The guy is talking about using it as a server, which would most likely be stationary, so there's plenty he could do to the chassis to increase airflow: cut holes, even pull out all the guts and mount them on a board. In the later case you could likely eliminate the CPU fan entirely.
As for the battery, I wouldn't even consider using a laptop battery for anything other than portable use. A UPS that can handle the power draw of a laptop is dirt cheap, and would probably have longer battery life under that kind of load than the laptop battery would.
Also, laptop hard drives are actually more durable than their desktop bretheren. Part of the reason they're so much more expensive is that they are designed to endure far more mechanical stress, so leaving a laptop drive spinning all the time is much less of an issue than leaving a desktop drive spinning all the time. Additionally, the vast majority of hard drive mechanical stress occurs during spin-up, so never spinning down the drive actually increases life expectancy.
As for wearing out non-mechanical parts by leaving them powered, as long as they have adequate ventilation that's a non-issue. Non-mechanical part die because of excessive heat or freak power spikes (which should be eliminated by the UPS), they don't "wear out".
Thank god! I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to see a post pointing out OpenCD, and I was getting quite discouraged about having to post one at the end of 600 or so comments. Talk about lost in the crowd!
I paid $19.95 for my last FireWire card, and that was about a year ago. Looking at Pricewatch, the cheapest card I can definately say is USB2 is $16.85, vs $18.25 for a FireWire card that comes with a 6ft cable and Ulead software (which sucks, btw, but at least it's free).
Not much of a price difference, especially when you consider FireWire's considerable performance advantage, but that's already been discussed by other responders.
Even when it is in front of your face you deny it or excuse it.
I haven't denied anything. I agree that there are several words and phrases that, individually, would constitute hate speech. Where I disagree is that this makes the whole site a hate site. Every one of those potential hate statements is in a context where it becomes highly questionable whether they in fact constitute hate speech, and the vast majority are used in an intellectual discussion dealing with issues of racism.
Remember that Good Speech article you offered the URL to? You should really read it again, because you apparently have completely missed the point of it.
If I were to point out the fact that inner city black youth are trying to reclaim the word "nigger" and remove it's negative connotations, at least within their own social circle, would you respond by calling me a racist because I said "nigger"? If so, then you are the one here who has an agenda, not me. The fact that this is exactly what you are doing with regards to this site says a lot.
I hope my little example has served to point out to you the importance of context to meaning, since you still don't seem to get that.
Just because the meaning I derived is different that what you did doesn't have anything to do with anyone's lack of comprehension.
Yes it does, actually.
Many years ago I took a class in college called "Advanced Composition and Critical Thinking". We spent a great deal of time in that class annalyzing text and deriving the difference between what they meant and what they actually said when you pull it apart into it's component pieces. Doing that was quite a revelation. It's shocking how often people say things and everybody understands what they meant, yet when annalyzed in detail the actually said the exact opposite. People understand what they meant only because of context. Context makes all the difference, and if you don't understand that then you have no real comprehension of what you read.
Sorry, I'm not the one who hopped on slashdot and decided to insult someone without at least checking things out first.
As I've already stated, I read the article you linked in your origional post, including all four pages of comments, before I ever responded to you.
I'm sorry you have yet to learn the difference between comprehending and deriving meaning.
Again, there is no difference. Go look it up, or even better, go ask an English teacher.
Perhaps you actually mean something like "derive meaning other than what is actually there by taking individual statements completely out of context"? Your right, that isn't comprehension, and that's exactly why I keep calling yours into question.
The question now is, are you a hate filled racist or simply someone who is so paranoid about loss of free speech that you will try and protect it even if it means you are standing up for hate filled racists?
I'm intelligent enough to recognize that stifling any speech, especially speech which is deemed destructive in nature, is damaging to a free society, and to the democratic process upon which all of our other freedoms depend. As soon as you say "you can't say that" it sets a precedent, and that precedent makes it easier to say "you can't say that either", and before you know it I'm not allowed to criticize the Attorney General for trying to turn the US into the same kind of police state that the Soviet Union was. When it's illegal to speak your mind you have no other rights. That's why it's called a "slippery slope", and that's why freedom of speech is far more important than the hurt feelings of a few individuals, or even groups.
Am I paranoid? No, because the definition of paranoid stipulates that a paranoid fears something that isn't actually happening. Our rights are being erroded as we speak. USA/PATRIOT has severely abridged our Constitutional rights to privacy, a speedy trial, legal representation, and freedom from illegal search and seizure. Granted that's only if I'm a suspected terrorist, but who's a suspected terrorist? Potentially anyone who disagrees with the government.
So, to quote both Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire, "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
And I'll add a little something from Eleanor Roosevelt: "A mature person is one who is does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally..."
The point the origional poster was trying to make is that this is not an AOL client.
OK, great, Netscape 7 has stuff Mozilla doesn't, and some of that stuff is related to AOL. Whoop-a-dee-doo! You still can't connect to AOL as your primary ISP. You still can't admin your AOL email account. You still can't access the special AOL-only content.
This is not adding AOL support to Linux, which while I personally wouldn't care, it would at least be newsworthy. This is just a distro shipping with the latest version of Netscape, which is, quite frankly, about as newsworthy as "RMS puts his pants on one leg at a time".
Common sense tells me the x86 PCs are faster than Macs just because so much more time and money goes into R&D for Intel and AMD's CPUs.
Benchmarks where the playing field is fairly level support that conclusion.
For the Mac cheerleaders: Photoshop filters heavily optimized for the G4 do not constitute a level playing field, but even then the G4 barely keeps up with current x86 tech.
By level playing field I mean, for example, all the machines running Linux and compiling emacs with a Spark target. In those kind of benchmarks you quickly find that a 500MHz CPU is a 500MHz CPU, regardless of manufacturer.
Hate speech can generally be defined as words so outrageous that they would be considered fighting words
And the rest of the sentence is:
provocations sufficiently serious to elicit a violent reaction
A few paragraphs down:
First, hate speech can be very hard to precisely define. Statements which some people regard as hateful, others may regard as an honest effort to raise the tough issues. Hate speech prohibitions can also be used as a basis for the suppressing dissent and harassing people. It is almost always possible to accuse people raising difficult issues of hate speech crimes... They can also have an extremely chilling effect upon efforts to honestly discuss the tough issues which underlie most conflicts.
Yes, I think that some statements made in the discussion you linked origionally are treading that line. The statements above, however, and indeed the large part of the Good Speech article, seems to imply that many of these borderline cases are in fact legitimate and that leveling the Hate Speech accusation can often be destructive in and of itself by preventing necessary discussion of real, if controversial and potentially offensive, issues. I believe that is the case here.
Remember that reading comprehension thing we were talking about? Were you hoping I wouldn't actually read the article, or did you not actually read it yourself?
Being able to seperate myself from the innitial emotional shock of seeing something like "Jews are the biggest racists" and think critically about the arguements presented in that and related posts, I didn't find anything particularly inflamatory. I did, however, find a great deal of intelligent discussion on the nature of racism, its roots, and effort to dispel many of the common myths about racism, such as that racism is exclusive to redneck trailer-trash.
The statement that "The world's biggest racists are the Jews" is definately extreme. I wouldn't say "the worlds biggest", but I have studied various religions including Judaism, and there are definately some racist aspects to Jewish tradition and history. The current Isreali regime is absolutely racist, and I would say the history of the Isreal/Palestine conflict reads like a study on racism on par with our own eviction and oppression of Native Americans.
Nothing that was said in support of this statement was untrue, feel free to research it yourself. Additionally, many of the people involved in that discussion were very careful to point out that they weren't trying to bash Jews, but rather dispelling the myth that poor white America has a monopoly on racism by providing a counter example.
How you can say that "And whatever else they are, the Jews are not non-achievers" is hate speech, however, brings back the question of your comprehension skills. How exactly does saying that a particular race has accomplished a great deal qualify as hate speech? Am I somehow bashing the Romans when I say that they were great engineers who built roads and aquaducts that have withstood the ravages of centuries all over Europe? I think not.
"Nuke the Raghead" I'll give you, I guess, even though it is in a completely different discussion and, again, taken totally out of context. You seem to not understand that context effects meaning, and that is the root of my questions about you comprehension skills. Personally, I thought the comment was an unfortunately worded indictment of the current national attitudes and the current administrations pining for the days of the Gulf War, when "Nuke the Raghead" was widely considered a perfectly acceptable thing to say. It was clearly a comment about how sites get classified by webfilters, implying that there would be a setting that would allow hate speech directed at Arab extremists only in accordance with the wishes of the current administration.
Why you would deny this language is used throughout this site is beyond me unless you have an agenda.
Ah, yes. It couldn't possibly be that your arguements are fallacious and your "proof" weak, it must be that I have an agenda!
I feel like I'm spinning my wheels with some kid who doesn't know the difference between comprehension and what it means to derive meaning from a reading
There is no difference. Read comprehension is the skill of deriving meaning from reading. They are one and the same.
Somebody doesn't know what 'microkernel' means, nor understand the GPL.
First, microkernels are all about modules, in fact, modularized drivers are the whole point of having a microkernel. So, yes, in theory a third party could write drivers. However, as you have already pointed out, at least indirectly, the OS X kernel is a closed Mach variant, so who really knows if it's possible to create driver modules for third party file systems? It seems like it would be a stupid thing to prevent, but I'm sure an MBA could make a reasonable-sounding case for it.
Also, while we're on the subject, It's the Mach kernel which is BSD compatible, since at least Mach3. That isn't something special that Apple added.
Now as for the GPL, they could use the GPL code only in the module, which would mean that only the module would be subject to the GPL, or they could write their own code which interfaces with the APIs (or whatever they are called) for reiser/ext3/whatever and none of their code would be subject to the GPL.
Don't buy the FUD. The GPL is not nearly as viral as Microsoft would have you believe.
If the mass media made no distinction between the terms `paedophile' and `homosexual', would that be reason to give up and say ``the `real term' is `homosexual', not `paedophile'''
I understand what you're trying to say, but you use a very poor example. 'Pedophile' and 'homosexual' are both made up of Greek/Latin roots whose definitions have been set for centuries, even millenia, and are widely known. Additionally, the distinction between them is already set in the public consciousness.
That puts them in a whole different catagory than 'hacker', which has only really been used in the context we are discussing for perhaps 20 or 30 years. In that time the definition has been set in the public consciousness as "someone who knows a lot about computers", generally with a negative connotation. Just because you disagree with that definition, that doesn't make the definition wrong, it makes you wrong.
It comes down to this: if you don't want to be associated in the public eye with people who break into computer systems with malicious intent, don't call yourself a hacker. Trying to get everyone else to call computer vandals something other than 'hacker' is pointless because that definition is already set, and 'cracker', as I've already pointed out, is already used elsewhere. There are plenty of other words you can use to describe yourself and what you do that don't carry that negative conotation, such as 'coder', 'techie', etc. Use one of them. 'Hacker' is a lost cause.
I have a GeForce2 GTS 32MB and it runs both of those games no problem. Come to think of it, the 16MB TNT (no, I don't mean TNT2) it replaced ran both of those games just fine, too, although the default machine gun in Q3 isn't really a usable weapon if you can't consistently hit 90+ FPS.
However, my GeForce2 seriously slows down on Morrowind. Fortunately, Morrowind is perfectly playable at low framerates, but that's not my point.
My point is, of course Counter-Strike and Quake3 run just fine on your 64MB Radeon: both of those games are older than your card!
Where exactly did I advocate showing children violence, edited or otherwise? All I did was respond to the "TV is evil, parents should be reading to their kids instead" BS that the parent was spewing with some examples of where that "solution" is unworkable.
However, here is my response to you.
My daughter's favorite movie is The Phantom Menace. She's 2.5 years old now, and she's been in love with this movie since before she turned 2. Every other family I know owns a copy, all of their kids watch it at least weekly, and there doesn't seem to be any problem with this.
The Phantom Menace has a fair amount of violence in it; people get shot, blown up, stabbed, even cut in half. Giant undersea monsters get torn apart by bigger giant undersea monsters, small creatures are pushed off ledges, or have their heads bit off and spit out. Certainly, TPM could have been on par with Saving Private Ryan in terms of gore had the makers decided that was the way they wanted to go. I would say that there is a comparable amount of violence, but the way it is dealt with makes all the difference in determining how appropriate it is for small children.
Saving Private Ryan is certainly a movie I wouldn't let my daughter see in its current state. She simply isn't equiped to deal with that level of gore on a mental or emotional level. If it were edited so there was no gore, yes I would probably let her watch it (although I doubt she would actually be interested). I don't believe it would be a better movie, since the horror of what they have to go through for this one guy is the main point of the story, but it would be age appropriate.
Age appropriateness in this case has more to do with the way violence is handled than anything else. it hasn't been available to me for a few years, but I very much doubt that Cartoon Network has become violence free during that time.
As far as my daughter knowing that killing is messy, I want her to understand that, but that doesn't mean I need to shove it in her face in such a way that it might be permenantly psychologically damaging, and will certainly lead to months worth of nightmares. Christ! She's only recently come to the point where she realizes that Qui Gon dies, and I'm still not sure she understands what that actually means! She certainly isn't prepared to deal with him being splattered across the room!
I was about to mod this down, but I decided that it would be better to respond.
The "real term" is hacker, not cracker. Why? Because that's what the majority of the english speaking population says it is. Get used to it, because unless you can convince Joe Sixpack and his favorite news anchor otherwise, that's the way it's going to stay.
You'd need to find another term anyway; cracker already has a commonly accepted meaning when it's applied to a person, and it has nothing to do with computers.
I'm sorry your experience in racism, hate speech or your personal agenda precludes you from understanding what you read.
It's interesting thet you should be the one leveling this accusation at me...
One might even call it ironic.
Slashdot is able to avoid this type of label by providing moderation for user posts that would rank those deemed inappropriate or racist.
I agree, but for the site in question to use moderation would be in opposition to everything for which it stands, namely libertarianism.
I wouldn't think I would have to explain the intricacies of this given your steadfast position on the topic but I guess even the holy have their flaws.
Please feel free to cure me of my apparent ignorance. Show me an example of a comment from the article you linked which could be classified as hate speech without taking it out of context or ignoring its satirical nature, and please explain why it is still hate speech.
Unless you can do that, your continued arguement on this topic merely proves that you have not comprehended what you have read. Comprehension is the ability to derive meaning, and meaning is dependent on context and intent.
Read them a book or something. Or would that be too much work for parents?
You obviously have no children, or if you do you have nothing to do with them. Just because I have a child shouldn't mean that I have to spend every waking moment with her. Sometimes I need a break from her, often so that I can actually get something done, like the laundry, or the dishes, or taking a shower, or maybe just regaining my sanity for a few minutes. TV/movies are an effective way to acheive that. Reading her a book, while certainly enjoyable for both of us, does not give me a chance to take a shower.
The sad part is, even with a fair judge, CleanFlicks is dead as a company
I very much doubt that. Clean Flicks isn't just one corner video store, it's a chain which is all over Mormon Country (which spills well over the borders of Utah). Clean Flicks innitiated the fight, and I don't think they would have done so if they thought it was going to kill them off. Also, Mormons stick together (that's one of the things I respect about them) and if Clean Flicks needs help to survive the battle, I have no doubt that their patrons will step up to the plate. Additionally, the Director Guild has now dragged over a dozen other companies that do the same thing into the fight.
For once I don't think money is going to be the deciding factor here, since I think both sides have plenty of it. It looks to me like this one might actually be decided based on the merits of the arguements.
What they're objecting to is a commercial company modifying and then reselling (or republishing, if you like) their copyrighted work without their consent.
Bullshit, because that's not what Clean Flicks does. Clean Flicks buys a legitimate copy of a movie, they edit that copy (no duplication involved), and then they rent their property (which is perfectly legal to do), clearly marked as altered, to people who actively seek out what Clean Flicks provides.
Since there is no duplication involved, it is not republishing. Reselling, which is completely irrelevant to this discussion since that isn't what Clean Flicks does, is completely legal!
this has nothing to do with end user consumer rights.
WRONG! This has everything to do with end user consumer rights. Clean Flicks buys the tape, therefore they are a consumer. Clean Flicks customers actively seek out what Clean Flicks provides, they are end users. They are trying to secure their right to modify property they legitimately own.
No one is attempting to restrict personal editing here.
That is exactly what the directors who are counter-sueing Clean Flicks are trying to do.
After all, you don't expect Readers Digest to be able to publish an abridged version of a book without the consent of the original author and/or publisher. So why do you expect Clean Flicks to be able to do it?
Because Clean Flicks doesn't publish anything, and Readers Digest does. Clean Flicks buys an individual copy and edits that individual copy. There is only ever one copy of the film, which is legitimately purchased, which means that what they do is not publishing. Readers Digest does their edit and sells millions of copies, which means that what they do is publishing.
Copyright law applies to what Readers Digest does because it is publishing. Copyright law does not apply to what Clean Flicks does because it is not publishing.
hard to believe though it may be hurting people's feelings isn't a crime
Yes it is. In the extreme it's called "hate speech", but there are plenty of anti-discrimination, harrasment, and other "political correctness" laws that, in essence, make it illegal to hurt someones feelings.
However, hurting someones feelings by burning a copy of the book they wrote is specifically protected by copyright law as criticism, which falls under Fair Use. I would say there's a fairly strong First Amendment arguement to support it as well.
Go to Radio Shack and get a lense cleaning CD. That has fixed all but one of similar problems I've had (my Diablo2 play disk refused to work in my old DVD drive). DVD players are optical drives, so any dust buildup, and there will be dust buildup, will interfere with it's operation. Naturally, you are more likely to see the problem with DVDs than CDs because the data density is so much higher.
I read the article and the replies did you go that far or did you stop after the FAQ.
I did indeed read the replies, all 4 pages of them. There were a few comments that could be considered racist if you took them totally out of context and ignored their obvious satirical nature. By and large, though, it was an intellectual discussion on the roots of racism.
There was certainly nothing there I would characterize as hate speech. I absolutely would not catagorize the site as one promoting hate, any more than I would categorize slashdot as a hate site based on the comments of a few trolls (the worst of the comments I read on the site in question didn't even compare to some of the things I've read while metamoderating here).
I stand by my assesment of your reading comprehension.
Surely you agree that some monkey getting a drive in the post and sending back a replacement (with optionally some techs in the background to run a few automated tests on the returned unit) is cheaper than a more rigid returns policy?
I don't agree. If it were cheaper that's what companies would be doing already, and I'd be out of a job. Testing, while expensive in it's own right, is essential to keep costs down. If you just replace everything with no questions asked then the company is bearing the cost for all sorts of things it should never have to.
If the drive fails on it's own, then yes, I agree the company should replace it at no charge. However, if the drive failed because the user plugged the cable in backwards[1], or because the user submerged it while it was running, or dropped it 5 meters onto concrete, then no, it's completely unreasonable to expect the company to bear that cost.
Of course if every customer decided to have a big warranty-fest and send back lots of perfectly working disks (getting other working second-hand disks in exchange) then it could be a bit of a drain. But I don't believe that is likely.
Once again, you've obviously never worked in customer service. I would say that roughly a third of callers absolutely refuse to beleive that the problem was caused by anything they did, even though that is fairly obviously the case, and will demand a replacement no matter what, with another third being reasonable people who will follow the phone techs directions to a resolution, and the remaining third result in a return. Bear in mind that my company produces very high end, non-consumer digital video production systems, so our caller quality is unusually high (as is the quality of our phone support). A consumer oriented company is likely to have less than 10 percent of calls warrant a return (though the beligerant caller percentage seems to hold steady).
Anyway, only about half of the product that gets returned to my company is actually bad. Sometimes we know that from the start, for example recently a customer decided that he didn't trust the older power supply revisions in our RAID units and demanded that they all be replaced with rev6 or higher. Obviously that wasn't a warranty replacement, but he did get a price break on the exchange. Another customer replaced all his power supplies after his building was hit by lightning. Again, acts of God are never covered by warranty, but he couldn't afford to not be sure so he replaced them. Only 2 out of 12 were actually damaged.
The basic problem with your theory is that you are assuming that the customer is right. This is not a philosophy that is held in customer service because more often than not it simply isn't the case, and when talking about consumer products, as we are in this general discussion, it isn't the case the vast majority of the time. For most consumer electronics companies a no questions replacement policy would increase their number of replacements by at least an order of magnitude.
[1] This isn't a problem for desktop drives, it simply won't work. But, if you plug the cable for a laptop drive backwards you will certainly burn up the cable, probably damage the electronics on the drive, and possibly burn up your motherboard and maybe some peripheral cards (I've seen it happen).
Did you bother to read the whole thing? If so, you should read it again and actually think about what it is saying.
I would agree that it is extreme, definately controversial, but hate speech? Only to someone with poor reading comprehension.
The article is definately anti-racist, including the type of racism promoted by affirmative action programs. I happen to disagree with him on a practical level (I don't see a better way to have acheived what we have acheived than affirmative action, although I do think it's time for it to fade away), but on an intellectual level he presents some valid arguments.
The blocked list is published and contains a categorization or description of the site which could be damaging to it's reputation and therefore it's viability. If that description is inaccurate, then the publisher of the list is guilty of libel, and the site can go after them for civil damages.
The same thing goes for spammers. If a lists blocks you for being a spammer and you can prove in court that you aren't, you can sue the list for damages.
I understand perfectly what you are saying, it is you who are not understanding what I am saying.
Having to do anything at all with the drive costs money, period. The problem is that the company only makes money on the innitial sale. Every refurb, test, replacement, whatever after the innitial sale eats away at the profit margin. In fact, just by accepting the return they've already demolished their profit margin on that one part many times over.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy is talking about using it as a server, which would most likely be stationary, so there's plenty he could do to the chassis to increase airflow: cut holes, even pull out all the guts and mount them on a board. In the later case you could likely eliminate the CPU fan entirely.
As for the battery, I wouldn't even consider using a laptop battery for anything other than portable use. A UPS that can handle the power draw of a laptop is dirt cheap, and would probably have longer battery life under that kind of load than the laptop battery would.
Also, laptop hard drives are actually more durable than their desktop bretheren. Part of the reason they're so much more expensive is that they are designed to endure far more mechanical stress, so leaving a laptop drive spinning all the time is much less of an issue than leaving a desktop drive spinning all the time. Additionally, the vast majority of hard drive mechanical stress occurs during spin-up, so never spinning down the drive actually increases life expectancy.
As for wearing out non-mechanical parts by leaving them powered, as long as they have adequate ventilation that's a non-issue. Non-mechanical part die because of excessive heat or freak power spikes (which should be eliminated by the UPS), they don't "wear out".
Thank god! I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to see a post pointing out OpenCD, and I was getting quite discouraged about having to post one at the end of 600 or so comments. Talk about lost in the crowd!
I paid $19.95 for my last FireWire card, and that was about a year ago. Looking at Pricewatch, the cheapest card I can definately say is USB2 is $16.85, vs $18.25 for a FireWire card that comes with a 6ft cable and Ulead software (which sucks, btw, but at least it's free).
Not much of a price difference, especially when you consider FireWire's considerable performance advantage, but that's already been discussed by other responders.
Even when it is in front of your face you deny it or excuse it.
I haven't denied anything. I agree that there are several words and phrases that, individually, would constitute hate speech. Where I disagree is that this makes the whole site a hate site. Every one of those potential hate statements is in a context where it becomes highly questionable whether they in fact constitute hate speech, and the vast majority are used in an intellectual discussion dealing with issues of racism.
Remember that Good Speech article you offered the URL to? You should really read it again, because you apparently have completely missed the point of it.
If I were to point out the fact that inner city black youth are trying to reclaim the word "nigger" and remove it's negative connotations, at least within their own social circle, would you respond by calling me a racist because I said "nigger"? If so, then you are the one here who has an agenda, not me. The fact that this is exactly what you are doing with regards to this site says a lot.
I hope my little example has served to point out to you the importance of context to meaning, since you still don't seem to get that.
Just because the meaning I derived is different that what you did doesn't have anything to do with anyone's lack of comprehension.
Yes it does, actually.
Many years ago I took a class in college called "Advanced Composition and Critical Thinking". We spent a great deal of time in that class annalyzing text and deriving the difference between what they meant and what they actually said when you pull it apart into it's component pieces. Doing that was quite a revelation. It's shocking how often people say things and everybody understands what they meant, yet when annalyzed in detail the actually said the exact opposite. People understand what they meant only because of context. Context makes all the difference, and if you don't understand that then you have no real comprehension of what you read.
Sorry, I'm not the one who hopped on slashdot and decided to insult someone without at least checking things out first.
As I've already stated, I read the article you linked in your origional post, including all four pages of comments, before I ever responded to you.
I'm sorry you have yet to learn the difference between comprehending and deriving meaning.
Again, there is no difference. Go look it up, or even better, go ask an English teacher.
Perhaps you actually mean something like "derive meaning other than what is actually there by taking individual statements completely out of context"? Your right, that isn't comprehension, and that's exactly why I keep calling yours into question.
The question now is, are you a hate filled racist or simply someone who is so paranoid about loss of free speech that you will try and protect it even if it means you are standing up for hate filled racists?
I'm intelligent enough to recognize that stifling any speech, especially speech which is deemed destructive in nature, is damaging to a free society, and to the democratic process upon which all of our other freedoms depend. As soon as you say "you can't say that" it sets a precedent, and that precedent makes it easier to say "you can't say that either", and before you know it I'm not allowed to criticize the Attorney General for trying to turn the US into the same kind of police state that the Soviet Union was. When it's illegal to speak your mind you have no other rights. That's why it's called a "slippery slope", and that's why freedom of speech is far more important than the hurt feelings of a few individuals, or even groups.
Am I paranoid? No, because the definition of paranoid stipulates that a paranoid fears something that isn't actually happening. Our rights are being erroded as we speak. USA/PATRIOT has severely abridged our Constitutional rights to privacy, a speedy trial, legal representation, and freedom from illegal search and seizure. Granted that's only if I'm a suspected terrorist, but who's a suspected terrorist? Potentially anyone who disagrees with the government.
So, to quote both Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire, "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
And I'll add a little something from Eleanor Roosevelt: "A mature person is one who is does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally..."
The point the origional poster was trying to make is that this is not an AOL client .
OK, great, Netscape 7 has stuff Mozilla doesn't, and some of that stuff is related to AOL. Whoop-a-dee-doo! You still can't connect to AOL as your primary ISP. You still can't admin your AOL email account. You still can't access the special AOL-only content.
This is not adding AOL support to Linux, which while I personally wouldn't care, it would at least be newsworthy. This is just a distro shipping with the latest version of Netscape, which is, quite frankly, about as newsworthy as "RMS puts his pants on one leg at a time".
Common sense tells me the x86 PCs are faster than Macs just because so much more time and money goes into R&D for Intel and AMD's CPUs.
Benchmarks where the playing field is fairly level support that conclusion.
For the Mac cheerleaders: Photoshop filters heavily optimized for the G4 do not constitute a level playing field, but even then the G4 barely keeps up with current x86 tech.
By level playing field I mean, for example, all the machines running Linux and compiling emacs with a Spark target. In those kind of benchmarks you quickly find that a 500MHz CPU is a 500MHz CPU, regardless of manufacturer.
Bullshit. Criticism is legitimate fair use, and is specifically allowed by US copyright law.
Hate speech can generally be defined as words so outrageous that they would be considered fighting words
And the rest of the sentence is:
provocations sufficiently serious to elicit a violent reaction
A few paragraphs down:
First, hate speech can be very hard to precisely define. Statements which some people regard as hateful, others may regard as an honest effort to raise the tough issues. Hate speech prohibitions can also be used as a basis for the suppressing dissent and harassing people. It is almost always possible to accuse people raising difficult issues of hate speech crimes... They can also have an extremely chilling effect upon efforts to honestly discuss the tough issues which underlie most conflicts.
Yes, I think that some statements made in the discussion you linked origionally are treading that line. The statements above, however, and indeed the large part of the Good Speech article, seems to imply that many of these borderline cases are in fact legitimate and that leveling the Hate Speech accusation can often be destructive in and of itself by preventing necessary discussion of real, if controversial and potentially offensive, issues. I believe that is the case here.
Remember that reading comprehension thing we were talking about? Were you hoping I wouldn't actually read the article, or did you not actually read it yourself?
Being able to seperate myself from the innitial emotional shock of seeing something like "Jews are the biggest racists" and think critically about the arguements presented in that and related posts, I didn't find anything particularly inflamatory. I did, however, find a great deal of intelligent discussion on the nature of racism, its roots, and effort to dispel many of the common myths about racism, such as that racism is exclusive to redneck trailer-trash.
The statement that "The world's biggest racists are the Jews" is definately extreme. I wouldn't say "the worlds biggest", but I have studied various religions including Judaism, and there are definately some racist aspects to Jewish tradition and history. The current Isreali regime is absolutely racist, and I would say the history of the Isreal/Palestine conflict reads like a study on racism on par with our own eviction and oppression of Native Americans.
Nothing that was said in support of this statement was untrue, feel free to research it yourself. Additionally, many of the people involved in that discussion were very careful to point out that they weren't trying to bash Jews, but rather dispelling the myth that poor white America has a monopoly on racism by providing a counter example.
How you can say that "And whatever else they are, the Jews are not non-achievers" is hate speech, however, brings back the question of your comprehension skills. How exactly does saying that a particular race has accomplished a great deal qualify as hate speech? Am I somehow bashing the Romans when I say that they were great engineers who built roads and aquaducts that have withstood the ravages of centuries all over Europe? I think not.
"Nuke the Raghead" I'll give you, I guess, even though it is in a completely different discussion and, again, taken totally out of context. You seem to not understand that context effects meaning, and that is the root of my questions about you comprehension skills. Personally, I thought the comment was an unfortunately worded indictment of the current national attitudes and the current administrations pining for the days of the Gulf War, when "Nuke the Raghead" was widely considered a perfectly acceptable thing to say. It was clearly a comment about how sites get classified by webfilters, implying that there would be a setting that would allow hate speech directed at Arab extremists only in accordance with the wishes of the current administration.
Why you would deny this language is used throughout this site is beyond me unless you have an agenda.
Ah, yes. It couldn't possibly be that your arguements are fallacious and your "proof" weak, it must be that I have an agenda!
I feel like I'm spinning my wheels with some kid who doesn't know the difference between comprehension and what it means to derive meaning from a reading
There is no difference. Read comprehension is the skill of deriving meaning from reading. They are one and the same.
Somebody doesn't know what 'microkernel' means, nor understand the GPL.
First, microkernels are all about modules, in fact, modularized drivers are the whole point of having a microkernel. So, yes, in theory a third party could write drivers. However, as you have already pointed out, at least indirectly, the OS X kernel is a closed Mach variant, so who really knows if it's possible to create driver modules for third party file systems? It seems like it would be a stupid thing to prevent, but I'm sure an MBA could make a reasonable-sounding case for it.
Also, while we're on the subject, It's the Mach kernel which is BSD compatible, since at least Mach3. That isn't something special that Apple added.
Now as for the GPL, they could use the GPL code only in the module, which would mean that only the module would be subject to the GPL, or they could write their own code which interfaces with the APIs (or whatever they are called) for reiser/ext3/whatever and none of their code would be subject to the GPL.
Don't buy the FUD. The GPL is not nearly as viral as Microsoft would have you believe.
If the mass media made no distinction between the terms `paedophile' and `homosexual', would that be reason to give up and say ``the `real term' is `homosexual', not `paedophile'''
I understand what you're trying to say, but you use a very poor example. 'Pedophile' and 'homosexual' are both made up of Greek/Latin roots whose definitions have been set for centuries, even millenia, and are widely known. Additionally, the distinction between them is already set in the public consciousness.
That puts them in a whole different catagory than 'hacker', which has only really been used in the context we are discussing for perhaps 20 or 30 years. In that time the definition has been set in the public consciousness as "someone who knows a lot about computers", generally with a negative connotation. Just because you disagree with that definition, that doesn't make the definition wrong, it makes you wrong.
It comes down to this: if you don't want to be associated in the public eye with people who break into computer systems with malicious intent, don't call yourself a hacker. Trying to get everyone else to call computer vandals something other than 'hacker' is pointless because that definition is already set, and 'cracker', as I've already pointed out, is already used elsewhere. There are plenty of other words you can use to describe yourself and what you do that don't carry that negative conotation, such as 'coder', 'techie', etc. Use one of them. 'Hacker' is a lost cause.
I have a GeForce2 GTS 32MB and it runs both of those games no problem. Come to think of it, the 16MB TNT (no, I don't mean TNT2) it replaced ran both of those games just fine, too, although the default machine gun in Q3 isn't really a usable weapon if you can't consistently hit 90+ FPS.
However, my GeForce2 seriously slows down on Morrowind. Fortunately, Morrowind is perfectly playable at low framerates, but that's not my point.
My point is, of course Counter-Strike and Quake3 run just fine on your 64MB Radeon: both of those games are older than your card!
Where exactly did I advocate showing children violence, edited or otherwise? All I did was respond to the "TV is evil, parents should be reading to their kids instead" BS that the parent was spewing with some examples of where that "solution" is unworkable.
However, here is my response to you.
My daughter's favorite movie is The Phantom Menace. She's 2.5 years old now, and she's been in love with this movie since before she turned 2. Every other family I know owns a copy, all of their kids watch it at least weekly, and there doesn't seem to be any problem with this.
The Phantom Menace has a fair amount of violence in it; people get shot, blown up, stabbed, even cut in half. Giant undersea monsters get torn apart by bigger giant undersea monsters, small creatures are pushed off ledges, or have their heads bit off and spit out. Certainly, TPM could have been on par with Saving Private Ryan in terms of gore had the makers decided that was the way they wanted to go. I would say that there is a comparable amount of violence, but the way it is dealt with makes all the difference in determining how appropriate it is for small children.
Saving Private Ryan is certainly a movie I wouldn't let my daughter see in its current state. She simply isn't equiped to deal with that level of gore on a mental or emotional level. If it were edited so there was no gore, yes I would probably let her watch it (although I doubt she would actually be interested). I don't believe it would be a better movie, since the horror of what they have to go through for this one guy is the main point of the story, but it would be age appropriate.
Age appropriateness in this case has more to do with the way violence is handled than anything else. it hasn't been available to me for a few years, but I very much doubt that Cartoon Network has become violence free during that time.
As far as my daughter knowing that killing is messy, I want her to understand that, but that doesn't mean I need to shove it in her face in such a way that it might be permenantly psychologically damaging, and will certainly lead to months worth of nightmares. Christ! She's only recently come to the point where she realizes that Qui Gon dies, and I'm still not sure she understands what that actually means! She certainly isn't prepared to deal with him being splattered across the room!
I was about to mod this down, but I decided that it would be better to respond.
The "real term" is hacker, not cracker. Why? Because that's what the majority of the english speaking population says it is. Get used to it, because unless you can convince Joe Sixpack and his favorite news anchor otherwise, that's the way it's going to stay.
You'd need to find another term anyway; cracker already has a commonly accepted meaning when it's applied to a person, and it has nothing to do with computers.
I'm sorry your experience in racism, hate speech or your personal agenda precludes you from understanding what you read.
It's interesting thet you should be the one leveling this accusation at me...
One might even call it ironic.
Slashdot is able to avoid this type of label by providing moderation for user posts that would rank those deemed inappropriate or racist.
I agree, but for the site in question to use moderation would be in opposition to everything for which it stands, namely libertarianism.
I wouldn't think I would have to explain the intricacies of this given your steadfast position on the topic but I guess even the holy have their flaws.
Please feel free to cure me of my apparent ignorance. Show me an example of a comment from the article you linked which could be classified as hate speech without taking it out of context or ignoring its satirical nature, and please explain why it is still hate speech.
Unless you can do that, your continued arguement on this topic merely proves that you have not comprehended what you have read. Comprehension is the ability to derive meaning, and meaning is dependent on context and intent.
Read them a book or something. Or would that be too much work for parents?
You obviously have no children, or if you do you have nothing to do with them. Just because I have a child shouldn't mean that I have to spend every waking moment with her. Sometimes I need a break from her, often so that I can actually get something done, like the laundry, or the dishes, or taking a shower, or maybe just regaining my sanity for a few minutes. TV/movies are an effective way to acheive that. Reading her a book, while certainly enjoyable for both of us, does not give me a chance to take a shower.
The sad part is, even with a fair judge, CleanFlicks is dead as a company
I very much doubt that. Clean Flicks isn't just one corner video store, it's a chain which is all over Mormon Country (which spills well over the borders of Utah). Clean Flicks innitiated the fight, and I don't think they would have done so if they thought it was going to kill them off. Also, Mormons stick together (that's one of the things I respect about them) and if Clean Flicks needs help to survive the battle, I have no doubt that their patrons will step up to the plate.
Additionally, the Director Guild has now dragged over a dozen other companies that do the same thing into the fight.
For once I don't think money is going to be the deciding factor here, since I think both sides have plenty of it. It looks to me like this one might actually be decided based on the merits of the arguements.
What they're objecting to is a commercial company modifying and then reselling (or republishing, if you like) their copyrighted work without their consent.
Bullshit, because that's not what Clean Flicks does. Clean Flicks buys a legitimate copy of a movie, they edit that copy (no duplication involved), and then they rent their property (which is perfectly legal to do), clearly marked as altered, to people who actively seek out what Clean Flicks provides.
Since there is no duplication involved, it is not republishing. Reselling, which is completely irrelevant to this discussion since that isn't what Clean Flicks does, is completely legal!
this has nothing to do with end user consumer rights.
WRONG! This has everything to do with end user consumer rights. Clean Flicks buys the tape, therefore they are a consumer. Clean Flicks customers actively seek out what Clean Flicks provides, they are end users. They are trying to secure their right to modify property they legitimately own.
No one is attempting to restrict personal editing here.
That is exactly what the directors who are counter-sueing Clean Flicks are trying to do.
After all, you don't expect Readers Digest to be able to publish an abridged version of a book without the consent of the original author and/or publisher. So why do you expect Clean Flicks to be able to do it?
Because Clean Flicks doesn't publish anything, and Readers Digest does. Clean Flicks buys an individual copy and edits that individual copy. There is only ever one copy of the film, which is legitimately purchased, which means that what they do is not publishing. Readers Digest does their edit and sells millions of copies, which means that what they do is publishing.
Copyright law applies to what Readers Digest does because it is publishing. Copyright law does not apply to what Clean Flicks does because it is not publishing.
hard to believe though it may be hurting people's feelings isn't a crime
Yes it is. In the extreme it's called "hate speech", but there are plenty of anti-discrimination, harrasment, and other "political correctness" laws that, in essence, make it illegal to hurt someones feelings.
However, hurting someones feelings by burning a copy of the book they wrote is specifically protected by copyright law as criticism, which falls under Fair Use. I would say there's a fairly strong First Amendment arguement to support it as well.
Go to Radio Shack and get a lense cleaning CD. That has fixed all but one of similar problems I've had (my Diablo2 play disk refused to work in my old DVD drive). DVD players are optical drives, so any dust buildup, and there will be dust buildup, will interfere with it's operation. Naturally, you are more likely to see the problem with DVDs than CDs because the data density is so much higher.
I read the article and the replies did you go that far or did you stop after the FAQ.
I did indeed read the replies, all 4 pages of them. There were a few comments that could be considered racist if you took them totally out of context and ignored their obvious satirical nature. By and large, though, it was an intellectual discussion on the roots of racism.
There was certainly nothing there I would characterize as hate speech. I absolutely would not catagorize the site as one promoting hate, any more than I would categorize slashdot as a hate site based on the comments of a few trolls (the worst of the comments I read on the site in question didn't even compare to some of the things I've read while metamoderating here).
I stand by my assesment of your reading comprehension.
Surely you agree that some monkey getting a drive in the post and sending back a replacement (with optionally some techs in the background to run a few automated tests on the returned unit) is cheaper than a more rigid returns policy?
I don't agree. If it were cheaper that's what companies would be doing already, and I'd be out of a job. Testing, while expensive in it's own right, is essential to keep costs down. If you just replace everything with no questions asked then the company is bearing the cost for all sorts of things it should never have to.
If the drive fails on it's own, then yes, I agree the company should replace it at no charge. However, if the drive failed because the user plugged the cable in backwards[1], or because the user submerged it while it was running, or dropped it 5 meters onto concrete, then no, it's completely unreasonable to expect the company to bear that cost.
Of course if every customer decided to have a big warranty-fest and send back lots of perfectly working disks (getting other working second-hand disks in exchange) then it could be a bit of a drain. But I don't believe that is likely.
Once again, you've obviously never worked in customer service. I would say that roughly a third of callers absolutely refuse to beleive that the problem was caused by anything they did, even though that is fairly obviously the case, and will demand a replacement no matter what, with another third being reasonable people who will follow the phone techs directions to a resolution, and the remaining third result in a return. Bear in mind that my company produces very high end, non-consumer digital video production systems, so our caller quality is unusually high (as is the quality of our phone support). A consumer oriented company is likely to have less than 10 percent of calls warrant a return (though the beligerant caller percentage seems to hold steady).
Anyway, only about half of the product that gets returned to my company is actually bad. Sometimes we know that from the start, for example recently a customer decided that he didn't trust the older power supply revisions in our RAID units and demanded that they all be replaced with rev6 or higher. Obviously that wasn't a warranty replacement, but he did get a price break on the exchange. Another customer replaced all his power supplies after his building was hit by lightning. Again, acts of God are never covered by warranty, but he couldn't afford to not be sure so he replaced them. Only 2 out of 12 were actually damaged.
The basic problem with your theory is that you are assuming that the customer is right. This is not a philosophy that is held in customer service because more often than not it simply isn't the case, and when talking about consumer products, as we are in this general discussion, it isn't the case the vast majority of the time. For most consumer electronics companies a no questions replacement policy would increase their number of replacements by at least an order of magnitude.
[1] This isn't a problem for desktop drives, it simply won't work. But, if you plug the cable for a laptop drive backwards you will certainly burn up the cable, probably damage the electronics on the drive, and possibly burn up your motherboard and maybe some peripheral cards (I've seen it happen).
Yeah, you're right. That would be a pretty stupid and pointless NDA, though.
Did you bother to read the whole thing? If so, you should read it again and actually think about what it is saying.
I would agree that it is extreme, definately controversial, but hate speech? Only to someone with poor reading comprehension.
The article is definately anti-racist, including the type of racism promoted by affirmative action programs. I happen to disagree with him on a practical level (I don't see a better way to have acheived what we have acheived than affirmative action, although I do think it's time for it to fade away), but on an intellectual level he presents some valid arguments.
The blocked list is published and contains a categorization or description of the site which could be damaging to it's reputation and therefore it's viability. If that description is inaccurate, then the publisher of the list is guilty of libel, and the site can go after them for civil damages.
The same thing goes for spammers. If a lists blocks you for being a spammer and you can prove in court that you aren't, you can sue the list for damages.
I understand perfectly what you are saying, it is you who are not understanding what I am saying.
Having to do anything at all with the drive costs money, period. The problem is that the company only makes money on the innitial sale. Every refurb, test, replacement, whatever after the innitial sale eats away at the profit margin. In fact, just by accepting the return they've already demolished their profit margin on that one part many times over.