I this this is a horrible thing, a constitutional violation on a major scale.
The funny (scary?) thing is, the US Army probably could have gotten a preliminary injunction against the site, if they sued for libel. I don't really see how this isn't libel, especially considering that a not-insignificant number of people seemed to believe it came from the army, and it was being presented as though it was...
The themes are: first, a grimly dystopic near future with nuclear warfare, environmental catastrophe, and violent criminals prowling everywhere; second, a biotechnological dominated lifestyle featuring designer drugs, enabling mechanical implants, and a flourishing gene and organ trade; third, an international and extraterrestrial computer network whose sophistication is so vast that it dominates all human life. The thematic level is epic. The thinness of the books belies the density of their themes.
Not to be rude, but I don't think that those are themes, in the literary sense of being the main idea that a work is intended to convey. Motifs is more appropriate, I believe.
Re:Hmm... (Score:1) by bukvich on Saturday November 20, @11:29AM EST (#63) (User Info) Mr. Joyner wrote:
> Gibson has never really been about plot, nor, certainly, about theme.
I have always thought that Gibson's strengths were thematic, especially in the sprawl trilogy
The themes are: first, a grimly dystopic near future with nuclear warfare, environmental catastrophe, and violent criminals prowling everywhere; second, a biotechnological dominated lifestyle featuring designer drugs, enabling mechanical implants, and a flourishing gene and organ trade; third, an international and extraterrestrial computer network whose sophistication is so vast that it dominates all human life. The thematic level is epic. The thinness of the books belies the density of their themes.
Not to be rude, but I don't think that those are themes, in the literary sense of being the main idea that a work is intended to convey.
Re:The humans rights violations are irksome
on
China Enters Space
·
· Score: 1
"stumble-bums of history"?
That's not really true of China, except for maybe the last 300 or 400 years out of the last 2000 or 3000.
I don't believe that a lot of the people on this board are blaming Clinton for the Chinese being able to launch a vehicle into space.
I don't believe it because I know that a lot of them also think the US encryption export rules are stupid, and most people think they're stupid because the information is going to get out anyway, that the rules serve no purpose.
I agree with that; they don't. Information will get out. It will leak, or it will be independently discovered, or it will be reverse engineered from observation. Do you think that this applies only to encryption? It does not. It's something that always occurs at the nexus of knowledge and human nature.
I think a lot of people know this, and I am disappointed that a lot of people disregard what they know so that they can preserve an opportunity to bash the Chinese and/or Clinton.
Get a life. Stop sitting there wishing that a fifth of the world's population would live in the aerospatial dark ages just because you don't like them, or because it doesn't match up with your political agenda. They won't, and that's a good thing.
> Perhaps those people exist, but I'm certainly not amongst them.
Oh yah, I never meant to imply that you were. I just meant that a casual person reading that previous post might very well assume that you were, which is a shame, because your points were good.
The guys I'm talking about are the ones that brag about only using X to start up fifty xterms at once, and rag on people for using GNOME or KDE or Windows out of some perverse sense of superiority.
I'm no Macro$haft fan, but I don't look down on people who use Windows. They're the sort of people I exist to serve. The people for whom computing is a means, not an end. It makes me proud to see that these people can finally start to use Linux, et. al., and be happy with it.
I hope that by combining ideas like the ones in your post with an attempt to push the state of the art in user-interface design, that we can surpass Windows, and, more importantly, that we can provide computers that are easier for people to use, which help them to do more. With the current development community personality, I think we have a shot.
I think it's also important to note that KDE has actually moved away from being a mere Windows copycat, which it was at inception, and to incoporate more original ideas. This makes me very happy. *^-^*
X != Unix, but X ~= Unix. When X sucks, Unix people will get the blame. I think this is inevitable.
*Yes, there was a footnote of somesort, but I forgot to type it in, and I'll be damned if I can remember what it was.:)
Laney didn't know exactly what the change was. It was something fundamental, that lay below the data stream and not within it. He could not see it.
The nodal points then and now (in the novel), you might think of as akin to Andy Grove's "inflection points". A ship's crew might not notice a slight change in course for hours or even days, but that change can vastly effect where they end up.
A nodal point like that is sub-liminal; the effects are vast. There is no cause and effect relationship, in a traditional sense. In reference to 1911, then, I would say that you're barking a bit up the wrong tree, trying to find out what happened, what changed. Everything changed, and the death of Curie's husband was only the start.
Maybe it's just me, but I never felt that ATP was lacking in plot. The plot was merely...subtle, as was the denouement. Subtle and oddly satisfying, to me.
However, the consensus is right in one respect: Gibson has never really been about plot, nor, certainly, about theme. Gibson has always been about the characters; the plot is sort of window-dressing for that, Gibson's illustration of the things that people do to themselves, and each other.
That, in my humble opinion, is where his genius lies, and it is very evident in ATP. Rei Todei is in the book for an almost indescribably short time, and yet she is more fully realized than many writers could have made her had they spent five hundred pages trying to do it.
Chevette and Rydell, then, get more time, and by the end, you start reading things into them; they're familiar enough, real enough, that you start to infer and induct things things about them, making art imitate life.
I think William Gibson would be a super-kickass interview, as would Neal Stephenson or Douglas Adams or...
Also, I must diagree with the reviewer. The soundtrack for this album is Vanessa-Mae's Storm. A compulsive blend of the old with the new. It's funky, but it works. "Bach Street Prelude" for the final 10 pages. And I'm not even a classical music fan.
Hmmm...you've got some good points in that post (as I would expect you, being, as you are, you, to have:)*, but parts of it come off as the annoyed rhetoric of a certain segment of the population who one feels would have been much happier if GUIs had never been invented in the first place.
Appearance-wise, then, and perhaps as a real issue, you might mention next time that the reforms you've proposed also make it easier for the disabled to use these applications. That's actually rather important, since that is one area in which Windows literally kicks X's ass in a very literal way, making Unix geeks look like a bunch of unenlightened shitheads. It's embarrassing.
Re:I wonder how that works...
on
Copyright!
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· Score: 1
umm...this is rude. granted, i appended something that was off-topic to my post (because i don't know of a forum on/. where it's on-topic, but the top of the post is perfectly legit, and poses a question i would legitimately like an answer to.
so why was i moderated down? did someone not read the post?
of course, this'll prolly get moderated down for being off-topic, too.
Re:I wonder how that works...
on
Copyright!
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· Score: 1
its, not it's. sorry. i hate that.
I wonder how that works...
on
Copyright!
·
· Score: 0
huh! apparently, the RIAA believes that if you link to pirated mp3's, that somehow gives you a magical right and ability to control the actions of the person who created that site.
does anybody know where, exactly, they get this idea, or how they justify it?
on a related note (repost in part):
I just saw an add banner at the top of the page that "click here" over a picture of a woman's face. to the left of that was a banner that said "X10 and Slashdot" [invite you to visit the wired home of tomorrow , or something like that]. Yep, slashdot. Trademark logo and all.
That isn't the only one I've seen, either. I saw one at zdnet or something that showed an alternating picture of the midriff of a woman in a bathing suit and "Click Here" in big letters. They should probably be tied up and made to watch three years of Brady Bunch reruns just for using an annoying animated gif (much like the VA Linux one at the top of the screen now) which was so gaudy that I had to wear sunglasses just to look directly at it, but I'm concerned about something different.
Ya know, d00d, if I wuz a chick, those ad's'd kinda piss me off (TIC). Seriously, These ads seem rather denigrating to women. Not only do they implicitly exclude women from the target market, but they use women's bodies to sell friggin' home control electronics. That's just offensive.
I'm not saying/. shouldn't run ads from X10, but does it really want to associate itself with that kind of ad by having it's name on there? I think a bit less of 'em for it, and I doubt I'm the only one.
I remember visiting the home control home page before it was revamped, and it was kind of sexist and control-freaky. So, maybe I'm biased on this, but I don't think so.
Supposing that Microsoft does wait around long enough, and Bush gets elected. If we assume that by that point, Jackson has already handed down a ruling, and it's not at all favorable to Microsoft, then what can GWB do? I'm thinking that a motion to appeal would have already been filed by then. He can gut the Antitrust division, but can he make them drop the case?
More importantly, what can he do about it if the DoJ takes the fast track option and attempts to appeal directly to the supreme court. Wouldn't it be heard before them before he takes office, and do you think that it will be pursued for that reason alone?
And I'm not opposed to women using their bodies to make money. Hell, if ya wanna get real radical, I think that prostitution laws are a symptom of baptist sensibilities that would keep women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, and to punish those who dare to do the "unspeakable". To make sure, if you will, that women have sex only in the context of marriage, where she can service her man whenever he snaps his fingers.
I wasn't arguing that these sorts of things should be outlawed; far from it. I am opposed to censorship in almost any form. I'm just wondering whether slashdot wants to actively support it, to put their name on it.
For one thing, these ads are just tasteless, and they assume that I, spikey little horny toad that I am, am stupid enough to click on a picture of a woman no matter what's behind it, which pisses me off.
pages that increasingly are rendered well only by a few, mostly proprietary, and always complex browsers.
...which is what the vast majority of web surfers view them on. NS or MSIE. And if the web didn't support the ability to make ugly, messy pages, then it would be superceded by something that did. People don't want elegance or simplicity, they want flexibility. When it comes to software, flexibility is like the genie that was never really in the bottle--you can't put it back again. Witness Jamie Zawinsky's observation on programs: "Every program attempts to evolve until it can read email. Those that can't are replace by those which can."
Application-specific languages grow until they become general purpose. And web standards evolve until they can show everything the designer can dream up. Slowly, imperfectly, and often the wrong way, but they do.
You can't blame the expressive power of the tools for the folly of the people who use them. If the tool didn't give them the power to screw up, they'd build a tool that did. Most people in society at large wouldn't know a sense of aesthetics if it hit them over the head. I wish I lived in a world where people didn't seem so driven to create things that are just...ugly, but I've come to terms with the fact that I don't.
I know this is off-topic, but I just saw an add banner at the top of the page that "click here" over a picture of a woman's face. to the left of that was a banner that said "X10 and Slashdot" [invite you to visit the wired home of tomorrow , or something like that]. Yep, slashdot. Trade mark logo and all.
That isn't the only one I've seen, either. I saw one at zdnet or something that showed an alternating picture of the midriff of a woman in a bathing suit and "Click Here" in big letters. They should probably be tied up and made to watch three years of Brady Bunch reruns just for using an annoying animated gif (much like the VA Linux one at the top of the screen now) which was so gaudy that I had to wear sunglasses just to look directly at it, but I'm concerned about something deeper.
Ya know, d00d, if I wuz a chick, those ad's'd kinda piss me off (TIC). Seriously, These ads seem rather denigrating to women. Not only do they implicitly exclude women from the target market, but they use women's bodies to sell friggin' home control electronics. That's just offensive.
I'm not saying/. shouldn't run ads from X10, but does it really want to associate itself with that kind of ad by having it's name on there. I think a bit less of 'em for it, and I doubt I'm the only one.
I remember visiting the home control home page before it was revamped, and it was kind of sexist and control-freaky. So, maybe I'm biased on this, but I don't think so.
Linux is open source, so supporting open source is implicitly supporting Linux (and other OSS operating systems, I'm not trying to be a bigot her), but it's possible to support Linux without being open source.
It's not only possible, it is increasingly the case; a lot of companies are starting to support Linux without giving much more than lip service to open source. Sometimes (as in the case of Xi), without giving even that.
So, the question arises: is it more important to support Linux right now that it is to support open source? Should we turn away companies because they support only part of what we stand for?
Take Xi, for instance. The situation isn't as abysmal as it might seem. They may not support open source (and their marketing drones might make disparaging comments), but they aren't opposed to it. If they were, I doubt they'd be using Apache as their web server.
Leaving them out of support from us would hurt them, and it would indirectly affect Linux in a negative way. Is that cost too much to pay to protect open source from a contest against a competing ideology? Or is this a holy war where we are fighting for the very heart and soul of our movement? Or do I just need to lay off the chronic?
ummm, i'm not trying to be rude here, but what planet are you from?
javascript (err, i mean, livescript, no, ecmascript, err...) isn't a particularly good scripting language, but for its purpose, it could be worse. it's certainly an integral part of web development, and if you don't think that it's vital to your web experience, try disabling it sometime.
as for style sheets, they're everywhere! and that's a good thing, too! the web would be much less hospitable today for users without CSS-P (also part of CSS2), and it would be miserable for developers without tools like dreamweaver, which are made possible by CSS.
As a matter of fact, Mozilla's great claim to fame is that it supports all of these standards, rather than a set of proprietary extensions. and that makes it easier to share information and make sure everyone has access, because, while javascript can cause problems when you try to view a page on your toaster, the whole point of css is that pages degrade gracefully.
cheers:).
Obligatory attempt to get a '2-funny': Mozilla is the Daikatana of web browsers. Actually, I think I'll give up on mozilla the day Daikatana comes out.:P
I'm not really sure that I see what the problem is here. I'm all for wiretapping, and here's why:
The internet has never been circuit switched. You shouldn't really have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and I mean that in a literal, not a legal, sense.
People can "tap" your "line". Somebody who wants to illicitly eavesdrop on this connection I'm using right now could simply rent a house in vaguely the same part of town and get a modified cable modem. If he had his own nifty equipment, he wouldn't even have to get the cable modem, just a cable link. for about $300 a month, the guy could listen to everything I have to say.
People with different types of connections, I'm sure, could imagine similar scenarios.
My point is that no-one assumes that their connection is clean, and that it's a bad assumption to make even if your line is *almost* proveably clean. Entire families of crypto protocols are based on the assumption of a dirty, tapped line.
So, if that's the assumption we should be making anyway, then what's the matter with allowing wiretapping?
It's sort of like the security situation with closed-source software, really. Assuming that disallowing wiretapping will keep people from it is kind of like assuming that because you don't give out the source code, no-one will find any holes in it.
It's a brave new world, but I think that we're pretty well ideologically equipped to handle it. (Famous last words....:)
Also, I wrote a daemon that lets you use the RealMagic Remote under Linux, if anybody's interested. I just wanted to say that. okay. i'll go now...
2. Unnnh, I still don't really agree, but I could be wrong, and it's too boring to argue about. (Also, it's getting late in the day; most things seem more boring by that time).
3. You might be right. At best, the PRC is taking 1.1 steps forward, and 1 step back. I do think that there is a fundamental shift in the ways that they oppress people: before, they were a much more ubiquitous influence, the type of people that could make you "show loyalty" because they were omnipresent in your life. today they have to kill the chicken to frighten the monkeys, which is less effective, and more visible to the outside world.
I think that the PRC is on the road to reform, but I'm not sure it's journey that will be complete in my lifetime, and I'm a fairly young person.
Slashdot Mirror
I this this is a horrible thing, a constitutional violation on a major scale.
The funny (scary?) thing is, the US Army probably could have gotten a preliminary injunction against the site, if they sued for libel. I don't really see how this isn't libel, especially considering that a not-insignificant number of people seemed to believe it came from the army, and it was being presented as though it was...
The themes are: first, a grimly dystopic near future with nuclear warfare,
environmental catastrophe, and violent criminals prowling everywhere;
second, a biotechnological dominated lifestyle featuring designer drugs,
enabling mechanical implants, and a flourishing gene and organ trade; third,
an international and extraterrestrial computer network whose sophistication
is so vast that it dominates all human life. The thematic level is epic. The
thinness of the books belies the density of their themes.
Not to be rude, but I don't think that those are themes, in the literary sense of being the main idea that a work is intended to convey. Motifs is more appropriate, I believe.
Re:Hmm... (Score:1)
by bukvich on Saturday November 20, @11:29AM EST (#63)
(User Info)
Mr. Joyner wrote:
> Gibson has never really been about plot, nor, certainly, about theme.
I have always thought that Gibson's strengths were thematic, especially
in the sprawl trilogy
The themes are: first, a grimly dystopic near future with nuclear warfare,
environmental catastrophe, and violent criminals prowling everywhere;
second, a biotechnological dominated lifestyle featuring designer drugs,
enabling mechanical implants, and a flourishing gene and organ trade; third,
an international and extraterrestrial computer network whose sophistication
is so vast that it dominates all human life. The thematic level is epic. The
thinness of the books belies the density of their themes.
Not to be rude, but I don't think that those are themes, in the literary sense of being the main idea that a work is intended to convey.
"stumble-bums of history"?
That's not really true of China, except for maybe the last 300 or 400 years out of the last 2000 or 3000.
And Russia, she had her era of greatness.
I don't believe that a lot of the people on this board are blaming Clinton for the Chinese being able to launch a vehicle into space.
I don't believe it because I know that a lot of them also think the US encryption export rules are stupid, and most people think they're stupid because the information is going to get out anyway, that the rules serve no purpose.
I agree with that; they don't. Information will get out. It will leak, or it will be independently discovered, or it will be reverse engineered from observation. Do you think that this applies only to encryption? It does not. It's something that always occurs at the nexus of knowledge and human nature.
I think a lot of people know this, and I am disappointed that a lot of people disregard what they know so that they can preserve an opportunity to bash the Chinese and/or Clinton.
Get a life. Stop sitting there wishing that a fifth of the world's population would live in the aerospatial dark ages just because you don't like them, or because it doesn't match up with your political agenda. They won't, and that's a good thing.
> Perhaps those people exist, but I'm certainly not amongst them.
:)
Oh yah, I never meant to imply that you were. I just meant that a casual person reading that previous post might very well assume that you were, which is a shame, because your points were good.
The guys I'm talking about are the ones that brag about only using X to start up fifty xterms at once, and rag on people for using GNOME or KDE or Windows out of some perverse sense of superiority.
I'm no Macro$haft fan, but I don't look down on people who use Windows. They're the sort of people I exist to serve. The people for whom computing is a means, not an end. It makes me proud to see that these people can finally start to use Linux, et. al., and be happy with it.
I hope that by combining ideas like the ones in your post with an attempt to push the state of the art in user-interface design, that we can surpass Windows, and, more importantly, that we can provide computers that are easier for people to use, which help them to do more. With the current development community personality, I think we have a shot.
I think it's also important to note that KDE has actually moved away from being a mere Windows copycat, which it was at inception, and to incoporate more original ideas. This makes me very happy. *^-^*
X != Unix, but X ~= Unix. When X sucks, Unix people will get the blame. I think this is inevitable.
*Yes, there was a footnote of somesort, but I forgot to type it in, and I'll be damned if I can remember what it was.
Laney didn't know exactly what the change was. It was something fundamental, that lay below the data stream and not within it. He could not see it.
The nodal points then and now (in the novel), you might think of as akin to Andy Grove's "inflection points". A ship's crew might not notice a slight change in course for hours or even days, but that change can vastly effect where they end up.
A nodal point like that is sub-liminal; the effects are vast. There is no cause and effect relationship, in a traditional sense. In reference to 1911, then, I would say that you're barking a bit up the wrong tree, trying to find out what happened, what changed. Everything changed, and the death of Curie's husband was only the start.
Maybe it's just me, but I never felt that ATP was lacking in plot. The plot was merely...subtle, as was the denouement. Subtle and oddly satisfying, to me.
However, the consensus is right in one respect: Gibson has never really been about plot, nor, certainly, about theme. Gibson has always been about the characters; the plot is sort of window-dressing for that, Gibson's illustration of the things that people do to themselves, and each other.
That, in my humble opinion, is where his genius lies, and it is very evident in ATP. Rei Todei is in the book for an almost indescribably short time, and yet she is more fully realized than many writers could have made her had they spent five hundred pages trying to do it.
Chevette and Rydell, then, get more time, and by the end, you start reading things into them; they're familiar enough, real enough, that you start to infer and induct things things about them, making art imitate life.
I think William Gibson would be a super-kickass interview, as would Neal Stephenson or Douglas Adams or...
Also, I must diagree with the reviewer. The soundtrack for this album is Vanessa-Mae's Storm. A compulsive blend of the old with the new. It's funky, but it works. "Bach Street Prelude" for the final 10 pages. And I'm not even a classical music fan.
literally literally literal literally. should have previewed.
Hmmm...you've got some good points in that post (as I would expect you, being, as you are, you, to have :)*, but parts of it come off as the annoyed rhetoric of a certain segment of the population who one feels would have been much happier if GUIs had never been invented in the first place.
Appearance-wise, then, and perhaps as a real issue, you might mention next time that the reforms you've proposed also make it easier for the disabled to use these applications. That's actually rather important, since that is one area in which Windows literally kicks X's ass in a very literal way, making Unix geeks look like a bunch of unenlightened shitheads. It's embarrassing.
umm...this is rude. granted, i appended something that was off-topic to my post (because i don't know of a forum on /. where it's on-topic, but the top of the post is perfectly legit, and poses a question i would legitimately like an answer to.
so why was i moderated down? did someone not read the post?
of course, this'll prolly get moderated down for being off-topic, too.
its, not it's. sorry. i hate that.
huh! apparently, the RIAA believes that if you link to pirated mp3's, that somehow gives you a magical right and ability to control the actions of the person who created that site.
/. shouldn't run ads from X10, but does it really want to associate itself with that kind of ad by having it's name on there? I think a bit less of 'em for it, and I doubt I'm the only one.
does anybody know where, exactly, they get this idea, or how they justify it?
on a related note (repost in part):
I just saw an add banner at the top of the page that "click here" over a picture of a woman's face. to the left of that was a banner that said "X10 and Slashdot" [invite you to visit the wired home of tomorrow , or something like that]. Yep, slashdot. Trademark logo and all.
That isn't the only one I've seen, either. I saw one at zdnet or something that showed an alternating picture of the midriff of a woman in a bathing suit and "Click Here" in big letters. They should probably be tied up and made to watch three years of Brady Bunch reruns just for using an annoying animated gif (much like the VA Linux one at the top of the screen now) which was so gaudy that I had to wear sunglasses just to look directly at it, but I'm concerned about something different.
Ya know, d00d, if I wuz a chick, those ad's'd kinda piss me off (TIC). Seriously, These ads seem rather denigrating to women. Not only do they implicitly exclude women from the target market, but they use women's bodies to sell friggin' home control electronics. That's just offensive.
I'm not saying
I remember visiting the home control home page before it was revamped, and it was kind of sexist and control-freaky. So, maybe I'm biased on this, but I don't think so.
'sprobly sposeta be a zen thing...
i would, but I Cannot Tell A Lie(tm). :)
Supposing that Microsoft does wait around long enough, and Bush gets elected. If we assume that by that point, Jackson has already handed down a ruling, and it's not at all favorable to Microsoft, then what can GWB do? I'm thinking that a motion to appeal would have already been filed by then. He can gut the Antitrust division, but can he make them drop the case?
More importantly, what can he do about it if the DoJ takes the fast track option and attempts to appeal directly to the supreme court. Wouldn't it be heard before them before he takes office, and do you think that it will be pursued for that reason alone?
So DES, at 56 bits, is secure?
I don't think so, and I don't think the DES keyspace is sparse.
that was in 2.0, i believe. the situtation is better in 2.2.
...yeah, but X10 isn't owned by women.
And I'm not opposed to women using their bodies to make money. Hell, if ya wanna get real radical, I think that prostitution laws are a symptom of baptist sensibilities that would keep women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, and to punish those who dare to do the "unspeakable". To make sure, if you will, that women have sex only in the context of marriage, where she can service her man whenever he snaps his fingers.
I wasn't arguing that these sorts of things should be outlawed; far from it. I am opposed to censorship in almost any form. I'm just wondering whether slashdot wants to actively support it, to put their name on it.
For one thing, these ads are just tasteless, and they assume that I, spikey little horny toad that I am, am stupid enough to click on a picture of a woman no matter what's behind it, which pisses me off.
pages that increasingly are rendered well only by a few, mostly proprietary, and always complex browsers.
...which is what the vast majority of web surfers view them on. NS or MSIE. And if the web didn't support the ability to make ugly, messy pages, then it would be superceded by something that did. People don't want elegance or simplicity, they want flexibility. When it comes to software, flexibility is like the genie that was never really in the bottle--you can't put it back again. Witness Jamie Zawinsky's observation on programs: "Every program attempts to evolve until it can read email. Those that can't are replace by those which can."
Application-specific languages grow until they become general purpose. And web standards evolve until they can show everything the designer can dream up. Slowly, imperfectly, and often the wrong way, but they do.
You can't blame the expressive power of the tools for the folly of the people who use them. If the tool didn't give them the power to screw up, they'd build a tool that did. Most people in society at large wouldn't know a sense of aesthetics if it hit them over the head. I wish I lived in a world where people didn't seem so driven to create things that are just...ugly, but I've come to terms with the fact that I don't.
I know this is off-topic, but I just saw an add banner at the top of the page that "click here" over a picture of a woman's face. to the left of that was a banner that said "X10 and Slashdot" [invite you to visit the wired home of tomorrow , or something like that]. Yep, slashdot. Trade mark logo and all.
/. shouldn't run ads from X10, but does it really want to associate itself with that kind of ad by having it's name on there. I think a bit less of 'em for it, and I doubt I'm the only one.
That isn't the only one I've seen, either. I saw one at zdnet or something that showed an alternating picture of the midriff of a woman in a bathing suit and "Click Here" in big letters. They should probably be tied up and made to watch three years of Brady Bunch reruns just for using an annoying animated gif (much like the VA Linux one at the top of the screen now) which was so gaudy that I had to wear sunglasses just to look directly at it, but I'm concerned about something deeper.
Ya know, d00d, if I wuz a chick, those ad's'd kinda piss me off (TIC). Seriously, These ads seem rather denigrating to women. Not only do they implicitly exclude women from the target market, but they use women's bodies to sell friggin' home control electronics. That's just offensive.
I'm not saying
I remember visiting the home control home page before it was revamped, and it was kind of sexist and control-freaky. So, maybe I'm biased on this, but I don't think so.
You made me think an interesting thought:
Linux is open source, so supporting open source is implicitly supporting Linux (and other OSS operating systems, I'm not trying to be a bigot her), but it's possible to support Linux without being open source.
It's not only possible, it is increasingly the case; a lot of companies are starting to support Linux without giving much more than lip service to open source. Sometimes (as in the case of Xi), without giving even that.
So, the question arises: is it more important to support Linux right now that it is to support open source? Should we turn away companies because they support only part of what we stand for?
Take Xi, for instance. The situation isn't as abysmal as it might seem. They may not support open source (and their marketing drones might make disparaging comments), but they aren't opposed to it. If they were, I doubt they'd be using Apache as their web server.
Leaving them out of support from us would hurt them, and it would indirectly affect Linux in a negative way. Is that cost too much to pay to protect open source from a contest against a competing ideology? Or is this a holy war where we are fighting for the very heart and soul of our movement? Or do I just need to lay off the chronic?
ummm, i'm not trying to be rude here, but what planet are you from?
:).
:P
javascript (err, i mean, livescript, no, ecmascript, err...) isn't a particularly good scripting language, but for its purpose, it could be worse. it's certainly an integral part of web development, and if you don't think that it's vital to your web experience, try disabling it sometime.
as for style sheets, they're everywhere! and that's a good thing, too! the web would be much less hospitable today for users without CSS-P (also part of CSS2), and it would be miserable for developers without tools like dreamweaver, which are made possible by CSS.
As a matter of fact, Mozilla's great claim to fame is that it supports all of these standards, rather than a set of proprietary extensions. and that makes it easier to share information and make sure everyone has access, because, while javascript can cause problems when you try to view a page on your toaster, the whole point of css is that pages degrade gracefully.
cheers
Obligatory attempt to get a '2-funny': Mozilla is the Daikatana of web browsers. Actually, I think I'll give up on mozilla the day Daikatana comes out.
-k. ^-^
I'm not really sure that I see what the problem is here. I'm all for wiretapping, and here's why:
The internet has never been circuit switched. You shouldn't really have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and I mean that in a literal, not a legal, sense.
People can "tap" your "line". Somebody who wants to illicitly eavesdrop on this connection I'm using right now could simply rent a house in vaguely the same part of town and get a modified cable modem. If he had his own nifty equipment, he wouldn't even have to get the cable modem, just a cable link. for about $300 a month, the guy could listen to everything I have to say.
People with different types of connections, I'm sure, could imagine similar scenarios.
My point is that no-one assumes that their connection is clean, and that it's a bad assumption to make even if your line is *almost* proveably clean. Entire families of crypto protocols are based on the assumption of a dirty, tapped line.
So, if that's the assumption we should be making anyway, then what's the matter with allowing wiretapping?
It's sort of like the security situation with closed-source software, really. Assuming that disallowing wiretapping will keep people from it is kind of like assuming that because you don't give out the source code, no-one will find any holes in it.
It's a brave new world, but I think that we're pretty well ideologically equipped to handle it.
(Famous last words....:)
Also, I wrote a daemon that lets you use the RealMagic Remote under Linux, if anybody's interested. I just wanted to say that. okay. i'll go now...
1. Yeah. Agreed.
2. Unnnh, I still don't really agree, but I could be wrong, and it's too boring to argue about. (Also, it's getting late in the day; most things seem more boring by that time).
3. You might be right. At best, the PRC is taking 1.1 steps forward, and 1 step back. I do think that there is a fundamental shift in the ways that they oppress people: before, they were a much more ubiquitous influence, the type of people that could make you "show loyalty" because they were omnipresent in your life. today they have to kill the chicken to frighten the monkeys, which is less effective, and more visible to the outside world.
I think that the PRC is on the road to reform, but I'm not sure it's journey that will be complete in my lifetime, and I'm a fairly young person.