Linux folks for providing a Free and legal means for the customer to reacquire control of their own property, back from the hands of those who think nothing of designing a business model that requires and presupposes invasive violations of individual privacy and liberty in order to be successful.
And my grade? I got a D. Why? Because, in the words of the teacher, "I wasn't being cooperative and participating in a constructive manner.."
You should have gotten at least a B. Maybe not an "A" as ethics is a part of what any polisci education should include, even if our country has degenerated to the point where they are seldom, if ever, apparent (with economic results like Enron et. al. to show for it).
Why would I give you a B, and perhaps an A? Because you probably single handedly not only provided the rest of the class with a solid, realistic lesson in what politics in America has become, you also probably disillusioned most of that class and insured they would never consider a career in politics.
20-30 less potential politicians in the world...that alone would earn you an "A" in my gradebook.
Which part of he wants absolutely no Microsoft software anywhere near it didn't you understand?
... both are using and promoting GNU/Linux and discouraging further use of Microsoft Windows, and while it may or may not be as polished as Microsoft's Japanese IME implimentations, it should be noted that (a) Japanese' use of Kanji aside, Japanese isn't remotely the same as Chinese and (b) the Freedom (both financial and otherwise) afforded by using a Free operating system such as GNU/Linux, and actively taken away by submitting to a Microsoft based solution, vastly outweighs any amount of polish Microsoft could possibly offer.
Shilling Microsoft solutions in answer to an article asking specifically how to do something without Microsoft software is not only offtopic, it is insulting to the intelligence of any reader not in the partisan throes of the pro-microsoft zealotry camp.
Now, I'm not saying that there isn't something similar for Linux. But if Apple couldn't come up with anything more productive for MacOS 9, which was intended from the start to be a consumer-level, desktop, OS, I am highly doubtful that Linux developers can come up with anything better.
So basically you are using your ignorance of GNU/Linux as an excuse for posting an offtopic response promoting your partisan software when in fact the only cognizant answer you could have possibly given would have been "I don't know."
Indeed, even a fraction of research on your part would have allowed for a slightly more intelligent answer than "use Microsoft, it kicks Apple's ass and GNU/Linux can't possibly be any better than Apple, so it must suck!", for perhaps then you might have stumbled across the Linux Chinese HOWTO.
Interestingly enough, both the Chinese and Taiwanese governments do not share your pessimism
The word "universal" actually never appears in my note.
/. posts including the "this is too English-centric anti-American nonsense that always seems to get modded to +5 no matter how inappropriate it is (remarkable how provincially prejudiced many of those who accuse Americans of provincialism are, isn't it?), then rebbutted some of those arguments without going back to reread the article again. You're right ... the criticisms wouldn't have held had you used the word 'universal', but in fact you did not, making their criticisms even more asinine, their +5 moderation even more idiotic, and my expression of annoyance at their attempted, and less appropriate than usual, policing of 'international political correctness', even more justified.
Excellent point.
I read the article, then read the
These are some very interesting insights, and I really hope you'll get together with the author of this piece and perhaps work out some optimized layouts based on these criteria.
... completely self-taught by simply doing, and I'm the fastest typer I know), though not to strike different keys with different fingers like a pianist, but rather to make the reach for some of the more distant keys more comfortable.
/.
... I played with dvorak once, but didn't find the improvement worth the trouble. This, on the other hand, would be more than worth the trouble.
1) I move my hands as well when I type (no formal typing education at all
This does result in typos, however, some of which people will doubtless see here on
2) Your insight on the natural position of the fingers is brilliant, if obvious (as most brilliant things tend to be, in retrospect).
A layout and typing regime based on home keys as awef and jio; would be very interesting to develop, one allowing hand movement a la a pianist and one (which I personally would prefer) assuming the fingers return to their home coordinates after each letter is typed.
Indeed, I would break the possibilities out into several options:
1) awef jio; homekeys, no laterial or vertical movement
2) awef jio; homekeys, vertical movement but no laternal movement
3) awef jio; homekeys, vertical and lateral movement
4) awef jio; homekeys, lateral movement but not vertical movement
and then see which of the 4 results in the easiest, and quickest, typing movement.
I would surmise that #1 would be preferred by many who already know how to type and might not be able to make the adjustment to MOVEMENT like a pianist might, while those starting from scratch would find one of the other three more natural and useful.
An improvement of this nature is something I would be willing to try a new keyboard layout and typing regime for
A final aside to purists who are griping about the author's unfortunate use of the word Universal: with the exception of most physiscists and astronomers, virtually everyone misuses the world 'universal', be it a movie studio, a beauty pagent, a mechanic, or any number of other contexts.
It was obvious from the context of the discussion that the author was working on an optimized keyboard for use with the English language, so obvious as to not even warrant a comment. The fact that the author wrote the article in English, sampled English works (and programming languages) in his study, and published in that very same language, to a web site located in the heartland of America (Michigan) targeted at English speaking readers, should have provided a big enough clue even for those who are clue-challenged.
Non-english speakers screaming and yelling about how this (obviously) doesn't apply to their language are belaboring the painfully obvious, and come across more like that quintessential, insecure adolescent boy who, during a lecture on female sexuality stands up and declares "but boys are different!"
Of course an optimized german keyboard likely won't use the qwerz layout, but something very unlike qwertz, very unlike dvorak, and very unlike a keyboard optimized for English. Ditto for French, not to mention numerous languages that do not even use the Roman (or Cyrillic) alphabets, such as Hindi, Thai, Japanese, and Chinese. Pointing this out in the context of this discussion is akin to pointing out that a study on the aerodynamic properties of a piston-driven propeller don't map well to the art of flavoring a Hollondais sauce with the proper mix of spices, to which the 'universal' (in an earthly sense) response is generally something on the order of: No shit, Sherlock.
That's the problem with running a service that's (for the most part) black market...when someone starts fucking it all up with counter-attacks, there's really not a lot of recourse.
... not all artists trying to get exposure have signed recording contracts with the RIAA, or with anyone for that matter, and some use p2p networks to get their material heard by as many people as they can in the hopes of building name and brand recognition).
... the RIAA (and MPAA, who are the ones involved in the dummy DivX nonsense) will find themselves contributing to their own demise in any number of ways as they conduct attacks against basic internet protocols, be they p2p or client-server.
Copyright is irrelevant. This is a premeditated Denial of Service Attack against a service that may, or may not, be facilitating the sharing of copyrighted material (and is likely providing a conduit for both
What if this attack were against the entire http protocol throughout the internet, taking down web pages everywhere because a few were trading copyrighted material illegally? Would we tolerate it? Absolutely not. Not even if for every legitimate, google or slashdot style website there were ten websites trading Warez and mp3s.
The act of DOSing a service is illegal (at least in some places), regardless of whether it is a copyright cartel dinasaur leading the attack to protect their outdated business model, or script kiddies and l337 h4x0rs defacing or DOSing their least favorite corporate website to express disdain.
Gentoo, Source Mage, Debian, and other GNU/Linux distributions that use the internet to display information may well adopt p2p methods to eliminate bandwidth bottlenecks, particularly during the release of new versions of popular packages like Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and Open Office. If Microsoft were performing such a DOS attack there would likely be people facing fines and perhaps jailtime.
This is an attack on the Internet itself. FTP, http, scp, all of these can be used to share copyrighted material. Shall we allow cartels a free hand in making those protocols unusable?
There are legal remedies for prosecuting copyright violation. There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of illegal activity in the name of 'protecting copyright', and while there will undoubtably be technical solutions to much of this kind of thing (anonymous GPG signatures and webs of trust, etc.), the bottom line is that you cannot have the majority of civilization constrained by one set of laws that make these sort of attacks illegal, while allowing another segment of society to engage in this sort of activity simply because they argue it protects their business interests.
I agree with the general sense of your post
I must say I am _amazed_ by how big companies are allowed to cripple civil rights over there. A country previously recogniced as one of the greatest democracies.
Yesterday I attended a party in Evanston (a suburb of Chicago). My host asked that I bring a bottle of wine, so I took along a magnum of 2000 Yellow Tail Shiraz.
5 cops were guarding the entrance end of the platform, searching everyone. Apparently, in the Land of the Free, an adult American is no longer permitted to carry a sealed bottle of wine onto a train (even though I had no cork screw or wine glasses on my person). In other words, if you are too poor to own a car, you cannot transport alcohol, even in sealed form, over any significant distance in this country anymore, especially not on our "Independence" day.
Fortunately for me the El Train was far less stringently controlled, so while I was an hour late to my friend's 4th of July party, I was at least able to make it.
We have already lost most of our freedoms in this country.
We have lost the freedom from search and seizure without due process.
We have lost (much) of the separation of church and state, which means most minority religions (and non-religions such as agnostacism or athiesm) have essentially lost much of their religious freedom.
We have lost much of our right to bear arms. Not a personal pieve of mine, but relevant nevertheless since the act requred widespread violation of the constitution and judicial tolerance of those violations.
We have lost the right not to be detained without charges, without due process, and with access to an attourney. People are now routinely "disappeared" into our Gulag, always under the excuse of anti-terrorism, where they are held incommunicado for weeks or even months. Some may in fact be terrorists, but most are not.
We have lost numerous personal, daily freedoms (like the ability to take a bottle of wine over to a friend's home who doesn't live within walking distance), many within the last few months.
Now, through Palladium and/or Disney Holling's DRM efforts we are about to lose our very freedom of speech in the digital age. Based on all of the other lost freedoms, given up in the name of War on [drugs|sex offendors|terrorism], I do not hold out much of any hope for preserving the remaining tatters of the constitution as our illustrious leaders open up Yet Another War, this time on (cracking? viruses? copyright violation? technical savvy that surpasses the FBI's?) Whatever they end up calling this farce, I'm sure they'll find a term that evokes the proper level of fear and dread in the general public to justify the removal of these last, tattered freedoms from our all-too-willing hands, and as one of our founding fathers has warned, we will find in our haste to trade the last of our freedoms for the perception of a little security that we, in fact, have neither.
Certainly the police stopping me for wanting to take a bottle of wine to a friends weren't protecting anyone, for indeed these encroachments on our liberty have absolutely nothing to do with protection and security, and everything to do with simple Power.
Unfortunately, by the time the majority of the people understand that all of this nonsense is about an unprecendented Power grab by an unconstitutional secret police (FBI, ), it will be far too late to do much of anything about it. If it isn't already.
The definition of SPAM predates any legislation on the subject by years. The fact that our corrupt government has drafted legislation (or, in some cases, allowed mass marketers to draft legislation) that changes the definition for the convinience of the SPAMMERs themselves in fact does nothing to legitimize the incorrect definition you are defending. It does serve, however, to delegitize the government that is redefining the term
From whatis: The most authoritative definitions are probably the following ones, offered by the Net Abuse FAQ (for USENET) and the email abuse FAQ (for email) The only people who are defining SPAM in the self-serving, restricted manner as you are are the SPAMMERs themselves and the legislators they have bought (and, indeed, not even all of them).
Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail with a specific commercial pitch or advertisement including a price.
Wrong, and spoken like a true spammer. (I hope you are not a spammer, but your definition echos almost precisely that which is used by some Spammers to justify their bulk emails).
SPAM is Unsolicited Bulk Email. Period.
Whether it is promoting Salvation from the Lord Our God(tm), Senator Hollings Reelection Campaign, or the Latest Penis Extention scam, it is SPAM.
However, opt in mailing lists are NOT SPAM because the Opt In process itself is an act of solicitation.
Of course, if a vendor or web site changes your selection from 'not opting in' to 'opting in' then, of course it is SPAM, because in fact you never did opt in, and they have deliberately miscategorized their lists in order to decieve.
Any bulk email that arrives without your having asked to be included on a list (e.g. for notifications, etc.) is SPAM. Period.
All of that having been said, it is my understanding that Mandrake's Newsletter is opt in, which means by opting in you solicited it and it is therefor NOT SPAM.
Over the last few years of open source, why is it that when an open source company becomes successful financially (and by this, I mean is able to operate without going under), they become the source of evil-ness in the eyes of others?
This presumption isn't correct IMHO. Not even Richard Stallman (whos rhetoric, while often quite insightful, is about as feiery as it gets) is guilty of what you describe here, much less the majority of the GNU/Linux and Free Software/Open Source community at large.
Red Hat has done some great things for the community, and has given back a great deal to the community. I may not prefer their distro personally, but I have no trouble suggesting it (or Mandrake) to friends who want to install and play around with Linux.
What has RedHat done that is so bad?
They have encouraged proprietary software vendors to release their wares in a manner that is compatible with Red Hat and not other distributions, by falsely implying that they, Red Hat, set the standards and everyone else follows.
This is bad because (a) Red Hat does not (and shouldn't) set the standards and (b) it is quite possible, and vastly preferable, to package software in a distribution-agnostic form installable by evertyone. Blender did it, Loki did it, Id and several other proprietary vendors do it now.
This is my only real criticism of Red Hat, and if they would cease and desist this behavior (which IMHO does in fact do harm to the community as a whole, and to the vendors who are seduced by the erroneous notion they have to target one or two main distros) I would have absolutely nothing bad to say about them whatsoever.
UL, on the other hand, is an effort to exploit exactly this myth, mislead software vendors in the process (to their detriment and the detriment of the GNU/Linux community at large), all without giving even a fraction of what Red Hat has given back to the community, and that is a very real and serious problem. Actually, propogating the notion of commercially imposed standards (rather than standards formed by consensus) and forcing users to use a One True Distro (or forever chase and mimick a One True Distro) is a terrible disservice to the community, regardless of how much is "given back" to the community to compensate, and it is an effort that should be resisted and fought.
While your rhetoric sounds nice to a well-educated linux guru, it hold one major flaw: it assumes all Linux users know how to download, compile, and install all their own software.
That simply isn't true. It assumes the Distribution Creators know how to untar a tarball and install it into their own distribution.
There is nothing preventing Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, Debian, et. al. from creating their own RPM/deb wrapper utility that will take a binary tarball and install it onto their respective distribution, perhaps even parsing the list of required libraries and versions and mapping it to their dependency resolution mechanisms anyway.
This is a far more reasonable and equitable approach to take than to tell vendors they should target one or two "preferred" distros and leave everyone else groping on their own, denying people choice and undermining the diversity of the community in the process.
You make grand assumptions about where people are coming from without any reasonable or logical basis for doing so, and extrapolate from that (example: I am in the "GNU/Linux should be for everybody camp", but that doesn't imply what you erroneously think it does), but those underlying assumptions are as false as those being promoted by the likes of United Linux, and the conclusions thereby just as erroneous.