...It gives people what they want. If their wants are based on reason, the market will provide it; if they are based on ignorance, pseudoscience, or technophobic hysteria (e.g. homeopathic "medicines," shoes with magnets, or brain shields for cell phones), the market will provide it too.
There was the (now no longer available for the average user, alas) ThirdVoice package. That one I liked because it gave people a way to comment on web sites--this is just plain evil.
Isn't there a rather obvious difference between TiVo's grabbing that information without his approval and his choosing to post a sample of such information in order to show others what kind of information TiVo is gathering about TiVo users? I see no hypocrisy here.
Thanks for the interesting link--I especially like the part near the end, with the writer indignant that the Czechs themselves have the unmitigated gall to not rise up in arms against what he doesn't like, so that he can have his "right" to live without seeing Golden Arches.
OK...Jon Katz, as part of a review of a book published by Houghton-Mifflin (one of those large corporations) criticizing large corporations, says, on a website so popular as to give rise to the term "slashdot effect" or "slashdot" as a verb meaning to swamp with hits as a result of a link from/., that there are no criticisms of corporate America. I read his rant a few blocks from two of those big evil corporate bookstores, where it is trivial to find lots of books and magazines criticizing corporate America, and went to a massively popular online bookstore to verify the publisher of Fast Food Nation, and trivially found it, and I'm sure I could find many others as well.
Easy to say "troll"...hard to refute. (Yes, it is sad...but a lot of things are, as Metallica sings, "sad but true.") I refer all interested parties to the works of Warren Farrell.
Anonymity is also a prerequisite for getting people who fear retribution to speak out--I recall some pamphlets a while back that you may have heard of, called The Federalist Papers, that were written anonymously, under a pseudonym. <sarcasm>Too bad the government of the time couldn't have tracked those folks down, eh?</sarcasm>
Science, arrogant? On the contrary! I urge you to read Asimov, Bronowski, and Feynman on the scientific method. The scientific method involves pointing out all the things that count against one's claims as well as for them, inviting others to verify them or shoot them down, and gradually winnowing out the false. Ever hear of any, say, religion that has willingly admitted to error? I thought not. Science, rightly done, as Feynman points out, requires ruthless honesty--and that, IMHO, is inconsistent with arrogance.
If you can only wonder at the unknown, friend, I pity you; your world is a truly impoverished place, where joy is ignorance's handmaiden. Give me the wonder that comes with understanding nature's elegance any day.
I can't help but snicker to myself when people go on about the music in A Knight's Tale--early music is getting more of a following, but I bet most of the kvetchers are wishing for a soundtrack of John Williams-style 21st century pastiche of 19th century Romantic music, which is every bit as anachronistic as Queen and David Bowie, dang it!
Authentic would be isorhythmic motets, Machaut virelais, troubadour and trouvere music, stuff from the Carmina Burana (no, not Orff's settiing), or something like that "Your God wants you for the nth Crusade" recruiting song, "Crucifigat omnes."
In a way, they did the right thing. At the time of the movie, the motets and such were modern music. (Heck, some medieval French college students sang a motet--"Hare, hare, hye/Balaam"--as they rioted over a tax on alcohol. The quality of protest music sure has gone downhill over the past few centuries...) The songs in the Carmina Burana were rowdy and raunchy; love songs of the era were every bit as treacly as the Backstreet Boys or 'N Sync. Rock and pop are their analogues to modern ears, not ossified 19th century art music. (If you want an example of what I'm talking about, check out the Bang Lassies web page--it's a couple of centuries later, but if I hadn't heard Dowland's "Come Again, Sweet Love" and someone played the Bang Lassies' version without telliing me who did it, I'd swear it was a Todd Rundgren track I hadn't heard.)
Agreed. I may be in conspiracy mode on this point, but I think that one of the "features" of.NET will be that MS can rapidly distribute versions of OS and apps that break compatibility.
It's not flamebait at all. MS can afford to hire lots of people whose sole job in life is to come up with ways to break WINE, so that counting on WINE is agreeing to be perpetually in catch-up, "me too" mode. (You need only look at the history of runnning Windows software under OS/2 to see this.) Ultimately the goal has to be to make it possible to do better games under Linux than under Windows.
You'd have to ask the people involved, but perhaps they were considering the history of the infamous win32s.dll, which Microsoft kept "improving" in ways that would break OS/2 compatibility. They finally stopped when they came up with a call whose sole purpose in life was to allocate memory and that made a point of grabbing memory above the 512 Mbyte limit that OS/2 (up until pretty recently) imposed on DOS sessions, and hence on Windows. At that point, evidently, IBM realized that MS would keep playing such games as long as IBM tried to catch up, and gave up.
I think the spin to put on this is: with software rental, you don't control your data any more--Microsoft does. Once upon a time, you bought an application, created your documents or databases, and could use them happily ever after. Now, to get to your very own data, you have to keep paying. And paying. And paying.
Not only that, but I recall an article a while back about AMD moving to making chips out of just the isotope of silicon that conducts heat better; it claimed they had a Duron made that way running fine using just a heat sink. My ears will thank them...
Years ago, Computer Shopper magazine was a hulking 900+ page monthly slab of dead tree, and C++ books were only a few hundred pages. Now Computer Shopper barely tops 200 pages, and introductory C++ books run around 1200 to 1500 pages. Coincidence? I think not.
Seriously, couldn't some work be devoted to finding that small language that is supposedly screaming to get out of C++?
The quote you can't think of is from Dune, Feyd-Rautha thinking to himself about listening to Count Fenring's tedious talk (not knowing that the "um"s and "ah"s are a code he uses to talk to his wife).
Re:What an incoherent posting. Don't waste your ti
on
Why Community Matters
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· Score: 2
Surely we at slashdot are for the most part, capitalist and libertarian.
That's hard to tell; posters are, by their nature, self-selected. I can say that whenever things like taxation come up, I regularly see postings from redistributionists and people who appear to actually think taxation is ethical--so it's not at all clear that things are as you say.
If it's real, then there is a real victim involved. People are likely to have seen the victim with the perpetrator; the victim can be questioned. Have UK police given up on child abuse other than child pornography, where there's not an image they can show the judge and jury?
Slashdot Mirror
...It gives people what they want. If their wants are based on reason, the market will provide it; if they are based on ignorance, pseudoscience, or technophobic hysteria (e.g. homeopathic "medicines," shoes with magnets, or brain shields for cell phones), the market will provide it too.
There was the (now no longer available for the average user, alas) ThirdVoice package. That one I liked because it gave people a way to comment on web sites--this is just plain evil.
Isn't there a rather obvious difference between TiVo's grabbing that information without his approval and his choosing to post a sample of such information in order to show others what kind of information TiVo is gathering about TiVo users? I see no hypocrisy here.
Taxation is a good effect?!
Just out of idle curiosity, what's the source of information underlying your stereotyping?
Um...I didn't think that Norse mythology counted as history, either.
Thanks for the interesting link--I especially like the part near the end, with the writer indignant that the Czechs themselves have the unmitigated gall to not rise up in arms against what he doesn't like, so that he can have his "right" to live without seeing Golden Arches.
What's wrong with this picture?
Easy to say "troll"...hard to refute. (Yes, it is sad...but a lot of things are, as Metallica sings, "sad but true.") I refer all interested parties to the works of Warren Farrell.
Anonymity is also a prerequisite for getting people who fear retribution to speak out--I recall some pamphlets a while back that you may have heard of, called The Federalist Papers, that were written anonymously, under a pseudonym. <sarcasm>Too bad the government of the time couldn't have tracked those folks down, eh?</sarcasm>
...in view of the old saw that the staple of British SF is the MUF (Mysterious Unknown Force) that it's the BBC reporting this.
If you can only wonder at the unknown, friend, I pity you; your world is a truly impoverished place, where joy is ignorance's handmaiden. Give me the wonder that comes with understanding nature's elegance any day.
In a way, they did the right thing. At the time of the movie, the motets and such were modern music. (Heck, some medieval French college students sang a motet--"Hare, hare, hye/Balaam"--as they rioted over a tax on alcohol. The quality of protest music sure has gone downhill over the past few centuries...) The songs in the Carmina Burana were rowdy and raunchy; love songs of the era were every bit as treacly as the Backstreet Boys or 'N Sync. Rock and pop are their analogues to modern ears, not ossified 19th century art music. (If you want an example of what I'm talking about, check out the Bang Lassies web page--it's a couple of centuries later, but if I hadn't heard Dowland's "Come Again, Sweet Love" and someone played the Bang Lassies' version without telliing me who did it, I'd swear it was a Todd Rundgren track I hadn't heard.)
Agreed. I may be in conspiracy mode on this point, but I think that one of the "features" of .NET will be that MS can rapidly distribute versions of OS and apps that break compatibility.
It's not flamebait at all. MS can afford to hire lots of people whose sole job in life is to come up with ways to break WINE, so that counting on WINE is agreeing to be perpetually in catch-up, "me too" mode. (You need only look at the history of runnning Windows software under OS/2 to see this.) Ultimately the goal has to be to make it possible to do better games under Linux than under Windows.
You'd have to ask the people involved, but perhaps they were considering the history of the infamous win32s.dll, which Microsoft kept "improving" in ways that would break OS/2 compatibility. They finally stopped when they came up with a call whose sole purpose in life was to allocate memory and that made a point of grabbing memory above the 512 Mbyte limit that OS/2 (up until pretty recently) imposed on DOS sessions, and hence on Windows. At that point, evidently, IBM realized that MS would keep playing such games as long as IBM tried to catch up, and gave up.
I think the spin to put on this is: with software rental, you don't control your data any more--Microsoft does. Once upon a time, you bought an application, created your documents or databases, and could use them happily ever after. Now, to get to your very own data, you have to keep paying. And paying. And paying.
And can I get it in italic and boldface?
Not only that, but I recall an article a while back about AMD moving to making chips out of just the isotope of silicon that conducts heat better; it claimed they had a Duron made that way running fine using just a heat sink. My ears will thank them...
Seriously, couldn't some work be devoted to finding that small language that is supposedly screaming to get out of C++?
The quote you can't think of is from Dune, Feyd-Rautha thinking to himself about listening to Count Fenring's tedious talk (not knowing that the "um"s and "ah"s are a code he uses to talk to his wife).
That's hard to tell; posters are, by their nature, self-selected. I can say that whenever things like taxation come up, I regularly see postings from redistributionists and people who appear to actually think taxation is ethical--so it's not at all clear that things are as you say.
If it's real, then there is a real victim involved. People are likely to have seen the victim with the perpetrator; the victim can be questioned. Have UK police given up on child abuse other than child pornography, where there's not an image they can show the judge and jury?
I'm sorry--that's simply an excuse for not actually bothering to go out and find evidence.