Actually, I thought it was a very reasonable and appropriate article, moreso than most of the discussion I've seen on the subject, and certainly moreso than posts by Linus on the subject.
I often wonder how many of the people that criticize the "free as in speech" software evangelists do so because they genuinely disagree, and how many do so because they are instinctively lashing out at those who make them feel guilty for using non-free software. Hopefully more of the former than of the latter.
Why should the US send people that have such a bitter hatred for the president?
Um, the people on Slashdot are not the people we're talking about here -- we're talking about a company choosing to donate money to a given political party, then being punished by a different administration for doing so. Or do you think that political contribution by a corporation automaticaly equates to hatred of the other side? Last I checked, lots of corporations donate to both sides, you know.
Yep. When my kids are old enough, they're getting computer/internet access, but it's going to be on a computer in the living room, and only when we're home. Nothing makes you careful about what you surf for like knowing your mom or dad can walk in behind you. Heh.
Maybe instead of being so focused on what the kid should be forbidden to do, maybe explain to him/her _why_ that stuff is bad, and what the consequences are?
Well, yeah. Far too many people seem to believe in the security through obscurity model as a way of teaching values; that is, they don't want their kids to do something, so they attempt to restrict access to information about it. Which pretty much ensures that their kids, who are as curious and intelligent as anyone else's, will be more motivated than ever to find the information. Without their parents' guidance, this leads directly to a huge pile of incorrect, incomplete or blatantly misleading information from a variety of sources.
I knew about sex before I wanted to know about it, and as a result have always had a healthy respect for and understanding of it, and an awareness of how this knowledge (or lack of it) impacted relationships between people. It's a model I'm going to use with my kids soon, and not just for information on sex, but on all important topics: religion, politics, personal responsibility, and so on.
Of course, it helps that my parents also presented a fine example on a regular basis. I hope I can hold up that end of the bargain.
Ah, but that requires the parents to understand how to teach common sense. Meaning they need to have it themselves, they need to start teaching it very early, and they need to be able to maintain a consistent good example such that by the time their child(ren) reach(es) fifteen or so and gets rebellious, they don't pick a last-minute tacked-on lesson in common sense as something to be rebelled against. Not as easy as it sounds, I'm sure...especially when the child is a result of a lack of common sense regarding birth control, for instance.
That's actually a good question, and points to a bug wherein whatever code that adds the paragraph tags is not running properly in the submit cycle. You preview, however, and the tags get added, and stay added through the submit that follows.
Or the bug is that the automatic paragraph tag filter code was removed from the submit cycle, but they neglected to remove it from the preview cycle.
Just as an FYI, I think you might want to draw an additional line here, because some of the stuff you and your friends did in college still falls in the "dumb stuff" category (drinking, getting stoned, gambling losses, alternative sexual behavior, alcohol poisoning, the girlfriends), while some stuff in both areas does not, as it actually caused harm to other people (petty theft, stealing from cars, getting pregnant*, providing beer to minors**, starting fires, driving recklessly).
Seriously, a pretty strong line should be drawn there. I did some of the former, no question, but none of the latter, because now you're injuring other people. Or didn't your mothers teach you that? Seriously asking.
*The child is harmed if they're unwanted, either by being raised by someone who didn't want them, or (arguably) by abortion. Just sayin'.
**Assuming the minors in question used the beer for what most of the kids I grew up with did, which is getting really drunk then driving places.
Incidentally, I loved getting a PDF created with the latest major release of Acrobat, then trying to view it on the matching major release version of Acrobat on my computer. Crash, crash, crash. Reboot after reboot. Finally I download the latest Acrobat point update, and it works fine.
I liked this so much, in fact, that with this merged I dream of a web where links say "Adobe Acrobat x.yy.zzzz-qqqq Required" and "Flash x.yy.zzzz-qqqq Required".
More like "This automatic-transmission, power-steering, ABS-braking, skid-avoiding car is really cool. Granted, it isn't capable of going as fast/turning as well/stopping as quickly as a manual transmission, manual-steering, standard braking, no driving aids car is when driven by a skilled person, but for people who have no idea what they're doing, it lets them drive much faster than they could before." "But what if it gives them false confidence, and they drive so fast that the driving aids can't save them?" "Uh..."
I know that sounds theoretical, but once upon a time I was hired by a PR firm that had just fired another guy. Seems he kept writing pages using Dreamweaver, and they kept telling him "it's not going to conform to the project standards if you use Dreamweaver's code." His response was always this: "I'm just using it for rapid prototyping, but the code will be manually written to be compliant." When they code-reviewed his initial code drop, it was -all- Dreamweaver, and he had to admit he couldn't code by hand. He gets fired, and they hired me, because I use a text editor for everything and understand how to write compliant code no matter what the standards are that I'm being asked to comply with.
I know you were being funny, but you were also being truthful. And the thing is, with popular music being delivered in the pre-mixed, ready-made forms that it is these days, artists who release their music files like this are -almost- bringing us back to the days of sheet music. After all, back then many more people could pick up and play a piece of sheet music; now a (likely) similar number of people can pick up and play with these files.
You're not kidding, and it's a pain in the butt. In order to listen to the small portion of our music library that my wife purchased from the iTunes store, I had to make a choice:
1. Leave it DRM'd, so that I could listen on my computer through iTunes and my iPod Shuffle, but can't listen in my living room through my SlimDevices Squeezebox;
2. Strip the DRM, so that I could listen on my SlimDevices Squeezebox but not iTunes or Shuffle;
3. Maintain a stripped and non-stripped copy in the same library by changing the id3 tags on the stripped set, and pick the appropriate one as needed;
4. Go AAC->WAV->MP3 on all of the tracks.
Short term, I did #2, and long term, I'm doing #4...and of course no longer buying any music from apple or any of their devices (got the iPod Shuffle from a friend).
After some consideration, I'm going to say "No, it does not violate the social contract."
Here's why:
1. There is no such thing as a social contract, as the word contract suggests that there is a fixed and unalterably correct way of doing things. What we have are social conventions, which are flexible and ever-changing, and generally vary by region and by circumstance.
2. If one person (or corporation) decides that a certain behavior is the "appropriate" or "right" thing to do, that doesn't mean the rest of society agrees. In fact, the "right" or "appropriate" thing to do can be defined directly by whatever the majority of people are doing. By that definition, the day the majority of people skip or otherwise avoid/reduce exposure to advertising is the day that doing so is considered socially acceptable. I believe we've already reached that day.
2b. However, the link between majority behavior and socially conventional behavior is even more tenuous than that, because the behavior in question doesn't have to actually occur within a majority -- it simply has to be considered acceptable by the majority.
In the case of blocking ads on web sites, here's how this all pans out: the person presenting the web site, and paying for it with ads, would prefer that people do not block the ads so as to increase revenue. But they have no more claim to the moral high ground than someone who presents a web site and pays for it by selling personal information, and would prefer that people do not withhold their personal information so as to increase revenue.
Does that mean that lots of web sites may shut down if they can't gain enough revenue from web ads? Absolutely. But that's because the business model is flawed, not because a theoretical "social contract" has been broken.
All this seems to be is an attempt to make people feel guilty, so that they will behave the way the web site owner(s) want them to. But that's nothing more than peer pressure, except that for most people the web site owners are not considered peers, and thus their attempts to pressure will have little or no impact.
Mind you, peer pressure can be powerful, and is certainly one of the mechanisms that determines social acceptability of a certain behavior...but advertisers and content providers are not and will never be "peers" of consumers in that sense.
Analog offers a softer image which may be more desireable.
For me personally, this trend towards anti-aliased fonts is just making it harder for me to focus on small letters. I run a DVI monitor, and my wife runs a much newer and more expensive VGA monitor (both LCDs, natch) and I'd much rather use mine than hers for the same reason that the parent suggests it should be the other way around.
But then, I'm an old man in my 30s, so maybe my eyes are just bad...
Re:Weren't they aware of this during implementatio
on
VLC & European Patents
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· Score: 4, Insightful
...or move it to an even more legally-backwards locale?
Actually, considering the nature of software patents, I should think we're looking for a place that is more legally forward-thinking...
A lot of angry people in this thread. I wonder -- if we polled everyone here about whether they'd ever been put on a blacklist and been unable to get off, then mapped it to the pro-RBL/anti-RBL comments, if there'd be a correlation?
If you send me mail and I don't get it I don't see how it harms you at all.
Um...how about if you sent me a request for technical support, and my response didn't reach you? Or you sent me the directions to the restaurant we're supposed to meet back, and I responded with "I'm going to have to cancel tonight" and you showed up anyway? Or you wrote to me (the love of your life, who is angry at you) to tell me you were sorry, and I wrote back that "yes, I forgive you, now come over now!" and you didn't get it, and assumed I'd ignored you and the relationship was over?
Is it possible -- not a fact, necessarily, but possible -- that people who use their phones to successfully hook up in this fashion are doing so as one of many how-do-I-meet-strangers-for-a-shag tools in their arsenal...and that, like many other tools used as conversation starters in bars and whatnot, people successfully using it have no time nor need to spend time talking about it online?
Or, in other words, just because it doesn't exist online doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Jokes aside, if you've invested years of effort into Photoshop at work, this is a nice way to carry that deeply-ingrained UI comfort into a tool that is free in both senses of the word. I use GIMP once and a while, but the UI differences between it and Photoshop (which I must use for work) are too jarring, so I end up booting my work laptop instead.
Well, yeah, they DID try to hide it: the css "text-indent: -9000px; overflow: hidden;" means the layer is placed, oh, 9000 pixels to the left of the left edge of the screen, where nobody can see it.
I'm a fan of Drupal myself; I moved to this platform from WordPress after becoming dissatisfied with WordPress's software (as opposed to payback for spammy transgressions).
Slashdot Mirror
he's gone ranting about how right he was
Actually, I thought it was a very reasonable and appropriate article, moreso than most of the discussion I've seen on the subject, and certainly moreso than posts by Linus on the subject.
I often wonder how many of the people that criticize the "free as in speech" software evangelists do so because they genuinely disagree, and how many do so because they are instinctively lashing out at those who make them feel guilty for using non-free software. Hopefully more of the former than of the latter.
Why should the US send people that have such a bitter hatred for the president?
Um, the people on Slashdot are not the people we're talking about here -- we're talking about a company choosing to donate money to a given political party, then being punished by a different administration for doing so. Or do you think that political contribution by a corporation automaticaly equates to hatred of the other side? Last I checked, lots of corporations donate to both sides, you know.
Yep. When my kids are old enough, they're getting computer/internet access, but it's going to be on a computer in the living room, and only when we're home. Nothing makes you careful about what you surf for like knowing your mom or dad can walk in behind you. Heh.
Maybe instead of being so focused on what the kid should be forbidden to do, maybe explain to him/her _why_ that stuff is bad, and what the consequences are?
Well, yeah. Far too many people seem to believe in the security through obscurity model as a way of teaching values; that is, they don't want their kids to do something, so they attempt to restrict access to information about it. Which pretty much ensures that their kids, who are as curious and intelligent as anyone else's, will be more motivated than ever to find the information. Without their parents' guidance, this leads directly to a huge pile of incorrect, incomplete or blatantly misleading information from a variety of sources.
I knew about sex before I wanted to know about it, and as a result have always had a healthy respect for and understanding of it, and an awareness of how this knowledge (or lack of it) impacted relationships between people. It's a model I'm going to use with my kids soon, and not just for information on sex, but on all important topics: religion, politics, personal responsibility, and so on.
Of course, it helps that my parents also presented a fine example on a regular basis. I hope I can hold up that end of the bargain.
Ah, but that requires the parents to understand how to teach common sense. Meaning they need to have it themselves, they need to start teaching it very early, and they need to be able to maintain a consistent good example such that by the time their child(ren) reach(es) fifteen or so and gets rebellious, they don't pick a last-minute tacked-on lesson in common sense as something to be rebelled against. Not as easy as it sounds, I'm sure...especially when the child is a result of a lack of common sense regarding birth control, for instance.
That's actually a good question, and points to a bug wherein whatever code that adds the paragraph tags is not running properly in the submit cycle. You preview, however, and the tags get added, and stay added through the submit that follows.
Or the bug is that the automatic paragraph tag filter code was removed from the submit cycle, but they neglected to remove it from the preview cycle.
Yeah, yeah, off-topic, I know.
Just as an FYI, I think you might want to draw an additional line here, because some of the stuff you and your friends did in college still falls in the "dumb stuff" category (drinking, getting stoned, gambling losses, alternative sexual behavior, alcohol poisoning, the girlfriends), while some stuff in both areas does not, as it actually caused harm to other people (petty theft, stealing from cars, getting pregnant*, providing beer to minors**, starting fires, driving recklessly).
Seriously, a pretty strong line should be drawn there. I did some of the former, no question, but none of the latter, because now you're injuring other people. Or didn't your mothers teach you that? Seriously asking.
*The child is harmed if they're unwanted, either by being raised by someone who didn't want them, or (arguably) by abortion. Just sayin'.
**Assuming the minors in question used the beer for what most of the kids I grew up with did, which is getting really drunk then driving places.
Incidentally, I loved getting a PDF created with the latest major release of Acrobat, then trying to view it on the matching major release version of Acrobat on my computer. Crash, crash, crash. Reboot after reboot. Finally I download the latest Acrobat point update, and it works fine.
I liked this so much, in fact, that with this merged I dream of a web where links say "Adobe Acrobat x.yy.zzzz-qqqq Required" and "Flash x.yy.zzzz-qqqq Required".
More like "This automatic-transmission, power-steering, ABS-braking, skid-avoiding car is really cool. Granted, it isn't capable of going as fast/turning as well/stopping as quickly as a manual transmission, manual-steering, standard braking, no driving aids car is when driven by a skilled person, but for people who have no idea what they're doing, it lets them drive much faster than they could before." "But what if it gives them false confidence, and they drive so fast that the driving aids can't save them?" "Uh..."
I know that sounds theoretical, but once upon a time I was hired by a PR firm that had just fired another guy. Seems he kept writing pages using Dreamweaver, and they kept telling him "it's not going to conform to the project standards if you use Dreamweaver's code." His response was always this: "I'm just using it for rapid prototyping, but the code will be manually written to be compliant." When they code-reviewed his initial code drop, it was -all- Dreamweaver, and he had to admit he couldn't code by hand. He gets fired, and they hired me, because I use a text editor for everything and understand how to write compliant code no matter what the standards are that I'm being asked to comply with.
I know you were being funny, but you were also being truthful. And the thing is, with popular music being delivered in the pre-mixed, ready-made forms that it is these days, artists who release their music files like this are -almost- bringing us back to the days of sheet music. After all, back then many more people could pick up and play a piece of sheet music; now a (likely) similar number of people can pick up and play with these files.
So this is a good thing.
You're not kidding, and it's a pain in the butt. In order to listen to the small portion of our music library that my wife purchased from the iTunes store, I had to make a choice:
1. Leave it DRM'd, so that I could listen on my computer through iTunes and my iPod Shuffle, but can't listen in my living room through my SlimDevices Squeezebox;
2. Strip the DRM, so that I could listen on my SlimDevices Squeezebox but not iTunes or Shuffle;
3. Maintain a stripped and non-stripped copy in the same library by changing the id3 tags on the stripped set, and pick the appropriate one as needed;
4. Go AAC->WAV->MP3 on all of the tracks.
Short term, I did #2, and long term, I'm doing #4...and of course no longer buying any music from apple or any of their devices (got the iPod Shuffle from a friend).
After some consideration, I'm going to say "No, it does not violate the social contract."
Here's why:
1. There is no such thing as a social contract, as the word contract suggests that there is a fixed and unalterably correct way of doing things. What we have are social conventions, which are flexible and ever-changing, and generally vary by region and by circumstance.
2. If one person (or corporation) decides that a certain behavior is the "appropriate" or "right" thing to do, that doesn't mean the rest of society agrees. In fact, the "right" or "appropriate" thing to do can be defined directly by whatever the majority of people are doing. By that definition, the day the majority of people skip or otherwise avoid/reduce exposure to advertising is the day that doing so is considered socially acceptable. I believe we've already reached that day.
2b. However, the link between majority behavior and socially conventional behavior is even more tenuous than that, because the behavior in question doesn't have to actually occur within a majority -- it simply has to be considered acceptable by the majority.
In the case of blocking ads on web sites, here's how this all pans out: the person presenting the web site, and paying for it with ads, would prefer that people do not block the ads so as to increase revenue. But they have no more claim to the moral high ground than someone who presents a web site and pays for it by selling personal information, and would prefer that people do not withhold their personal information so as to increase revenue.
Does that mean that lots of web sites may shut down if they can't gain enough revenue from web ads? Absolutely. But that's because the business model is flawed, not because a theoretical "social contract" has been broken.
All this seems to be is an attempt to make people feel guilty, so that they will behave the way the web site owner(s) want them to. But that's nothing more than peer pressure, except that for most people the web site owners are not considered peers, and thus their attempts to pressure will have little or no impact.
Mind you, peer pressure can be powerful, and is certainly one of the mechanisms that determines social acceptability of a certain behavior...but advertisers and content providers are not and will never be "peers" of consumers in that sense.
REAL hackers can whistle into a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem and make ASCII porn come up on the screen. Word.
Wow. Different people have several different theories about why Budweiser would take this step -- all of them reasonable.
With that many reasons presented by laypeople off the top of their heads, their more informed position should come as no surprise.
Analog offers a softer image which may be more desireable.
For me personally, this trend towards anti-aliased fonts is just making it harder for me to focus on small letters. I run a DVI monitor, and my wife runs a much newer and more expensive VGA monitor (both LCDs, natch) and I'd much rather use mine than hers for the same reason that the parent suggests it should be the other way around.
But then, I'm an old man in my 30s, so maybe my eyes are just bad...
...or move it to an even more legally-backwards locale?
Actually, considering the nature of software patents, I should think we're looking for a place that is more legally forward-thinking...
A lot of angry people in this thread. I wonder -- if we polled everyone here about whether they'd ever been put on a blacklist and been unable to get off, then mapped it to the pro-RBL/anti-RBL comments, if there'd be a correlation?
If you send me mail and I don't get it I don't see how it harms you at all.
Um...how about if you sent me a request for technical support, and my response didn't reach you? Or you sent me the directions to the restaurant we're supposed to meet back, and I responded with "I'm going to have to cancel tonight" and you showed up anyway? Or you wrote to me (the love of your life, who is angry at you) to tell me you were sorry, and I wrote back that "yes, I forgive you, now come over now!" and you didn't get it, and assumed I'd ignored you and the relationship was over?
Just off the top of my head.
Is it possible -- not a fact, necessarily, but possible -- that people who use their phones to successfully hook up in this fashion are doing so as one of many how-do-I-meet-strangers-for-a-shag tools in their arsenal...and that, like many other tools used as conversation starters in bars and whatnot, people successfully using it have no time nor need to spend time talking about it online?
Or, in other words, just because it doesn't exist online doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
>you are a fucking liar.
Aaaaaaand...you are wasting your time, because with a kickoff like that, why should I read the rest of your comment?
Jokes aside, if you've invested years of effort into Photoshop at work, this is a nice way to carry that deeply-ingrained UI comfort into a tool that is free in both senses of the word. I use GIMP once and a while, but the UI differences between it and Photoshop (which I must use for work) are too jarring, so I end up booting my work laptop instead.
(it doesn't grow on trees)
Literally. It is mined.
Well, yeah, they DID try to hide it: the css "text-indent: -9000px; overflow: hidden;" means the layer is placed, oh, 9000 pixels to the left of the left edge of the screen, where nobody can see it.
I'm a fan of Drupal myself; I moved to this platform from WordPress after becoming dissatisfied with WordPress's software (as opposed to payback for spammy transgressions).
Well, it costs eBay money every time one of those useless links is clicked, right? Why not just click 'em like crazy?