The fact is Bush et. al. weren't even remotely interested in running a true free market,
you know, apologists for the magical free market mythology sound almost exactly like apologists for communism when they say that you can't blame the theory of communism for the distortions and abuses of it in the soviet union and china.
and in trying to quiet the economic grumblings following the dot-com-bubble-bursting set the stage for an even bigger crisis.
oh, is that what they were doing? silly me...i thought they were lining their own pockets and looting the treasury for themselves and their investors & business partners while they had the opportunity.
your own personal idiosyncratic definition is both irrelevant and wrong.
what the article describes is a trojan, not a virus. it requires the user to manually execute it. such malicious programs have been called trojans (short for "trojan horse", a term that has been in common use for centuries, if not millenia - a reference to the iliad and the cleverness of odysseus in social-engineering the fall of troy) since at least the early 1970s.
the thing that distinguishes a virus from a trojan is that a virus is malware that can self-propagate by misusing the resources of a host that it has already infected - i.e. it can infect other machines *without* requiring a user to take specific action to execute it. it's called a "virus" or "computer virus" as a direct analogy to biological viruses.
to over-extend the analogy:
a cup of hemlock, poison, could be a trojan (esp. if someone was tricked - social engineering - into drinking it), while a disease such as hepatitis is caused by a virus, an infectious biological agent that invades cells and hijacks their reproductive apparatus to create more copies of itself - which then spread out to invade other cells and repeat the process.
BTW, by your erroneous definition, format or mkfs are "viruses" because they can do damage if misused. they're not. they're not even trojans because their intended purpose is to be a useful utility, not to cause harm.
The system can't protect against this unless you want to life in the nanny state. Women are free to go with convicted wife-beaters unless you want the state to decide your partner for you. People can install spyware unless you want the system to decide what you can install.
true, the state can't decide those things for individuals.
however, the state can prosecute wife-beaters for assault, rape, murder, and any other crimes they may have committed.
similarly, the state can prosecute spyware vendors for fraud, deception, false-advertising and/or misrepresentation, unauthorised access to a computer, infringement of privacy, and other crimes.
I'll leave insurance alone because I don't consider myself qualified to speak on it. However, I will say that if government is in the "business" of providing insurance that implies that it is insuring people that the private sector has determined are "un-insurable" or "bad risks". This means that the government is using other people's money to take risks on people that private institutions have decided are not worth risking their own money on. I'll let others decide if they feel that's an endeavour that can pay off, socially or economically.
actually, what it means is that governments have different goals, motives, and priorities than corporations.
private sector insurance has the goal of making a profit. that's it. and one of the ways of increasing profit is to insure only those who don't appear to need it while rejecting those who do. they can afford to eliminate such immediate costs because the long term costs are external to them...they won't have to pay them, because the government and/or the public will.
government insurance has several goals, including: 1. providing an essential service to the public (which is what governments are FOR) and, 2. ultimately, reducing future costs. e.g. it's cheaper to provide universal health cover to everyone so that people get ailments treated early while they're cheap and relatively easy to fix, than it is to wait until their ailment has progressed to near terminal stage.
yeah, same as when sprinkling salt onto eggs, the idea is to use just a little rather than a lot. a few grains of salt improves the flavour while a teaspoon of salt would make it inedible.
vegemite on toast tastes pretty good if made to reasonable proportions. toasted bread, hot melted butter, and salty vegemite. carbs & fat & salt. yum.
it's pretty good on plain bread with loads of butter (not margarine) too.
some people like sickly sweet things like jam. others like savoury/salty things like vegemite. tastes are different.
btw, i've known cats (and dogs) who seem more than willing to rip your arm off to get some of your vegemite toast. they like salt.
no, while most spam is commercial, it doesn't have to be. i.e. "commercial" is NOT one of the defining attributes of spam. "unsolicited" and "bulk" are. spam is not about content, it is about consent.
e.g there is political spam, religious spam, and chain-letter spam.
if your example local school sent their notification to an opt-in list of people who wanted such notifications then it would not be spam. if, however, they sent it to everyone in the neighbourhood (or just to every parent) without first receiving a subscription request or obtaining prior consent then it would be spam.
a teenager who sends a chain letter to your entire domain IS spam, as well as annoying.
the student's email that this article about may or may not be spam. there isn't enough detail in the article to tell for sure.
if she sent it to an existing staff list at the university which ordinarily allows students to email staff then it certainly would not be spam.
if she constructed her own list then it might be spam. in any other context it certainly would be spam, but students DO have an implicit right to contact their teachers which makes it a grey area rather than clear cut.
if she repeatedly sent email to her self-constructed list in order to harrass or cause annoyance or disruption of mail service then it would be mail-bombing (a form of DoS) rather than spam.
> For example, convicted felons on parole cannot vote in my state, > whereas they can in most others. But the fact is that citizens of > my state chose that, and those that disagree are free to move and > live in another state which allows parolees to vote if it's that > important to them.
is that true for parolees themselves? are they free to move at will to another state if they want?
personally, i think that barring from voting felons is inherently unfair and undemocratic - it makes it possible, AND provides political incentive to disenfranchise large segments of the population by making new classes of felony crimes, e.g. making it illegal to be black, or white, or an atheist, or a socialist, or a roman catholic, or a nazi, or to prefer certain intoxicating drugs over others.
> To what extent can these description without implementation represent Prior Art ?
legally? a written description is certainly adequate prior art.
the classic example is that of the waterbed. which was unable to be patented in 1968 because Robert Heinlein had described it in three of his novels: _Beyond This Horizon_ (1942), _Double Star_ (1956), and _Stranger in a Strange Land_ (1961)
practically? you can patent whatever you want in the US these days. all your idea are belong to US.
it's interesting that they call it 'Digital Manners'.
it's almost as if they want people to think it's just benign reminders and opt-in enforcement of polite social niceties rather than a method for enforcing mandatory external control over all your devices.
> I strongly disagree, why should businesses be allowed to provide support to known criminals?
because, when you strip out all the emotive stuff about spammers - and who doesn't want to see a dead-or-tortured bounty on spammers? - there's an important principle here.
to be a known criminal, you've been caught and convicted. the court has sentenced you to a specific punishment, taking into account the nature and severity of your crime and any previous convictions. now, when you've done your time then you've done your time - and it should be a criminal offence to impose further sanctions than what the court has sentenced.
if it is made illegal to deal with someone who has committed a crime in the past then how the hell do they have ANY CHANCE WHATSOEVER to "go straight"? they're barred from dealing in the legit economy, so that means they have no choice but to get even further involved in the shadow and criminal economies.
sure, repeat offenders should get more severe sentences than first-time or once-off offenders - but that can and should be dealt with in the courts the next time that they are caught offending.
> Businesses have been profiting from their involvement with these sorts, > I really don't see any reason why they shouldn't shoulder some of the responsibility.
businesses that knowingly profit from (direct or indirect) involvement in crimes are, at the very least, guilty of engaging in criminal conspiracy. there are already adequate laws. they just need to be enforced.
> BTW I'm not racist and certainly the Chinese have the right to economic development. > I just think it's time they started playing by the rules.
but they ARE playing by "the rules". exactly the same rules that the USA has been playing by for decades, exactly the same rules that the USA has imposed on the rest of the world - "Might Makes Right". the rules suck, and americans are going to start thinking they suck too now that they're on the wrong side of them.
over the next decade or so, americans are about to learn exactly why the rest of the world hates american arrogance.
I can't say i'm happy about that(*), but it is kind of ironic justice.
(*) china as the world's only superpower is bound to be worse than america in that role. there's not much to like about american dominance of the world, but when you have a choice between two evils, it's sensible to chose the lesser evil. not that i, or anyone else, actually has a *choice*...just a personal preference.
since you're talking about GBP, i'd bet that your positive experience with paypal in that situation is entirely due to the fact that you live in a country where paypal is regulated like a bank, a country where paypal can't disclaim responsibility merely by claiming "we're not a bank". paypal fixed the problem because they had to, there were UK laws & regulations on your side that forced them to do the right thing.
if you lived in the US, you'd be screwed. paypal is effectively unregulated there. hell the yanks can't even properly regulate their banks. regulation is unwanted, and there's been a lot of propaganda to make it a dirty word, because "regulation hinders business"....which is much more important than preventing consumers from being ripped off.
like you, i live in a country (AU) where paypal is regulated similarly to banks. after many years of wanting nothing to do with paypal, i finally gave in and got a paypal a/c a few years ago (but only after i got a second debit card - no way was i going to give them direct access to my bank account). now, though, i'm seriously considering cancelling both my paypal and ebay accounts in protest.
not that they'll care one little bit about my protest/boycott - there are way too many stupid sheep in the world who'll just accept ebay/paypal's "rules" without question and without even thinking about it.
actually geeks keep it alive for practical reasons, not nostalgia or image.
there's a difference between emitted light (e.g. reading a screen) and reflected light (e.g. reading a paper page).
with emitted light, it's a bright light shining directly into your eyes, so you want minimum brightness and maximum contrast in order to avoid eyestrain.
white (or gray or yellow or cyan etc) on black works well for that.
for coloured text, yellow or white on very dark blue gives excellent contrast with minimal brightness.
for reflected light such as on printed material, brightness doesnt matter so much but you still want high contrast. it's cheaper to bleach paper white and print in black or other colours than it is to dye the paper black (or blue or pink or whatever) and print in white. brightness isn't as important a factor here, but expense is. hence the default of black print on white paper.
btw, hardly anyone likes green on black, especially bright green. it sucks. people who have black backgrounds in terminal programs aren't doing it for 'nostalgia', they're doing it to minimise the eyestrain and headache-inducing brightness.
I blame Apple. they popularised the idea (but borrowed it from xerox and others) of having bright white backgrounds for documents and screens in the early 80s with the Lisa and then the Mac. and then everyone else copied them because they had got so much else right eith their Human Interface Guidelines that almost everyone assumed they were right about this too. and, of course, it helped that Macs were so much prettier than the PC screens or vt100 etc terminals that were around back then.
> "Queue" is a correct and acceptable variation of "cue". > It is not usually found in US English, however, so maybe this is why you think it's wrong.
no, it's not. 'cue' and 'queue' are two completely different words.
> You may also see it meaning "to line up for" as in "queue up for", again usually > in British English (and in places like Australia that were/are part of the British Empire).
yes, that's the meaning of 'queue'. it's used in US English too, possibly after transformation into weird american spelling. IIRC, i've seen some americans spell it as 'que' - not sure if that's standard USian or if it's a mis-spelling even in the US. in geek circles, the British spelling seems to be common.
'cue', on the other hand, refers to a prompt or reminder (as in an actor's cue), or sometimes a clue, or even a 'cue stick' (as in pool or billiards).
yes, you can do *SOME* of the things you can do from a command-line in a GUI.
no, you can not do *ALL* of them.
i use a Mac at work too. i have a Mac and a linux box on my desk at work....and even though the mac is a faster, better machine, i spend 90+% of my time using the linux box. it's easier, and less hassle. and all the glitzy animations and sounds and other annoying crap was easy to turn off. and it doesn't keep popping up stupid questions while i'm trying to work on something or prompting me to update iTunes or some other crap i'm not interested in.
i've been using Apple's GUI interfaces to tools for years, since the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) stuff in the 1980s. you can do some of the basic operations fairly easily with them, and they can serve as useful 'training wheels' (IFF they display the command-line that would be run) for novice users. but they will never and can never be as flexible or as capable as a command-line. there are inherent limitations in the interface.
whether it's 'easy' or not is a subjective judgement but, for me, pointing-and-clicking is far more difficult and tedious and time-consuming than typing.
i'm not and never have been a very visually-oriented person. text and words make sense to me, they require no interpretation, their meaning is self-evident. icons generally don't make sense to me, and most icons which are allegedly easy or intuitive are generally inscrutable to me...i have to spend a lot of time trying to puzzle out WTF they are supposed to mean.
how do you make an icon that "intuitively" represents 'grep'? remember that it has to be visually distinct from every other search tool.
IMO, icons are for the illiterate - and any user-interface that focuses predominantly on icons rather than text is both pandering to and reinforcing/encouraging illiteracy.
...that security, freedom, tweakability, tinkerosity, and community support are false reasons and that the only real reason is that it's fun.
for me, there is no one reason i use linux. all of the above and more are reasons why i use it. and my reasons have grown over the years - my original reasons way back in 1993 was that unix on a cheap home computer was cool and uucp actually worked on linux whereas it sucked badly on OS/2. they're all still REAL reasons, not false ones.
i do agree, however, that using the command line is fun. it's also extremely productive.
one of the interesting comments in the blog was "Saying the GUI has inherent disadvantages simply means that the GUIs that exist are not GOOD enough.". that's simply not true. there are many things which are possible - even easy - from a CLI which are impossible (or would be so complicated to achieve that no one would ever do it) from a GUI.
for example how do you make a GUI do the following:
find all files in the current directory and beneath it which have been modified less than 3 months ago, exclude all jpg and png files, then search them for the string 'foobar'. open all matching files in my favourite editor.
and that's only a very simple example of what you can do with standard tools and pipes from a CLI. there is no way that that could be implemented in a GUI in a manner that was actually usable, let alone easy to use....and the more complicated the pipeline, the more baroque and unwieldy the GUI would become.
and yes, i do stuff like this all the time. e.g. finding all CGI scripts or PHP pages that send mail or open a connection to a particular database or whatever. it's the computer's job to find files matching my criteria, not mine to manually search every one of them and manually construct a list of files to edit. that's what computers are for, for doing tedious stuff that would otherwise be prone to operator error.
> > i didn't ask for a right-wing propaganda rant > Sure you did, by framing your objection to the reporter's coverage of the events in political terms.
i didn't. i said that fox news isn't a credible source. here's what i said: "do you have that from any *credible* news source? fox news certainly isn't.".
to deduce that that's a political criticism is to acknowledge the fact that fox news is pure political propaganda.
> [ link to bbc news article ]
compare the two articles. the fox news link was to a blog post which had an agenda to push and made numerous unsubstantiated claims to support its agenda. the article's agenda was to push the idea that venezuela is evil and expansionist, that it's just like iraq and chavez is saddam hussein's ideological brother.
the BBC News article reported the known facts, reported comments from both sides of the dispute, and didn't take a position that supported one side or the other - the tone of the BBC article was neutral and the reporter's personal opinion was not evident, nor could it readily be deduced. i.e. the reporter did as he or she is supposed to do and made an effort to stick to the facts and keep their personal opinion out of it.
> Again - who is more credible to you on this? Who gets a 10? Chavez's own propogandists? Cuba's?
nobody gets a 10. ever.
doubting the accuracy of fox news does not make one a stooge of chavez.
> The events in question are political. If your sympathies lie with Chavez, > then any reporting that mentions the possibility of his troops trashing the mining > facilities of a rival neighbor are going to annoy you, I suppose.
that would be because you're an american and have no actual experience of any unbiased news source, or one with any journalistic integrity. to you, news IS all just partisan propaganda, and the only purpose for facts is to use or ignore them depending on whether they support the position that's being argued or not.
no newspaper is perfect, but i'd much rather read one that has a tradition of non-bias and journalistic integrity, rather than one that takes sides and has an agenda to push (no matter what that agenda is - loony left propaganda is no more palatable than right wing fascist propaganda).
i didn't ask for a right-wing propaganda rant, i asked if you had a credible source for the claim you made.
fox news is not a credible source.
pointing out that there are other non-credible sources does not in any way make fox news a credible source. it just states the obvious.
i have no idea whether SF Gate is a credible source or not. i've never read it. by 'credible source', i mean 'internationally recognised credible news service', not just another one of the many US-centric parochial newspapers.
i'd accept BBC news as a reasonably credible source (which is not to say that i would uncritically believe anything and everything they might publish).
by way of illustration: whereas on a scale of 1 to 10 i would give Fox News a credibility score of 1 or 2 (at best - on anything political, they'd rate negative), i would rate BBC News at least a 6 or 7.
> Kennedy [...] took care of the Missile problem with the USSR directly by more or less > saying if you place nukes there we will consider it an act of war and respond in kind
actually, it was more like Kennedy said "OK, you've called our bluff. We'll remove our missiles from Turkey like you want, and you give up on putting yours in Cuba. And we'll get our newspapers to report it as if we forced you to back down, and you can get your newspapers to do the same for you".
>But when Castro was in power, he was a threat to the security of the US
don't be ridiculous. Castro was never any kind of a threat to U.S. security. He's just an embarrassment because he kicked out Batista and the other U.S.-backed gangsters in the fifties and took away the playground where U.S. Senators and Congressmen and businessmen could mingle with Mafia figures outside of the public eye. He's also an embarrassment because Cuba actually functions reasonably well as a socialist state, even despite the U.S. trade embargoes and other sanctions, and the assassination attempts and the various failed invasions. Castro never broke no matter what they did to him and to Cuba....that, they'll never forgive.
Worst of all, Castro committed the crime of demonstrating that a South American state could exist without the malicious influence of the U.S. propping up dictators, backing fascists, and overthrowing democratically-elected socialist or socialist-leaning governments as they've done repeatedly for many decades - e.g. in Chile in the 70s or Nicaragua in the 80s, and as they'd like to do to Chavez now.
Matt Hartley writes in his, for want of a better term, "article":
> I hear this argument all the time. How companies trying to make Linux more accessible, > through any means necessary, so long as they abide by the GPL, are working against the > vision of Linux from the beginning. This is asinine.
no, this is a straw-man.
it's also a bizarre tangential rant. he was writing a (fairly lame and light-on) review of little linux-based desktop/laptop devices - and then suddenly goes off on this weird rant to pre-emptively address an entirely unheard criticism followed by an even more bizarre attack on imaginary "crazy whack-job" linux dudes who happen to be trapped in the 1990s for some unexplained reason.
Hey Matt, don't look now but your inferiority complex is showing! it must be way past time for your medication.
> And, even though some of the statements were crudely sexual and accused Ms. Krinsky > of being among 'boobs, liars and crooks,' the statements were held to 'fall into the category > of crude, satirical hyperbole which, while reflecting the immaturity of the speaker, > constitute protected opinion under the First Amendment.'"
the obvious smart-arse thing for Ms Krinsky to do here is to immediately turn around and say "In my opinion, this decision just proves that Californian judges are boobs, liars and crooks".
> So after that point, the original author can't even relicense > code that the original author adds to the project,
nope.
the author of any piece of code retains the copyright on whatever they write (unless they assign it to someone else - like the project's lead developer or the FSF), so they can take their code (both the original code AND anything they've added to it after contributed code is accepted) and re-license it.
they will, of course, have to delete or rewrite or negotiate a license for any code contributed by others.
(actually, even rewriting may be difficult - "clean room" reverse engineering is extremely problematic for free software or any other code where you've already seen the source)
NOTE: this still doesn't allow them to revoke the GPL on previous versions of the program.
of course, this is a good argument for contributors to GPL projects to either retain the copyright in their own name (or assign it to the FSF who they can trust to keep it free) so that projects they contribute to find it very difficult to go closed-source. it's also a good argument for choosing not to contribute to projects that require transfer of copyright for contributed code.
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you know, apologists for the magical free market mythology sound almost exactly like apologists for communism when they say that you can't blame the theory of communism for the distortions and abuses of it in the soviet union and china.
oh, is that what they were doing? silly me...i thought they were lining their own pockets and looting the treasury for themselves and their investors & business partners while they had the opportunity.
your own personal idiosyncratic definition is both irrelevant and wrong.
what the article describes is a trojan, not a virus. it requires the user to manually execute it. such malicious programs have been called trojans (short for "trojan horse", a term that has been in common use for centuries, if not millenia - a reference to the iliad and the cleverness of odysseus in social-engineering the fall of troy) since at least the early 1970s.
the thing that distinguishes a virus from a trojan is that a virus is malware that can self-propagate by misusing the resources of a host that it has already infected - i.e. it can infect other machines *without* requiring a user to take specific action to execute it. it's called a "virus" or "computer virus" as a direct analogy to biological viruses.
to over-extend the analogy:
a cup of hemlock, poison, could be a trojan (esp. if someone was tricked - social engineering - into drinking it), while a disease such as hepatitis is caused by a virus, an infectious biological agent that invades cells and hijacks their reproductive apparatus to create more copies of itself - which then spread out to invade other cells and repeat the process.
BTW, by your erroneous definition, format or mkfs are "viruses" because they can do damage if misused. they're not. they're not even trojans because their intended purpose is to be a useful utility, not to cause harm.
true, the state can't decide those things for individuals.
however, the state can prosecute wife-beaters for assault, rape, murder, and any other crimes they may have committed.
similarly, the state can prosecute spyware vendors for fraud, deception, false-advertising and/or misrepresentation, unauthorised access to a computer, infringement of privacy, and other crimes.
Because "Jane Sixpack" would be sexist.
actually, what it means is that governments have different goals, motives, and priorities than corporations.
private sector insurance has the goal of making a profit. that's it. and one of the ways of increasing profit is to insure only those who don't appear to need it while rejecting those who do. they can afford to eliminate such immediate costs because the long term costs are external to them...they won't have to pay them, because the government and/or the public will.
government insurance has several goals, including: 1. providing an essential service to the public (which is what governments are FOR) and, 2. ultimately, reducing future costs. e.g. it's cheaper to provide universal health cover to everyone so that people get ailments treated early while they're cheap and relatively easy to fix, than it is to wait until their ailment has progressed to near terminal stage.
yeah, same as when sprinkling salt onto eggs, the idea is to use just a little rather than a lot. a few grains of salt improves the flavour while a teaspoon of salt would make it inedible.
vegemite on toast tastes pretty good if made to reasonable proportions. toasted bread, hot melted butter, and salty vegemite. carbs & fat & salt. yum.
it's pretty good on plain bread with loads of butter (not margarine) too.
some people like sickly sweet things like jam. others like savoury/salty things like vegemite. tastes are different.
btw, i've known cats (and dogs) who seem more than willing to rip your arm off to get some of your vegemite toast. they like salt.
no, while most spam is commercial, it doesn't have to be. i.e. "commercial" is NOT one of the defining attributes of spam. "unsolicited" and "bulk" are. spam is not about content, it is about consent.
e.g there is political spam, religious spam, and chain-letter spam.
if your example local school sent their notification to an opt-in list of people who wanted such notifications then it would not be spam. if, however, they sent it to everyone in the neighbourhood (or just to every parent) without first receiving a subscription request or obtaining prior consent then it would be spam.
a teenager who sends a chain letter to your entire domain IS spam, as well as annoying.
the student's email that this article about may or may not be spam. there isn't enough detail in the article to tell for sure.
if she sent it to an existing staff list at the university which ordinarily allows students to email staff then it certainly would not be spam.
if she constructed her own list then it might be spam. in any other context it certainly would be spam, but students DO have an implicit right to contact their teachers which makes it a grey area rather than clear cut.
if she repeatedly sent email to her self-constructed list in order to harrass or cause annoyance or disruption of mail service then it would be mail-bombing (a form of DoS) rather than spam.
> For example, convicted felons on parole cannot vote in my state,
> whereas they can in most others. But the fact is that citizens of
> my state chose that, and those that disagree are free to move and
> live in another state which allows parolees to vote if it's that
> important to them.
is that true for parolees themselves? are they free to move at will to another state if they want?
personally, i think that barring from voting felons is inherently unfair and undemocratic - it makes it possible, AND provides political incentive to disenfranchise large segments of the population by making new classes of felony crimes, e.g. making it illegal to be black, or white, or an atheist, or a socialist, or a roman catholic, or a nazi, or to prefer certain intoxicating drugs over others.
> To what extent can these description without implementation represent Prior Art ?
legally? a written description is certainly adequate prior art.
the classic example is that of the waterbed. which was unable to be patented in 1968 because Robert Heinlein had described it in three of his novels: _Beyond This Horizon_ (1942), _Double Star_ (1956), and _Stranger in a Strange Land_ (1961)
practically? you can patent whatever you want in the US these days. all your idea are belong to US.
it's interesting that they call it 'Digital Manners'.
it's almost as if they want people to think it's just benign reminders and opt-in enforcement of polite social niceties rather than a method for enforcing mandatory external control over all your devices.
> I strongly disagree, why should businesses be allowed to provide support to known criminals?
because, when you strip out all the emotive stuff about spammers - and who doesn't want to see a dead-or-tortured bounty on spammers? - there's an important principle here.
to be a known criminal, you've been caught and convicted. the court has sentenced you to a specific punishment, taking into account the nature and severity of your crime and any previous convictions. now, when you've done your time then you've done your time - and it should be a criminal offence to impose further sanctions than what the court has sentenced.
if it is made illegal to deal with someone who has committed a crime in the past then how the hell do they have ANY CHANCE WHATSOEVER to "go straight"? they're barred from dealing in the legit economy, so that means they have no choice but to get even further involved in the shadow and criminal economies.
sure, repeat offenders should get more severe sentences than first-time or once-off offenders - but that can and should be dealt with in the courts the next time that they are caught offending.
> Businesses have been profiting from their involvement with these sorts,
> I really don't see any reason why they shouldn't shoulder some of the responsibility.
businesses that knowingly profit from (direct or indirect) involvement in crimes are, at the very least, guilty of engaging in criminal conspiracy. there are already adequate laws. they just need to be enforced.
> BTW I'm not racist and certainly the Chinese have the right to economic development.
> I just think it's time they started playing by the rules.
but they ARE playing by "the rules". exactly the same rules that the USA has been playing by for decades, exactly the same rules that the USA has imposed on the rest of the world - "Might Makes Right". the rules suck, and americans are going to start thinking they suck too now that they're on the wrong side of them.
over the next decade or so, americans are about to learn exactly why the rest of the world hates american arrogance.
I can't say i'm happy about that(*), but it is kind of ironic justice.
(*) china as the world's only superpower is bound to be worse than america in that role. there's not much to like about american dominance of the world, but when you have a choice between two evils, it's sensible to chose the lesser evil. not that i, or anyone else, actually has a *choice*...just a personal preference.
since you're talking about GBP, i'd bet that your positive experience with paypal in that situation is entirely due to the fact that you live in a country where paypal is regulated like a bank, a country where paypal can't disclaim responsibility merely by claiming "we're not a bank". paypal fixed the problem because they had to, there were UK laws & regulations on your side that forced them to do the right thing.
if you lived in the US, you'd be screwed. paypal is effectively unregulated there. hell the yanks can't even properly regulate their banks. regulation is unwanted, and there's been a lot of propaganda to make it a dirty word, because "regulation hinders business"....which is much more important than preventing consumers from being ripped off.
like you, i live in a country (AU) where paypal is regulated similarly to banks. after many years of wanting nothing to do with paypal, i finally gave in and got a paypal a/c a few years ago (but only after i got a second debit card - no way was i going to give them direct access to my bank account). now, though, i'm seriously considering cancelling both my paypal and ebay accounts in protest.
not that they'll care one little bit about my protest/boycott - there are way too many stupid sheep in the world who'll just accept ebay/paypal's "rules" without question and without even thinking about it.
actually geeks keep it alive for practical reasons, not nostalgia or image.
there's a difference between emitted light (e.g. reading a screen) and reflected light (e.g. reading a paper page).
with emitted light, it's a bright light shining directly into your eyes, so you want minimum brightness and maximum contrast in order to avoid eyestrain.
white (or gray or yellow or cyan etc) on black works well for that.
for coloured text, yellow or white on very dark blue gives excellent contrast with minimal brightness.
for reflected light such as on printed material, brightness doesnt matter so much but you still want high contrast. it's cheaper to bleach paper white and print in black or other colours than it is to dye the paper black (or blue or pink or whatever) and print in white. brightness isn't as important a factor here, but expense is. hence the default of black print on white paper.
btw, hardly anyone likes green on black, especially bright green. it sucks. people who have black backgrounds in terminal programs aren't doing it for 'nostalgia', they're doing it to minimise the eyestrain and headache-inducing brightness.
I blame Apple. they popularised the idea (but borrowed it from xerox and others) of having bright white backgrounds for documents and screens in the early 80s with the Lisa and then the Mac. and then everyone else copied them because they had got so much else right eith their Human Interface Guidelines that almost everyone assumed they were right about this too. and, of course, it helped that Macs were so much prettier than the PC screens or vt100 etc terminals that were around back then.
> "Queue" is a correct and acceptable variation of "cue".
> It is not usually found in US English, however, so maybe this is why you think it's wrong.
no, it's not. 'cue' and 'queue' are two completely different words.
> You may also see it meaning "to line up for" as in "queue up for", again usually
> in British English (and in places like Australia that were/are part of the British Empire).
yes, that's the meaning of 'queue'. it's used in US English too, possibly after transformation into weird american spelling. IIRC, i've seen some americans spell it as 'que' - not sure if that's standard USian or if it's a mis-spelling even in the US. in geek circles, the British spelling seems to be common.
'cue', on the other hand, refers to a prompt or reminder (as in an actor's cue), or sometimes a clue, or even a 'cue stick' (as in pool or billiards).
google's providing a service to the user doing the search.
users are free to come and go from a site as they please, they are not the property of any web site.
the sooner site owners realise that trying to lock-in users to their site just pisses people off, the better off they (and the users) will be.
yes, you can do *SOME* of the things you can do from a command-line in a GUI.
no, you can not do *ALL* of them.
i use a Mac at work too. i have a Mac and a linux box on my desk at work....and even though the mac is a faster, better machine, i spend 90+% of my time using the linux box. it's easier, and less hassle. and all the glitzy animations and sounds and other annoying crap was easy to turn off. and it doesn't keep popping up stupid questions while i'm trying to work on something or prompting me to update iTunes or some other crap i'm not interested in.
i've been using Apple's GUI interfaces to tools for years, since the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) stuff in the 1980s. you can do some of the basic operations fairly easily with them, and they can serve as useful 'training wheels' (IFF they display the command-line that would be run) for novice users. but they will never and can never be as flexible or as capable as a command-line. there are inherent limitations in the interface.
whether it's 'easy' or not is a subjective judgement but, for me, pointing-and-clicking is far more difficult and tedious and time-consuming than typing.
i'm not and never have been a very visually-oriented person. text and words make sense to me, they require no interpretation, their meaning is self-evident. icons generally don't make sense to me, and most icons which are allegedly easy or intuitive are generally inscrutable to me...i have to spend a lot of time trying to puzzle out WTF they are supposed to mean.
how do you make an icon that "intuitively" represents 'grep'? remember that it has to be visually distinct from every other search tool.
IMO, icons are for the illiterate - and any user-interface that focuses predominantly on icons rather than text is both pandering to and reinforcing/encouraging illiteracy.
...that security, freedom, tweakability, tinkerosity, and community support are false reasons and that the only real reason is that it's fun.
.gif files too. so you just ^C and edit the line like so:
for me, there is no one reason i use linux. all of the above and more are reasons why i use it. and my reasons have grown over the years - my original reasons way back in 1993 was that unix on a cheap home computer was cool and uucp actually worked on linux whereas it sucked badly on OS/2. they're all still REAL reasons, not false ones.
i do agree, however, that using the command line is fun. it's also extremely productive.
one of the interesting comments in the blog was "Saying the GUI has inherent disadvantages simply means that the GUIs that exist are not GOOD enough.". that's simply not true. there are many things which are possible - even easy - from a CLI which are impossible (or would be so complicated to achieve that no one would ever do it) from a GUI.
for example how do you make a GUI do the following:
find all files in the current directory and beneath it which have been modified less than 3 months ago, exclude all jpg and png files, then search them for the string 'foobar'. open all matching files in my favourite editor.
in bash, it's something like this:
vi $( find . -mtime -90 -print0 | egrep -zZi '\.(png|jpe?g)$' | xargs -0r grep -l foobar )
and then you realise you should have excluded
vi $( find . -mtime -90 -print0 | egrep -zZi '\.(gif|png|jpe?g)$' | xargs -0r grep -l foobar )
and that's only a very simple example of what you can do with standard tools and pipes from a CLI. there is no way that that could be implemented in a GUI in a manner that was actually usable, let alone easy to use....and the more complicated the pipeline, the more baroque and unwieldy the GUI would become.
and yes, i do stuff like this all the time. e.g. finding all CGI scripts or PHP pages that send mail or open a connection to a particular database or whatever. it's the computer's job to find files matching my criteria, not mine to manually search every one of them and manually construct a list of files to edit. that's what computers are for, for doing tedious stuff that would otherwise be prone to operator error.
> > i didn't ask for a right-wing propaganda rant
> Sure you did, by framing your objection to the reporter's coverage of the events in political terms.
i didn't. i said that fox news isn't a credible source. here's what i said: "do you have that from any *credible* news source? fox news certainly isn't.".
to deduce that that's a political criticism is to acknowledge the fact that fox news is pure political propaganda.
> [ link to bbc news article ]
compare the two articles. the fox news link was to a blog post which had an agenda to push and made numerous unsubstantiated claims to support its agenda. the article's agenda was to push the idea that venezuela is evil and expansionist, that it's just like iraq and chavez is saddam hussein's ideological brother.
the BBC News article reported the known facts, reported comments from both sides of the dispute, and didn't take a position that supported one side or the other - the tone of the BBC article was neutral and the reporter's personal opinion was not evident, nor could it readily be deduced. i.e. the reporter did as he or she is supposed to do and made an effort to stick to the facts and keep their personal opinion out of it.
> Again - who is more credible to you on this? Who gets a 10? Chavez's own propogandists? Cuba's?
nobody gets a 10. ever.
doubting the accuracy of fox news does not make one a stooge of chavez.
> The events in question are political. If your sympathies lie with Chavez,
> then any reporting that mentions the possibility of his troops trashing the mining
> facilities of a rival neighbor are going to annoy you, I suppose.
that would be because you're an american and have no actual experience of any unbiased news source, or one with any journalistic integrity. to you, news IS all just partisan propaganda, and the only purpose for facts is to use or ignore them depending on whether they support the position that's being argued or not.
no newspaper is perfect, but i'd much rather read one that has a tradition of non-bias and journalistic integrity, rather than one that takes sides and has an agenda to push (no matter what that agenda is - loony left propaganda is no more palatable than right wing fascist propaganda).
i didn't ask for a right-wing propaganda rant, i asked if you had a credible source for the claim you made.
fox news is not a credible source.
pointing out that there are other non-credible sources does not in any way make fox news a credible source. it just states the obvious.
i have no idea whether SF Gate is a credible source or not. i've never read it. by 'credible source', i mean 'internationally recognised credible news service', not just another one of the many US-centric parochial newspapers.
i'd accept BBC news as a reasonably credible source (which is not to say that i would uncritically believe anything and everything they might publish).
by way of illustration: whereas on a scale of 1 to 10 i would give Fox News a credibility score of 1 or 2 (at best - on anything political, they'd rate negative), i would rate BBC News at least a 6 or 7.
do you have that from any *credible* news source? fox news certainly isn't.
> Kennedy [...] took care of the Missile problem with the USSR directly by more or less
> saying if you place nukes there we will consider it an act of war and respond in kind
actually, it was more like Kennedy said "OK, you've called our bluff. We'll remove our missiles from Turkey like you want, and you give up on putting yours in Cuba. And we'll get our newspapers to report it as if we forced you to back down, and you can get your newspapers to do the same for you".
>But when Castro was in power, he was a threat to the security of the US
don't be ridiculous. Castro was never any kind of a threat to U.S. security. He's just an embarrassment because he kicked out Batista and the other U.S.-backed gangsters in the fifties and took away the playground where U.S. Senators and Congressmen and businessmen could mingle with Mafia figures outside of the public eye. He's also an embarrassment because Cuba actually functions reasonably well as a socialist state, even despite the U.S. trade embargoes and other sanctions, and the assassination attempts and the various failed invasions. Castro never broke no matter what they did to him and to Cuba....that, they'll never forgive.
Worst of all, Castro committed the crime of demonstrating that a South American state could exist without the malicious influence of the U.S. propping up dictators, backing fascists, and overthrowing democratically-elected socialist or socialist-leaning governments as they've done repeatedly for many decades - e.g. in Chile in the 70s or Nicaragua in the 80s, and as they'd like to do to Chavez now.
Matt Hartley writes in his, for want of a better term, "article":
> I hear this argument all the time. How companies trying to make Linux more accessible,
> through any means necessary, so long as they abide by the GPL, are working against the
> vision of Linux from the beginning. This is asinine.
no, this is a straw-man.
it's also a bizarre tangential rant. he was writing a (fairly lame and light-on) review of little linux-based desktop/laptop devices - and then suddenly goes off on this weird rant to pre-emptively address an entirely unheard criticism followed by an even more bizarre attack on imaginary "crazy whack-job" linux dudes who happen to be trapped in the 1990s for some unexplained reason.
Hey Matt, don't look now but your inferiority complex is showing! it must be way past time for your medication.
> And, even though some of the statements were crudely sexual and accused Ms. Krinsky
> of being among 'boobs, liars and crooks,' the statements were held to 'fall into the category
> of crude, satirical hyperbole which, while reflecting the immaturity of the speaker,
> constitute protected opinion under the First Amendment.'"
the obvious smart-arse thing for Ms Krinsky to do here is to immediately turn around and say "In my opinion, this decision just proves that Californian judges are boobs, liars and crooks".
> So after that point, the original author can't even relicense
> code that the original author adds to the project,
nope.
the author of any piece of code retains the copyright on whatever they write (unless they assign it to someone else - like the project's lead developer or the FSF), so they can take their code (both the original code AND anything they've added to it after contributed code is accepted) and re-license it.
they will, of course, have to delete or rewrite or negotiate a license for any code contributed by others.
(actually, even rewriting may be difficult - "clean room" reverse engineering is extremely problematic for free software or any other code where you've already seen the source)
NOTE: this still doesn't allow them to revoke the GPL on previous versions of the program.
of course, this is a good argument for contributors to GPL projects to either retain the copyright in their own name (or assign it to the FSF who they can trust to keep it free) so that projects they contribute to find it very difficult to go closed-source. it's also a good argument for choosing not to contribute to projects that require transfer of copyright for contributed code.