Pardon me, but isn't protection against security breaches the OPERATING SYSTEM'S JOB???
Partially, but it isn't the operating system's job to stop the user from being an idiot. If you want to run executables from suspicious websites, that's your right. And if the rest of the world wants a device to stab you in the face over the internet, that's their right, too.
The giant corporations are winning. Ask people if they think it more likely that genetic research will result in exciting new medical treatments or be used by enormous health insurance companies to deny coverage.
What people think is not the same as reality. In the U.S. at least, using genetic information to deny insurance coverage is illegal. Of course, people will believe what they want to believe, which just emphasizes the GP's point. I'm sure plenty of my beliefs are wrong, too.
But "cloud computing" is a long-distant descendant of the "client server" model. They aren't the same thing anymore than a nuclear bomb is just "a really strong TNT bomb".
If "cloud computing" is so different from the client-server model (with the server being provided by someone else), then surely you can name some differences between the two models.
Kind of a thread jack / off topic. But, have you looked into a montessori school? It introduces children into learning in a fun way and adapts to tasks and styles of learnign that the child enjoys.
While we're offtopic, here's an anecdote. I know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, and certainly the singular isn't, but...
When I was a kid, my parents put me in a private Montessori school because I was bored out of my skull with a regular school. Less than two years later, we changed to homeschooling. I was literally coming home every day crying because I was so miserable. I don't know if the school actually followed Montessori principles, but they claimed to and it was horrible. It was literally just like the traditional school system, but with "hands on" activities and ten times the busywork. The last straw was when they tried to get me to do a science project that involved dropping parachutes from a second-story balcony three hundred times for "accuracy".
Sorry to reply to myself, but here's another link you should look at. The first story in there describes exactly why finally blocks should never be used as a poor man's transactions system.
In nicer languages than C that have exceptions, you often also have try...finally blocks, where you can guarantee that your cleanup code will be called, even if you call some function which calls exit(). Essentially, it gives you nice atomic/transactional operations, at every level of code you want them at.
At least in Java, System.exit() calls the shutdown hooks and then kills every thread without mercy. To quote the excellent book Java Puzzlers, which had this as one of its puzzles: "the presence of a finally clause does not give a thread special permission to continue executing". In fact, you can read this this puzzle in the sample chapter on their website.
10 years ago the US Congress had the foresight to pass the DMCA which protects search engines, ISP caches, and similar technologies from this kind of nonsense. Too bad other nations haven't followed the USA's lead in this respect.
Indeed, while lots of people on Slashdot hate the DMCA for its lack of penalties for abusive takedown notices, the protection for search engines and the like is definitely necessary for the internet to continue in the form we know it today.
Saying Wolfram Alpha isn't a search engine is like saying that Linux should be called GNU/Linux. It might be more technically correct (emphasis on might), but it won't change the public's perception of it.
Now, I never played Mario 64, but in most games there are stars or flags or some other widget scattered all over the place, and collecting them is completely tangential to the plot. A normal play through might have you find 20% of them. But some people then go back to find every last one. Those are the sort of people being discussed here.
In fact, I would argue that Mario 64 is a terrible example. You need more than half the stars to finish the game (unless you're tool assisted). Also, they aren't just random achievements--all the stars except the 100-coin and 8-red-coin ones are completely original.
The problem is that you're confusing "goods vs. services" with "in-person services vs. potentially-distant services". You can outsource production of goods (like textiles), and you can outsource information services (like programming), but you can't outsource "in-person" services (like plumbing).
Even more puzzling to me is how someone could decide to use a data structure without understanding its behavior (and without at least checking the Java APIs or simply Googling).
Easy. They learned that they should use *insert class here* in Intro to Programming 1 or 2 and never thought about it again since then. Horrendous overuse of StringBuilders is probably the most common example of this, but it can apply to just about anything.
But if nobody can figure out another way to do the same thing, the patent does indeed stifle innovation (since other inventions often build on top of existing ones).
I think the key point is that there is no "magic number" that is the length of time during which a patent is guaranteed to not stifle innovation--other than zero. What if C. A. R. Hoare had gotten a patent on the original quicksort? Even modern general sorting algorithms like introsort are based on quicksort. Science and engineering are built, fundamentally, on iterative improvement of existing designs, and patenting just stops progress in a direction of research for the length of the patent.
... replying to myself to stop the inevitable flood of comments about free vs. open source software, how not all free software comes at no charge, etc., etc.
Or have you not noticed the banners on all the pages?
I can't speak for the OP, but I'm not a subscriber and I don't see ads on Slashdot. Or anywhere, for that matter. Can you say "Adblock Plus" and "NoScript"?
Touche. I'll concede this one then and chalk it up to a policy that I don't agree with.
Indeed, this is a policy I think a lot of people disagree with. Still, it prevents Wikipedia from having an article on every Pokemon.
I still think the policy is fundamentally flawed. It's one thing to delete an article that some douchebucket writes about his two-week-old blog; it's another to delete something that's fairly well-known to a large but specific group of people.
So what's a better criterion? An arbitrary "I've heard of it before" vote? Ghits?
The current article for Lolrus is a redirect. However, if you follow the redirect back and check the page history, you'll find a medium-length article with some independent citations (Slate and Time Magazine).
Read WP:N again, carefully. At least some references must specifically refer to the subject as an independent topic, not just mention it as a subtopic of something else. (The Time Magazine article comes close, but it doesn't really go into any detail, as the first commenter on the AfD mentioned.) That's why the article was merged. Why none of the content of said article appears in the lolcats article is another matter entirely.
The article lacks citations, but there are enough sources on the internet that citations could be provided.
If there are so many references, why don't you add some of them to the article? You see, that's the beauty of Wikipedia: if something is wrong, you can fix it yourself. And it's almost impossible for an article with reliable, properly cited references to get deleted for good.
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon me, but isn't protection against security breaches the OPERATING SYSTEM'S JOB???
Partially, but it isn't the operating system's job to stop the user from being an idiot. If you want to run executables from suspicious websites, that's your right. And if the rest of the world wants a device to stab you in the face over the internet, that's their right, too.
The giant corporations are winning. Ask people if they think it more likely that genetic research will result in exciting new medical treatments or be used by enormous health insurance companies to deny coverage.
What people think is not the same as reality. In the U.S. at least, using genetic information to deny insurance coverage is illegal. Of course, people will believe what they want to believe, which just emphasizes the GP's point. I'm sure plenty of my beliefs are wrong, too.
But "cloud computing" is a long-distant descendant of the "client server" model. They aren't the same thing anymore than a nuclear bomb is just "a really strong TNT bomb".
If "cloud computing" is so different from the client-server model (with the server being provided by someone else), then surely you can name some differences between the two models.
Well?
A government with tech experience is not a nice thing.
I disagree. If all governments understood technology, then they would understand...
The problem we have now is that governments know technology exists but don't understand it.
Kind of a thread jack / off topic. But, have you looked into a montessori school? It introduces children into learning in a fun way and adapts to tasks and styles of learnign that the child enjoys.
While we're offtopic, here's an anecdote. I know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, and certainly the singular isn't, but...
When I was a kid, my parents put me in a private Montessori school because I was bored out of my skull with a regular school. Less than two years later, we changed to homeschooling. I was literally coming home every day crying because I was so miserable. I don't know if the school actually followed Montessori principles, but they claimed to and it was horrible. It was literally just like the traditional school system, but with "hands on" activities and ten times the busywork. The last straw was when they tried to get me to do a science project that involved dropping parachutes from a second-story balcony three hundred times for "accuracy".
There are, however, irrational--indeed, transcendental--numbers that follow a discernible decimal pattern, like the Liouville constant.
Sorry to reply to myself, but here's another link you should look at. The first story in there describes exactly why finally blocks should never be used as a poor man's transactions system.
In nicer languages than C that have exceptions, you often also have try...finally blocks, where you can guarantee that your cleanup code will be called, even if you call some function which calls exit(). Essentially, it gives you nice atomic/transactional operations, at every level of code you want them at.
At least in Java, System.exit() calls the shutdown hooks and then kills every thread without mercy. To quote the excellent book Java Puzzlers, which had this as one of its puzzles: "the presence of a finally clause does not give a thread special permission to continue executing". In fact, you can read this this puzzle in the sample chapter on their website.
Do you have any evidence of snopes.com being incorrect? I've never heard of anyone challenging their credulity.
Ahem... I believe that in this situation someone is supposed to say "whoosh".
10 years ago the US Congress had the foresight to pass the DMCA which protects search engines, ISP caches, and similar technologies from this kind of nonsense. Too bad other nations haven't followed the USA's lead in this respect.
Indeed, while lots of people on Slashdot hate the DMCA for its lack of penalties for abusive takedown notices, the protection for search engines and the like is definitely necessary for the internet to continue in the form we know it today.
Wolfram Alpha isn't a search engine.
Saying Wolfram Alpha isn't a search engine is like saying that Linux should be called GNU/Linux. It might be more technically correct (emphasis on might), but it won't change the public's perception of it.
Now, I never played Mario 64, but in most games there are stars or flags or some other widget scattered all over the place, and collecting them is completely tangential to the plot. A normal play through might have you find 20% of them. But some people then go back to find every last one. Those are the sort of people being discussed here.
In fact, I would argue that Mario 64 is a terrible example. You need more than half the stars to finish the game (unless you're tool assisted). Also, they aren't just random achievements--all the stars except the 100-coin and 8-red-coin ones are completely original.
The problem is that you're confusing "goods vs. services" with "in-person services vs. potentially-distant services". You can outsource production of goods (like textiles), and you can outsource information services (like programming), but you can't outsource "in-person" services (like plumbing).
Even more puzzling to me is how someone could decide to use a data structure without understanding its behavior (and without at least checking the Java APIs or simply Googling).
Easy. They learned that they should use *insert class here* in Intro to Programming 1 or 2 and never thought about it again since then. Horrendous overuse of StringBuilders is probably the most common example of this, but it can apply to just about anything.
No, but your grand(^^64)son might
Surely, you mean Graham_64 son?
Linux + Office 2007 = all-Linux?
Yes. Remember, as GNU fanatics like to say, Linux is just the kernel. "All-Linux" here refers to Linux on every computer the person uses.
But if nobody can figure out another way to do the same thing, the patent does indeed stifle innovation (since other inventions often build on top of existing ones).
I think the key point is that there is no "magic number" that is the length of time during which a patent is guaranteed to not stifle innovation--other than zero. What if C. A. R. Hoare had gotten a patent on the original quicksort? Even modern general sorting algorithms like introsort are based on quicksort. Science and engineering are built, fundamentally, on iterative improvement of existing designs, and patenting just stops progress in a direction of research for the length of the patent.
Why would this be tied in to the kernel?
In the immortal words of the Internet Explorer development team: "Why not?"
... replying to myself to stop the inevitable flood of comments about free vs. open source software, how not all free software comes at no charge, etc., etc.
If everybody wants free everything, then nobody will work on anything.
Every open source project ever begs to disagree.
Or have you not noticed the banners on all the pages?
I can't speak for the OP, but I'm not a subscriber and I don't see ads on Slashdot. Or anywhere, for that matter. Can you say "Adblock Plus" and "NoScript"?
Hey, Slashdot can do random bullshit too. *cough* idle *cough*
Oh, and look at this: http://www.google.com/trends?q=emacs%2C+vi%2C+notepad
False positives aren't too bad. You just fall back on the old method.
Yes, but would they?
</cynicism>
Touche. I'll concede this one then and chalk it up to a policy that I don't agree with.
Indeed, this is a policy I think a lot of people disagree with. Still, it prevents Wikipedia from having an article on every Pokemon.
I still think the policy is fundamentally flawed. It's one thing to delete an article that some douchebucket writes about his two-week-old blog; it's another to delete something that's fairly well-known to a large but specific group of people.
So what's a better criterion? An arbitrary "I've heard of it before" vote? Ghits?
The current article for Lolrus is a redirect. However, if you follow the redirect back and check the page history, you'll find a medium-length article with some independent citations (Slate and Time Magazine).
Read WP:N again, carefully. At least some references must specifically refer to the subject as an independent topic, not just mention it as a subtopic of something else. (The Time Magazine article comes close, but it doesn't really go into any detail, as the first commenter on the AfD mentioned.) That's why the article was merged. Why none of the content of said article appears in the lolcats article is another matter entirely.
The article lacks citations, but there are enough sources on the internet that citations could be provided.
If there are so many references, why don't you add some of them to the article? You see, that's the beauty of Wikipedia: if something is wrong, you can fix it yourself. And it's almost impossible for an article with reliable, properly cited references to get deleted for good.