Or maybe he's attempting to combat the idea that something should have greatly increased value just because nobody ever bothered to use it before.
Anyone trying to do that fails by definition. Things have value because people give it value, not through decision by committee.
Basically, even if you don't think it makes sense that "something should have greatly increased value just because nobody ever bothered to use it before" the fact that other people are actually willing to pay more because nobody ever bothered to use it before is enough reason for you not to use it. You can sell it to those people for the price they are willing to pay and maximize your profits. Any other decision is illogical.
I always thought geeks loved to play with arcane tech, making this an ideal story.
We do, but that's what used arcane tech is for. You see the huge deal about this being an unopened box? It's now no longer an unopened box, and he ruined a perfectly good collectible.
Thanks. I suffer from shin splints very badly and love to run so it's a bad combination. I really do appreciate the advice and I'll look into it. I don't mind paying more for shoes if it can help with the pain.
The good news is that this operation has a very high success rate. Another piece of good news is that if you have HCM and are treated by a specialist your life expectancy jumps back up to that of the general population.
That's great. I wish the best of luck to ya and a speedy recovery.
I don't see why they're overdoing this so much. I've been able to become invisible for a long time--all I have to do is cover my eyes!
Try it today!
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy doesn't mention that that Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal posts to slashdot. I shall tell Ford to send in the update:)
Hovering your hands over the keyboard and moving them as little as possible is exactly how you get CTS...Exercise, it's not just for your legs.
Well, first of all there's plenty of debate on whether CTS can be caused by any activity (or lack thereof) at all. It seems to be mostly a genetic thing. There's real injury to be had through bad posture and repetitive motion and people usually confuse that with CTS.
As to the real injuries that these new methods are trying to prevent: The "hovering" part probably has more to do with them than the "moving as little as possible" part. It's a repetitive motion injury, so minimizing motion is definitely beneficial. Same for your legs too. Minimizing leg exercises will prevent a whole bunch of injuries that can only occur through over exercising.
Of course I'm not saying exercise is bad for you. Over exercising most definitely is, though. Especially if the motion is repetitive over many hours. I don't think anyone who can get injured from typing is having a problem with not enough exercise of their fingers. Having a high wrist pad that will allow you to always have your hands rested and never hovering as well as minimizing movement is probably a whole lot better than not hovering and increasing movement. Both are better than hovering AND increasing movement.
That said, I'm not a doctor. Just a guy who had repetitive motion injury on his wrists that seemed to get better after I switched to dvorak, as well as somebody with really bad shin splints that require me to not run as much as I would like to or risk really bad fractures.
They are leading the charge to remove boxes from shelves.
That's enough reason to dislike them right there, without even getting to the DRM.
I don't want to remove boxes from shelves. I want my goddamned physical media, that I can install, play, and decide to sell after I'm done with it. I can't resell any steam games. Or if I don't want to sell, I want to be able to pick it up ten years from now and install it. I'm right in the middle of playing an old (mid 90's) game from Spectrum Holobyte right now. Spectrum Holobyte isn't around anymore, what kind of guarantee do I have that Valve and their servers will still be there ten years from now?
Yeah, they've "promised" to release the DRM if they ever go bankrupt, but that's not in the contract when I buy the game, so they're not bound to it. If they go bankrupt they certainly won't have the time, resources, or motivation to worry about making sure the DRM is off.
When I ran Debian on my web server, however, I had to have a firm hand in the unstable branch (which was usually very stable) just to keep up with web server and app server patches (and ssh, and python, and a few others)
Debian backports all security patches to its stable branches (that security.debian.org entry in your sources.list file? That's the type of stuff that goes there). The unstable updates are for features, but you don't need to be concerned about their release cycle because of security. They keep up to date.
It's possible, it's just not desirable. I don't see the issue with mixing apps from different frameworks anyway.
Where is the music player that beats Amarok?
Ugh. Just any single one? I'd rather use windows media player through wine...luckily I don't have to because of rhythmbox.
Believe it or not, my point here isn't that Amarok sucks. You obviously like it a lot, which means they've done something right. My point is that people have different tastes and want to use different stuff. I hate Amarok, but I don't think everybody else should quit using it. You like it, a lot of other people like it, yay for you. I don't like it, I shall use rhythmbox and stay away from amarok. Choice is good. What I think sucks is the exact same software you think is the best one available. I'm sure we could find examples that go in the other direction if we tried.
He had localized GNOME in Dutch, and when KGPG pops up...everything was in English. The localization settings are stored in different places...
Don't see a problem with that either, I've configured my desktop both under gnome and kde to get things the way I like them for all apps I use. If that type of stuff bothers you, then I guess you should try to avoid using programs from another desktop. If it bothers enough people that there's no gtk amarok, somebody should make an amarok-like player in gtk. Apparently they are doing that with Exaile. Might not be good enough yet (or it might be. I haven't tried it because I have no desire for amarok-like programs), but it'll get there, I'm sure.
Not that I wouldn't encourage both teams to collaborate where possible in order to increase compatibility between frameworks, that would be great. However, I certainly wouldn't want either KDE or gnome to disappear (or for qt or gtk to disappear) for the same reasons I outlined above. I like the ability to pick and choose what I prefer and the choices I make won't necessarily be the same choices you'd make. Somebody is going to be unhappy.
there are very legitimate reasons for a state to seek limits in the distribution of news, and limits to what its citizens communicate to outsiders. Most of these actions truly do have the welfare of the citizens and their crucial security in mind. These things are done to preserve their life most of the time.
Those of you raised in the west or who have lived your lives mostly in the west may not understand or remember the reality of living in weaker states.
It's not a question of being a "weaker state" whatever that means. It is a bit of a cultural question. Those of us who were raised in the west don't think the government has the right to decide what's better for us citizens. That's our job. We should decide what the government has the right to do, not the other way around.
I was looking through your other posts trying to decide if you were a troll, and discovered you have a different view. For example, one of your posts was a recommendation that people read another poster's story about someone who got badly hurt with their hobby chemicals on the house. You did this advocating the idea that government should restrict access to dangerous chemicals. In your view, you see this as protecting the individual. In my view, the government has no right to decide what risks I can or cannot take. If I think the benefits outweigh any risks to my life, that's my life, my decision to make, and the government has no right to interfere and say otherwise.
I would normally say that the people of Vietnam have a right to a government that limits their freedoms if that's what they want from their government, and that my opinion of what's best shouldn't matter. The problem is that if the government limits the spread of information, they don't have access to enough information to make an informed decision about the type of government they want.
Too bad there are no directors still living that are capable of capturing what actually makes this work a masterpiece. I look forward to not even watching this movie.
Eh...The best directors that have ever existed are living right now with the exception of hitchcock and kubrick neither of whom had a style appropriate for watchmen. If you say welles should be on that list of great dead directors, you suck...Citizen Kane is way overrated.
See how ridiculous that sounds? Yes, the directors above are great (even welles. Citizen Kane seems overrated if you watch it now because all the shots that were revolutionary in that movie are now used in every movie you've ever seen, so we completely miss out). I also ignored a whole bunch of great past directors, some of whom you probably enjoy quite a bit. That's what you're doing to today's talented directors.
Zack Snider isn't quite there yet, but he has proven that he can do something most good directors absolutely FAIL at: perform a straight adaptation from a different medium without inserting his own "vision" into it and changing it into something else. 300 captured everything that was good about the comic book, up to and including the artwork. If somebody is going to capture what made watchmen a masterpiece, I think he has the qualifications to do it...and lucky us, he's the one at the helm.
Try not to be that elitist...this is the best age of film, RIGHT NOW and we have plenty of great writers and directors. Yes, we have tons of crap, but we're putting out so many movies that we also have fantastic stuff coming out. You just need to learn to filter the noise from the signal.
What a charming and reassuring reality you have constructed for yourself! Do you actually want to have a debate about this designed to learn truth, or do you want to shore up your psychological defenses against scary things and 'win' at all cost? (ie, Truth being irrelevant.)
Depends. Do you actually have an argument to give, or are you just going to claim that my reality is the constructed one? You never pointed out the hole in my line of reasoning.
Otherwise, I would be happy to talk this over with you; there are several flaws in your thinking and your examples.
Alright, let's hear it.
As per Occam.
1. Okay. It's more complicated that looking at his date of birth.
That was just a factual error with your "13th century monk." It's not that important other than an example of what I thought was poor fact-checking. A lot of conspiracy theories look plausible because a lot of small errors like that one start piling up into something that looks huge.
2. Okay. The "Law of Parsimony" is an old idea. It's more complicated than simply saying that because Occam's name is on it means he invented it. I over-simplified to make a point.
That wasn't exactly an oversimplification, it was a completely incorrect statement. You said that Occam, "invented his Razor to prove the existence of God." That statement becomes an outright lie when he didn't invent the thing at all. Furthermore, it was being used by philosophers not associated with the church long before Ockham ever used it.
3. Excommunicated because he was a rebel, eh? You're going to suggest this, while complaining about my over-simplifying historical data to illustrate a point? Hypocrite.
I was simply pointing out the hole in your argument. Your only supporting evidence for Ockham supposedly using his principle to "prove the existence of God" was the fact that he was a monk. That's not a valid argument for a monk in good standing with the church, much less for one that was excommunicated. You need to cite his writings to make that point.
Ironically, Ockham actually used the principle to argue against other scholars, like Aquinas, who were trying to come up with scientific proofs for the existence of God. Ockham was pointing out that you cannot possibly prove God's existence through reason, it's simply something that you choose to have faith in.
The most simple course of thinking is by no means the most accurate. This is precisely the problem with Occam's Razor.
As I said in my original post, the biggest problem with Occam's Razor is that people don't understand it and apply it incorrectly. It does not say the simplest course of thinking is the most accurate. It says that there's no reason to add variables without necessity. If you knew the details about Ockham before accusing him of "trying to prove the existence of God with his Razor," that would become obvious. After all, he both argued that it wasn't possible to prove the existence of God while still believing that He did exist.
Here's how to apply Ockham. You have a Black Box. You type in a positive number input, and it gives you a number output. You're trying to figure out what the black box does. You come up with the following theory: "the black box takes the input. Then it adds the square of the input to the input. Then it takes the result and divides it by the original input. Then it adds 17 to that result. Then it subtracts the original input from that result. Then it divides by 6 and spits that out." Another guy comes with another theory: "no matter what you type in as the input, it always outputs the number 3." Both theories correctly predict that number 3 is going to be given as the output, and there's nothing about the Razor that says the black box doesn't actually go through the process described in the first the
Secret agents exist. We know this. It's not a theory. It's a career path.
Nobody denies this
Their job is to conspire and execute conspiracies.
Not typically within their own country. They are not legally allowed to do it, and the government isn't as good as you think in keeping secrets. Every single time someone in the high levels of government does something like that, a lot of people need to be involved, and it only takes one to blow the whistle. MK Ultra, watergate, warrantless wiretapping...all these things that you're going to use to point at how conspiracies exist are actually arguments against it: all these things are shit that the government couldn't manage to keep secret. It only takes one honest person to leak it.
Things like, "Occam can be used to justify ignorance, despite the fact that he was a 13th century monk who invented his razor to prove the existence of God."
One of the biggest problems with Occam's Razor isn't actually with Occam's Razor. It's with people using it incorrectly. In case of conspiracy theories, Occam's Razor doesn't say, "a conspiracy theory can't possibly occur," it says, "if the simple explanation fits the facts, it's not logical to assume a conspiracy instead." That's where an investigation comes in. When evidence is uncovered that shows the simple explanation doesn't cut it, or evidence supporting a conspiracy surfaces, then you start leaning toward other theories.
Stuff like that. Only retards and suckers don't grasp this basic notion, which is pretty much everybody.
Before calling other people "retards and suckers" you should get your shit right. William of Ockham was indeed a monk. He did not "invent Occam's Razor to prove the existence of God," though. He
Wasn't a Monk during the 13th century, but during the 14th century. Yes, he was born in the late 13th century, but he was only 12 at the turn of the century.
Did not invent Occam's Razor. The concept existed since the Aristotle days. He simply used it a lot in his writings, which is why the idea was later attributed to him.
He advanced the fields of logic and philosophy by quite a bit. Being a monk doesn't necessarily mean that you just follow the church's party line, especially in the case of Ockham who was unpopular with the papacy, charged with herecy, and excommunicated
And that's the problem with most conspiracy theories. They don't bother to check the facts before spouting their theories, which leads to the ridicule you dislike so much.
Whether or not that's true, your comment certainly would have cemented him into that position. Self-fulfilling prophecy indeed.
Not really. After the interviewer's brain finished clicking, he would have put together "subtle dark humor" with "necrophelia" regardless of whether or not it sounded sarcastic.
It's also quite well known among people who interview well that a sense of humor is far more important than being qualified for the job. It's sad, but it's true in most places. That joke could actually have landed him the job.
So anyone who works a job where they are on call 24/7 should just forget about having a social life because some asshole teenyboppers abuse their cell phone at the movies and piss you off?
No, it means they can't take their cell phones to the theaters because if the on-call cell phone rings / lights up / vibrates loudly it will piss me off. Even if they don't answer and walk out.
Yes, it sucks for them, but that's what being on call MEANS. It means you can't go to theaters, because you're not guaranteed to be there for the whole movie, you might have to leave. It means you can't drink alcohol because you'll be impaired. It means that anywhere you go with your friends, you will have to drive your own car because you might have to leave.
There's a reason people who are on call get paid more than those who are not. It places restrictions on your goddamn social life. Don't take a job where you're required to be on call if you can't do that.
Ahem! OpenSolaris' pkg image-update snapshots the entire root filesystem before the update. You can just do a simple restore of the ZFS files system Or boot the liveCD import the ZFS pool and do the restore from there.
Rolling back isn't the issue. I was trying out the operating system (and using virtualbox, I had a snapshot of the system as it was immediately after installation). If I do what you suggest, I end up with a working system as it was immediately before the update. Meaning, nothing is updated, meaning when I update again, it's going to break again.
As I explained in that post, I did manage to boot the livecd and import the zfs pool. I didn't want to do a rollback, I wanted to fix the problem the update introduced. When that proved difficult, I gave up because I wasn't that interested in it.
I will say that ZFS is the one badass feature in solaris that I got to check out, though. I can do the ZFS thing in freebsd, though. I didn't get a chance to try out the other stuff I was interested in, such as dtrace.
No, they really don't. I've never had an upgrade cause a system to not boot in either linux or windows. Even back in the days when I was learning those systems.
Sometimes upgrades get botched.
Yes, that's why I said, "catastrophically destroyed." It wasn't just a case of it screwing up a few things. The computer wouldn't boot. Opensolaris isn't including a safemode option, and it wouldn't even boot into single-user mode after editing the grub menu. My options for manual recovery are limited if I can't get to a shell.
Eventually I used the livecd to mount the hard drive and chroot into it in an attempt for recovery, but that turned out to also be a pain, because smf requires you to have a service running to edit service scripts. What kind of brain dead design is that? Eventually I decided I didn't want to deal with it anymore, I was just trying it out for fun and it wasn't worth the trouble, I'm plenty happy with linux.
No OS will be stable if the admin upgrading it isn't testing their update first and competent in the proper upgrade procedures and familiar with how to do a recovery or manual update/rollback if something is wrong with an upgrade package.
By varying definitions of stable. In a production environment where the server must always be up, you need to do all that to guard against an important service going down, or an application not working. However, I have no qualms about telling people to keep the automatically update setting enabled for windows or ubuntu, because I'm pretty confident nothing will break so badly that they won't be able to use their computer anymore.
If you've just tried Solaris a few times, then you are not what I would call a competent Solaris administrator.
I agree, I'm not a solaris admin at all. But I didn't have that experience back in a time when I wasn't a competent linux admin. Pretty much all distributions I tried for fun were always usable even if some things didn't work, or didn't work as well as others.
Would you let someone who's just tried out Linux a few times upgrade your production server?
No, but as I said, I'd have no qualms about letting them update their own computer. In fact, I recommend that people keep automatic updates on.
Package management is something some Linux distributions, esp. Debian excel at... which is why I like Nexenta... combines OpenSolaris with.DEB packages, and even apt-get is included.
Fair enough, I should give Nexenta a try. That still doesn't mean smf doesn't suck. The thing also tended to have problems booting if it wasn't shut down correctly. Yes, production servers have UPS's, but like I said, a truly stable system should be able to be resistant to unexpected problems.
Opensolaris is substantially more stable than Linux
Bullshit. The last two times I tried opensolaris, the installation was catastrophically destroyed the first time that I upgraded it. System wouldn't even fucking boot.
It might be stable if you never touch it, but so is linux, so the difference can't be that great. Besides, an admin is expected to, at the very least, perform security upgrades on a regular basis. Their packaging system is *beyond* broken and smf is a horrible piece of trash that makes you long for the simplicity of rc.d scripts.
So if an Iranian company invited you to come work for them, you'd just go and expect the Iranian government to be able to do nothing?
Not at all. If an Iranian company legitimately invited me to go work for them, and I agreed, that would be my problem.
I would also not be surprised if the Iranian government tricked people into visiting their country in order to be arrested. I don't think it's right, and I like to hold the US to higher standards than I hold Iran.
Extradition treaties protect people who choose not to go to other countries, they don't really protect you if you decide that you are going to do the work for them and fly yourself there or let them fly you there...It's not a *legal* obligation, however.
Right. I'm not advocating any type of legal obligations between countries, that would be insane (we don't have representation on laws passed in other countries). However, precisely because there's no legal obligation or recourse, it goes against the spirit of an extradition treaty negotiated in good faith.
For example, many countries with no capital punishment refuse extradition when the death sentence is a possible penalty for the accused. If the United States, knowing about these terms, never asks for an extradition and instead tricks the accused into traveling to thel US, they're forcing him to give up his protections for a crime he didn't even know he was accused of (since the extradition was never requested, he was never informed). In spirit, it's a little bit like not informing a suspect of his right to a lawyer, or his right to remain silent, and then tricking him into spilling his guts. I don't care if his guilty, they're tricking a person into giving up their legal protections.
By the way, fraud implies that you are telling untruths which deprive someone of their rights/property without due process.
I didn't say it was fraud. I didn't say it was illegal. I agreed with the original poster that it should be made illegal in a civilized country, such as the United States.
If I conspired to hire a hitman to kill someone in Germany, and I then went to Germany under any circumstances, you'd better believe I'd be in a German jail so after I arrived, no matter why I was there.
I don't have anything against a government arresting a non-citizen who is in the country. I don't have anything against a government putting a non-citizen they want to arrest on a watch list so they can arrest him the moment he arrives in the country. Even if he arrived for a job interview, assuming said interview is legitimate.
I do have a problem when a government wants to arrest someone who is not on the country, and instead of going through extraditions channels, they trick him into traveling to said country.
As far as I know, its perfectly legal to induce someone to come to your country even under false pretenses if it is for the purposes of simply apprehending the person for a fair trial.
As I've said before, I'm sure it is. I just don't think it should be.
Cops in the US are perfectly in their rights to use trickery to arrest you and in questioning you.
That's all well and good, but there are certain limits to what they can do. They can sure try to convince you to talk without calling a lawyer first, but they are required to inform you that you don't have to. They can ask to search your house without a warrant when they know they don't have enough evidence to get one, but the person is fully aware that a cop is about to search their house before they agree.
No one is required to give you a warning that an action by you will get you arrested
No, but they are required to give you a warning before you give up a protection you currently have. "Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. Now, please tell me everything you did yesterday at 8 o'clock."
Monkeys can be mean to other animals - they can be observed stealing food and toys from other species (including cats, dogs, and other non-primates) and placing them where the animal can't reach them.
As a kid, I've always done this with my dogs, but there was absolutely no malicious feeling behind it. I just liked to watch their attempts at problem solving. What are they going to do to get their toy now? I've had 5 dogs as I was growing up (yeah, I know), and it was cool observing that they differed pretty significantly in problem solving skills.
I was never threatened by any of them as I reached for their toys, and they would be wagging their tails the entire time they were trying to get at their toys, so I'm pretty sure they enjoyed the game as much as I did.
Eventually, if they didn't succeed, they would get frustrated and either give up or whimper. Then I would give the toy back and play with them, because it's not my goal to make them feel bad. In fact, if they whimpered, I would feel bad, so it wasn't like I was waiting for this sign of subordination as a type of reward. I was much, much happier when I witnessed a clever and successful attempt at retrieving the toy.
Because it bypasses protections established by extradition treaties (or lack thereof). How would you like to be tricked into visiting Iran, and then be prosecuted for posting some offensive comment on slashdot?
have to disagree with this. Copyright is there to protect the creator from the theft of what he creates.
No, it is not. Copyright is there to encourage the creation of more works into the public domain. The idea is that if we delay its entry into the public domain, the public's gain (incentive for artists to create more work) outweights the public loss (the temporary monopoly on the right to make and distribute copies).
After all, the idea that you can't do anything you wish with something you bought and paid for (actual, physical property), including copying the content and handing out the copies to everyone you want is ludicrous. The public would only accept it if we had something to gain for it, and that's why the constitution specifically qualifies the right of congress to establish copyright with for limited times, and indicates that it's purpose is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. It doesn't say, "to protect property," because if it had been considered property, there would be no reason to limit the length of the copyright.
And to those of you who will undoubtedly claim that US constitution is invalid because Rowling is British, the lawsuit in question is in US jurisdiction.
This is how Seagate "stays relevant" against SSD's:
"We sell decent storage drives that don't cost thousands of dollars"
Seriously, SSDs just aren't there yet, nor are they going to be in the foreseeable future. They're a niche item for laptops because they should theoretically use a lot less power without having to power a mechanical drive. They should also be a lot more reliable. However, the point is that I can't go out and buy a 1.5 TB SSD.
However it is the right of governments to decide what they make public and not.
Why? I mean, if the government is feudalism you might justify that by saying that the nobles were more important than the rabble. In a democracy, the government works for the people not the other way around. That means the government doesn't have the "right" to do anything against the wishes of the people.
And for my American friends remember that we have a different view on things like this, usually European governments are MORE open than the US.
Something you apparently don't value, because you think the government should be allowed to be less open if it decides to. Lack of openness in the US government is a problem that needs to be rectified, it's not a goal you should aim for.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe he's attempting to combat the idea that something should have greatly increased value just because nobody ever bothered to use it before.
Anyone trying to do that fails by definition. Things have value because people give it value, not through decision by committee.
Basically, even if you don't think it makes sense that "something should have greatly increased value just because nobody ever bothered to use it before" the fact that other people are actually willing to pay more because nobody ever bothered to use it before is enough reason for you not to use it. You can sell it to those people for the price they are willing to pay and maximize your profits. Any other decision is illogical.
I always thought geeks loved to play with arcane tech, making this an ideal story.
We do, but that's what used arcane tech is for. You see the huge deal about this being an unopened box? It's now no longer an unopened box, and he ruined a perfectly good collectible.
Thanks. I suffer from shin splints very badly and love to run so it's a bad combination. I really do appreciate the advice and I'll look into it. I don't mind paying more for shoes if it can help with the pain.
I will likely have a myectomy this year.
The good news is that this operation has a very high success rate. Another piece of good news is that if you have HCM and are treated by a specialist your life expectancy jumps back up to that of the general population.
That's great. I wish the best of luck to ya and a speedy recovery.
I don't see why they're overdoing this so much. I've been able to become invisible for a long time--all I have to do is cover my eyes!
Try it today!
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy doesn't mention that that Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal posts to slashdot. I shall tell Ford to send in the update :)
Hovering your hands over the keyboard and moving them as little as possible is exactly how you get CTS...Exercise, it's not just for your legs.
Well, first of all there's plenty of debate on whether CTS can be caused by any activity (or lack thereof) at all. It seems to be mostly a genetic thing. There's real injury to be had through bad posture and repetitive motion and people usually confuse that with CTS.
As to the real injuries that these new methods are trying to prevent: The "hovering" part probably has more to do with them than the "moving as little as possible" part. It's a repetitive motion injury, so minimizing motion is definitely beneficial. Same for your legs too. Minimizing leg exercises will prevent a whole bunch of injuries that can only occur through over exercising.
Of course I'm not saying exercise is bad for you. Over exercising most definitely is, though. Especially if the motion is repetitive over many hours. I don't think anyone who can get injured from typing is having a problem with not enough exercise of their fingers. Having a high wrist pad that will allow you to always have your hands rested and never hovering as well as minimizing movement is probably a whole lot better than not hovering and increasing movement. Both are better than hovering AND increasing movement.
That said, I'm not a doctor. Just a guy who had repetitive motion injury on his wrists that seemed to get better after I switched to dvorak, as well as somebody with really bad shin splints that require me to not run as much as I would like to or risk really bad fractures.
They are leading the charge to remove boxes from shelves.
That's enough reason to dislike them right there, without even getting to the DRM.
I don't want to remove boxes from shelves. I want my goddamned physical media, that I can install, play, and decide to sell after I'm done with it. I can't resell any steam games. Or if I don't want to sell, I want to be able to pick it up ten years from now and install it. I'm right in the middle of playing an old (mid 90's) game from Spectrum Holobyte right now. Spectrum Holobyte isn't around anymore, what kind of guarantee do I have that Valve and their servers will still be there ten years from now?
Yeah, they've "promised" to release the DRM if they ever go bankrupt, but that's not in the contract when I buy the game, so they're not bound to it. If they go bankrupt they certainly won't have the time, resources, or motivation to worry about making sure the DRM is off.
When I ran Debian on my web server, however, I had to have a firm hand in the unstable branch (which was usually very stable) just to keep up with web server and app server patches (and ssh, and python, and a few others)
Debian backports all security patches to its stable branches (that security.debian.org entry in your sources.list file? That's the type of stuff that goes there). The unstable updates are for features, but you don't need to be concerned about their release cycle because of security. They keep up to date.
Are you saying you've never had that happen to you?
Actually, based on his tone, I think he's saying it has happened to him way too many times :)
Which is just not possible.
It's possible, it's just not desirable. I don't see the issue with mixing apps from different frameworks anyway.
Where is the music player that beats Amarok?
Ugh. Just any single one? I'd rather use windows media player through wine...luckily I don't have to because of rhythmbox.
Believe it or not, my point here isn't that Amarok sucks. You obviously like it a lot, which means they've done something right. My point is that people have different tastes and want to use different stuff. I hate Amarok, but I don't think everybody else should quit using it. You like it, a lot of other people like it, yay for you. I don't like it, I shall use rhythmbox and stay away from amarok. Choice is good. What I think sucks is the exact same software you think is the best one available. I'm sure we could find examples that go in the other direction if we tried.
He had localized GNOME in Dutch, and when KGPG pops up...everything was in English. The localization settings are stored in different places...
Don't see a problem with that either, I've configured my desktop both under gnome and kde to get things the way I like them for all apps I use. If that type of stuff bothers you, then I guess you should try to avoid using programs from another desktop. If it bothers enough people that there's no gtk amarok, somebody should make an amarok-like player in gtk. Apparently they are doing that with Exaile. Might not be good enough yet (or it might be. I haven't tried it because I have no desire for amarok-like programs), but it'll get there, I'm sure.
Not that I wouldn't encourage both teams to collaborate where possible in order to increase compatibility between frameworks, that would be great. However, I certainly wouldn't want either KDE or gnome to disappear (or for qt or gtk to disappear) for the same reasons I outlined above. I like the ability to pick and choose what I prefer and the choices I make won't necessarily be the same choices you'd make. Somebody is going to be unhappy.
there are very legitimate reasons for a state to seek limits in the distribution of news, and limits to what its citizens communicate to outsiders. Most of these actions truly do have the welfare of the citizens and their crucial security in mind. These things are done to preserve their life most of the time.
Those of you raised in the west or who have lived your lives mostly in the west may not understand or remember the reality of living in weaker states.
It's not a question of being a "weaker state" whatever that means. It is a bit of a cultural question. Those of us who were raised in the west don't think the government has the right to decide what's better for us citizens. That's our job. We should decide what the government has the right to do, not the other way around.
I was looking through your other posts trying to decide if you were a troll, and discovered you have a different view. For example, one of your posts was a recommendation that people read another poster's story about someone who got badly hurt with their hobby chemicals on the house. You did this advocating the idea that government should restrict access to dangerous chemicals. In your view, you see this as protecting the individual. In my view, the government has no right to decide what risks I can or cannot take. If I think the benefits outweigh any risks to my life, that's my life, my decision to make, and the government has no right to interfere and say otherwise.
I would normally say that the people of Vietnam have a right to a government that limits their freedoms if that's what they want from their government, and that my opinion of what's best shouldn't matter. The problem is that if the government limits the spread of information, they don't have access to enough information to make an informed decision about the type of government they want.
Too bad there are no directors still living that are capable of capturing what actually makes this work a masterpiece. I look forward to not even watching this movie.
Eh...The best directors that have ever existed are living right now with the exception of hitchcock and kubrick neither of whom had a style appropriate for watchmen. If you say welles should be on that list of great dead directors, you suck...Citizen Kane is way overrated.
See how ridiculous that sounds? Yes, the directors above are great (even welles. Citizen Kane seems overrated if you watch it now because all the shots that were revolutionary in that movie are now used in every movie you've ever seen, so we completely miss out). I also ignored a whole bunch of great past directors, some of whom you probably enjoy quite a bit. That's what you're doing to today's talented directors.
Zack Snider isn't quite there yet, but he has proven that he can do something most good directors absolutely FAIL at: perform a straight adaptation from a different medium without inserting his own "vision" into it and changing it into something else. 300 captured everything that was good about the comic book, up to and including the artwork. If somebody is going to capture what made watchmen a masterpiece, I think he has the qualifications to do it...and lucky us, he's the one at the helm.
Try not to be that elitist...this is the best age of film, RIGHT NOW and we have plenty of great writers and directors. Yes, we have tons of crap, but we're putting out so many movies that we also have fantastic stuff coming out. You just need to learn to filter the noise from the signal.
What a charming and reassuring reality you have constructed for yourself! Do you actually want to have a debate about this designed to learn truth, or do you want to shore up your psychological defenses against scary things and 'win' at all cost? (ie, Truth being irrelevant.)
Depends. Do you actually have an argument to give, or are you just going to claim that my reality is the constructed one? You never pointed out the hole in my line of reasoning.
Otherwise, I would be happy to talk this over with you; there are several flaws in your thinking and your examples.
Alright, let's hear it.
As per Occam.
1. Okay. It's more complicated that looking at his date of birth.
That was just a factual error with your "13th century monk." It's not that important other than an example of what I thought was poor fact-checking. A lot of conspiracy theories look plausible because a lot of small errors like that one start piling up into something that looks huge.
2. Okay. The "Law of Parsimony" is an old idea. It's more complicated than simply saying that because Occam's name is on it means he invented it. I over-simplified to make a point.
That wasn't exactly an oversimplification, it was a completely incorrect statement. You said that Occam, "invented his Razor to prove the existence of God." That statement becomes an outright lie when he didn't invent the thing at all. Furthermore, it was being used by philosophers not associated with the church long before Ockham ever used it.
3. Excommunicated because he was a rebel, eh? You're going to suggest this, while complaining about my over-simplifying historical data to illustrate a point? Hypocrite.
I was simply pointing out the hole in your argument. Your only supporting evidence for Ockham supposedly using his principle to "prove the existence of God" was the fact that he was a monk. That's not a valid argument for a monk in good standing with the church, much less for one that was excommunicated. You need to cite his writings to make that point.
Ironically, Ockham actually used the principle to argue against other scholars, like Aquinas, who were trying to come up with scientific proofs for the existence of God. Ockham was pointing out that you cannot possibly prove God's existence through reason, it's simply something that you choose to have faith in.
The most simple course of thinking is by no means the most accurate. This is precisely the problem with Occam's Razor.
As I said in my original post, the biggest problem with Occam's Razor is that people don't understand it and apply it incorrectly. It does not say the simplest course of thinking is the most accurate. It says that there's no reason to add variables without necessity. If you knew the details about Ockham before accusing him of "trying to prove the existence of God with his Razor," that would become obvious. After all, he both argued that it wasn't possible to prove the existence of God while still believing that He did exist.
Here's how to apply Ockham. You have a Black Box. You type in a positive number input, and it gives you a number output. You're trying to figure out what the black box does. You come up with the following theory: "the black box takes the input. Then it adds the square of the input to the input. Then it takes the result and divides it by the original input. Then it adds 17 to that result. Then it subtracts the original input from that result. Then it divides by 6 and spits that out." Another guy comes with another theory: "no matter what you type in as the input, it always outputs the number 3." Both theories correctly predict that number 3 is going to be given as the output, and there's nothing about the Razor that says the black box doesn't actually go through the process described in the first the
Secret agents exist. We know this. It's not a theory. It's a career path.
Nobody denies this
Their job is to conspire and execute conspiracies.
Not typically within their own country. They are not legally allowed to do it, and the government isn't as good as you think in keeping secrets. Every single time someone in the high levels of government does something like that, a lot of people need to be involved, and it only takes one to blow the whistle. MK Ultra, watergate, warrantless wiretapping...all these things that you're going to use to point at how conspiracies exist are actually arguments against it: all these things are shit that the government couldn't manage to keep secret. It only takes one honest person to leak it.
Things like, "Occam can be used to justify ignorance, despite the fact that he was a 13th century monk who invented his razor to prove the existence of God."
One of the biggest problems with Occam's Razor isn't actually with Occam's Razor. It's with people using it incorrectly. In case of conspiracy theories, Occam's Razor doesn't say, "a conspiracy theory can't possibly occur," it says, "if the simple explanation fits the facts, it's not logical to assume a conspiracy instead." That's where an investigation comes in. When evidence is uncovered that shows the simple explanation doesn't cut it, or evidence supporting a conspiracy surfaces, then you start leaning toward other theories.
Stuff like that. Only retards and suckers don't grasp this basic notion, which is pretty much everybody.
Before calling other people "retards and suckers" you should get your shit right. William of Ockham was indeed a monk. He did not "invent Occam's Razor to prove the existence of God," though. He
And that's the problem with most conspiracy theories. They don't bother to check the facts before spouting their theories, which leads to the ridicule you dislike so much.
Whether or not that's true, your comment certainly would have cemented him into that position. Self-fulfilling prophecy indeed.
Not really. After the interviewer's brain finished clicking, he would have put together "subtle dark humor" with "necrophelia" regardless of whether or not it sounded sarcastic.
It's also quite well known among people who interview well that a sense of humor is far more important than being qualified for the job. It's sad, but it's true in most places. That joke could actually have landed him the job.
So anyone who works a job where they are on call 24/7 should just forget about having a social life because some asshole teenyboppers abuse their cell phone at the movies and piss you off?
No, it means they can't take their cell phones to the theaters because if the on-call cell phone rings / lights up / vibrates loudly it will piss me off. Even if they don't answer and walk out.
Yes, it sucks for them, but that's what being on call MEANS. It means you can't go to theaters, because you're not guaranteed to be there for the whole movie, you might have to leave. It means you can't drink alcohol because you'll be impaired. It means that anywhere you go with your friends, you will have to drive your own car because you might have to leave.
There's a reason people who are on call get paid more than those who are not. It places restrictions on your goddamn social life. Don't take a job where you're required to be on call if you can't do that.
Ahem! OpenSolaris' pkg image-update snapshots the entire root filesystem before the update. You can just do a simple restore of the ZFS files system Or boot the liveCD import the ZFS pool and do the restore from there.
Rolling back isn't the issue. I was trying out the operating system (and using virtualbox, I had a snapshot of the system as it was immediately after installation). If I do what you suggest, I end up with a working system as it was immediately before the update. Meaning, nothing is updated, meaning when I update again, it's going to break again.
As I explained in that post, I did manage to boot the livecd and import the zfs pool. I didn't want to do a rollback, I wanted to fix the problem the update introduced. When that proved difficult, I gave up because I wasn't that interested in it.
I will say that ZFS is the one badass feature in solaris that I got to check out, though. I can do the ZFS thing in freebsd, though. I didn't get a chance to try out the other stuff I was interested in, such as dtrace.
Linux systems frequently do similar things.
No, they really don't. I've never had an upgrade cause a system to not boot in either linux or windows. Even back in the days when I was learning those systems.
Sometimes upgrades get botched.
Yes, that's why I said, "catastrophically destroyed." It wasn't just a case of it screwing up a few things. The computer wouldn't boot. Opensolaris isn't including a safemode option, and it wouldn't even boot into single-user mode after editing the grub menu. My options for manual recovery are limited if I can't get to a shell.
Eventually I used the livecd to mount the hard drive and chroot into it in an attempt for recovery, but that turned out to also be a pain, because smf requires you to have a service running to edit service scripts. What kind of brain dead design is that? Eventually I decided I didn't want to deal with it anymore, I was just trying it out for fun and it wasn't worth the trouble, I'm plenty happy with linux.
No OS will be stable if the admin upgrading it isn't testing their update first and competent in the proper upgrade procedures and familiar with how to do a recovery or manual update/rollback if something is wrong with an upgrade package.
By varying definitions of stable. In a production environment where the server must always be up, you need to do all that to guard against an important service going down, or an application not working. However, I have no qualms about telling people to keep the automatically update setting enabled for windows or ubuntu, because I'm pretty confident nothing will break so badly that they won't be able to use their computer anymore.
If you've just tried Solaris a few times, then you are not what I would call a competent Solaris administrator.
I agree, I'm not a solaris admin at all. But I didn't have that experience back in a time when I wasn't a competent linux admin. Pretty much all distributions I tried for fun were always usable even if some things didn't work, or didn't work as well as others.
Would you let someone who's just tried out Linux a few times upgrade your production server?
No, but as I said, I'd have no qualms about letting them update their own computer. In fact, I recommend that people keep automatic updates on.
Package management is something some Linux distributions, esp. Debian excel at... which is why I like Nexenta... combines OpenSolaris with .DEB packages, and even apt-get is included.
Fair enough, I should give Nexenta a try. That still doesn't mean smf doesn't suck. The thing also tended to have problems booting if it wasn't shut down correctly. Yes, production servers have UPS's, but like I said, a truly stable system should be able to be resistant to unexpected problems.
Opensolaris is substantially more stable than Linux
Bullshit. The last two times I tried opensolaris, the installation was catastrophically destroyed the first time that I upgraded it. System wouldn't even fucking boot.
It might be stable if you never touch it, but so is linux, so the difference can't be that great. Besides, an admin is expected to, at the very least, perform security upgrades on a regular basis. Their packaging system is *beyond* broken and smf is a horrible piece of trash that makes you long for the simplicity of rc.d scripts.
So if an Iranian company invited you to come work for them, you'd just go and expect the Iranian government to be able to do nothing?
Not at all. If an Iranian company legitimately invited me to go work for them, and I agreed, that would be my problem.
I would also not be surprised if the Iranian government tricked people into visiting their country in order to be arrested. I don't think it's right, and I like to hold the US to higher standards than I hold Iran.
Extradition treaties protect people who choose not to go to other countries, they don't really protect you if you decide that you are going to do the work for them and fly yourself there or let them fly you there...It's not a *legal* obligation, however.
Right. I'm not advocating any type of legal obligations between countries, that would be insane (we don't have representation on laws passed in other countries). However, precisely because there's no legal obligation or recourse, it goes against the spirit of an extradition treaty negotiated in good faith.
For example, many countries with no capital punishment refuse extradition when the death sentence is a possible penalty for the accused. If the United States, knowing about these terms, never asks for an extradition and instead tricks the accused into traveling to thel US, they're forcing him to give up his protections for a crime he didn't even know he was accused of (since the extradition was never requested, he was never informed). In spirit, it's a little bit like not informing a suspect of his right to a lawyer, or his right to remain silent, and then tricking him into spilling his guts. I don't care if his guilty, they're tricking a person into giving up their legal protections.
By the way, fraud implies that you are telling untruths which deprive someone of their rights/property without due process.
I didn't say it was fraud. I didn't say it was illegal. I agreed with the original poster that it should be made illegal in a civilized country, such as the United States.
If I conspired to hire a hitman to kill someone in Germany, and I then went to Germany under any circumstances, you'd better believe I'd be in a German jail so after I arrived, no matter why I was there.
I don't have anything against a government arresting a non-citizen who is in the country. I don't have anything against a government putting a non-citizen they want to arrest on a watch list so they can arrest him the moment he arrives in the country. Even if he arrived for a job interview, assuming said interview is legitimate.
I do have a problem when a government wants to arrest someone who is not on the country, and instead of going through extraditions channels, they trick him into traveling to said country.
As far as I know, its perfectly legal to induce someone to come to your country even under false pretenses if it is for the purposes of simply apprehending the person for a fair trial.
As I've said before, I'm sure it is. I just don't think it should be.
Cops in the US are perfectly in their rights to use trickery to arrest you and in questioning you.
That's all well and good, but there are certain limits to what they can do. They can sure try to convince you to talk without calling a lawyer first, but they are required to inform you that you don't have to. They can ask to search your house without a warrant when they know they don't have enough evidence to get one, but the person is fully aware that a cop is about to search their house before they agree.
No one is required to give you a warning that an action by you will get you arrested
No, but they are required to give you a warning before you give up a protection you currently have. "Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. Now, please tell me everything you did yesterday at 8 o'clock."
Monkeys can be mean to other animals - they can be observed stealing food and toys from other species (including cats, dogs, and other non-primates) and placing them where the animal can't reach them.
As a kid, I've always done this with my dogs, but there was absolutely no malicious feeling behind it. I just liked to watch their attempts at problem solving. What are they going to do to get their toy now? I've had 5 dogs as I was growing up (yeah, I know), and it was cool observing that they differed pretty significantly in problem solving skills.
I was never threatened by any of them as I reached for their toys, and they would be wagging their tails the entire time they were trying to get at their toys, so I'm pretty sure they enjoyed the game as much as I did.
Eventually, if they didn't succeed, they would get frustrated and either give up or whimper. Then I would give the toy back and play with them, because it's not my goal to make them feel bad. In fact, if they whimpered, I would feel bad, so it wasn't like I was waiting for this sign of subordination as a type of reward. I was much, much happier when I witnessed a clever and successful attempt at retrieving the toy.
Why not?
Because it bypasses protections established by extradition treaties (or lack thereof). How would you like to be tricked into visiting Iran, and then be prosecuted for posting some offensive comment on slashdot?
have to disagree with this. Copyright is there to protect the creator from the theft of what he creates.
No, it is not. Copyright is there to encourage the creation of more works into the public domain. The idea is that if we delay its entry into the public domain, the public's gain (incentive for artists to create more work) outweights the public loss (the temporary monopoly on the right to make and distribute copies).
After all, the idea that you can't do anything you wish with something you bought and paid for (actual, physical property), including copying the content and handing out the copies to everyone you want is ludicrous. The public would only accept it if we had something to gain for it, and that's why the constitution specifically qualifies the right of congress to establish copyright with for limited times, and indicates that it's purpose is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. It doesn't say, "to protect property," because if it had been considered property, there would be no reason to limit the length of the copyright.
And to those of you who will undoubtedly claim that US constitution is invalid because Rowling is British, the lawsuit in question is in US jurisdiction.
This is how Seagate "stays relevant" against SSD's:
"We sell decent storage drives that don't cost thousands of dollars"
Seriously, SSDs just aren't there yet, nor are they going to be in the foreseeable future. They're a niche item for laptops because they should theoretically use a lot less power without having to power a mechanical drive. They should also be a lot more reliable. However, the point is that I can't go out and buy a 1.5 TB SSD.
However it is the right of governments to decide what they make public and not.
Why? I mean, if the government is feudalism you might justify that by saying that the nobles were more important than the rabble. In a democracy, the government works for the people not the other way around. That means the government doesn't have the "right" to do anything against the wishes of the people.
And for my American friends remember that we have a different view on things like this, usually European governments are MORE open than the US.
Something you apparently don't value, because you think the government should be allowed to be less open if it decides to. Lack of openness in the US government is a problem that needs to be rectified, it's not a goal you should aim for.