At least all the yammering about "the cloud" seems to have decreased.
Apparently you haven't watched any television lately. MS is actually trying to push the notion that Windows7 == "the cloud". And yes, the ads make about as much sense as you'd expect from that very confused notion.
What I've learned from MS this month: "the cloud" will auto-position cut-and-pasted heads into your photos(!?), "the cloud" will provide an RDP connection to your home machine which will magically be fast enough to allow you to stream locally stored video, and "the cloud" will allow you to become a megamillionaire and quit your day job in the fast food industry. Yay cloud.:/
Personally I favor Condorcet voting, but Instant Runoff is nearly as good and much easier to explain.
I agree, and if you want to move in that direction, the best approach may be to try to get it implemented on a local level, in your city or town. Oakland and San Francisco have both switched to instant runoff for local elections, over the screams of the established/entrenched powers-that-be, and it seems to be working quite well. IMO, the more places that do the same, the more likely it is to be implemented on larger scales (especially--for now--in California).
One common complaint of the P-T-B seems to be that it's a liberal plot. Presumably this is coming from people who remember Ralph Nader, but have forgotten Ross Perot, so please feel free to remind them if you hear this nonsense.
Are we finally using the term "pirates" correctly?
Correctly? You think there's a "the" correct usage? I hate to tell you this, but words in English can, and frequently do have more than one meaning; and there usually isn't just one you can point to and say "this is the correct meaning." In this particular case, the 1913 public domain version of Webster's that is widely distributed on the Internet includes the infringement definition for "pirate", so that use is at least a century old, making it more legit than, say, the term "sky pirate".
If you want to argue that using the term for infringement is inappropriate and should be abandoned, I'm with ya, but to claim it's incorrect just makes you look silly.
That said, I'm not sure the term "pirate" applies here no matter which meaning of the word you choose. But yes, it does seem closer to the nautical definition, if anything.:)
Should we go through the dictionary and find all the words that have more than one meaning and try to do something about them? Good luck with that! While we're at it, maybe we can force people to stop referring to unsolicited commercial email as "spam", since that name is already used for the Hawaiian State Bird^W^W^Wtinned meat product.
The term "pirate" as used to refer to large scale copyright violators dates back way before the Internet. It's thoroughly established usage. And I oppose changing it, because it would make the bandana, eye-patch and plushy parrot I often wear when sitting at my computer into non-sequiturs.:)
Of course, your Jesus analogy also fails, because Jesus made those loafs and fishes he gave away. The analogy to Jesus would be best reserved for those groups that give their own work away, like the Grateful Dead, Radiohead, the FSF or the Blender Foundation.
from what I gather it's the only decent film he's made
From what I gather it may be the best film he's made, but that's not exactly saying very much. It's a bad movie, and the notion that his other movies are worse has cured me of any lingering urges I might have had to see any of them. It does have a few (very few) funny moments, but for me, the highlight of the movie was finally getting to see Dave Foley's schlong. And since I'm not gay, that's not much of a highlight!:)
I will say this: if you're suffering from incurable curiosity about Boll's movies, Postal is probably the least painful way to satisfy that curiosity. It worked for me. Never again!:)
It's a matter of intent, something the law can and does take into consideration. Google et al. are shielded by the Betamax decision, because they're not promoting illegal uses. Incidental illegal uses (even if they constitute the majority of actual use) are not a problem, legally, but, as the Grokster case established, once you begin promoting the illegal uses, you've crossed the line.
I have no idea whether Torrent-finder did promote illegal uses, but that's the question this is likely to hinge on.
You're obviously a programmer or techie without any experience of the law. Reading Groklaw might help a little. It's not about percentages, it's about intent. The Betamax case made it clear that being useful for illegal activities is not illegal, even if the majority of current uses are illegal, but the Grokster (unrelated to Groklaw) case established that promoting the illegal uses (no matter what percentage they may be) is crossing the line.
Thus, your question is unanswerable as it stands. Percentages are irrelevant. To make this clearer, let us consider a more extreme example: a site that is 50% murder-for-hire and 50% political speech. Do you think the political speech would shield the site from legal attention? On the other hand, even if the site was 90% murder-for-hire, the owners might be able to get off if they could prove that they never once promoted the site for anything like that.
Now, I'll admit that torrent search is a much more borderline case. There are plenty of uses for torrent that are perfectly legal, whether the powers-that-be are willing to acknowledge that or not, so the whole thing may prove to be a misstep by DHS, and may result in countersuits, but currently I don't have enough information on the sites in question to judge whether that's true or not. But it's going to come down to questions of intent. Were the sites actually promoting illegal activity, or was it simply incidental? I'd suspect that many of them have a strong case for simply incidental, but we'll have to wait and see.
Now do you people understand the opposition to net neutrality?
Nope. Opposition to net neutrality remains idiotic, ill-informed and/or evil. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume #2 in this case.
The government would "regulate" torrent traffic and other things that high-paying lobbyists didn't like.
They already do. Anyway, pointing to this as an example of the "evils" of net neutrality when we don't have net neutrality yet is some pretty funky logic (using the term very loosely).
I gather that what you're worried about is that they may attach riders to any net neutrality bill. Well guess what? They can (and do) attach riders to all sorts of bills, even bills that are completely unrelated. So if what you're worried about is riders, opposing net neutrality won't help. It'll simply block the good stuff (actual net neutrality) while leaving them free to add all the bad stuff they want to other bills.
Windows/286/386 were horrible at multi-tasking, whereas DV did it quite well.
That's why I continued to use it as a software developer--when my apps blew up, they would often take down the VM, but my desktop, editor, and build environment would all remain running, which was much less likely to be true when I ran them under Windows. I think the only time I ever managed to trash DV completely was when I was trying to run a program that had its own built-in protected-mode multitasking, and even that one normally worked just fine.
This was just before I switched to Unix (the transition aided by DV/X); I've never actually used Windows or Mac for much of anything.:)
I've got one I still use because I know it's foibles, I trust it a little more than whatever random stuff a mo-bo maker might have chosen, and I know it has good open-source drivers. It's over 10 years old, and has been in a variety of computers over the years, though. When it finally dies, I doubt I'll replace it, unless I'm setting up a media center or something.
Not to rain on your attempt at humor, but "discrete" means "separate; distinct; disjunct". Discrete sets are called that because they're separate, not because they're not continuous, even if that is their most significant property. Anyway, I'm just happy that the submission didn't refer to a "discreet" sound card.:)
Then there are the special-purpose subengines - stocks, health, celebrities, weather, sports, travel, etc. That was actually a Yahoo innovation. Yahoo introduced that in early 2008
An "innovation" that Ask.com had since at least 2002. But hey, who's counting?:)
What's changing is that some [subengines] now actually sell something.
How is asking a question or raising a question "begging?"
How is asking for money "begging?" Oh, wait....begging is simply a particularly emphatic form of asking.
The phrase may be a little awkward and stilted, but it's perfectly standard English; no special rules are required to make it a valid phrase. No change in the language is required to make it make sense. There's nothing "descriptivist" about it.
Now, speaking of stupid, the phrase as it's used in formal logic is based on a mistranslation of the Latin, "petitio principii". How stupid is that?
I admit that the phrasing is awkward and a little strange, and surely only entered the popular vocabulary because of the (stupid) name of the logical phallacy, but being awkward or even stupid doesn't make it wrong. If you succeed in convincing enough people that it's stupid and shouldn't be used, then it may well become wrong, but until that time, it's not wrong, whether or not it's stupid and/or awkward.
If you mean, what are slashdotters' feelings?, well, despite the many claims about groupthink, slashdotters actually display a fairly wide range of feelings and opinions. (In fact, at least half the posts claiming groupthink stand as counter-evidence to their own claims.)
If you want my opinion, I think that the opposite of net neutrality is called fraud or extortion. I also think that those who conflate net neutrality with QoS issues are thoroughly misguided, possibly deliberately so.
I might go so far as to suggest that if you notice this stuff, it's a sign that the movie is insufficiently immersive. Not that there's anything wrong with noticing after repeated viewings, but if you're actually watching for it the first time through, chances are high that you, like the infamous inchworm, are missing something fairly fundamental.
It's like looking at a painting and focusing on the brushstrokes, while ignoring the composition and execution and use of color--or to put it in terms that slashdotters are more likely to understand, like admiring the formatting of a piece of code while ignoring such basic questions as "does it work?", and "is it safe, reliable and efficient?"
(As for Ep1, I think it's sufficient to say that it might have been good if it had been a completely different movie...)
Huh? That article doesn't seem to weigh in either way on whether LO is good, bad or indifferent. It merely points out that it's not the first derivative of OOo to appear, which is plainly true. Nor is there any indication that he's speaking for IBM. It's simply a statement of Rob Weir's opinion that LO is not as unprecedented as some people seem to think.
If that stands as anything, it stands as evidence that Rob Weir doesn't like the term "fork". It offers nothing about either Rob's opinion or IBM's opinion of LO as a project.
That said, the reference I was using to claim IBM support turns out, when I read more closely, to have been speculative, so I'll mark them as neutral for now, until more evidence appears.
it tends to come back to haunt you when someone finds an obscure illegal use for foo that you did include.
No, obscurity doesn't matter. The earlier Betamax case established (thank you Sony) that a tool can be blatantly used primarily for illegal purposes, and still be perfectly legal as long as there exist substantial legal uses. The Grokster case merely narrowed that by establishing that you cannot promote the illegal uses.
Do people have a right to critique the package inclusion policies?
Certainly.
Sure. Do the rest of us have a right to call these people out if we think they're trying to make a mountain out of a molehill? Likewise certain. You seem to be trying to deny the AC the same rights you demand for yourself.
The fact is that post-Grokster, the way a program is marketed is legally significant, and the way this program has been marketed is definitely a bit sketchy, IMO. Grokster didn't lose because their program lacked legal uses; it lost because they promoted the illegal ones.
Debian has "over 25000". If RHEL6 is "software you can weigh", then Debian must be "software designed to break your scale".:)
(Note: this is not a claim that "Debian is better" or any such nonsense. Merely pointing out that 2000 packages is hardly an impressive or unprecedented feat in itself.)
Slashdot Mirror
At least all the yammering about "the cloud" seems to have decreased.
Apparently you haven't watched any television lately. MS is actually trying to push the notion that Windows7 == "the cloud". And yes, the ads make about as much sense as you'd expect from that very confused notion.
What I've learned from MS this month: "the cloud" will auto-position cut-and-pasted heads into your photos(!?), "the cloud" will provide an RDP connection to your home machine which will magically be fast enough to allow you to stream locally stored video, and "the cloud" will allow you to become a megamillionaire and quit your day job in the fast food industry. Yay cloud. :/
Personally I favor Condorcet voting, but Instant Runoff is nearly as good and much easier to explain.
I agree, and if you want to move in that direction, the best approach may be to try to get it implemented on a local level, in your city or town. Oakland and San Francisco have both switched to instant runoff for local elections, over the screams of the established/entrenched powers-that-be, and it seems to be working quite well. IMO, the more places that do the same, the more likely it is to be implemented on larger scales (especially--for now--in California).
One common complaint of the P-T-B seems to be that it's a liberal plot. Presumably this is coming from people who remember Ralph Nader, but have forgotten Ross Perot, so please feel free to remind them if you hear this nonsense.
Are we finally using the term "pirates" correctly?
Correctly? You think there's a "the" correct usage? I hate to tell you this, but words in English can, and frequently do have more than one meaning; and there usually isn't just one you can point to and say "this is the correct meaning." In this particular case, the 1913 public domain version of Webster's that is widely distributed on the Internet includes the infringement definition for "pirate", so that use is at least a century old, making it more legit than, say, the term "sky pirate".
If you want to argue that using the term for infringement is inappropriate and should be abandoned, I'm with ya, but to claim it's incorrect just makes you look silly.
That said, I'm not sure the term "pirate" applies here no matter which meaning of the word you choose. But yes, it does seem closer to the nautical definition, if anything. :)
We obviously need new terminology.
Should we go through the dictionary and find all the words that have more than one meaning and try to do something about them? Good luck with that! While we're at it, maybe we can force people to stop referring to unsolicited commercial email as "spam", since that name is already used for the Hawaiian State Bird^W^W^Wtinned meat product.
The term "pirate" as used to refer to large scale copyright violators dates back way before the Internet. It's thoroughly established usage. And I oppose changing it, because it would make the bandana, eye-patch and plushy parrot I often wear when sitting at my computer into non-sequiturs. :)
Of course, your Jesus analogy also fails, because Jesus made those loafs and fishes he gave away. The analogy to Jesus would be best reserved for those groups that give their own work away, like the Grateful Dead, Radiohead, the FSF or the Blender Foundation.
I'd seriously recommend watching Postal
Seriously? Have you seen it?
from what I gather it's the only decent film he's made
From what I gather it may be the best film he's made, but that's not exactly saying very much. It's a bad movie, and the notion that his other movies are worse has cured me of any lingering urges I might have had to see any of them. It does have a few (very few) funny moments, but for me, the highlight of the movie was finally getting to see Dave Foley's schlong. And since I'm not gay, that's not much of a highlight! :)
I will say this: if you're suffering from incurable curiosity about Boll's movies, Postal is probably the least painful way to satisfy that curiosity. It worked for me. Never again! :)
It's a matter of intent, something the law can and does take into consideration. Google et al. are shielded by the Betamax decision, because they're not promoting illegal uses. Incidental illegal uses (even if they constitute the majority of actual use) are not a problem, legally, but, as the Grokster case established, once you begin promoting the illegal uses, you've crossed the line.
I have no idea whether Torrent-finder did promote illegal uses, but that's the question this is likely to hinge on.
You're obviously a programmer or techie without any experience of the law. Reading Groklaw might help a little. It's not about percentages, it's about intent. The Betamax case made it clear that being useful for illegal activities is not illegal, even if the majority of current uses are illegal, but the Grokster (unrelated to Groklaw) case established that promoting the illegal uses (no matter what percentage they may be) is crossing the line.
Thus, your question is unanswerable as it stands. Percentages are irrelevant. To make this clearer, let us consider a more extreme example: a site that is 50% murder-for-hire and 50% political speech. Do you think the political speech would shield the site from legal attention? On the other hand, even if the site was 90% murder-for-hire, the owners might be able to get off if they could prove that they never once promoted the site for anything like that.
Now, I'll admit that torrent search is a much more borderline case. There are plenty of uses for torrent that are perfectly legal, whether the powers-that-be are willing to acknowledge that or not, so the whole thing may prove to be a misstep by DHS, and may result in countersuits, but currently I don't have enough information on the sites in question to judge whether that's true or not. But it's going to come down to questions of intent. Were the sites actually promoting illegal activity, or was it simply incidental? I'd suspect that many of them have a strong case for simply incidental, but we'll have to wait and see.
Now do you people understand the opposition to net neutrality?
Nope. Opposition to net neutrality remains idiotic, ill-informed and/or evil. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume #2 in this case.
The government would "regulate" torrent traffic and other things that high-paying lobbyists didn't like.
They already do. Anyway, pointing to this as an example of the "evils" of net neutrality when we don't have net neutrality yet is some pretty funky logic (using the term very loosely).
I gather that what you're worried about is that they may attach riders to any net neutrality bill. Well guess what? They can (and do) attach riders to all sorts of bills, even bills that are completely unrelated. So if what you're worried about is riders, opposing net neutrality won't help. It'll simply block the good stuff (actual net neutrality) while leaving them free to add all the bad stuff they want to other bills.
Windows/286 /386 were horrible at multi-tasking, whereas DV did it quite well.
That's why I continued to use it as a software developer--when my apps blew up, they would often take down the VM, but my desktop, editor, and build environment would all remain running, which was much less likely to be true when I ran them under Windows. I think the only time I ever managed to trash DV completely was when I was trying to run a program that had its own built-in protected-mode multitasking, and even that one normally worked just fine.
This was just before I switched to Unix (the transition aided by DV/X); I've never actually used Windows or Mac for much of anything. :)
I've got one I still use because I know it's foibles, I trust it a little more than whatever random stuff a mo-bo maker might have chosen, and I know it has good open-source drivers. It's over 10 years old, and has been in a variety of computers over the years, though. When it finally dies, I doubt I'll replace it, unless I'm setting up a media center or something.
As opposed to what? Continuous sound card?
Not to rain on your attempt at humor, but "discrete" means "separate; distinct; disjunct". Discrete sets are called that because they're separate, not because they're not continuous, even if that is their most significant property. Anyway, I'm just happy that the submission didn't refer to a "discreet" sound card. :)
Yeah, yeah, it was by design! And if you believe that, we've got a nice bridge^H^H^H^H^H^Hoperating system to sell you. :)
Then there are the special-purpose subengines - stocks, health, celebrities, weather, sports, travel, etc. That was actually a Yahoo innovation. Yahoo introduced that in early 2008
An "innovation" that Ask.com had since at least 2002. But hey, who's counting? :)
What's changing is that some [subengines] now actually sell something.
Again, not as new as you think.
How is asking a question or raising a question "begging?"
How is asking for money "begging?" Oh, wait....begging is simply a particularly emphatic form of asking.
The phrase may be a little awkward and stilted, but it's perfectly standard English; no special rules are required to make it a valid phrase. No change in the language is required to make it make sense. There's nothing "descriptivist" about it.
Now, speaking of stupid, the phrase as it's used in formal logic is based on a mistranslation of the Latin, "petitio principii". How stupid is that?
I admit that the phrasing is awkward and a little strange, and surely only entered the popular vocabulary because of the (stupid) name of the logical phallacy, but being awkward or even stupid doesn't make it wrong. If you succeed in convincing enough people that it's stupid and shouldn't be used, then it may well become wrong, but until that time, it's not wrong, whether or not it's stupid and/or awkward.
What are Slashdot's feelings...?
Anthropomorphize much? :)
If you mean, what are slashdotters' feelings?, well, despite the many claims about groupthink, slashdotters actually display a fairly wide range of feelings and opinions. (In fact, at least half the posts claiming groupthink stand as counter-evidence to their own claims.)
If you want my opinion, I think that the opposite of net neutrality is called fraud or extortion. I also think that those who conflate net neutrality with QoS issues are thoroughly misguided, possibly deliberately so.
I might go so far as to suggest that if you notice this stuff, it's a sign that the movie is insufficiently immersive. Not that there's anything wrong with noticing after repeated viewings, but if you're actually watching for it the first time through, chances are high that you, like the infamous inchworm, are missing something fairly fundamental.
It's like looking at a painting and focusing on the brushstrokes, while ignoring the composition and execution and use of color--or to put it in terms that slashdotters are more likely to understand, like admiring the formatting of a piece of code while ignoring such basic questions as "does it work?", and "is it safe, reliable and efficient?"
(As for Ep1, I think it's sufficient to say that it might have been good if it had been a completely different movie...)
Really? IBM doesn't sound all that enthusiastic.
Huh? That article doesn't seem to weigh in either way on whether LO is good, bad or indifferent. It merely points out that it's not the first derivative of OOo to appear, which is plainly true. Nor is there any indication that he's speaking for IBM. It's simply a statement of Rob Weir's opinion that LO is not as unprecedented as some people seem to think.
If that stands as anything, it stands as evidence that Rob Weir doesn't like the term "fork". It offers nothing about either Rob's opinion or IBM's opinion of LO as a project.
That said, the reference I was using to claim IBM support turns out, when I read more closely, to have been speculative, so I'll mark them as neutral for now, until more evidence appears.
I fully expect LibreOffice to merge all the Go-oo patches
Already done--that was pretty much the first step.
And I think it is very possible that the community will line up behind LibreOffice
Pretty much already done as well, at least as far as the Red Hat, Novell, Debian, Canonical, FSF, IBM and Google parts of the community.
Actually, I think gnumeric may well be the best open-source spreadsheet out there, but both oowriter and kword are better than abiword, IMO.
it tends to come back to haunt you when someone finds an obscure illegal use for foo that you did include.
No, obscurity doesn't matter. The earlier Betamax case established (thank you Sony) that a tool can be blatantly used primarily for illegal purposes, and still be perfectly legal as long as there exist substantial legal uses. The Grokster case merely narrowed that by establishing that you cannot promote the illegal uses.
Do people have a right to critique the package inclusion policies?
Certainly.
Sure. Do the rest of us have a right to call these people out if we think they're trying to make a mountain out of a molehill? Likewise certain. You seem to be trying to deny the AC the same rights you demand for yourself.
The fact is that post-Grokster, the way a program is marketed is legally significant, and the way this program has been marketed is definitely a bit sketchy, IMO. Grokster didn't lose because their program lacked legal uses; it lost because they promoted the illegal ones.
Debian has "over 25000". If RHEL6 is "software you can weigh", then Debian must be "software designed to break your scale". :)
(Note: this is not a claim that "Debian is better" or any such nonsense. Merely pointing out that 2000 packages is hardly an impressive or unprecedented feat in itself.)
Google took over as the primary search engine because it was lightweight and fast. Now Google is adding bling that will turn it into Yahoo
Actually, in this case, it's adding bling that will turn it into Ask.com which had a similar preview feature for its search results for many years.
But at least they're finally learning from Microsoft the proper way to "innovate". :)
Indeed. One might even consider it to be a branch of mathematics rather than a science per se.
you can waste *days* reading that website
As explained here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TvTropesWillRuinYourLife
end up destroying your vocabulary
As explained here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourVocabulary.