You must not be an X11 developer. You are also, if you can talk about Linux becoming somehow comparable to FreeBSD, not very aware of Linux usage. Linux sees far more use as a server than a desktop, and while it's possible that some other project starts eating up marketshare in that segment, I would be extremely surprised if that happened, and then we have the supercomputer, embedded, and mobile markets.
Your post is devoid of technical arguments for X11, because X11 is technically a clusterfuck. It does far too many things, and none of them well. The print server is probably the worst offense there, but by no means the only one. How many rendering interfaces are there, again? Tell me about why exactly I can't adjust my computer's volume while the screensaver is active, and how that is a good idea.
The only approximation of a coherent argument against Wayland is a repetitive drone of "network transparency means my ssh -X works as expected". Cool, but that's not what that means and that's not going away, and certainly not any time soon. Wayland is not ready for production, and not expected to be anytime soon, and it's blindingly obvious to everyone that it will not be considered ready for production until ssh -X works correctly.
I have to ask if you're even a developer, because my limited programming experiences have led me to believe that if an experienced dev says that the entire approach is crap and needs to be scrapped, more than likely this is true. It is unreasonable to expect that the display solutions of 30 years ago are remotely appropriate for today. It's also a deeply held Unix principle that programs should have a limited scope; why anyone would complain about a "stripped down windowing system" is beyond me. Especially with all of the obsolete, unused crap that even X11's adherents cannot deny that it contains.
So one the one side we have technical and philosophical arguments, and on the other -- please, please have something better than "ssh -X won't work". If you haven't seen the video, it's amusing and informative. Also if you haven't seen the video, you don't know what you're arguing.
One of my arguments was Jefferson's, so you are bizarrely dishonest in claiming that it was based on any fallacy of mine. You are also incorrect in identifying said fallacies.
If patents prevent competition, as you assert, then why is it that Apple is not the first smartphone inventor, nor Microsoft the first OS inventor, nor Dell the PC inventor? I would be harder pressed to find markets that were dominated by a single entity by virtue of patents; perhaps you can suggest some. In the strict sense though I am afraid the case is unassailable, since unless a potentially-infringing party is competing there is no case to be made for infringement. One may force an entity to cease infringing, but you can't prevent it. Even getting an injunction during a lawsuit can be tricky, as evidenced by the Apple/Samsung litigations. I am not the world's most ardent capitalist by any means, but a for-profit, government-granted monopoly is a hard thing to justify in any circumstances.
I admit you didn't say explicitly what I ascribed to you. Your example however utilized in the positive sense an inventor and as adversary a MegaCorp, which is a strong case for patents but not the common one. The example you chose was one where patents were a good thing for the "little guy". Far more often, patents are held by "big guys", who need much less help in dealing with their competition. Even if it were not the usual case for patents to be used abusively, there's no use pretending they are not a two-edged sword. Disputing one with any entity having a $100M patent portfolio would be risky no matter how righteous your cause.
If you have the time, you might attempt a real response, but I suspect that you will have to succumb to a more nuanced view on patents; Jefferson makes a compelling case, the more so because he served as the first Patent Commissioner. I will also suggest that you might not need to ask why people require explanations of these things, if you actually read the counterarguments.
I submit I am the highest authority on this specific subject here on slashdot. I grew up in Valdez, AK, the closest town to the spill. I was there when it happened. There is some documentary footage somewhere of myself and my siblings at one of these oil-soaked beaches. I've known friends to go out and do these beach surveys looking for oil, and I've fished and kayaked throughout Prince William Sound.
Firstly I have to say that, unless one goes specifically looking for it, this oil is invisible. The environment has entirely recovered, the salmon run is healthy, and there are as many sea birds, sea otters, and sea lions as there ever have been.
Secondly, the other posters make a very good points about the relative safety of oil tankers vs oil pipelines. I will additionally say that tankers are better protected from deliberate damage than pipelines. I don't know where you're getting your costs from, but I make the average oil tanker to be in the $100M range, and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System cost $8B.
I don't know if you know about it, but there is also a proposed natural gas pipeline which was intended to run through Canada to the States. Extrapolating from the cost per mile of TAPS, an oil pipeline would probably be in the range of $15B. Setting aside whether it is actually better for the environment, it is a lot easier to suggest that environmental concerns trump economic ones when it's not your $15B.
Nuclear power is probably a good option for Alaska, whereas solar is pretty much off the table. Hopefully one day someone will take advantage of the tidal energy in the Cook Inlet as well, one lobe of that (Turnagain Arm) having the third-highest tides in the world. There are one or two problems though with putting nuclear reactors in geologically active places though, and the NRC isn't exactly putting applications through quickly at the moment.
Personally though, from having witnessed one of the larger oil spills in history, I don't really find them all that concerning.
You assume that patents do anything to prevent MegaCorp from competing. You also assume that it is Joe Inventor filing most of the patents, and not said MegaCorp. In practice, neither of these things are true, and the primary beneficiaries of patent litigation are lawyers.
Patents are the right to squash competition. Competition in the ideal sense is a very efficient way to allocate resources. If one company is first to market, and a competitor makes a product which is "better, faster, and shinier," what exactly is wrong with letting the market decide who gets rewarded?
Your argument hinges on the role of patents in encouraging people to bring products to market, which is actually an orthogonal process. Patents are intended to promote the disclosure of ideas. All well and good, but maybe an automatic monopoly isn't necesarily the best way to accomplish either of those things.
There are two really big problems with patents. The first is that almost all knowledge is derivative of other knowledge. Certain persons with an excess of self-interest will argue that such a thing as originality exists in some distinguishable form. I submit that even for the invention of fire there was prior art, and every invention since then was either an incremental adaptation or based on some other preexisting knowledge. Keep in mind that the ones who add to our knowledge of the world are called scientists, not inventors.
The second problem is embodied in the phrase "intellectual property." Jefferson noted that there is nothing less suited to ownership than an idea. I could not possibly improve on his argument.
Patents are a granted right, not a natural one. You are as free to pursue financial gain by sweat of the brow or toil of the mind with or without their existence. I'm not, frankly, interested in pursuing a discussion of whether there is some better way to encourage inventors, but the discussion is not advanced by conjuring a trivial and misleading hypothetical situation, ignoring actual practice, and presupposing the necessity of some legal instrument unknown through most of human history.
You seem to have a strange divergence from reality.
The deal is four billion dollars cash, the rest in stock. Facebook's net income for 2013 was $1.5 billion. The deal ate up 35% of Facebook's cash on hand, so there's not necessarily any debt here to make up, and all things being held constant, my math would have them in the green again within three years.
I don't think that Facebook has any more chance of long-term success than those people silly enough to sell operating systems, but at the moment they're both pretty good rackets. This is a heavy investment for Facebook, but they're not an untalented bunch; they have by necessity made a very fast pig out of a PHP application, and they have (apparently) a lot of money to throw at a new market. Can anyone really say that this makes less sense than whatever chunk of Google's $6.8B R&D budget is going to autonomous vehicles and Glass?
Besides, you're giving Zuckerberg & co. far too much credit for long-term thinking.
The NSA can notify whoever they want to as long as there is a public process for it. However, they should stay the hell away from that for the most part because they are a branch of the United States military and it's fucking retarded and treasonous to use military force against its own society.
This is the whole reason we have rules of evidence. We intentionally restrain the investigative branches of our civil justice system, because few citizen can entirely avoid lawbreaking, even aside from cases of civil disobedience. We also restrain these bodies because their consequences are often swift and terrible, and the mere association with crime, the suspicion only of guilt, can be enough to end a man's reputation and career. Laxity in evidentiary procedure is not really a problem we need to have. You also have a right to all the evidence used against you, specifically so that you can challenge it. Secret evidence is a hallmark of the Star Chamber, not the US Justice System.
The bigger issue though is the military nature of this investigative body. I'm sure that to some degree we are justly hoist on our own petard for our treatment of our allies, but freedom from military action is a right of all citizens. Where concerns our martial foes, we have far fewer legal restrictions on actions. War is not civil. War is Hell. We do not bring Hell home, and we do not visit arms against the shores that bore them. If we are not to raise arms ourselves against this treason, then let justice come swiftly.
Straw man. Try what I actually said: we already have the most expansive prison program in the world, and it is objectively bad at rehabilitation. You should probably be trying to justify either the current system or your idea that somehow it's not punishing people enough. Also we might cover whether punishment or rehabilitation is the primary purpose of a prison system.
Nice soundbite though. Reactionary, fallacious and obvious: a jab to please even the most thoughtless. I hope you didn't stay up too late writing it.
There is indeed a difference. Please pardon my rhetoric; my argument is not necessarily academically rigorous. However, if we can reverse my intention with that remark, and suggest that a criminal record is an excellent way to be unemployed or otherwise in an impoverished state, the statistics range are supportive. Some of them were even shocking; one document I read indicated a low four-figure annual income for some groups. An exaggeration, one can only hope. I also do not think it beggars belief to suggest that e.g. a starving man might steal a loaf, but since he cannot be proven to do so, you must have a valid objection. I had considered striking the term, and mere laziness prevented me. Again, your pardon. If you have further argument for increased incarceration, please do continue.
We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and you're arguing that not enough people are being jailed? Poverty is causally linked to crime! Assault, rape, and robbery have been in decline for years, and prison sentences have been lengthening.
It should be a surprise to no one that statistics on the income level of incoming prisoners are heavily biased towards the lowest levels of income. Income statistics for released felons are even worse. We stigmatize prison to such a degree that it destroys people's ability to earn a living afterwards, and you wonder why we have a >60% recidivision rate. Our "corrections system" is fundamentally broken, and by all measures worsening. Isn't prison supposed to prevent people from returning to a life of crime?
I am appalled at your ignorance, and the idea of a higher incarceration rate is vile. If you have no human compassion, have at least the sense to see when a solution isn't working.
Yes, yes, Gnome3 depends on logind/systemd. Also ConsoleKit ceased development. It's almost as if they think it's a better technology. But hey, you want to install a massive monolithic DE, it's gonna pull in some dependencies that you may or may not like. That is not Debian's problem, actually -- if they showed any signs of being amenable to discussion on the matter, then you might complain to the Gnome developers.
This vote ignored the issue of what kind of default the default should be, because it only had one question that was being decided. It is unlikely to be the end of the discussion on the matter, so I am sure that all those with opinions will get their fair say -- just not on this vote. I realize that the vote may not have gone your way, but those grapes were probably sour anyway.
What if you win, and Dice decides that they, like so many of/.'s other owners, can't make a dime off the site as it is?
Because as far as I can tell they already have made that decision, and the beta is the only thing keeping them in this game at all. What are you going to do when you get your wish, the Beta goes away -- and the rest of the site with it? Congratulate yourself on your victory, no doubt.
I want them to have an open development process. I want Slashcode to be on github, and for all this bile to be replaced with an adult conversation, an issue tracker, and a mailing list. Failing that I see no reason for profanity or vandalism. It is not a necessary part of anything, especially not civil disobedience. Hatred begets hatred, and the haters have not the bargaining power that they think they do. There is nothing to stop Dice from pulling the plug on the whole show, and if the site is destined to dry up and blow away in either case, I don't want my lasting memories of the place to include this uninhibited flood of vitriol.
No, it is loathed by a small, vocal, percentage of system administrators, who have very little in the way of technical arguments at their disposal. This vote may be considered evidence in that respect.
There is very little to recommend init scripts. I dismiss arguments that they are any easier for any average mortal to deal with than any other piece of code, and there is very little justification for wasting CPU time on a non-interactive process. Additionally, this will merely be a default -- those who want slow boots, or think cgroups are evil, can go ahead and install systemv-init and purge systemd. Or, since systemd, d-bus, pulseaudio, and wayland are evidently the future of Linux, the malcontents can install BSD -- it comes with a free chip for your other shoulder.
The idea of military specialists of whatever type being employed against the society they belong to, is treasonous and fucking retarded no matter what legal acrobatics are employed in their defense.
You may have some sort of mystic devotion to the law, but I believe laws are made by (generally corrupt) men for their own interests, and I am familiar enough with the world outside the borders and political influence of the United States to know there is an enormous difference between legality and rightousness. The U.S.A. may not be the kind of country where you are expected to bribe every public official however minor -- we generally reserve that for higher office. It takes a special kind of idiocy to use military forces against their homeland, though.
Government at its core is the body to which we have delegated our inherent right to violence -- a right being defined in this case as something which cannot be taken from you. We delegate this right to others, specialized in its use, with the express understanding that [a] as applied to civilian life, the exercise of violence by police will be applied fairly and equally as men can manage, and [b] that the unrestricted expression of this (as embodied by military force) be only employed against our enemies. War is hell, and we do not bring hell home.
Snowden is a patriot, and the NSA is treasonous -- whether or not the law can be made to serve whichever purpose. Beyond all other argument, potentially felonious violation of the law is so common with the continual proliferation of laws that lawfulness cannot be the only measure of either justice or rightousness. May all those who support the NSA have a fair trial.
You're assuming that none of these 'clones' would be any good. This is not a solid premise. First demonstrate that only Nintendo could have created these works.
I think Zynga is a good counterexample; I am sure they have some original content but they mostly seem to use concepts that originated elsewhere. There is no reason in a world with more limited copyrights that some other company could not take whichever IP and run with it, and create a product at least equal to the original. I would imagine that it would actually spur developers to create new content or gameplay, as opposed to the rent-seeking unending sequels that get published today.
You forget that Google has not written their own OS. They have customized the kernel and written their own display manager, among (to be fair) a fairly respectable number of other changes. However, they started with Linux, and
uname -s
will still return 'Linux'.
You have more or less the Filesystem Heirarchy Standard, a limited but unixy shell, and anyone who has cut their teeth on the command line should feel at home. It doesn't by default let you install packages from the command line, but that's to be expected: the biggest security threat to a system is the user, and they need to be able to support a specific subset of features, as opposed to every combination of packages and configurations.
Point being though, they got 98% of the system for free, and the changes they made have been mostly in a fairly common vein. They're hardly the first to create a Linux-based appliance. And of course they get to draw on all of the Chrome-browser efforts.
With regard to your general point, it must be remembered that Microsoft originated the idea of an operating system as being something that was sold directly to consumers. At the risk of being predictive, that is beginning to seem like a bizarre anomaly, and it is difficult to see where any other future business could possibly duplicate their success, even the future Microsoft.
That was actually Mussolini's favorite definition of fascism: the union of the corporation with the state.
This I have to see as the union of two bad ideas: the first being the indefinitely chartered corporation, the second being the idea of indefinite copyright. I stop short of saying that copyright itself was a mistake, but it didn't always exist, and if patronage was good enough for Michelangelo...
No, I mean decades, because I have actually read the research papers coming out of the various climate study organizations in the State of Alaska. I can single out studies by the University of Alaska Fairbanks as being particularly informative on the subject of ice sheet loss. Overall temperatures in the Arctic have risen at about twice the global average since the 1950s. Ice sheet loss was about 52 cubic kilometers per year until the 1990s, when it essentially doubled. As might be expected, glacial retreat is greatest for low-altitude glaciers, which happen to be the most accessible and visible. Or would be if they weren't retreating so fast; we have glacier viewpoints where you cannot even see the glacier any more. Other fun facts: the number of frost-free days in Fairbanks, AK have increased by 50% over the last century. Villages that have been protected for millennia by sea ice are having to be moved.
If you're going to make an argument, make it with facts. Unfortunately the facts are against you, so you may want to revise your beliefs.
The Earth is 70% covered with water, which is in continual phase transition depending on local temperature. The most important transition for these purposes between liquid and gaseous states. Given that there is almost always some liquid water which will under no great provocation become gaseous should the atmosphere be capable of absorbing it, we can for most intents and purposes say that the atmosphere is saturated with H20. There is precisely zero we can do about that. Looking down the list of gases which are present in non-trivial amounts in the atmosphere, and which also contribute to the greenhouse effect by absorbing long-wave radiation, CO2 is clearly the biggest concern. Discounting the seasonal variations, the largest natural contributions to the carbon cycle are volcanic. In past eras volcanism has been responsible for some rather extreme extinction events. At our current rates of CO2 emission, humanity has been putting even the largest-scale volcanic events to shame. An eruption the size of Mt Pinatubo would, as I recall, represent about a day and a half of human CO2 emissions. An eruption on the scale of the Yellowstone supervolcano could be had twice annually without equalling our impact. We are still a couple orders of magnitude away from the largest CO2 outgassings the world has ever seen -- but we're working on it. And you must keep in mind that even spectacular events like the Deccan Traps happened over millenia and gigaannums. We are almost certainly changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere at a rate unprecedented in its existence.
Discrepencies between theories and observed results are common in all fields, and in most cases do not affect the validity of those theories. Certainly not to the point where one would question, e.g. the greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide, which may be trivially demonstrated with any transparent container and a thermometer. In point of fact, since it is such an obvious property, it should come as no surprise that the idea of CO2-induced warming is about 200 years old. We may also point out, since you mention it, that the variation in solar irradiance is on the order of.1% over its 11-year cycle. This is still worth accounting for in a mathematical model, but being a fairly stable cycle it of course has a minimal effect on the error factors. I don't wish to belabor the point, but variance has nothing to do with predictability: consider any harmonic oscillation.
We may touch on the necessity for mathematical models and their use: a simple and fairly useless model would be to consider the Earth as a perfect blackbody, which can only tell us that this ideal Earth would have a temperature of ~6 degrees C. A less bad model might consider the atmosphere as a column of layered gases, from which one could derive some useful indications of what effect they have in various proportions. Again, a higher partial pressure of carbon dioxide will result in greater absorbtion of outgoing long-wave radiation, i.e. a "greenhouse" effect. Since warmer air can contain more water, and since the supply of water may be considered to be inexhaustible, a naive calculation would show that increasing the partial pressure of CO2 would lead to arbitrarily large temperatures, a la Venus. Since we know from experience and paleontology that this does not occur on Earth, we may be extremely thankful for various countering forces in the biosphere which ensure that this is not a runaway effect -- so far.
The problem is, of course, that our atmospheric changes are drastic and unprecedented. We rely on of life in order to balance out our carbon equation, but we're also doing a wonderful job of deforestation and various other forms of damage to our environment. At this point we are merely hoping that enough of these various other species are able to survive the Great Anthropogenic Extinction Event in order to ensure our own survival.
You may not be an idiot. You are deeply ignorant; this is grade-school level science. You are also close-minded, appar
The Earth, modeled as a perfect blackbody, has a trivially calulable temperature: 6 degrees C global average. Observed temperatures are obviously higher than that. The difference is, you guessed it, the "greenhouse" effect of the atmosphere. The science behind the greenhouse effect has been known for about 200 years now. There is no "so-called" adjective necessary to describe it and only the purest idiots would bother denying something that is trivially observable with any transparent container, a CO2 source, and a thermometer. That CO2 absorbs radiation in a certain band is incontrovertible.
For experimental confirmation that the Earth is warming a great amount, I may use my window: I live in Alaska, where glacial ice thousands of years old is vanishing with increasing rapidity and has been for decades. Guess which observation represents a trend?
Certainly theft was not involved, but it was not presented in the manner of a cautionary tale. I was cruising with a young good ol' boy whose highest ambition in life was defacing road signs, in a battered willys jeep of unknown provenance. Said acquaintance had just been released from the care of the local penal system, and was out visiting old friends to celebrate his newfound (and short-lived) freedom. I don't recall either of their names, but I'll always remember his friend as "Bubba", and he was quite the type. We pulled off a disused highway that wound amongst the foothills of the Appalachians, down a dusty red dirt track which pointed towards a hovel and nearly indistinguishable trash heaps surrounding it. A sweaty mountain wearing only denim overalls (with one strap fastened, of course) cornered the house and lumbered up the slope towards us. I was somewhat apprehensive and shall we say not in Kansas any more, being nineteen and straying out of Alaska on my own for the first time.
The topics of conversation were, as I mentioned, in the manner of a reunion after an enforced absence, and I am sure that of all possible answers to the question of, "So what have you been up to?" there could not have been any more shocking. Caution had no part in it; the man was embarrassed to show us his scar, and to describe his previous condition, and particularly wished us to understand that he was doing much better. One could only hope that to be the case -- there may be a downward path from that kind of state but it is surely very short and I cannot begin to imagine what horrors it would contain.
Shortly thereafter, as I was flying out of that benighted human waste-land, I read another local news story: a pair of rednecks had stolen their neighbor's pet pygmy goats, butchered them, and traded the meat to their dealer for crack. I had other experiences in the Carolinas, but nothing that one would call particularly pleasant, and these two for me have come to represent the place. I would let them be cautionary against spending time in Appalachia as much as against having a crack habit, but I've known other people and places to have crack problems without quite that level of crazy. Take from it what you will.
I met a man in South Carolina who claimed to have sold a kidney for crack. He displayed the most horrible scar, which I could very well have believed to be from the most amateur of surgeons. I remember that he said, "You know those stories that you hear about people waking up in a bathtub full of ice? Yeah, that happened to me."
But he said he'd kicked the habit.
Now, I make no claims as to this man's honesty, only to my own recollection, but surely while the implantation of an organ requires all that you mention, the removal of such is far simpler?
There are two divisions of "technique" when it comes to art. The first involves the physical manipulation of the medium, which has changed somewhat with the invention of new media, and some parts have become obsolete. The second involves understanding of perspective, anatomy, color, lines and shapes, various atmospheric effects, et cetera, and in many cases also how these rules may be broken to artistic effect, and these are timeless. Sure, anyone can paint without understanding, and anyone may criticize without comprehending, but you know how it is: everyone has an opinion and an asshole.
But, to be any good as an artist, you must certainly have rigor and knowledge of history. It is not enough to simply expel your first imaginings onto paper or canvas. The proper course would be to take photographs, do a color study, a black-and-white shape study, and a dozen figure studies (from life, including making a maquette if necessary), before even touching the main work. A lifetime of photographic study, plein air painting, and a deep understanding of the Old Masters helps too. If you do all this, you may enjoy the commercial success of e.g. James Gurney. I wouldn't want to give odds on his being long remembered to history though, unfortunately. It is of course not necessary for the critic to be an artist, if you think only of a critic as someone who draws public perception towards or away from a work, but if your friend comes to you and says, "Be honest with me. What's wrong with this painting?" then you had better know the trade at least as well as he does.
On the mathematical side, as long as we teach mathematics as nothing more than mechanical calculation, I despair of the species. Rigor may be necessary to STEM, but we have truly wonderful machines for calculation these days. Perhaps programming will be the necessary method with which we abstract computation into the proper sphere of symbol manipulation.
First let's model the Earth as a point particle with perfect blackbody characteristics. Taking into account the received radiation from the sun, that should get us a global temperature of ~6 degrees C.
But wait, we know the Earth isn't a perfect blackbody, so we'll factor in an albedo of ~.3 and get a global temperature of -18 degrees C.
This isn't a very good model so far, is it? Well, let's model the atmosphere as a layered column of gases, then. Oh hey, funny thing. It looks like if you increase the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, it heats up, and then the atmosphere can hold more CO2, leading to arbitrarily large temperatures. That can't be right. Let's revise the model...
That brings us to the beginnings of the 20th Century in terms of atmospheric modeling. You can read more about subsequent steps in this textbook, or perhaps this one. I can particularly recommend the former as it is brief and a good introduction to the problems associated with e.g. where in the atmosphere CO2 is concentrated, and its peculiar vibrational modes.
All of Science is to some degree wrong. Congratulations on your discovery of this fact. The question is, how wrong? And with these models we try to estimate that. We would all dearly like for there not to be such thing as the greenhouse effect right about now, believe you me. However, since it is trivial to show that an atmosphere with a greater proportion of CO2 will retain more solar radiation, and this has been known since the early 19th Century, we're not holding out much hope for that hypothesis. Wrong we may be, but that wrong we are surely not. I don't know where in your fathomless depths of ignorance and hubris you find the means to dispute apparent fact, but keep in mind that when many others' opinions differ from yours, it's unlikely to be a conspiracy.
So what? English is lingua franca for most of the western world. It's boring as hell, actually. You see people from all corners of Europe together in a room, all speaking English to each other. It's not a question of who is number one, it's about how English gets used in the real world. Being the most popular second language (which Ethnologue claims is true of English) is actually more important the number of native speakers, at least until such point as perfect audio-based machine translation becomes ubiquitous (likely never).
Half your posts are provocative by way of being wholly obtuse, and the other half are merely provocative.
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You must not be an X11 developer. You are also, if you can talk about Linux becoming somehow comparable to FreeBSD, not very aware of Linux usage. Linux sees far more use as a server than a desktop, and while it's possible that some other project starts eating up marketshare in that segment, I would be extremely surprised if that happened, and then we have the supercomputer, embedded, and mobile markets.
Your post is devoid of technical arguments for X11, because X11 is technically a clusterfuck. It does far too many things, and none of them well. The print server is probably the worst offense there, but by no means the only one. How many rendering interfaces are there, again? Tell me about why exactly I can't adjust my computer's volume while the screensaver is active, and how that is a good idea.
The only approximation of a coherent argument against Wayland is a repetitive drone of "network transparency means my ssh -X works as expected". Cool, but that's not what that means and that's not going away, and certainly not any time soon. Wayland is not ready for production, and not expected to be anytime soon, and it's blindingly obvious to everyone that it will not be considered ready for production until ssh -X works correctly.
I have to ask if you're even a developer, because my limited programming experiences have led me to believe that if an experienced dev says that the entire approach is crap and needs to be scrapped, more than likely this is true. It is unreasonable to expect that the display solutions of 30 years ago are remotely appropriate for today. It's also a deeply held Unix principle that programs should have a limited scope; why anyone would complain about a "stripped down windowing system" is beyond me. Especially with all of the obsolete, unused crap that even X11's adherents cannot deny that it contains.
So one the one side we have technical and philosophical arguments, and on the other -- please, please have something better than "ssh -X won't work". If you haven't seen the video, it's amusing and informative. Also if you haven't seen the video, you don't know what you're arguing.
One of my arguments was Jefferson's, so you are bizarrely dishonest in claiming that it was based on any fallacy of mine. You are also incorrect in identifying said fallacies.
If patents prevent competition, as you assert, then why is it that Apple is not the first smartphone inventor, nor Microsoft the first OS inventor, nor Dell the PC inventor? I would be harder pressed to find markets that were dominated by a single entity by virtue of patents; perhaps you can suggest some. In the strict sense though I am afraid the case is unassailable, since unless a potentially-infringing party is competing there is no case to be made for infringement. One may force an entity to cease infringing, but you can't prevent it. Even getting an injunction during a lawsuit can be tricky, as evidenced by the Apple/Samsung litigations. I am not the world's most ardent capitalist by any means, but a for-profit, government-granted monopoly is a hard thing to justify in any circumstances.
I admit you didn't say explicitly what I ascribed to you. Your example however utilized in the positive sense an inventor and as adversary a MegaCorp, which is a strong case for patents but not the common one. The example you chose was one where patents were a good thing for the "little guy". Far more often, patents are held by "big guys", who need much less help in dealing with their competition. Even if it were not the usual case for patents to be used abusively, there's no use pretending they are not a two-edged sword. Disputing one with any entity having a $100M patent portfolio would be risky no matter how righteous your cause.
If you have the time, you might attempt a real response, but I suspect that you will have to succumb to a more nuanced view on patents; Jefferson makes a compelling case, the more so because he served as the first Patent Commissioner. I will also suggest that you might not need to ask why people require explanations of these things, if you actually read the counterarguments.
I submit I am the highest authority on this specific subject here on slashdot. I grew up in Valdez, AK, the closest town to the spill. I was there when it happened. There is some documentary footage somewhere of myself and my siblings at one of these oil-soaked beaches. I've known friends to go out and do these beach surveys looking for oil, and I've fished and kayaked throughout Prince William Sound.
Firstly I have to say that, unless one goes specifically looking for it, this oil is invisible. The environment has entirely recovered, the salmon run is healthy, and there are as many sea birds, sea otters, and sea lions as there ever have been.
Secondly, the other posters make a very good points about the relative safety of oil tankers vs oil pipelines. I will additionally say that tankers are better protected from deliberate damage than pipelines. I don't know where you're getting your costs from, but I make the average oil tanker to be in the $100M range, and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System cost $8B.
I don't know if you know about it, but there is also a proposed natural gas pipeline which was intended to run through Canada to the States. Extrapolating from the cost per mile of TAPS, an oil pipeline would probably be in the range of $15B. Setting aside whether it is actually better for the environment, it is a lot easier to suggest that environmental concerns trump economic ones when it's not your $15B.
Nuclear power is probably a good option for Alaska, whereas solar is pretty much off the table. Hopefully one day someone will take advantage of the tidal energy in the Cook Inlet as well, one lobe of that (Turnagain Arm) having the third-highest tides in the world. There are one or two problems though with putting nuclear reactors in geologically active places though, and the NRC isn't exactly putting applications through quickly at the moment.
Personally though, from having witnessed one of the larger oil spills in history, I don't really find them all that concerning.
You assume that patents do anything to prevent MegaCorp from competing. You also assume that it is Joe Inventor filing most of the patents, and not said MegaCorp. In practice, neither of these things are true, and the primary beneficiaries of patent litigation are lawyers.
Patents are the right to squash competition. Competition in the ideal sense is a very efficient way to allocate resources. If one company is first to market, and a competitor makes a product which is "better, faster, and shinier," what exactly is wrong with letting the market decide who gets rewarded?
Your argument hinges on the role of patents in encouraging people to bring products to market, which is actually an orthogonal process. Patents are intended to promote the disclosure of ideas. All well and good, but maybe an automatic monopoly isn't necesarily the best way to accomplish either of those things.
There are two really big problems with patents. The first is that almost all knowledge is derivative of other knowledge. Certain persons with an excess of self-interest will argue that such a thing as originality exists in some distinguishable form. I submit that even for the invention of fire there was prior art, and every invention since then was either an incremental adaptation or based on some other preexisting knowledge. Keep in mind that the ones who add to our knowledge of the world are called scientists, not inventors.
The second problem is embodied in the phrase "intellectual property." Jefferson noted that there is nothing less suited to ownership than an idea. I could not possibly improve on his argument.
Patents are a granted right, not a natural one. You are as free to pursue financial gain by sweat of the brow or toil of the mind with or without their existence. I'm not, frankly, interested in pursuing a discussion of whether there is some better way to encourage inventors, but the discussion is not advanced by conjuring a trivial and misleading hypothetical situation, ignoring actual practice, and presupposing the necessity of some legal instrument unknown through most of human history.
You seem to have a strange divergence from reality.
The deal is four billion dollars cash, the rest in stock. Facebook's net income for 2013 was $1.5 billion. The deal ate up 35% of Facebook's cash on hand, so there's not necessarily any debt here to make up, and all things being held constant, my math would have them in the green again within three years.
I don't think that Facebook has any more chance of long-term success than those people silly enough to sell operating systems, but at the moment they're both pretty good rackets. This is a heavy investment for Facebook, but they're not an untalented bunch; they have by necessity made a very fast pig out of a PHP application, and they have (apparently) a lot of money to throw at a new market. Can anyone really say that this makes less sense than whatever chunk of Google's $6.8B R&D budget is going to autonomous vehicles and Glass?
Besides, you're giving Zuckerberg & co. far too much credit for long-term thinking.
The NSA can notify whoever they want to as long as there is a public process for it. However, they should stay the hell away from that for the most part because they are a branch of the United States military and it's fucking retarded and treasonous to use military force against its own society.
This is the whole reason we have rules of evidence. We intentionally restrain the investigative branches of our civil justice system, because few citizen can entirely avoid lawbreaking, even aside from cases of civil disobedience. We also restrain these bodies because their consequences are often swift and terrible, and the mere association with crime, the suspicion only of guilt, can be enough to end a man's reputation and career. Laxity in evidentiary procedure is not really a problem we need to have. You also have a right to all the evidence used against you, specifically so that you can challenge it. Secret evidence is a hallmark of the Star Chamber, not the US Justice System.
The bigger issue though is the military nature of this investigative body. I'm sure that to some degree we are justly hoist on our own petard for our treatment of our allies, but freedom from military action is a right of all citizens. Where concerns our martial foes, we have far fewer legal restrictions on actions. War is not civil. War is Hell. We do not bring Hell home, and we do not visit arms against the shores that bore them. If we are not to raise arms ourselves against this treason, then let justice come swiftly.
Editor? This is Slashdot.
You forgot to finish with the kick into the pit of death.
But what if GP is already using Beta?
Straw man. Try what I actually said: we already have the most expansive prison program in the world, and it is objectively bad at rehabilitation. You should probably be trying to justify either the current system or your idea that somehow it's not punishing people enough. Also we might cover whether punishment or rehabilitation is the primary purpose of a prison system.
Nice soundbite though. Reactionary, fallacious and obvious: a jab to please even the most thoughtless. I hope you didn't stay up too late writing it.
There is indeed a difference. Please pardon my rhetoric; my argument is not necessarily academically rigorous. However, if we can reverse my intention with that remark, and suggest that a criminal record is an excellent way to be unemployed or otherwise in an impoverished state, the statistics range are supportive. Some of them were even shocking; one document I read indicated a low four-figure annual income for some groups. An exaggeration, one can only hope. I also do not think it beggars belief to suggest that e.g. a starving man might steal a loaf, but since he cannot be proven to do so, you must have a valid objection. I had considered striking the term, and mere laziness prevented me. Again, your pardon. If you have further argument for increased incarceration, please do continue.
We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and you're arguing that not enough people are being jailed? Poverty is causally linked to crime! Assault, rape, and robbery have been in decline for years, and prison sentences have been lengthening.
It should be a surprise to no one that statistics on the income level of incoming prisoners are heavily biased towards the lowest levels of income. Income statistics for released felons are even worse. We stigmatize prison to such a degree that it destroys people's ability to earn a living afterwards, and you wonder why we have a >60% recidivision rate. Our "corrections system" is fundamentally broken, and by all measures worsening. Isn't prison supposed to prevent people from returning to a life of crime?
I am appalled at your ignorance, and the idea of a higher incarceration rate is vile. If you have no human compassion, have at least the sense to see when a solution isn't working.
Yes, yes, Gnome3 depends on logind/systemd. Also ConsoleKit ceased development. It's almost as if they think it's a better technology. But hey, you want to install a massive monolithic DE, it's gonna pull in some dependencies that you may or may not like. That is not Debian's problem, actually -- if they showed any signs of being amenable to discussion on the matter, then you might complain to the Gnome developers.
This vote ignored the issue of what kind of default the default should be, because it only had one question that was being decided. It is unlikely to be the end of the discussion on the matter, so I am sure that all those with opinions will get their fair say -- just not on this vote. I realize that the vote may not have gone your way, but those grapes were probably sour anyway.
What if you win, and Dice decides that they, like so many of /.'s other owners, can't make a dime off the site as it is?
Because as far as I can tell they already have made that decision, and the beta is the only thing keeping them in this game at all. What are you going to do when you get your wish, the Beta goes away -- and the rest of the site with it? Congratulate yourself on your victory, no doubt.
I want them to have an open development process. I want Slashcode to be on github, and for all this bile to be replaced with an adult conversation, an issue tracker, and a mailing list. Failing that I see no reason for profanity or vandalism. It is not a necessary part of anything, especially not civil disobedience. Hatred begets hatred, and the haters have not the bargaining power that they think they do. There is nothing to stop Dice from pulling the plug on the whole show, and if the site is destined to dry up and blow away in either case, I don't want my lasting memories of the place to include this uninhibited flood of vitriol.
No, it is loathed by a small, vocal, percentage of system administrators, who have very little in the way of technical arguments at their disposal. This vote may be considered evidence in that respect.
There is very little to recommend init scripts. I dismiss arguments that they are any easier for any average mortal to deal with than any other piece of code, and there is very little justification for wasting CPU time on a non-interactive process. Additionally, this will merely be a default -- those who want slow boots, or think cgroups are evil, can go ahead and install systemv-init and purge systemd. Or, since systemd, d-bus, pulseaudio, and wayland are evidently the future of Linux, the malcontents can install BSD -- it comes with a free chip for your other shoulder.
The idea of military specialists of whatever type being employed against the society they belong to, is treasonous and fucking retarded no matter what legal acrobatics are employed in their defense.
You may have some sort of mystic devotion to the law, but I believe laws are made by (generally corrupt) men for their own interests, and I am familiar enough with the world outside the borders and political influence of the United States to know there is an enormous difference between legality and rightousness. The U.S.A. may not be the kind of country where you are expected to bribe every public official however minor -- we generally reserve that for higher office. It takes a special kind of idiocy to use military forces against their homeland, though.
Government at its core is the body to which we have delegated our inherent right to violence -- a right being defined in this case as something which cannot be taken from you. We delegate this right to others, specialized in its use, with the express understanding that [a] as applied to civilian life, the exercise of violence by police will be applied fairly and equally as men can manage, and [b] that the unrestricted expression of this (as embodied by military force) be only employed against our enemies. War is hell, and we do not bring hell home.
Snowden is a patriot, and the NSA is treasonous -- whether or not the law can be made to serve whichever purpose. Beyond all other argument, potentially felonious violation of the law is so common with the continual proliferation of laws that lawfulness cannot be the only measure of either justice or rightousness. May all those who support the NSA have a fair trial.
You're assuming that none of these 'clones' would be any good. This is not a solid premise. First demonstrate that only Nintendo could have created these works.
I think Zynga is a good counterexample; I am sure they have some original content but they mostly seem to use concepts that originated elsewhere. There is no reason in a world with more limited copyrights that some other company could not take whichever IP and run with it, and create a product at least equal to the original. I would imagine that it would actually spur developers to create new content or gameplay, as opposed to the rent-seeking unending sequels that get published today.
You forget that Google has not written their own OS. They have customized the kernel and written their own display manager, among (to be fair) a fairly respectable number of other changes. However, they started with Linux, and
will still return 'Linux'.
You have more or less the Filesystem Heirarchy Standard, a limited but unixy shell, and anyone who has cut their teeth on the command line should feel at home. It doesn't by default let you install packages from the command line, but that's to be expected: the biggest security threat to a system is the user, and they need to be able to support a specific subset of features, as opposed to every combination of packages and configurations.
Point being though, they got 98% of the system for free, and the changes they made have been mostly in a fairly common vein. They're hardly the first to create a Linux-based appliance. And of course they get to draw on all of the Chrome-browser efforts.
With regard to your general point, it must be remembered that Microsoft originated the idea of an operating system as being something that was sold directly to consumers. At the risk of being predictive, that is beginning to seem like a bizarre anomaly, and it is difficult to see where any other future business could possibly duplicate their success, even the future Microsoft.
That was actually Mussolini's favorite definition of fascism: the union of the corporation with the state.
This I have to see as the union of two bad ideas: the first being the indefinitely chartered corporation, the second being the idea of indefinite copyright. I stop short of saying that copyright itself was a mistake, but it didn't always exist, and if patronage was good enough for Michelangelo...
No, I mean decades, because I have actually read the research papers coming out of the various climate study organizations in the State of Alaska. I can single out studies by the University of Alaska Fairbanks as being particularly informative on the subject of ice sheet loss. Overall temperatures in the Arctic have risen at about twice the global average since the 1950s. Ice sheet loss was about 52 cubic kilometers per year until the 1990s, when it essentially doubled. As might be expected, glacial retreat is greatest for low-altitude glaciers, which happen to be the most accessible and visible. Or would be if they weren't retreating so fast; we have glacier viewpoints where you cannot even see the glacier any more. Other fun facts: the number of frost-free days in Fairbanks, AK have increased by 50% over the last century. Villages that have been protected for millennia by sea ice are having to be moved.
If you're going to make an argument, make it with facts. Unfortunately the facts are against you, so you may want to revise your beliefs.
The Earth is 70% covered with water, which is in continual phase transition depending on local temperature. The most important transition for these purposes between liquid and gaseous states. Given that there is almost always some liquid water which will under no great provocation become gaseous should the atmosphere be capable of absorbing it, we can for most intents and purposes say that the atmosphere is saturated with H20. There is precisely zero we can do about that. Looking down the list of gases which are present in non-trivial amounts in the atmosphere, and which also contribute to the greenhouse effect by absorbing long-wave radiation, CO2 is clearly the biggest concern. Discounting the seasonal variations, the largest natural contributions to the carbon cycle are volcanic. In past eras volcanism has been responsible for some rather extreme extinction events. At our current rates of CO2 emission, humanity has been putting even the largest-scale volcanic events to shame. An eruption the size of Mt Pinatubo would, as I recall, represent about a day and a half of human CO2 emissions. An eruption on the scale of the Yellowstone supervolcano could be had twice annually without equalling our impact. We are still a couple orders of magnitude away from the largest CO2 outgassings the world has ever seen -- but we're working on it. And you must keep in mind that even spectacular events like the Deccan Traps happened over millenia and gigaannums. We are almost certainly changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere at a rate unprecedented in its existence.
Discrepencies between theories and observed results are common in all fields, and in most cases do not affect the validity of those theories. Certainly not to the point where one would question, e.g. the greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide, which may be trivially demonstrated with any transparent container and a thermometer. In point of fact, since it is such an obvious property, it should come as no surprise that the idea of CO2-induced warming is about 200 years old. We may also point out, since you mention it, that the variation in solar irradiance is on the order of .1% over its 11-year cycle. This is still worth accounting for in a mathematical model, but being a fairly stable cycle it of course has a minimal effect on the error factors. I don't wish to belabor the point, but variance has nothing to do with predictability: consider any harmonic oscillation.
We may touch on the necessity for mathematical models and their use: a simple and fairly useless model would be to consider the Earth as a perfect blackbody, which can only tell us that this ideal Earth would have a temperature of ~6 degrees C. A less bad model might consider the atmosphere as a column of layered gases, from which one could derive some useful indications of what effect they have in various proportions. Again, a higher partial pressure of carbon dioxide will result in greater absorbtion of outgoing long-wave radiation, i.e. a "greenhouse" effect. Since warmer air can contain more water, and since the supply of water may be considered to be inexhaustible, a naive calculation would show that increasing the partial pressure of CO2 would lead to arbitrarily large temperatures, a la Venus. Since we know from experience and paleontology that this does not occur on Earth, we may be extremely thankful for various countering forces in the biosphere which ensure that this is not a runaway effect -- so far.
The problem is, of course, that our atmospheric changes are drastic and unprecedented. We rely on of life in order to balance out our carbon equation, but we're also doing a wonderful job of deforestation and various other forms of damage to our environment. At this point we are merely hoping that enough of these various other species are able to survive the Great Anthropogenic Extinction Event in order to ensure our own survival.
You may not be an idiot. You are deeply ignorant; this is grade-school level science. You are also close-minded, appar
The Earth, modeled as a perfect blackbody, has a trivially calulable temperature: 6 degrees C global average. Observed temperatures are obviously higher than that. The difference is, you guessed it, the "greenhouse" effect of the atmosphere. The science behind the greenhouse effect has been known for about 200 years now. There is no "so-called" adjective necessary to describe it and only the purest idiots would bother denying something that is trivially observable with any transparent container, a CO2 source, and a thermometer. That CO2 absorbs radiation in a certain band is incontrovertible.
For experimental confirmation that the Earth is warming a great amount, I may use my window: I live in Alaska, where glacial ice thousands of years old is vanishing with increasing rapidity and has been for decades. Guess which observation represents a trend?
Certainly theft was not involved, but it was not presented in the manner of a cautionary tale. I was cruising with a young good ol' boy whose highest ambition in life was defacing road signs, in a battered willys jeep of unknown provenance. Said acquaintance had just been released from the care of the local penal system, and was out visiting old friends to celebrate his newfound (and short-lived) freedom. I don't recall either of their names, but I'll always remember his friend as "Bubba", and he was quite the type. We pulled off a disused highway that wound amongst the foothills of the Appalachians, down a dusty red dirt track which pointed towards a hovel and nearly indistinguishable trash heaps surrounding it. A sweaty mountain wearing only denim overalls (with one strap fastened, of course) cornered the house and lumbered up the slope towards us. I was somewhat apprehensive and shall we say not in Kansas any more, being nineteen and straying out of Alaska on my own for the first time.
The topics of conversation were, as I mentioned, in the manner of a reunion after an enforced absence, and I am sure that of all possible answers to the question of, "So what have you been up to?" there could not have been any more shocking. Caution had no part in it; the man was embarrassed to show us his scar, and to describe his previous condition, and particularly wished us to understand that he was doing much better. One could only hope that to be the case -- there may be a downward path from that kind of state but it is surely very short and I cannot begin to imagine what horrors it would contain.
Shortly thereafter, as I was flying out of that benighted human waste-land, I read another local news story: a pair of rednecks had stolen their neighbor's pet pygmy goats, butchered them, and traded the meat to their dealer for crack. I had other experiences in the Carolinas, but nothing that one would call particularly pleasant, and these two for me have come to represent the place. I would let them be cautionary against spending time in Appalachia as much as against having a crack habit, but I've known other people and places to have crack problems without quite that level of crazy. Take from it what you will.
I met a man in South Carolina who claimed to have sold a kidney for crack. He displayed the most horrible scar, which I could very well have believed to be from the most amateur of surgeons. I remember that he said, "You know those stories that you hear about people waking up in a bathtub full of ice? Yeah, that happened to me."
But he said he'd kicked the habit.
Now, I make no claims as to this man's honesty, only to my own recollection, but surely while the implantation of an organ requires all that you mention, the removal of such is far simpler?
There are two divisions of "technique" when it comes to art. The first involves the physical manipulation of the medium, which has changed somewhat with the invention of new media, and some parts have become obsolete. The second involves understanding of perspective, anatomy, color, lines and shapes, various atmospheric effects, et cetera, and in many cases also how these rules may be broken to artistic effect, and these are timeless. Sure, anyone can paint without understanding, and anyone may criticize without comprehending, but you know how it is: everyone has an opinion and an asshole.
But, to be any good as an artist, you must certainly have rigor and knowledge of history. It is not enough to simply expel your first imaginings onto paper or canvas. The proper course would be to take photographs, do a color study, a black-and-white shape study, and a dozen figure studies (from life, including making a maquette if necessary), before even touching the main work. A lifetime of photographic study, plein air painting, and a deep understanding of the Old Masters helps too. If you do all this, you may enjoy the commercial success of e.g. James Gurney. I wouldn't want to give odds on his being long remembered to history though, unfortunately. It is of course not necessary for the critic to be an artist, if you think only of a critic as someone who draws public perception towards or away from a work, but if your friend comes to you and says, "Be honest with me. What's wrong with this painting?" then you had better know the trade at least as well as he does.
On the mathematical side, as long as we teach mathematics as nothing more than mechanical calculation, I despair of the species. Rigor may be necessary to STEM, but we have truly wonderful machines for calculation these days. Perhaps programming will be the necessary method with which we abstract computation into the proper sphere of symbol manipulation.
Let's build a model of the Earth's atmosphere.
First let's model the Earth as a point particle with perfect blackbody characteristics. Taking into account the received radiation from the sun, that should get us a global temperature of ~6 degrees C.
But wait, we know the Earth isn't a perfect blackbody, so we'll factor in an albedo of ~ .3 and get a global temperature of -18 degrees C.
This isn't a very good model so far, is it? Well, let's model the atmosphere as a layered column of gases, then. Oh hey, funny thing. It looks like if you increase the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, it heats up, and then the atmosphere can hold more CO2, leading to arbitrarily large temperatures. That can't be right. Let's revise the model...
That brings us to the beginnings of the 20th Century in terms of atmospheric modeling. You can read more about subsequent steps in this textbook, or perhaps this one. I can particularly recommend the former as it is brief and a good introduction to the problems associated with e.g. where in the atmosphere CO2 is concentrated, and its peculiar vibrational modes.
All of Science is to some degree wrong. Congratulations on your discovery of this fact. The question is, how wrong? And with these models we try to estimate that. We would all dearly like for there not to be such thing as the greenhouse effect right about now, believe you me. However, since it is trivial to show that an atmosphere with a greater proportion of CO2 will retain more solar radiation, and this has been known since the early 19th Century, we're not holding out much hope for that hypothesis. Wrong we may be, but that wrong we are surely not. I don't know where in your fathomless depths of ignorance and hubris you find the means to dispute apparent fact, but keep in mind that when many others' opinions differ from yours, it's unlikely to be a conspiracy.
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So what? English is lingua franca for most of the western world. It's boring as hell, actually. You see people from all corners of Europe together in a room, all speaking English to each other. It's not a question of who is number one, it's about how English gets used in the real world. Being the most popular second language (which Ethnologue claims is true of English) is actually more important the number of native speakers, at least until such point as perfect audio-based machine translation becomes ubiquitous (likely never).
Half your posts are provocative by way of being wholly obtuse, and the other half are merely provocative.