BTW if anybody hasn't tried the Win 8 developer preview its out now for free and you really should give it a go. its got epic fail written on it so deep you're amazed it doesn't make your PC release a rancid shit smell when you run it.
Mod parent informative! And pray for all the poor bastards doomed to run Win8. On the one hand, I think they should release it as-is, and thus spur mac and linux adoption. On the other hand, I worry that it will open a portal to R'lyeh. Either way, leave it to Microsoft to design the only interface that could make Unity look good. For certain values of 'good'.
I think you mean "fractional reserve banking". And possibly the refusal of the Church of Economics to model markets as chaotic systems. Debt-based money is kinda crazy, but commodity-based money is generally worse. BitCoin and Ripplepay are interesting.
In e.g. Ohio, the legal minimum wage for tip-earning workers is a miserable fraction of the normal minimum wage, and employers do not have any obligation to improve that. The American way is to fucking tip your waitstaff, because that's their primary income. They're lucky if they don't have to split their tips with the house, or other servers.
You think minimum wage ought to be enough for anyone? Wake up and smell the 21st Century. Not tipping your wait staff isn't your private revolution: it simply makes you a sociopath of the meanest degree.
Humans are themselves radioactive on about the same scale bananas are. The amount of radiation involved is so small that it's difficult to express, and the "Banana Equivalent Dose" does not account for how your body actually processes potassium. You're on much safer grounds picking on Brazil nuts, which contain barium. However, regardless of whether you choose to eat either foodstuff, there's enough random isotopes in the rest of your diet to account for about ten times the radiation dose you'd get by eating a banana a day.
By comparison, taking a six-hour plane trip will expose you to more radiation than a year's supply of bananas. How was Africa?
Your body is made up of many things, the overwhelming majority of which are not genetic material. Your genetic material actually has ways of repairing itself, and unrepaired radiation damage to your genome is probably more likely to affect your future offspring than yourself. Generally speaking, if you've had enough radiation exposure to be worried about your chromosomal material, you're probably not going to be around long enough for reproduction to be an issue.
"Radiation" comprises a whole shit ton of things that mostly don't affect humans in the slightest: light and radio waves being the most common. If you live near Fukushima or if your cell phone emits gamma radiation, you should worry. However, there aren't too many sources of harmful radiation, and despite our ever-increasing use of the EM spectrum, life expectancies continue to rise. Cancer rates would be appropriate to discuss under this context, but I will excuse myself from that if you don't mind.
Why should linux target the consumer market? Leave it to Apple and Android devs to develop computer appliances for the mass market. Linux is for people that take computing seriously. Not to say that that's all it's good for or that's all its users are interested in, but if you don't have an ideological chip on your shoulder and aren't interested in the command line, you're probably better off just using whatever came on the box you bought. Until Apple, there was no interest from the Unix community in the consumer segment, and the degree of consumer that consumer OSs enjoy is inversely related to their Unix components.
There's a lot of people I would recommend linux to, and many tasks for which it is an (arguably) superior option. Freedom from viruses is worth a great deal to me, as someone who has spent years repairing fucked up Windows systems. But I'm not eager for that particular advantage to erode, and I've dealt with far too many windows-using idiots to wish that upon the linux community.
For the artsy teen, promote Blender and MyPaint; needlessly inflicting vector graphics on people is criminal, and I use Inkscape about 8 hours a day at this point. My friends in the 3d biz don't have nice things to say about Blender, either, but they also complain about Maya. If/when the Doom3 engine goes open source, you might promote that instead; it has some name recognition, and gives the budding modeler something to do.
MyPaint, for those who haven't used it, is a painting program most similar (but superior) to OpenCanvas, which hasn't had an open source release for years. MyPaint runs on all major OSs.
I understand the thing about GIMP, but home users are less likely to care -- my mother has been known to use it.
Capitalism is far more a farce than socialism, and inherently anti-democratic. It is also fundamentally insane, where insanity is defined as simultaneously holding two incompatible beliefs.
The ultimate success for a company is to become a monopoly. Free market, laissez-faire capitalism is the idea that the only role for government is to enforce property rights. Everything else is controlled, produced, and enforced by whatever commercial power(s) exist. A very pure philosophy, I'm sure, and well in line with economic theories designed to be consistent with it. Sadly, the world is a bit too complicated for pure philosophies of any sort.
Capitalism is sort of a philosophy of economics, one that promotes individual gain. Hard to argue with -- most of us are individuals, and see ourselves as more deserving than these other idiots. But most of us see some reason in not just picking an individual and giving him ownership of everything, which was the previous economic system. So in the name of making things more "fair" and equal, we fracture our philosophy, and say that everyone should have a chance to be that one shining individual. This contradiction is the fundamental psychosis of capitalism.
Philosophies of all types have their adherents, but none are so determined to have their views recognized as a science as capitalists. But how do you defend the indefensible? Well, as long as they have you sold on the idea that things that benefit *one* person will mean that one person will be *you*, you can feed all sorts of lines down there throats. Things like "invisible hands", "rational actors", and "equilibrium". How Englightened! Clearly something that would appeal to the rational minds of Adam Smith's era, and to subsequent theorists.
Meanwhile rational thinkers in other fields ran into a more fundamental flaw: Kurt GÃdel's completeness theorem. Rational systems cannot completely or consistently describe the world, or even small parts of it. Whoops, there goes the Enlightenment.
Meanwhile, economic theorists soldiered on, trying to create rational, capitalist theories out of irrational human behavior. Fama's efficient market theorem seemed to suggest that stock prices displayed random behavior, but it was the emergence of chaos theory and the work of Benoit Mandelbrot that put the final nail in the coffin of rational economic theory. The margin of slashdot is too small to contain the marvelous proof of this, but there are a multitude of accessible works on the subject.
So what does that leave us with? Zero predictive power. Traders and quants that perform no better than a coin flip, while understating risk, pocketing the rewards, and putting the entire world on the hook for the inevitable losses. Welcome to capitalism, the system by which a few prosper at the expense of many.
Many of the critiques of capitalism apply equally to any other economic theory, but capitalism, by taking the rights of the individual as being more valued than the rights of society, results in drastic power imbalances and corresponding abuses. The exploitation of less developed nations follows as a matter of course (and comprises another lengthy tangential discussion).
Socialism's basic tenet is, as far as I'm aware, that all men are created equal, and that society should reflect our common humanity more than the vagaries of chance that seek to divide us. You are cordially invited to dispute this, and any of the above.
It's possible that slashdot should add that information to the profile section. It's also possible that there's no way the slashdot web devs would be able to implement that in a useful manner, so perhaps someone should start slashdot meetup.com groups in major cities. I would quite like to meet other slashdotters, but Panama is not a conducive locale. What's the best way to encourage real-world interaction amongst ourselves?
To paraphrase, with network neutrality content providers win. Without NN, service providers win. Both win at the consumer's expense, but it's a lot easier to find alternate content than alternate infrastructure. The demise of NAT should make it easier for all of us to be content providers; I'm looking forward to it.
I admit to not being able to follow your example. I myself cannot come up with a clear example of how equal access to networks (or other infrastructure) could be a bad thing. I suspect you may have a different definition of network neutrality than the rest of us; I believe the most commonly accepted phrasing would be "traffic should not be prioritized based on endpoints."
This sounds far more reasonable than current law, however, rather than picking a number out of a hat it may be possible to gather data on the subject with the intent of maximizing the profit potential and the speed at which material enters the public domain. And then, of course, picking a completely arbitrary number with no relation to said data.
For the purposes of parody, copyright duration is already nil. Additionally most fan-created works escape infringement lawsuits. A world without copyright would not be easily distinguishable from our own, except where concerns abuses of the current system.
San Jose, then. I haven't stayed in that city a moment longer than necessary -- between the barbed wire fences and bars on all the windows, it reminded me of a prison.
I've been relaxing in Puerto Viejo and Bocas del Toro, Panama, and as far as I know I've yet to meet another slashdotter. I can't host travelers, but if you (or anyone else reading this) are planning on being in the area, let me know.
As a resident of Alaska I've only filed federal taxes. Nice to see that you enjoy regressive taxation, but we really appreciate the lack of it. I would even opine that sales taxes should not ever be levied.
Speaking as a fag, we don't need "defenders" like you. Don't try to pretend our interests are aligned, or even compatible. Despite being inanely more focused on subtext over substance in the context of your political party, you seem to have missed that "tea bagger" has no negative connotations in a gay context. Generally speaking we're not ashamed to fuck, and tea bagging is a tame sex act.
Ironically, the only way that "tea bagger" can be understood in an insulting context is if you think there is something wrong with the term in its normal context. While I don't doubt that you have many "gay friends", I propose that you might gain a deeper understanding of how your rhetoric relates to our culture and issues by taking a hard copy of your post and inserting it anally.
P.S. -- This being Slashdot, I have to ask: have you paid your $699 license fee yet?
Art loses much in its transition into a digital mass media, but it has never been more popular. To take Keats loosely then the Internet itself may be considered an enormous collective work of art.
So far we have POSIX, Linux Standard Base, and the Free Desktop "standards". Standards are always optional, whatever the "business community" says. There are many categories of software, but there aren't terribly many different competing projects per category. As concerns distros, there are the debian-based distros, the fedora/RHEL based distros: everyone else is more or less "niche", and generally not intended for mainstream consumption.
"Relevant" in the FOSS world means your code compiles on new systems and your application does what it says on the tin. TeX and wget are highly relevant but hardly developed at all these days. Your definition of relevancy seems to be a bit more subjective, and betrays a woeful depth of ignorance of the software world.
You are not an animator. HTML5 Canvas was not designed for animation. Flash is a better animation tool. That said, no one will argue its best purpose is to adorn the dung-heap of history.
I've used a protractor before, when I was in elementary school. I cannot imagine a practical use for one today. Arithmetical calculation is far from a necessary task and does nothing to further human knowledge or ennoble the human spirit. It is a drudge task, for which we invented mechanical and, later, digital calculators beginning over a century ago. They are far faster and more accurate than the best human computers, to use the term in its old sense.
But I realize that anyone that disagrees with you is an idiot, so I'll just don my dunce cap and go lick a window or two.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW if anybody hasn't tried the Win 8 developer preview its out now for free and you really should give it a go. its got epic fail written on it so deep you're amazed it doesn't make your PC release a rancid shit smell when you run it.
Mod parent informative! And pray for all the poor bastards doomed to run Win8. On the one hand, I think they should release it as-is, and thus spur mac and linux adoption. On the other hand, I worry that it will open a portal to R'lyeh. Either way, leave it to Microsoft to design the only interface that could make Unity look good. For certain values of 'good'.
I think you mean "fractional reserve banking". And possibly the refusal of the Church of Economics to model markets as chaotic systems. Debt-based money is kinda crazy, but commodity-based money is generally worse. BitCoin and Ripplepay are interesting.
In e.g. Ohio, the legal minimum wage for tip-earning workers is a miserable fraction of the normal minimum wage, and employers do not have any obligation to improve that. The American way is to fucking tip your waitstaff, because that's their primary income. They're lucky if they don't have to split their tips with the house, or other servers.
You think minimum wage ought to be enough for anyone? Wake up and smell the 21st Century. Not tipping your wait staff isn't your private revolution: it simply makes you a sociopath of the meanest degree.
Humans are themselves radioactive on about the same scale bananas are. The amount of radiation involved is so small that it's difficult to express, and the "Banana Equivalent Dose" does not account for how your body actually processes potassium. You're on much safer grounds picking on Brazil nuts, which contain barium. However, regardless of whether you choose to eat either foodstuff, there's enough random isotopes in the rest of your diet to account for about ten times the radiation dose you'd get by eating a banana a day.
By comparison, taking a six-hour plane trip will expose you to more radiation than a year's supply of bananas. How was Africa?
Your body is made up of many things, the overwhelming majority of which are not genetic material. Your genetic material actually has ways of repairing itself, and unrepaired radiation damage to your genome is probably more likely to affect your future offspring than yourself. Generally speaking, if you've had enough radiation exposure to be worried about your chromosomal material, you're probably not going to be around long enough for reproduction to be an issue.
"Radiation" comprises a whole shit ton of things that mostly don't affect humans in the slightest: light and radio waves being the most common. If you live near Fukushima or if your cell phone emits gamma radiation, you should worry. However, there aren't too many sources of harmful radiation, and despite our ever-increasing use of the EM spectrum, life expectancies continue to rise. Cancer rates would be appropriate to discuss under this context, but I will excuse myself from that if you don't mind.
Why should linux target the consumer market? Leave it to Apple and Android devs to develop computer appliances for the mass market. Linux is for people that take computing seriously. Not to say that that's all it's good for or that's all its users are interested in, but if you don't have an ideological chip on your shoulder and aren't interested in the command line, you're probably better off just using whatever came on the box you bought. Until Apple, there was no interest from the Unix community in the consumer segment, and the degree of consumer that consumer OSs enjoy is inversely related to their Unix components.
There's a lot of people I would recommend linux to, and many tasks for which it is an (arguably) superior option. Freedom from viruses is worth a great deal to me, as someone who has spent years repairing fucked up Windows systems. But I'm not eager for that particular advantage to erode, and I've dealt with far too many windows-using idiots to wish that upon the linux community.
For the artsy teen, promote Blender and MyPaint; needlessly inflicting vector graphics on people is criminal, and I use Inkscape about 8 hours a day at this point. My friends in the 3d biz don't have nice things to say about Blender, either, but they also complain about Maya. If/when the Doom3 engine goes open source, you might promote that instead; it has some name recognition, and gives the budding modeler something to do.
MyPaint, for those who haven't used it, is a painting program most similar (but superior) to OpenCanvas, which hasn't had an open source release for years. MyPaint runs on all major OSs.
I understand the thing about GIMP, but home users are less likely to care -- my mother has been known to use it.
Capitalism is far more a farce than socialism, and inherently anti-democratic. It is also fundamentally insane, where insanity is defined as simultaneously holding two incompatible beliefs.
The ultimate success for a company is to become a monopoly. Free market, laissez-faire capitalism is the idea that the only role for government is to enforce property rights. Everything else is controlled, produced, and enforced by whatever commercial power(s) exist. A very pure philosophy, I'm sure, and well in line with economic theories designed to be consistent with it. Sadly, the world is a bit too complicated for pure philosophies of any sort.
Capitalism is sort of a philosophy of economics, one that promotes individual gain. Hard to argue with -- most of us are individuals, and see ourselves as more deserving than these other idiots. But most of us see some reason in not just picking an individual and giving him ownership of everything, which was the previous economic system. So in the name of making things more "fair" and equal, we fracture our philosophy, and say that everyone should have a chance to be that one shining individual. This contradiction is the fundamental psychosis of capitalism.
Philosophies of all types have their adherents, but none are so determined to have their views recognized as a science as capitalists. But how do you defend the indefensible? Well, as long as they have you sold on the idea that things that benefit *one* person will mean that one person will be *you*, you can feed all sorts of lines down there throats. Things like "invisible hands", "rational actors", and "equilibrium". How Englightened! Clearly something that would appeal to the rational minds of Adam Smith's era, and to subsequent theorists.
Meanwhile rational thinkers in other fields ran into a more fundamental flaw: Kurt GÃdel's completeness theorem. Rational systems cannot completely or consistently describe the world, or even small parts of it. Whoops, there goes the Enlightenment.
Meanwhile, economic theorists soldiered on, trying to create rational, capitalist theories out of irrational human behavior. Fama's efficient market theorem seemed to suggest that stock prices displayed random behavior, but it was the emergence of chaos theory and the work of Benoit Mandelbrot that put the final nail in the coffin of rational economic theory. The margin of slashdot is too small to contain the marvelous proof of this, but there are a multitude of accessible works on the subject.
So what does that leave us with? Zero predictive power. Traders and quants that perform no better than a coin flip, while understating risk, pocketing the rewards, and putting the entire world on the hook for the inevitable losses. Welcome to capitalism, the system by which a few prosper at the expense of many.
Many of the critiques of capitalism apply equally to any other economic theory, but capitalism, by taking the rights of the individual as being more valued than the rights of society, results in drastic power imbalances and corresponding abuses. The exploitation of less developed nations follows as a matter of course (and comprises another lengthy tangential discussion).
Socialism's basic tenet is, as far as I'm aware, that all men are created equal, and that society should reflect our common humanity more than the vagaries of chance that seek to divide us. You are cordially invited to dispute this, and any of the above.
It's possible that slashdot should add that information to the profile section. It's also possible that there's no way the slashdot web devs would be able to implement that in a useful manner, so perhaps someone should start slashdot meetup.com groups in major cities. I would quite like to meet other slashdotters, but Panama is not a conducive locale. What's the best way to encourage real-world interaction amongst ourselves?
BORE, n.: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Boycott Intel for anti-competitive practices.
To paraphrase, with network neutrality content providers win. Without NN, service providers win. Both win at the consumer's expense, but it's a lot easier to find alternate content than alternate infrastructure. The demise of NAT should make it easier for all of us to be content providers; I'm looking forward to it.
I admit to not being able to follow your example. I myself cannot come up with a clear example of how equal access to networks (or other infrastructure) could be a bad thing. I suspect you may have a different definition of network neutrality than the rest of us; I believe the most commonly accepted phrasing would be "traffic should not be prioritized based on endpoints."
This sounds far more reasonable than current law, however, rather than picking a number out of a hat it may be possible to gather data on the subject with the intent of maximizing the profit potential and the speed at which material enters the public domain. And then, of course, picking a completely arbitrary number with no relation to said data.
For the purposes of parody, copyright duration is already nil. Additionally most fan-created works escape infringement lawsuits. A world without copyright would not be easily distinguishable from our own, except where concerns abuses of the current system.
San Jose, then. I haven't stayed in that city a moment longer than necessary -- between the barbed wire fences and bars on all the windows, it reminded me of a prison.
I've been relaxing in Puerto Viejo and Bocas del Toro, Panama, and as far as I know I've yet to meet another slashdotter. I can't host travelers, but if you (or anyone else reading this) are planning on being in the area, let me know.
Where in CR?
As a resident of Alaska I've only filed federal taxes. Nice to see that you enjoy regressive taxation, but we really appreciate the lack of it. I would even opine that sales taxes should not ever be levied.
Democrat = Fascist(different corporations)
Also, remember to distinguish the demos from the demagogue; It's only civil.
Speaking as a fag, we don't need "defenders" like you. Don't try to pretend our interests are aligned, or even compatible. Despite being inanely more focused on subtext over substance in the context of your political party, you seem to have missed that "tea bagger" has no negative connotations in a gay context. Generally speaking we're not ashamed to fuck, and tea bagging is a tame sex act.
Ironically, the only way that "tea bagger" can be understood in an insulting context is if you think there is something wrong with the term in its normal context. While I don't doubt that you have many "gay friends", I propose that you might gain a deeper understanding of how your rhetoric relates to our culture and issues by taking a hard copy of your post and inserting it anally.
P.S. -- This being Slashdot, I have to ask: have you paid your $699 license fee yet?
Rex mortuus est, vivat rex.
Art loses much in its transition into a digital mass media, but it has never been more popular. To take Keats loosely then the Internet itself may be considered an enormous collective work of art.
So far we have POSIX, Linux Standard Base, and the Free Desktop "standards". Standards are always optional, whatever the "business community" says. There are many categories of software, but there aren't terribly many different competing projects per category. As concerns distros, there are the debian-based distros, the fedora/RHEL based distros: everyone else is more or less "niche", and generally not intended for mainstream consumption.
"Relevant" in the FOSS world means your code compiles on new systems and your application does what it says on the tin. TeX and wget are highly relevant but hardly developed at all these days. Your definition of relevancy seems to be a bit more subjective, and betrays a woeful depth of ignorance of the software world.
1) Economics is much closer to religion than to science.
2) Libertarian economics is the Scientology of economic theory.
3) Zombie Mandelbrot thinks y'all are a bunch of dumbasses.
Terranigma is a gem, probably the most undeservedly obscure game for SNES. Highly recommended to anyone who hasn't played it.
It is true what they say about slashdot...but it's unverifiable. Hit me up on gmail/gchat/g+
What is a headers? Help! What is a car??
You are not an animator. HTML5 Canvas was not designed for animation. Flash is a better animation tool. That said, no one will argue its best purpose is to adorn the dung-heap of history.
I've used a protractor before, when I was in elementary school. I cannot imagine a practical use for one today. Arithmetical calculation is far from a necessary task and does nothing to further human knowledge or ennoble the human spirit. It is a drudge task, for which we invented mechanical and, later, digital calculators beginning over a century ago. They are far faster and more accurate than the best human computers, to use the term in its old sense.
But I realize that anyone that disagrees with you is an idiot, so I'll just don my dunce cap and go lick a window or two.