Incidentally my right to expression doesn't intefere with yours (at least not in the domain that copyright cares about); it only interferes with your ability to merchandise your expression. It's a dread mistake to confuse the two, considering the huge difference in importance between the two -- placement in the ontology of rights, so to speak. And really that's the crucial issue, isn't it? People with one set of interests want sales to trump speech. People with another set of interests want speech to trump nearly everything, and certainly commercialism. So it's important to realize that the situation isn't at all symmetrical.
The Constitution can't be wrong. It is the supreme law of the United States. And you call me utterly moronic?
Yes, the constitution is the supreme law. And like any other law, it can sure as fuck be wrong. The law does not tell what is right, it tells what is legal. The purpose of lawmaking, in theory, is to make these two concepts align as nearly as possible. But it's an inexact science, meaning that sometimes what is legal is not right, and what is right is not legal.
If we had perfect knowledge, perfect reason, and perfect foresight, then the law would be fixed in stone and justice would never be miscarried. But we have imperfect knowledge and imperfect ability to see the consequences of our actions, so the best we can hope to do is observe human affairs, find out where there are inequities, and address them using the tools of law. Which requires admitting, to begin with, that the law can be unjust, that it can be wrong.
And of course I say "the best that we can hope to do"... in reality we do much worse than that. The law as it exists in the real world isn't crafted solely to safeguard the life, liberty, and property of those under its protection; instead, lawmaking is an exercise in power: personal, political, and corporate, in a thousand combinations that I'm sure I needn't go into. The result of this can't be anything but injustice, and while the constitution's own processes insulate it somewhat from this tarnishing, it's not at all immune.
That does not comport with the notions of positive and negative liberty embodied by the Constitution.
All negative defenses are based on a right that has been trumped by another right, requiring the legal system to affirmatively support, or grant, supremacy of one over the other.
[..]
If you're willing to reduce the defense to the status of privilege based on a falsely pedantic notion of "rights", that's fine with me. But it is an unequivocally stupid move. Nope. The constitution can "affirmatively support" anything it wants, but that doesn't mean anything except as a statement (affirmation, to use the term that's sitting right there) that the right does exist in the first place. If the constitution were to state, on the other hand, that I have the right to kick people in the head if their slashdot UID ends with "6", I would not be "granted" such a right; the constitution would merely be wrong.
Don't be surprised if buried in the analogue output circuitry of your digital set top box is a macrovision circuit just itching to be switched on by a hidden flag hidden in some program to mop up the remaining analogue recorders such as yourself!:) So what you're saying is you need a good old VHS unit that's too dumb to be fooled by macrovision:)
If you want a distribution that's produced by an "open" company I hear there's a nonprofit called "Software in the Public Interest" that puts out a Linux distro...
All I know is that upgrading to Hoary bricked my PC, I can't even boot into XP anymore due to GRUB errors. And you waited three years to complain about it?
And sometimes things have to be options. Look, clearly there's a class of users that finds the resizing feature to be useful -- which is why it was requested and added. At a guess, it's really nice on platforms with really small screens -- displaying a single line of input field lets you see as much conversation as possible, most of the time. So that's nifty.
However there's also a class of users that finds the whole thing stupid and annoying and inconsistent. For one, UI elements aren't expected to change their shape without an explicit request, and for the whole screen to jump while you're typing is pretty jarring. For another, thanks to the "options are evil" thing, there's no way to configure the minimum or maximum size of the input area, which leads to a UI that's just generally ugly when the app is used in a different way from how the developers are expecting. That's not friendly either.
So this is a case where configurability really would be simple, and worthwhile, and make everybody happy. But the pidgin developers have instead chosen to say "fuck you". And not for the first time either. They aren't the least bit interested in communicating with their users, and they haven't really been for years. In a sense, that's their right -- but it doesn't mean the users are required to put up with it. They say that they work on pidgin as a hobby activity, for their own satisfaction -- well let's see how much satisfaction they get from "owning" a project with no users.
I guess it's time to see if PostgreSQL's documentation and tools have managed to get any less user-hostile over the years. Buh? Postgres had some really quality documentation before MySQL had much of anything, and a summarized version of it is even available live in the client. Yeah, it's slightly less verbose than MySQL's has gotten to be, but it's certainly not incomplete. It just isn't "SQL for Dummies". (Side note: that's one of the better "Dummies" books ever printed).
As to tools, I'm not sure what you're after, as postgres has less need for addon tools than mysql, doing more via SQL instead. The only thing that's especially tricky in configuration is pg_hba.conf -- but comparison with mysql's user auth shows the complexity to be worthwhile.
1) I did it for years upon years (well, it was Debian back when I had dialup, not ubuntu... but I ran sid!) Updates took some time, but everything was great. 2) Even on a modem, apt is more than anyone has ever gotten with windows. 3) Lots of goodies on the DVD, and they really do show up in McDonald's. Thousands of pieces of software, several of them even pretty damn good, a couple clicks away as soon as you installed the OS. Is It Not Shiny?
Economics that has "math" (which is to say, arithmetic, algebra, or anything with numbers) in it is impure economics. The true economics is that which can be explained using logic, diagrams, (completely abstract) graphs, and stories.:)
Get a used-in-good-condition Audigy2. Pretty good driver, hardware mixing galore, and some other stuff that you don't think you want but may find out you actually do. And without the upsampling stupidity of the original Audigy.
Actually I think it's an improvement. D2 was kind of busted before. Now the threading works better. Yeah, the lines are too heavy and the buttons are too fat and there's a few bugs in, but it's a step in the right direction. Oh, and forcing people to hit preview... thank you! Other places have had it for a while now and it really does work. I'm glad slashdot got there.
Oh, and re: piracy, since I see that came up elsewhere in the thread -- I already covered Windows -- the machines come with licenses, there's an OEM disc, and a sticker. You can probably figure out who. Nearly everything else we run, in and out of IT, is free. For the exceptions, we have legit boxes in the filing cabinet for everything. There are copies of Office available on request but the non-IT users (who don't admin their own machines) are encouraged to use OOo unless necessary. For a few other dev things from vendors that need licensing, there's a box that doesn't belong to any one dev that can be rdesktopped into, and the software lives there.:)
"IT" proper is one manager, one admin, and a handful of developers. We're given some hardware (decent) and told "set up a system. You need to be able to do X, Y, and Z" (say, Subversion, Java development, and Jabber). There's a pile of vendor Windows CDs, a pile of Linux CDs, or you get someone to burn something for you, and you go to it. Problems are few, complaints are pretty much nil, and the only big problem is when someone manages to completely hose their own machine -- at which point they're expected to fix it themselves or reinstall real quick so they can get working again:)
But yeah, the reason it works is because 1) We all have clue, and 2) We're not big -- in the sense that the people in charge of creating "IT policy", the people in charge of implementing it, and the people who have to live with it, are all within earshot of each other.
Right, because Leibniz wasn't the least bit overbearing himself.
As to QM, I'm still waiting for something better to come along and replace it. It's too ugly to be true. You can't fault Einstein for thinking the same.
Cuz God forbid someone use 3D for their job! Sheesh! The idiots on Slashdot these days... There are cards made for that. They're not at all the same as the cards under discussion.:)
Quad SLi is for the consumer just like a super computer is for the consumer. Bzzrt! WRONGO!
Supercomputers are for people who make so much money by having a supercomputer that it makes sense for them to fork out for one. Super-high-end video cards are for people who have so much money that they can spend it for no fucking reason. Because you gain no useful benefit from having one. So yes, they're for the consumer, because there's no other conceivable target market. Only the utterly stupid consumer. Your analogy, she is broke.
It's a well-known fact that the more costly a bad decision, the greater the lengths people will go to to justify it. If you spend $10 on a piece of gear and it turns out to be crap you say "oh well, that was a waste of $10" and toss it. If you spend $2,000 on a piece of gear and it doesn't meet expectations, you don't throw it out, because that would be admitting that you wasted two thousand bucks (making you look very silly). Instead, you "find something to love" about it, spend even more money on compatible accessories (or whatever), and tell the world that it's the greatest thing ever. Apple customers are that much more defensive than anyone else, not because Apple products are better than everything else, not because Apple products are worse than everything else, but because Apple products cost that much more than everything else.;)
KDE is technically superior, better-designed, and more usable -- but you run Ubuntu, and GNOME gets all of the system-integration love. Kubuntu folks try to keep up but they don't have enough people to make it possible. So, some of the (pretty damn nice) whiz-bang features aren't there, not because KDE can't do them, but because the integration army has chosen to support someone else.
It's not the AC frequency one. Household CFLs invariably have schnazzy electronic ballasts that operate way up in the tens-of-kHz range. They have less perceptible flicker than incandescents. And GE's bog-standard (not daylight) CFLs produce a color that I can't tell from incandescents, and my camera nearly can't. (I find the daylight ones to be excessively blue -- maybe it's just a contrast effect and I wouldn't notice if I replaced all of my bulbs, but I'm not really inclined.) Maybe your adverse reaction is caused by a fatal brain cloud.
As the problem is simply one of image, create two brands, say "Wikipedia Core" and "Wikipedia Fringe". Keep everything, but only elevate articles into the core on some sort of vote / consensus. Keeps both sides happy. And this effort already exists, in a sense; it's called "Wikipedia 1.0".
I've used GANDI before in the past, they're definitely good, and they play the game straight. Currently my domains are registered through Register4Less, who are reselling Tucows. Service is good and I haven't heard about Tucows doing anything awful either. I could be wrong on that though.
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally my right to expression doesn't intefere with yours (at least not in the domain that copyright cares about); it only interferes with your ability to merchandise your expression. It's a dread mistake to confuse the two, considering the huge difference in importance between the two -- placement in the ontology of rights, so to speak. And really that's the crucial issue, isn't it? People with one set of interests want sales to trump speech. People with another set of interests want speech to trump nearly everything, and certainly commercialism. So it's important to realize that the situation isn't at all symmetrical.
Yes, the constitution is the supreme law. And like any other law, it can sure as fuck be wrong. The law does not tell what is right, it tells what is legal. The purpose of lawmaking, in theory, is to make these two concepts align as nearly as possible. But it's an inexact science, meaning that sometimes what is legal is not right, and what is right is not legal.
If we had perfect knowledge, perfect reason, and perfect foresight, then the law would be fixed in stone and justice would never be miscarried. But we have imperfect knowledge and imperfect ability to see the consequences of our actions, so the best we can hope to do is observe human affairs, find out where there are inequities, and address them using the tools of law. Which requires admitting, to begin with, that the law can be unjust, that it can be wrong.
And of course I say "the best that we can hope to do"... in reality we do much worse than that. The law as it exists in the real world isn't crafted solely to safeguard the life, liberty, and property of those under its protection; instead, lawmaking is an exercise in power: personal, political, and corporate, in a thousand combinations that I'm sure I needn't go into. The result of this can't be anything but injustice, and while the constitution's own processes insulate it somewhat from this tarnishing, it's not at all immune.
All negative defenses are based on a right that has been trumped by another right, requiring the legal system to affirmatively support, or grant, supremacy of one over the other.
[..]
If you're willing to reduce the defense to the status of privilege based on a falsely pedantic notion of "rights", that's fine with me. But it is an unequivocally stupid move. Nope. The constitution can "affirmatively support" anything it wants, but that doesn't mean anything except as a statement (affirmation, to use the term that's sitting right there) that the right does exist in the first place. If the constitution were to state, on the other hand, that I have the right to kick people in the head if their slashdot UID ends with "6", I would not be "granted" such a right; the constitution would merely be wrong.
So vote for anyone except Republicans and Democrats. Actually... don't vote. It's a scam.
If you want a distribution that's produced by an "open" company I hear there's a nonprofit called "Software in the Public Interest" that puts out a Linux distro...
And sometimes things have to be options. Look, clearly there's a class of users that finds the resizing feature to be useful -- which is why it was requested and added. At a guess, it's really nice on platforms with really small screens -- displaying a single line of input field lets you see as much conversation as possible, most of the time. So that's nifty.
However there's also a class of users that finds the whole thing stupid and annoying and inconsistent. For one, UI elements aren't expected to change their shape without an explicit request, and for the whole screen to jump while you're typing is pretty jarring. For another, thanks to the "options are evil" thing, there's no way to configure the minimum or maximum size of the input area, which leads to a UI that's just generally ugly when the app is used in a different way from how the developers are expecting. That's not friendly either.
So this is a case where configurability really would be simple, and worthwhile, and make everybody happy. But the pidgin developers have instead chosen to say "fuck you". And not for the first time either. They aren't the least bit interested in communicating with their users, and they haven't really been for years. In a sense, that's their right -- but it doesn't mean the users are required to put up with it. They say that they work on pidgin as a hobby activity, for their own satisfaction -- well let's see how much satisfaction they get from "owning" a project with no users.
"In lew"? How does Lew feel about that?
As to tools, I'm not sure what you're after, as postgres has less need for addon tools than mysql, doing more via SQL instead. The only thing that's especially tricky in configuration is pg_hba.conf -- but comparison with mysql's user auth shows the complexity to be worthwhile.
1) I did it for years upon years (well, it was Debian back when I had dialup, not ubuntu... but I ran sid!) Updates took some time, but everything was great.
2) Even on a modem, apt is more than anyone has ever gotten with windows.
3) Lots of goodies on the DVD, and they really do show up in McDonald's. Thousands of pieces of software, several of them even pretty damn good, a couple clicks away as soon as you installed the OS. Is It Not Shiny?
Economics that has "math" (which is to say, arithmetic, algebra, or anything with numbers) in it is impure economics. The true economics is that which can be explained using logic, diagrams, (completely abstract) graphs, and stories. :)
Get a used-in-good-condition Audigy2. Pretty good driver, hardware mixing galore, and some other stuff that you don't think you want but may find out you actually do. And without the upsampling stupidity of the original Audigy.
Actually I think it's an improvement. D2 was kind of busted before. Now the threading works better. Yeah, the lines are too heavy and the buttons are too fat and there's a few bugs in, but it's a step in the right direction. Oh, and forcing people to hit preview... thank you! Other places have had it for a while now and it really does work. I'm glad slashdot got there.
Oh, and re: piracy, since I see that came up elsewhere in the thread -- I already covered Windows -- the machines come with licenses, there's an OEM disc, and a sticker. You can probably figure out who. Nearly everything else we run, in and out of IT, is free. For the exceptions, we have legit boxes in the filing cabinet for everything. There are copies of Office available on request but the non-IT users (who don't admin their own machines) are encouraged to use OOo unless necessary. For a few other dev things from vendors that need licensing, there's a box that doesn't belong to any one dev that can be rdesktopped into, and the software lives there. :)
"IT" proper is one manager, one admin, and a handful of developers. We're given some hardware (decent) and told "set up a system. You need to be able to do X, Y, and Z" (say, Subversion, Java development, and Jabber). There's a pile of vendor Windows CDs, a pile of Linux CDs, or you get someone to burn something for you, and you go to it. Problems are few, complaints are pretty much nil, and the only big problem is when someone manages to completely hose their own machine -- at which point they're expected to fix it themselves or reinstall real quick so they can get working again :)
But yeah, the reason it works is because
1) We all have clue, and
2) We're not big -- in the sense that the people in charge of creating "IT policy", the people in charge of implementing it, and the people who have to live with it, are all within earshot of each other.
Right, because Leibniz wasn't the least bit overbearing himself.
As to QM, I'm still waiting for something better to come along and replace it. It's too ugly to be true. You can't fault Einstein for thinking the same.
Supercomputers are for people who make so much money by having a supercomputer that it makes sense for them to fork out for one. Super-high-end video cards are for people who have so much money that they can spend it for no fucking reason. Because you gain no useful benefit from having one. So yes, they're for the consumer, because there's no other conceivable target market. Only the utterly stupid consumer. Your analogy, she is broke.
It's a well-known fact that the more costly a bad decision, the greater the lengths people will go to to justify it. If you spend $10 on a piece of gear and it turns out to be crap you say "oh well, that was a waste of $10" and toss it. If you spend $2,000 on a piece of gear and it doesn't meet expectations, you don't throw it out, because that would be admitting that you wasted two thousand bucks (making you look very silly). Instead, you "find something to love" about it, spend even more money on compatible accessories (or whatever), and tell the world that it's the greatest thing ever. Apple customers are that much more defensive than anyone else, not because Apple products are better than everything else, not because Apple products are worse than everything else, but because Apple products cost that much more than everything else. ;)
KDE is technically superior, better-designed, and more usable -- but you run Ubuntu, and GNOME gets all of the system-integration love. Kubuntu folks try to keep up but they don't have enough people to make it possible. So, some of the (pretty damn nice) whiz-bang features aren't there, not because KDE can't do them, but because the integration army has chosen to support someone else.
It's not the AC frequency one. Household CFLs invariably have schnazzy electronic ballasts that operate way up in the tens-of-kHz range. They have less perceptible flicker than incandescents. And GE's bog-standard (not daylight) CFLs produce a color that I can't tell from incandescents, and my camera nearly can't. (I find the daylight ones to be excessively blue -- maybe it's just a contrast effect and I wouldn't notice if I replaced all of my bulbs, but I'm not really inclined.) Maybe your adverse reaction is caused by a fatal brain cloud.
I've used GANDI before in the past, they're definitely good, and they play the game straight. Currently my domains are registered through Register4Less, who are reselling Tucows. Service is good and I haven't heard about Tucows doing anything awful either. I could be wrong on that though.