I don't buy into that sort of relativism. What's the point of talking (and thinking) at all if everything is just as right? Some thoughts are just plain stupid, and need to be argued against, at least to demonstrate their implications.
The implications of the comment I responded to were that it's OK to do something "wrong" if someone else already is doing it. The implications of your comment are 1)that this is neither right nor wrong, and 2)that I can only agree or disagree with him. The first point is, taken on face value, not necessarily wrong. It seems axiomatic, and can either be accepted or rejected. But from it follows your second point, which is demonstrably wrong, since I've already responded to a comment with reasoning (based on common sense, unfortunately, but that followed from the parent) instead of AOL-talk. I could reject that comment even if I agreed with it, just because its logical implications contradicts the basis for its reasoning, making it absurd from a purely common-sensical view (but just bad as ethical thinking).
And then I can safely reject and disagree with your second point, which makes me also reject your first point, even though I actually agree with it, in a way. It just happens to be fruitless and destructive as a starting point for thinking.
Gentoo is as easy as talking a walk in the park with your nanny. I've used Gentoo on several architectures, and even done a networked install of Gentoo on a MIPS-based SGI-box with no problem whatsoever -- and I don't even know a single programming language. Gentoo is perfect for ignorant people. It may even make them feel they're learning something, although they don't.
Now, configuring GRUB to boot the Hurd, that was a bit more difficult the last time I tried. If you want to harden your balls, you can try the Hurd.
Straw man. I am not restricting anyone elses freedom if I don't redistribute the source. The original program still exists for anyone else to base their own derivitive work upon. The same freedom I had is still there, and nothing I do can change that (short of tracking down every copy and destroying them).
No, it's not a strawman argument. You see, if you distribute your app without source, the person you distribute to doesn't have the same rights that you had. Practical example: If you give me XEmacs, and I find a bug I need to fix, I would not have the freedom to do it if I only have access to the source of GNU Emacs.
Extending the same freedom to the users of my derivitive work should be a choice, not a requirement. It's like saying that I have to give away the food I farm because it comes from seeds that others grew and sold or gave to me (remember, you can sell Free software, if you can find a buyer).
Maybe I will give away some or all the food I farm, but there is no moral or ethical question if I do not.
No, it's not remotely the same as demanding you should give away your food. Food is scarce, software can be copied at no cost. But if you sell sterilized livestock, then it's a bit like selling proprietary software. Except that the animals would also carry an EULA saying you can't slaughter (reverse-engineer) them or use them for food (derivative works).
Maybe you should look into your own similes before accusing RMS of using deceptive and vague arguments.
He uses words like "you have the freedom to..." when what he really means is "you have the requirement to..."
ie. not only do I have the freedom to redistribute source, I have the requirement to do so if I redistribute my program based on it.
Poor you. So under the GPL you have to let the person you distribute to have the same freedoms you had yourself. That is really restrictive, almost as restrictive as democracy -- you don't have the freedom to restrict freedom to yourself and a few friends! I mean, that's practically GULag.
To head off all the "Then don't use it" arguments, that's not the point. The point is that his arguments are deceptive, vague, and emotionally charged.
Then you should back up that argument instead of trying to confuse people with your radically ego-centrical concept of freedom.
His views are well known, and based on a pretty consistent ethical reasoning. They may be wrong, but calling them wrong based on the fact that '[B]oth free and non-free software has its place in the modern world' is plain moronic. You criticize ethical thinking from a point of common behaviour.
Well, corruption, deception and exploitation certainly have their place in the common world. Since you claim this is OK, you're just sooo wacky.
Maybe, but for many commercial game developers, the GPL isn't an option anyway. Sure, you can keep the game art proprietary and the engine GPL, but I don't think (for instance) EA would do that. They want to keep their modifications of the engine to themselves.
OTOH, a developer may be pissed off if she buys an engine licence just to have id release the source before she has released the game.
19) Duke Nukem--A Decade in the Making
Just when everybody forgot the existence of Duke Nukem, 3D Realms announces that it signed Swedish firm Meqon to handle the physics engine for its vaporous sequel, Duke Nukem Forever. While 3D Realms has a reassuring "it's done when it's done" stance for the shooter, the numerous delays either signals a new Half-Life--or the new Daikatana.
Ah, come on! This isn't a low point at all. A game that has survived ten years of development without being officially canned is nothing short of amazing. Duke sets new standards for vapour. A true legend in the making, haha!
But that shouldn't be surprising at all. If you're a scholar, perhaps you'll search for Marting Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. But hey, maybe not. Maybe you're into computer science and OS design. Or maybe some particular marxist historian, a religious thinker, problems in geology, or the writing of T. S. Eliot or even that of Norman Mailer. But it's pretty fucking unlikely that you're interested in all of these, or that you'd actually believe you could find useful information about Heidegger on the intarweb.
A different person would probably come up with very different examples. You can specialize in lots of stuff, and most of this is of no interest to the general population.
On the other hand, if you're searching for stuff that you're not really that interested in, it's more likely to be on Google's list of top searches. Come to think of it, I'm quite sure I've contributed to the list after thinking: 'Who is Paris Hilton, and why should I care?' I think many people must have been asking the same question this year. Of course, this isn't so much because people are stupid as it is because the media is a huge family of incestuous whores, and Spears, Hilton, et al are perfectly adapted to that environment, as parasites living in the media's collective jizz.
I'm pretty sure that adapting the radio to Japan's FM range is even cheaper than including the radio in the first place. Also, I believe Clear Channel does not have a radio monopoly in Korea, which, if you read TFA, is the first country this gadget is marketed in. The same goes for the rest of the world, excluding USA (and Canada? I didn't know CC had monopoly there).
The primary market for iPods is the USA. When one company has a stronghold in a market with one product, you don't attack that with a product with equal features, you try to find a niche -- preferably a large one -- that the leading product fails in. For instance, by adding radio to an mp3 player. And voila! You just expanded the market to the parts of the world where they still have and want proper FM radio.
A friend of mine claims KDE runs fine on his 128 MB computer. It does not run fine at all on 64 MB, which I had to suffer earlier. However, WindowMaker runs on 64 MB, and OpenOffice.org opens and works under that -- and still works after opening Firefox. And Thunderbird. But at that time, switching between apps is dreadfully slow.
But less than 256 MB in a new computer is an insult to the customer.
Come on, the 'award' went to the eMac, not the iBook. The iBook is one of the better laptops at its price point. It is light, the battery lasts longer than for most Intel based stuff, and it even has a design that some people like. Personally, I'd consider it close to the perfect laptop for me, if it wasn't so ugly, and that the keyboard isn't quite as good as some others (I use and old Powerbook G3).
The eMac has far more competition, and is severely underpowered to run OS X in its default configuration. 256 MB just doesn't cut it for OS X, although it runs fine with only a few apps open at the same time. But then, OS X isn't really designed for closing applications, if we have to consider the user to be completely braindead (and hey, you started it!).
If you don't count in the user's stupidity in the purchase, the eMac loses.
I know, I know. I should have put a smiley at the end. What I meant was: I'm never going to bother with television and commercial breaks, and the media companies can just give up. If I rip off Fox, it's just for the better (and anyway: it's not like I'm ever going to buy the stuff they advertize, so it doesn't really matter).
Not to mention Simpsons. There should be a new episode tonight, I think. Yes, I can watch Simpsons on TV3, but not the newest episodes. Not yet. But I have the right to time-shift, haven't I?
Ouch! Mrtwig.net is down as well. No South Park for slow children this christmas.
If you're not too shy for that, you probably don't need one of those. Confidence is worth more than both good looks and hard cash, when it comes to chicks.
Thanks. Yes, Guide to LaTeX seems to be a better starting point, but I've used LaTeX for a while now (written a ~120 page thesis), so I figured I needed more of a reference book. But then again, there are lots of things in LaTeX that I don't understand, but that I can get to work anyway, somehow. It's not unlikely that I need better understanding of the basics.
I want The LaTeX Companion by Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens et al. LaTeX is a seriously cool piece of software for text publishing -- and far from easy to use, if you want to exploit its full potential (it's not difficult to produce simple but good looking documents, that's almost automagic). From what I've heard, this book is among the best on the subject. Too bad the title makes it sound like a condom.
So Santa, if you read this: Please, please, please!
Exactly. Slashdot covered Bleep here, but I'd completely forgotten about it until this story came up. Anyway, Bleep seems to have grown quite a bit, selling albums and songs from other big electronica labels like Ninja Tune, Mego (Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma is the best album ever!), Domino (Franz Ferdinand seems to be popular now, but that's not electronica), One Little Indian (Bjork) and more.
It's far from the biggest store on the net, but OTOH, it's extremely cool, if you're into that sort of music. And: no DRM, high quality, and standard mp3s that work on all relevant players. I think I need to buy something from them now.
Re:She taught me some math once at uni
on
Mathematics and Sex
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So, considering there are about 9,956,572 female australians, of which less than 50 are sexy enough for you, the chance of you getting laid is about 0.000005022, a rounding error from zero. And we haven't even started considering your own attractiveness from a woman's viewpoint.
More seriously, though: Those lists of 'most beatiful women' only take those who figure regularly in the media into consideration, and noone gets on television without a thick layer of make-up, and the lighting is always better than at a uni in a TV studio.
To continue the last sentence from the post above, the one starting with 'I': ^H^H The game was unplayable because it ran too fast. I could get the ship to stand still or run at warp speed, but nothing in between.
Yep. There was a symphony at the beginning of WC I. I played that on my dad's 286 with 1 MB RAM. Boy did I have to tweak MS-DOS to free up enough memory to make the game run at all.
Some years later, my dad got a Pentium 100 MHz, and I tried the game again. I
'The' is a good example for the limitations of this sort of dictionary in general. It shows up in the Norwegian translation as well. We don't use a definite article in front of nouns, but concatenate it at the end, so that 'mann', which means 'man', becomes 'mannen' in definitive. Fdicts just translates words into other words, which severely distorts the usual meaning in this case. The list of Norwegian words for 'the' usually means 'them' 'they' 'that' or the type of 'the' you have in 'the more the merrier' -- one of two possible translations of the last kind can be translated back to some uses of the word 'yes'. And Norwegian, like Dutch, is pretty close to English.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't buy into that sort of relativism. What's the point of talking (and thinking) at all if everything is just as right? Some thoughts are just plain stupid, and need to be argued against, at least to demonstrate their implications.
The implications of the comment I responded to were that it's OK to do something "wrong" if someone else already is doing it. The implications of your comment are 1)that this is neither right nor wrong, and 2)that I can only agree or disagree with him. The first point is, taken on face value, not necessarily wrong. It seems axiomatic, and can either be accepted or rejected. But from it follows your second point, which is demonstrably wrong, since I've already responded to a comment with reasoning (based on common sense, unfortunately, but that followed from the parent) instead of AOL-talk. I could reject that comment even if I agreed with it, just because its logical implications contradicts the basis for its reasoning, making it absurd from a purely common-sensical view (but just bad as ethical thinking).
And then I can safely reject and disagree with your second point, which makes me also reject your first point, even though I actually agree with it, in a way. It just happens to be fruitless and destructive as a starting point for thinking.
Gentoo is as easy as talking a walk in the park with your nanny. I've used Gentoo on several architectures, and even done a networked install of Gentoo on a MIPS-based SGI-box with no problem whatsoever -- and I don't even know a single programming language. Gentoo is perfect for ignorant people. It may even make them feel they're learning something, although they don't.
Now, configuring GRUB to boot the Hurd, that was a bit more difficult the last time I tried. If you want to harden your balls, you can try the Hurd.
No, it's not remotely the same as demanding you should give away your food. Food is scarce, software can be copied at no cost. But if you sell sterilized livestock, then it's a bit like selling proprietary software. Except that the animals would also carry an EULA saying you can't slaughter (reverse-engineer) them or use them for food (derivative works).
Maybe you should look into your own similes before accusing RMS of using deceptive and vague arguments.
Then you should back up that argument instead of trying to confuse people with your radically ego-centrical concept of freedom.
His views are well known, and based on a pretty consistent ethical reasoning. They may be wrong, but calling them wrong based on the fact that '[B]oth free and non-free software has its place in the modern world' is plain moronic. You criticize ethical thinking from a point of common behaviour.
Well, corruption, deception and exploitation certainly have their place in the common world. Since you claim this is OK, you're just sooo wacky.
Maybe, but for many commercial game developers, the GPL isn't an option anyway. Sure, you can keep the game art proprietary and the engine GPL, but I don't think (for instance) EA would do that. They want to keep their modifications of the engine to themselves.
OTOH, a developer may be pissed off if she buys an engine licence just to have id release the source before she has released the game.
But that shouldn't be surprising at all. If you're a scholar, perhaps you'll search for Marting Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. But hey, maybe not. Maybe you're into computer science and OS design. Or maybe some particular marxist historian, a religious thinker, problems in geology, or the writing of T. S. Eliot or even that of Norman Mailer. But it's pretty fucking unlikely that you're interested in all of these, or that you'd actually believe you could find useful information about Heidegger on the intarweb.
A different person would probably come up with very different examples. You can specialize in lots of stuff, and most of this is of no interest to the general population.
On the other hand, if you're searching for stuff that you're not really that interested in, it's more likely to be on Google's list of top searches. Come to think of it, I'm quite sure I've contributed to the list after thinking: 'Who is Paris Hilton, and why should I care?' I think many people must have been asking the same question this year. Of course, this isn't so much because people are stupid as it is because the media is a huge family of incestuous whores, and Spears, Hilton, et al are perfectly adapted to that environment, as parasites living in the media's collective jizz.
I'm pretty sure that adapting the radio to Japan's FM range is even cheaper than including the radio in the first place. Also, I believe Clear Channel does not have a radio monopoly in Korea, which, if you read TFA, is the first country this gadget is marketed in. The same goes for the rest of the world, excluding USA (and Canada? I didn't know CC had monopoly there).
The primary market for iPods is the USA. When one company has a stronghold in a market with one product, you don't attack that with a product with equal features, you try to find a niche -- preferably a large one -- that the leading product fails in. For instance, by adding radio to an mp3 player. And voila! You just expanded the market to the parts of the world where they still have and want proper FM radio.
I'd guess there are about 6 billion people on this planet who can't receive Clear Channel at all. That makes your point a bit worthless.
A friend of mine claims KDE runs fine on his 128 MB computer. It does not run fine at all on 64 MB, which I had to suffer earlier. However, WindowMaker runs on 64 MB, and OpenOffice.org opens and works under that -- and still works after opening Firefox. And Thunderbird. But at that time, switching between apps is dreadfully slow.
But less than 256 MB in a new computer is an insult to the customer.
Come on, the 'award' went to the eMac, not the iBook. The iBook is one of the better laptops at its price point. It is light, the battery lasts longer than for most Intel based stuff, and it even has a design that some people like. Personally, I'd consider it close to the perfect laptop for me, if it wasn't so ugly, and that the keyboard isn't quite as good as some others (I use and old Powerbook G3).
The eMac has far more competition, and is severely underpowered to run OS X in its default configuration. 256 MB just doesn't cut it for OS X, although it runs fine with only a few apps open at the same time. But then, OS X isn't really designed for closing applications, if we have to consider the user to be completely braindead (and hey, you started it!).
If you don't count in the user's stupidity in the purchase, the eMac loses.
install the BugMeNot plugin for FireFox.
I know, I know. I should have put a smiley at the end. What I meant was: I'm never going to bother with television and commercial breaks, and the media companies can just give up. If I rip off Fox, it's just for the better (and anyway: it's not like I'm ever going to buy the stuff they advertize, so it doesn't really matter).
Not to mention Simpsons. There should be a new episode tonight, I think. Yes, I can watch Simpsons on TV3, but not the newest episodes. Not yet. But I have the right to time-shift, haven't I?
Ouch! Mrtwig.net is down as well. No South Park for slow children this christmas.
If you're not too shy for that, you probably don't need one of those. Confidence is worth more than both good looks and hard cash, when it comes to chicks.
Thanks. Yes, Guide to LaTeX seems to be a better starting point, but I've used LaTeX for a while now (written a ~120 page thesis), so I figured I needed more of a reference book. But then again, there are lots of things in LaTeX that I don't understand, but that I can get to work anyway, somehow. It's not unlikely that I need better understanding of the basics.
I want The LaTeX Companion by Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens et al. LaTeX is a seriously cool piece of software for text publishing -- and far from easy to use, if you want to exploit its full potential (it's not difficult to produce simple but good looking documents, that's almost automagic). From what I've heard, this book is among the best on the subject. Too bad the title makes it sound like a condom.
So Santa, if you read this: Please, please, please!
Exactly. Slashdot covered Bleep here, but I'd completely forgotten about it until this story came up. Anyway, Bleep seems to have grown quite a bit, selling albums and songs from other big electronica labels like Ninja Tune, Mego (Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma is the best album ever!), Domino (Franz Ferdinand seems to be popular now, but that's not electronica), One Little Indian (Bjork) and more.
It's far from the biggest store on the net, but OTOH, it's extremely cool, if you're into that sort of music. And: no DRM, high quality, and standard mp3s that work on all relevant players. I think I need to buy something from them now.
The republicans got stuck in the creationism-thread above.
I don't get it. What's a loach?
So, considering there are about 9,956,572 female australians, of which less than 50 are sexy enough for you, the chance of you getting laid is about 0.000005022, a rounding error from zero. And we haven't even started considering your own attractiveness from a woman's viewpoint.
More seriously, though: Those lists of 'most beatiful women' only take those who figure regularly in the media into consideration, and noone gets on television without a thick layer of make-up, and the lighting is always better than at a uni in a TV studio.
Damned be all touchpads. I never clicked submit!
To continue the last sentence from the post above, the one starting with 'I': ^H^H The game was unplayable because it ran too fast. I could get the ship to stand still or run at warp speed, but nothing in between.
Yep. There was a symphony at the beginning of WC I. I played that on my dad's 286 with 1 MB RAM. Boy did I have to tweak MS-DOS to free up enough memory to make the game run at all.
Some years later, my dad got a Pentium 100 MHz, and I tried the game again. I
'The' is a good example for the limitations of this sort of dictionary in general. It shows up in the Norwegian translation as well. We don't use a definite article in front of nouns, but concatenate it at the end, so that 'mann', which means 'man', becomes 'mannen' in definitive. Fdicts just translates words into other words, which severely distorts the usual meaning in this case. The list of Norwegian words for 'the' usually means 'them' 'they' 'that' or the type of 'the' you have in 'the more the merrier' -- one of two possible translations of the last kind can be translated back to some uses of the word 'yes'. And Norwegian, like Dutch, is pretty close to English.
This is just The Wrong Way to write a dictionary.