If I get some damn PDF in email, I certainly don't expect my PDF reader to report to someone else without my permission. Big difference.
Well, if you get an html email, you can expect it to report back to someone without your permission, especially if images are loaded in html email. Maybe this just requires treating PDF as a similar document format to HTML, rather than as a glorified rtf.
So journalists are afraid that if a blogger becomes a journalist, then the privilege will end up getting "watered down" and will eventually wind up not being useful, or wind up being repealed if it gets overused.
I think the fear is simpler than that. Journalists are afraid of competition. In a time when real quality investigative journalism is at an all-time low in the mainstream media, bloggers have come along and started providing the original spirit of investigation that used to be part of journalism. Yeah, maybe there's no great depth of accountability for bloggers, but there doesn't really seem to be any greater accountability for the mainstream media either. This is a close parallel to the debate between open source and proprietary software.
So if the cost of making my product goes up I shouldn't raise the price? When I raise the price customers have to pay more.
If you raise the minimum wage by a X percent, and minimum wage labor is P percent of your sale price, then you only need to raise the price X*P to obtain the same distribution. This does not cause runaway inflation, because labor is only a component of cost. It instead causes a redistribution of purchasing power, such that the poorest then have the purchasing power to take care of themselves and their families. It raises the poor closer to the middle class, which on the whole makes for a stronger economy.
For example, if we were to raise minimum wage in the U.S. from $5.15 to $7, as has recently been proposed by several politicians, this would affect 7.4 million workers. If you assume each of those 7.4 million workers is currently at the bottom end, $5.15, and working full time, then this rise only amounts to 0.2% of the GDP. But at the same time, it gives about 36% more purchasing power to the poorest Americans.
You must not have ever used the Outlook web component. It is almost as full featured as Outlook.
No, I haven't. But now that I look it up, this seems to essentially put Outlook server-side, and detaches it from the client interface. (Which is good.) This would also make it easier to substitute other webmail software, should one become dissatisfied with the Outlook backend.
After my recent trip to the US (I live in the UK), I was baffled to why on earth the lowest base denomination was a note (bill) instead of a coin
Stick twenty $1 coins in your left pocket, and twenty $1 bills in your right pocket, and then let us know which way your pants tilt. Bills are more convenient, easier to carry, and stack better.
Hmm, from what I see, it seems that webmail has taken the market. Everyday people seem to primarily use free webmail sources, since it stays constant when they change providers. Organizations now seem to be shifting or seem to have shifted toward webmail, since it's accessible from any location, and it keeps people in contact even if they travel and move about.
I don't think Outlook can even come close to competing with this level of mobility.
Most companies seem to make decisions about what to do based on the server and bandwidth costs. Google seems to ignore these concerns and charge blindly ahead, and so far this seems to be working wonderfully for them.
Hopefully the math will work out somewhere without all the question marks.
That's not very confidence inspiring. I think that running Debian Testing on a production machine, where there are money and careers on the line, would be irresponsible.
What you've missed is that this is relative. Debian testing is not as stable as stable, certainly. But it's still a pretty solid release for which packages have already gone through one testing cycle before they get there. Can you find a release from another distribution that's more consistently stable at that level of newness?
The difference is one of attitude. To the Debian team, stable means quite seriously stable, and if a machine is mission critical, then yeah, you probably want to go with that, because then you benefit from that consistency. But if you need more newness, you go with testing, and in the real experience, you don't really lose much of a noticeable level of stability. Some packages even get more reliable, since you get newer bug fixes that haven't been tested enough to propagate into stable. And in the normal experience, security updates make it into testing in a timely fashion. Usually my machines on testing have upgraded the package to one with the security fix before the security team sends out an email notifying people the update is available.
If you want to elect a democratic candidate, you do have to vote for someone "electable", or your idealism will merely insure that the Republicans win. Again.
Yeah, so that strategy has been working well so far?
When people try to vote for the most electable, they're voting for the candidate with the best superficiality and the least content, because the least content has the lowest negatives. This thought process results in a large number of superficial politicians with no meaningful content.
It's not about picking the candidate who agrees with your issues 100%. If you find such a candidate, then you probably aren't concerned with very many issues. It's about choosing the candidate with genuine character, compassion, capability, intellect, and leadership, who also happens to use these characteristics to support important issues you agree with. We haven't been doing this for a while.
That doesn't mean there's not some good stuff in Debian, but no admin I respect as as an admin would ever run Debian Unstable on a real server. And far fewer are running Stable, either, because it's so old; the world's moved on.
If only there were some sort of middle of the line release which was neither as cutting edge as unstable or as refined and old as stable...
This assessment of debian as out-of-date is a bogus argument, which I think is more often made by people who don't use debian, because it doesn't match the experience of using it. In actuality, debian offers you a range. Perhaps people would be less confused if instead of "unstable", "testing", and "stable", the releases were named "cutting-edge", "normal", and "old-sturdy". With apt_preferences, you even have the capability to choose packages from each release and hybridize the release you are using.
There are occasionally individual packages which lag behind other distributions, but similarly there are individual packages which are ahead of other distributions. Most of these differences are minor, average out, and work themselves in the long run.
it's far better to die when you can gracefully than it is to ignore all errors and crash losing data.
Not if dying gracefully ALREADY causes you to lose data. Would you rather a program crash gracefully, or enter an anomalous mode and give you a chance to try to save an extra copy of your data?
Of course you're not the only one to think of this and others figured out the solution to your problem. You need two counter-rotating flywheels; so all those nasty effects cancel out.
And when the car is 5 years old, and one of those flywheels gets a little sticky, you had better hope you opted for the side airbags...
You're lying to yourself, though, if you suggest that the driving force behind P2P is anything other than illegal file sharing.
You're confusing "predominent usage" with "potential and occasional usage worthy of protection."
Most people don't use swearing for productive political discourse, but the supreme court is not going to rule in favor of making swearing illegal, particularly because it CAN be used in political discourse. For example.
P2P permits material to be distributed with a high degree of anonymity regarding the original source, even in the face of personal or political persecution. This is most definitely worthy of protection, and I, for one, will strongly oppose any attempt to prohibit such technology.
There's nothing wrong with having a standardized package format. (With programs like "alien" we essentially already have this.) But the real meat is in how you deal with dependencies across systems, and with distribution of upgrades and security updates.
It won't change until you find a way to convince the general public to stop voting people they don't really want up through the primary elections just because they think they can win, and find a way to convince the general public to stop believing fabricated rhetoric from the "news" telling them what to think about a candidate's character.
It's a much bigger problem than just finding a new candidate. It's a systemic problem involving the distribution and control of information, and it has hit both parties.
Bzzzt! Thanks for playing but you are incorrect: syntax alone cannot determine whether the "militia" clause is restrictive.
Perhaps it was simply written that way because it was written by committee. One group wanted to say as clearly as possible, "The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," and another group in the committee wanted to justify it, and give a reason for it, so the militia clause was prepended as a justification, but without grammatical connection.
These are people who just finished fighting and winning a revolutionary war. You can bet good money that protecting the capability of the people to do an armed revolt was top on their mind when formulating that amendment. There were probably just differences of opinion between them about how that could best be done.
It appears to me you are extrapolating a situation that has not occurred yet and for which there is no evidence it will occur.
Packages like Acrobat Reader, or Java, tend to be third-party distributed, and this makes them more difficult to manage productively than the rest of the system. Just the other day there was an announcement of a conflict between Mozilla and Debian, over who controls the contents of a package. What if more control-desiring upstream developers release their packages upstream? If Mozilla is released as an AutoPackage, then how do I get bug fixes and security updates of Mozilla, or a dozen other such packages? If my core of my system is apt, and I can update the core of my system with an apt-get upgrade, but then Mozilla and a dozen other of the third-party packages are through AutoPackage, then how do I update those without going out and manually downloading a few dozen AutoPackage updates?
The argument being made is that having decentralized package distribution standardizes things across distros, which yes, it can somewhat (even though it reduces standardization within distro), but then it significantly detracts from automated management of a system unless a solution can be found for this. I'm thinking of something along the lines of a massive table of apt sources, but for the AutoPackaging system to obtain updates.
Automatic update management has become essential for serious management of a system. Removing that with an alternate package management system which cannot perform this would be a critical mistake, so I hope the AutoPackaging developers take some time to consider this.
So, you're saying that the FEC is fundamentally an unconstitutional entity? I'd think that if that was the case, it would have come up in the Supreme Court sometime in the last thirty years.
It would have, except there are enough people annoyed by corporate money running the country that the populace and judicial system are willing to go to greater lengths to curtail the problem.
The optimal solution is probably something significantly different from what we have, with more emphasis on educating and informing voters, and giving voters more realistic choices (such as with Approval Voting), rather than on restricting funding. The restricting funding approach doesn't really seem to be working so well, it's simply redirecting the mode and style of funding. The Swift Boat ads were clearly a campaign contribution. Was F911? How about Fox News? We can legislate financial contributions into oblivion, and there will still be ways for money to influence opinion unless the opinion-holders get more selective in how they are influenced.
The reason is that most of these packaging solutions, while great for developers and those who want detailed knowledge of the inner workings of their systems, simply suck when given to mortal users.
Well, there's also a flip side. Having an easy 3rd-party packaging solution might also detract from the number of packages that make it into central repositories, and this would be a significant loss. The ability to manage an entire system with ease from apt is one of the significant advantages of a Linux system. If updates and security fixes for packages are detached from this central management system, then the familiar windows-style nightmare of software management is created.
Hopefully a happy medium or a productive integration will be found. Perhaps the AutoPackaging people can think of a clever way to address the issue of managing decentralized updates and security fixes.
Slashdot Mirror
Well then you can read your pdf files with a text editor too. :)
If I get some damn PDF in email, I certainly don't expect my PDF reader to report to someone else without my permission. Big difference.
Well, if you get an html email, you can expect it to report back to someone without your permission, especially if images are loaded in html email. Maybe this just requires treating PDF as a similar document format to HTML, rather than as a glorified rtf.
It's /usr/lib/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/Reader/intellinux/plug_i ns for me, and I must say, wow, that's quite a lot faster.
Adobe really needs to work on some light-weight hooks for those plugins, because that load delay was killing the experience of using pdf.
So journalists are afraid that if a blogger becomes a journalist, then the privilege will end up getting "watered down" and will eventually wind up not being useful, or wind up being repealed if it gets overused.
I think the fear is simpler than that. Journalists are afraid of competition. In a time when real quality investigative journalism is at an all-time low in the mainstream media, bloggers have come along and started providing the original spirit of investigation that used to be part of journalism. Yeah, maybe there's no great depth of accountability for bloggers, but there doesn't really seem to be any greater accountability for the mainstream media either. This is a close parallel to the debate between open source and proprietary software.
I honestly don't understand why all these get cancelled.
Because the type of people who make TV executives are usually not the same people who make sci-fi fans. So they don't "get it".
So if the cost of making my product goes up I shouldn't raise the price? When I raise the price customers have to pay more.
If you raise the minimum wage by a X percent, and minimum wage labor is P percent of your sale price, then you only need to raise the price X*P to obtain the same distribution. This does not cause runaway inflation, because labor is only a component of cost. It instead causes a redistribution of purchasing power, such that the poorest then have the purchasing power to take care of themselves and their families. It raises the poor closer to the middle class, which on the whole makes for a stronger economy.
For example, if we were to raise minimum wage in the U.S. from $5.15 to $7, as has recently been proposed by several politicians, this would affect 7.4 million workers. If you assume each of those 7.4 million workers is currently at the bottom end, $5.15, and working full time, then this rise only amounts to 0.2% of the GDP. But at the same time, it gives about 36% more purchasing power to the poorest Americans.
You must not have ever used the Outlook web component. It is almost as full featured as Outlook.
No, I haven't. But now that I look it up, this seems to essentially put Outlook server-side, and detaches it from the client interface. (Which is good.) This would also make it easier to substitute other webmail software, should one become dissatisfied with the Outlook backend.
After my recent trip to the US (I live in the UK), I was baffled to why on earth the lowest base denomination was a note (bill) instead of a coin
Stick twenty $1 coins in your left pocket, and twenty $1 bills in your right pocket, and then let us know which way your pants tilt. Bills are more convenient, easier to carry, and stack better.
most people equate email with Outlook
Hmm, from what I see, it seems that webmail has taken the market. Everyday people seem to primarily use free webmail sources, since it stays constant when they change providers. Organizations now seem to be shifting or seem to have shifted toward webmail, since it's accessible from any location, and it keeps people in contact even if they travel and move about.
I don't think Outlook can even come close to competing with this level of mobility.
Most companies seem to make decisions about what to do based on the server and bandwidth costs. Google seems to ignore these concerns and charge blindly ahead, and so far this seems to be working wonderfully for them.
Hopefully the math will work out somewhere without all the question marks.
That's not very confidence inspiring. I think that running Debian Testing on a production machine, where there are money and careers on the line, would be irresponsible.
What you've missed is that this is relative. Debian testing is not as stable as stable, certainly. But it's still a pretty solid release for which packages have already gone through one testing cycle before they get there. Can you find a release from another distribution that's more consistently stable at that level of newness?
The difference is one of attitude. To the Debian team, stable means quite seriously stable, and if a machine is mission critical, then yeah, you probably want to go with that, because then you benefit from that consistency. But if you need more newness, you go with testing, and in the real experience, you don't really lose much of a noticeable level of stability. Some packages even get more reliable, since you get newer bug fixes that haven't been tested enough to propagate into stable. And in the normal experience, security updates make it into testing in a timely fashion. Usually my machines on testing have upgraded the package to one with the security fix before the security team sends out an email notifying people the update is available.
If you want to elect a democratic candidate, you do have to vote for someone "electable", or your idealism will merely insure that the Republicans win. Again.
Yeah, so that strategy has been working well so far?
When people try to vote for the most electable, they're voting for the candidate with the best superficiality and the least content, because the least content has the lowest negatives. This thought process results in a large number of superficial politicians with no meaningful content.
It's not about picking the candidate who agrees with your issues 100%. If you find such a candidate, then you probably aren't concerned with very many issues. It's about choosing the candidate with genuine character, compassion, capability, intellect, and leadership, who also happens to use these characteristics to support important issues you agree with. We haven't been doing this for a while.
That doesn't mean there's not some good stuff in Debian, but no admin I respect as as an admin would ever run Debian Unstable on a real server. And far fewer are running Stable, either, because it's so old; the world's moved on.
If only there were some sort of middle of the line release which was neither as cutting edge as unstable or as refined and old as stable...
This assessment of debian as out-of-date is a bogus argument, which I think is more often made by people who don't use debian, because it doesn't match the experience of using it. In actuality, debian offers you a range. Perhaps people would be less confused if instead of "unstable", "testing", and "stable", the releases were named "cutting-edge", "normal", and "old-sturdy". With apt_preferences, you even have the capability to choose packages from each release and hybridize the release you are using.
There are occasionally individual packages which lag behind other distributions, but similarly there are individual packages which are ahead of other distributions. Most of these differences are minor, average out, and work themselves in the long run.
We could go on, and on. Shatner was lucky. Typecasting is a real problem for actors.
Typecasting seems to be more of a problem for actors with minimal acting skills.
Brent Spiner and Patrick Stewart, for example, could never be typecasted.
it's far better to die when you can gracefully than it is to ignore all errors and crash losing data.
Not if dying gracefully ALREADY causes you to lose data. Would you rather a program crash gracefully, or enter an anomalous mode and give you a chance to try to save an extra copy of your data?
That would have been funnier if CleverNickName had posted it. ;)
Of course you're not the only one to think of this and others figured out the solution to your problem. You need two counter-rotating flywheels; so all those nasty effects cancel out.
And when the car is 5 years old, and one of those flywheels gets a little sticky, you had better hope you opted for the side airbags...
You're lying to yourself, though, if you suggest that the driving force behind P2P is anything other than illegal file sharing.
You're confusing "predominent usage" with "potential and occasional usage worthy of protection."
Most people don't use swearing for productive political discourse, but the supreme court is not going to rule in favor of making swearing illegal, particularly because it CAN be used in political discourse. For example.
P2P permits material to be distributed with a high degree of anonymity regarding the original source, even in the face of personal or political persecution. This is most definitely worthy of protection, and I, for one, will strongly oppose any attempt to prohibit such technology.
Those packages could just as easily be placed in a repository and could be downloaded all at once by an automated facility supplied by the distro.
The autopackaging system is working in the opposite direction of a centralized repository. See here.
You could also read the concept being put forward for upgrades and security updates.
There's nothing wrong with having a standardized package format. (With programs like "alien" we essentially already have this.) But the real meat is in how you deal with dependencies across systems, and with distribution of upgrades and security updates.
When do I get my Deomocrat party back
Where'd all the real republicans go?
It won't change until you find a way to convince the general public to stop voting people they don't really want up through the primary elections just because they think they can win, and find a way to convince the general public to stop believing fabricated rhetoric from the "news" telling them what to think about a candidate's character.
It's a much bigger problem than just finding a new candidate. It's a systemic problem involving the distribution and control of information, and it has hit both parties.
Bzzzt! Thanks for playing but you are incorrect: syntax alone cannot determine whether the "militia" clause is restrictive.
Perhaps it was simply written that way because it was written by committee. One group wanted to say as clearly as possible, "The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," and another group in the committee wanted to justify it, and give a reason for it, so the militia clause was prepended as a justification, but without grammatical connection.
These are people who just finished fighting and winning a revolutionary war. You can bet good money that protecting the capability of the people to do an armed revolt was top on their mind when formulating that amendment. There were probably just differences of opinion between them about how that could best be done.
It appears to me you are extrapolating a situation that has not occurred yet and for which there is no evidence it will occur.
Packages like Acrobat Reader, or Java, tend to be third-party distributed, and this makes them more difficult to manage productively than the rest of the system. Just the other day there was an announcement of a conflict between Mozilla and Debian, over who controls the contents of a package. What if more control-desiring upstream developers release their packages upstream? If Mozilla is released as an AutoPackage, then how do I get bug fixes and security updates of Mozilla, or a dozen other such packages? If my core of my system is apt, and I can update the core of my system with an apt-get upgrade, but then Mozilla and a dozen other of the third-party packages are through AutoPackage, then how do I update those without going out and manually downloading a few dozen AutoPackage updates?
The argument being made is that having decentralized package distribution standardizes things across distros, which yes, it can somewhat (even though it reduces standardization within distro), but then it significantly detracts from automated management of a system unless a solution can be found for this. I'm thinking of something along the lines of a massive table of apt sources, but for the AutoPackaging system to obtain updates.
Automatic update management has become essential for serious management of a system. Removing that with an alternate package management system which cannot perform this would be a critical mistake, so I hope the AutoPackaging developers take some time to consider this.
So, you're saying that the FEC is fundamentally an unconstitutional entity? I'd think that if that was the case, it would have come up in the Supreme Court sometime in the last thirty years.
It would have, except there are enough people annoyed by corporate money running the country that the populace and judicial system are willing to go to greater lengths to curtail the problem.
The optimal solution is probably something significantly different from what we have, with more emphasis on educating and informing voters, and giving voters more realistic choices (such as with Approval Voting), rather than on restricting funding. The restricting funding approach doesn't really seem to be working so well, it's simply redirecting the mode and style of funding. The Swift Boat ads were clearly a campaign contribution. Was F911? How about Fox News? We can legislate financial contributions into oblivion, and there will still be ways for money to influence opinion unless the opinion-holders get more selective in how they are influenced.
The reason is that most of these packaging solutions, while great for developers and those who want detailed knowledge of the inner workings of their systems, simply suck when given to mortal users.
Well, there's also a flip side. Having an easy 3rd-party packaging solution might also detract from the number of packages that make it into central repositories, and this would be a significant loss. The ability to manage an entire system with ease from apt is one of the significant advantages of a Linux system. If updates and security fixes for packages are detached from this central management system, then the familiar windows-style nightmare of software management is created.
Hopefully a happy medium or a productive integration will be found. Perhaps the AutoPackaging people can think of a clever way to address the issue of managing decentralized updates and security fixes.
Is the era of free news content about to end?
Yeah, it's going out like free TV and radio.