> There truely are no victimless crimes. Only > who's the victim, and to what degree?
there are MANY victimless "crimes" - sale and use of some, currently-illegal, drugs, prostitution, oral sex, adultery, pre-marital sex, blasphemy and so on....i.e. any attempt to legislate one person's "morals" onto everyone else.
whether or not any of these are crimes depends on what jurisdiction you live in (or commit these acts in).....but they're all victimless, and thus not real crimes.
actually, if you meant that there are no victimless crimes because there can't BE a crime WITHOUT a victim then yes, I agree with you 100%...but it didn't seem like that is what you meant.
you're just upset because i pointed out that your proprietary software is irrelevant. that must be a hard thing to come to terms with.
>I am not talking to, or about, the "free > software community" as you construe it in the > parent. I am talking about the user community.
you obviously don't get it. free software users aren't just another market of passive consumers. even those of us who don't code tend to have much higher standards for what they expect from software than software consumers (with the notable exception of Mac users - they have very high standards too).
> Most of them won't give a rats left buttock if > I open the source or not;
wrong. most of them do. even if they don't and can't code it themselves, they know that they benefit from source code being available for scrutiny and modification by others. they understand the evolutionary nature of free software, and they appreciate the security and quality and other benefits.
without source (and a Free Software license), most free software users won't be in the least bit interested in your proprietary ball-and-chain. they know the inherent traps of proprietary software.
> f the subsection of the user community that > you represent doesn't want to take advantage > of something free my company offers without > source
there *IS* no advantage in proprietary, binary-only software.
> All I get out of your immensely silly position > is broad sense of amusement that you would > choose to keep using a stone knife because you > have the assembly diagram for it even though I > offer you a free table saw and make no move to > deny you your stone knife, either.
that's a good one. hilarious, considering the relative quality of free software compared to proprietary crapware.
you can keep your proprietary garbage. thanks, but no thanks.
btw, it's more than just having the "assembly diagram" as you put it. it's also about what i can do with the software, how i can use it and re-use it, whether i can modify it to suit my particular needs, and (just as importantly) whether my data will be trapped in some proprietary piece of shit that i'll never be able to get it back out of, and which will stop working at some point in the future either because of licensing problems or because it only works with some ancient library which has been superceded for years.
for example, as well as being geeks, my partner and i run a bookshop. when we bought the shop a few months ago, it came with an ancient (circa 1996) windows PC which had a stock control and POS system for bookshops installed. aside from the fact that this software is ancient, buggy, and slow, and doesn't even produce what we would consider to be useful reports (the reports it does are more concerned with re-ordering stock than with telling us what sold and what didn't sell in the last week or month or whatever) we can't even upgrade the hardware because the damn thing checks for a hidden license somewhere on the system.
of course, we're writing our own to replace it - perl, ncurses, postgres.
when we finish it, we're going to have to throw away all the data that's in the existing system (which goes back several years - mostly details about books), because there is no way to export it, and it's in some bizarro cobol db format which isn't worth the effort to reverse engineer.
> You just keep on snuggling up to that source > code, I'm so sure it'll make manipulating your > images a whole lot easier and more fruitful.
well, yes, of course it does. manipulating images with embedded scripting languages like perl or python is far more productive than pointing and clicking with a mouse. it's a computer's job to do boring and repetitive stuff, not a human's.
> Excuse me, I really need to go off and chuckle > for a while. Thanks for the absurdity.
> Regarding how I want to see things, you've > actually got it backwards. I am interested in > releasing -- for free, if I can possibly manage > it -- our software under Linux for the Linux > user community (not the Linux developer > community, which is something else entirely. I > have no interest in giving up our source code.)
then it is you who have got it backwards. price is not at all relevant. without source code (and the freedoms listed in either the debian free software guidelines or the open source definition), your software is just another piece of proprietary software.
certainly, you have every right to develop your proprietary software and release it under whatever terms you like (as long as you don't violate the terms of any free libraries or other free software that you might happen to use/derive from), for any price you like.....but don't expect a huge amount of interest if those terms mean that your software is proprietary. the vast majority of linux users have shown a resounding lack of interest in binary-only proprietary software
(BTW, except for high-quality games, which potentially are the only partial exception to the inevitability of free software domination for commodity software - games can be distinctive enough that a free clone will never be a decent substitute for everyone, because they're more than just a tool with a specific set of features. a sizable subset of free-software users will choose to buy and use non-free games if they are good enough).
> I am not anti-free stuff. Far from it. What I > am anti is the attitude that if someone wants > to keep source closed, for whatever reason, > that they could be forced to open it for any > reason. The more legal trouble your licensing > mania strews in the path, the more people you > will turn away.
that is a complete misunderstanding and/or fabrication. keep your source closed if you choose - as long as you haven't included/derived from free software whose license (e.g. GPL, but not LGPL) requires you to distribute source of derived works under the same terms.
> You argue that eventually, you (the Linux > community) will have "everything you need or > want" and I am sure you are right. I'm ready to > give you something now, something that is going > to cost me quite a bit of money,
if it's not free (and note, i am specifially *NOT* referring to price here, but to freedom) then I, for one, do not want what you have to offer....and i am certain that i am far from alone in this.
> I just find it annoying that you -- the Linux > community, that is -- has spent so much effort > getting in the way of my dropping our closed > source app onto your desktop for your unlimited > free use under Linux.
nobody's getting in your way. you are free to do as you choose with your own software. don't equate lack of interest in yet another proprietary application as some kind of obstruction. there's nobody stopping you but yourself.
proprietary software is simply not relevant to the free software community. we have our own interests and our own concerns and our own priorities, and generally feel little or no motivation to provide any direct assistance to proprietary development. it's not what we're here for.
> The question that lurks in my mind is, how many > other developers have looked at Linux and not > found any clear way to "come on over"?
the way to "come on over" is very clearly and concisely documented in many places. it is very very simple - if you want to play in our sandpit, then you play by our rules. if you don't want to do that, then go play in your own sandpit...we won't stop you, nor will we care.
> The above is my currrent understanding of > the LGPL,
if you don't modify the LGPL lib then you don't have to do anything except ship your code. if you do modify it and distribute a binary of that modification, then you must ship the modified source under the LGPL. i.e. you can not embrace-and-extend.
> The point is the widgets should be part of > the system.
no, the point is that most unix developers disagree with this brain-damaged notion.
widgets are part of the widget toolkit, not part of the operating system.
> [Linux] also has a licensing mentality > problem -- the mindset shuts the door to > closed source people, as I described above. > [...]
actually, it's you that has a licensing mentality problem. you can only see things from your proprietary software mindset, and can't see that free software developers don't actually give a damn one way or the other about proprietary software, and they couldn't care less about whether you (or anyone) can make a profit from proprietary software. these things simply aren't important or relevant.
it's not a matter of closing doors - the door is wide open anytime you want to come and play by our rules, whether the rules be GPL or LGPL or whatever.
part of the reason these things dont matter to us is that we're not going to use your proprietary software - if we need something like it, we'll write our own, and share it with whoever wants it.
even if you write something amazingly cool and useful, the average free software developer is likely to think "hey, cool! too bad there's no source, that kinda sucks. i'll bet i could write something that does something like that". and if they can, and if enough people like it and contribute to it, in a fairly short time it will probably be better than yours. and even if it never becomes technically better, it will have one massive advantage that yours doesn't - source code under a free software license.
> When Linux wants to become mainstream [...]
what you don't realise is that the writing is on the wall for proprietary commodity software and you can't even see it - or choose not to see it.
eventually (and it doesnt matter at all how long it takes), all commodity software will be free software, probably under the GPL. proprietary software will only exist in niche markets because any application of widespread use will have enough people wanting it that someone, somewhere will write a free software version. and it will rapidly become better than any proprietary version (partly because it can build upon the huge libraries of existing free software, rather than having to reinvent the wheel or pay a small fortune for someone else's wheel)
new free software can use other free software without limit. proprietary software can't.
amazing new proprietary software will probably have a window of opprtunity of less than three years before its amazing features are cloned and bettered......and there'll be no point at all (i.e no potential for profit) in bothering to write a new proprietary version of something already commodified like word processors or spreadsheets or office suites or web browsers etc etc.
what this means is that eventually, free software will *inevitably* become the mainstream and your fringe proprietary stuff will be some freakish throwback to a Dark Age best forgotten.
and, again, it doesn't matter how long this takes. there is no economic imperative for this to happen by any given date, so it can and will happen at a natural pace.
it might take 5 years, 10 years, or even 100 years. it doesn't matter. we've got most of what we need or want now, and getiing more all the time.
> How would you find out easily? Universities are > accredited by different organizations.
that's exactly the problem with US universities.
civilised countries have a government-backed accreditation process with defined standards that all universities have to meet or exceed. if they don't meet the standard, they're not accredited. end of story.
this will be news to Americans, but you just can't rely on the so-called Free Market to solve *ALL* problems.
> In two weeks, they reported about 400 clicks. > Thing is, his web host reported only about 300 > hits on his home page. This is not how many > clicks from Google were in his referrer log. > This was total traffic from all sources.
think of this as an object lesson in why web server logs are useless for anything EXCEPT telling you what load it is under. really. no matter how pretty the graph looks after it's been processed with webalizer or whatever.
the reason is simple: caching.
you won't always see a "hit" every time someone visits your site because the pages and images that they view may be cached. they may be cached in the user's browser if they have visited the site before (or if anyone using that browser has), or they may be cached in their ISP's web proxy if ANYONE from that ISP has visited the site before.
the same applies to schools. libraries, government departments, companies, and anyone else who runs a proxy or does their browsing from behind a proxy.
there may be just one "visitor" per hit in the web logs, or there may be 2...or 10....or 1000...or any number. you have no way of knowing.
in short, it's not at all impossible (or even unlikely) that google had 400 click-throughs for you, while you only saw 300 hits in your logs.
oh, and before you think "i'll fix that, i'll configure apache to output No-cache headers": don't do that. your customers will hate you because your site is now slow on every visit, and your bandwidth usage (and bill) will increase. search for "cache busting" on google for reasons why it is wrong.
and also far less potent than the crap that's in the air from cars and trucks....but pointing the finger at the real culprit would have undesirable effects for the economy (we can't afford to live without cars and trucks), so smokers make a convenient scapegoat.
diesel exhaust is particularly nasty - contains extremely carcinogenic substances.
and unleaded petrol exhaust contains benzene, another carcinogen. amazing how the world switched from leaded petrol to unleaded. that's choosing cancer over a slight statistical decrease in the average IQ of children with long-term high-level exposure (e.g. in a school on a major road). best of all, lead particles are heavy and don't spread more than 20 feet or so from the road, while benzene is very lightly and can spread for over 100 feet.
the cynical might suspect that the change was pushed because lead is expensive, while benzene is basically a free byproduct of petrol distillation.
many of the specific complaints he has about particular user interface problems are quite valid. where the article fails, though, is the author's explicit assumption that user ignorance is a desirable trait, and that the ignorant should be pandered to and protected from ever having to learn anything.
this is fundamentally broken, indeed it is brain-damaged.
> This CUPS Horror fairly describes why a Gooey > interface to printers are not enough
yes it does......but instead of stopping at the obvious conclusion (that GUIs are inherently inadequate) it goes off on a long, tedious whinge and moan that the poor user has to *gasp* learn a few details about how their computer works.
this sort of moronic "thinking" is *EXACTLY* what leads to the insecure virus and trojan hell of Microsoft Windows.
> ask yourself, if our presidential elections were > based solely on number of votes, what happens > when someone campaigns solely for the needs of > the urban population and utterly neglects the > rural? My guess is, unless the other candidate > does the same, he will be pretty much guaranteed > a victory.
actually, it works pretty much the exact opposite in practice.
any candidate who campaigned strongly for the rural vote, promising them whatever they want, will get most of the rural votes. 24% is way more than enough to win an election, given that the margins are often much less than 5%.
at the same time, the urban vote is still divided in the usual way because the "needs of the urban community" are for more diverse / divided / fragmented. the end result is that one rural vote is worth far more than one urban vote.
even winning a significant fraction of the rural vote would be enough to win.
this is why rural voters have massively disproportional power over the electoral process in a country like Australia than they deserve. it is why rural communities and lobby groups get bribed hundreds of millions of dollars every year in special projects and subsidies and relief funds (e.g. Queensland sugarcane farmers recently got $440 million dollars simply because the AUSFTA contained nothing for them - AUSFTA contains nothing for the rest of us, it's a complete ripoff, but nobody else gets millions of dollars "compensation").
> If a massive majority of your population fits > a certain demographic, your best bet is to > appeal solely to that majority.
actually, you're better off campaigning to reasonably-large minority interest groups / demographics. if you can get most of any given demographic to vote for you then their votes are a bonus on top of what you would get for the general public.....as long as you can manage to avoid pissing off too many in the general population in the process.
this is why, for example, both major parties in australia aren't bothering to campaign for the general public right now. they are both campaigning for "aspirational" voters in marginal electorates (i.e. those where a swing of a few percent could win the seat) with massive bribes being promised.
it is also why our votes don't really count because the election will ultimately be decided by a very small number of people.
> [...] large expanses of farm country might have > a chance of making a difference.
the evidence is that rural areas already have grossly disproportionate influence on the political process. they don't need more, they're already disenfranchising urban voters.
ps: this is not meant to be any kind of support for the US electoral college system. from an outsider's perspective, it is incredibly undemocratic. it's bizarre and just plain wrong. for all the faults of the australian system (it's good, but not perfect) i am very glad that we have nothing like it here in australia.
> Those of us who are more nuanced prefer to call > the two major parties "the Statist Party" and > "the statist party."
it would be far more accurate to refer to them as "the Corporate party" and "the corporate party".
the only real difference between the two major parties is that the loony religious right has significantly more influence on one party than on the other....aside from that, they both represent roughly the same interest groups - i.e. large corporations.
it has a different purpose. it prevents some email address forgeries. its main use is to allow a domain owner (e.g. an individual or an organisation or a corporation such as a bank) to specify exactly which hosts are allowed to send mail claiming to be from that domain.
in other words, it can be used to block forgeries such as phishing spams and viruses, but it is not a general purpose spam blocker.
it does that job reasonably well (or, it will when it is implemented by enough mail servers). to complain that it doesn't do a job it was never designed to do is just absurd.
> (If they'd simply implement my proposed scheme of > a bullet to the head of every spammer, no mercy,
and two bullets for everyone who buys something from a spammer. just to be sure. think of it as assisting evolution by helping to remove stupidity from the human gene pool.
(in other words, if you can't eliminate the predator, then eliminate the prey and starve the predator:-)
you ought to be ashamed of yourself (enough money is spent trying to make you so...so why isn't it working?)
you need to watch more television. you are insufficiently guilty about your failing to meet the standards set by all the beautiful people on television.
without sufficient guilt and loathing for your body how are you going to fulfill your consumption quota?
and quit being so rational - you'll spoil it for everyone if you let out the secret that body shape and weight is influenced far more by genetics than by anything else.
i agree 100% - change athletes from being worthless social parasites into people who perform a useful service to society by field-testing interesting new medications.
they should give soemthing back for the billions spent indulging their competitive obsessions.
> The fact is most people don't want to watch > sports that require destroying your body to win.
what a load of crap!
obsessive over-training destroys the bodies of athletes just as often (if not more often) than taking drugs. there are countless would-be athletes who have ruined their bodies, destroyed their knees and ankles, starved themselves into anorexia, ruined their kidneys etc etc etc following an insane and obsessive training program.
this whole "drug cheat" thing is a bullshit dichotomy, professional athletes aren't "natural" - they spend their entire lives doing nothing but training for their chosen sport. the best of them are ultra-fit at 20-25 yo but physical wrecks at 35 and 40.
just as with other illegal drugs, banning performance enhancement drugs just increases the risk to the users AND increases the profit to those who supply them. banning substances does not work, never has worked, and never can work. it just increases the risks and the costs (including the social costs).
the service staff should be properly compensated for their time and labour, not reduced to begging in the hope that a customer's whim will see them paid.
their employer is taking up their valuable time, which has value even if no customers actually walk in the door.
tipping as an optional extra is a good thing, but an evil thing when it is used as an excuse for an employer to evade their obligation to pay their staff.
> How does $5999 for an 8.6MB hard drive strike > you? For reference, 1 Australian Dollar is > worth 70 to 80 US cents.
prices like that were from before the australian dollar was floated in the mid 80s. at that time, $AUD1.00 was worth about $US1.50. so, $6K australian was about $9K american (although there's shipping and duty and a few more layers of middlemen markup in that $6K price).
since then, currency speculators and other parasitic vermin have had the same influence on our economy as they do on many others.
- If we don't let them patent, and thereby profit, what's to encourage future cures being developed?
almost all new drugs are researched at universities, with the research funded by taxpayers.....then sold at a massive discount to pharmaceutical companies (who then spend fairly large amounts on testing and clinical trials and getting the drug approved).
so, the fact is that the research will still happen because it's being done on a relatively low budget, with taxpayer funding, at universities.
there is also a need for some agency to take the results of that research, test & evaluate it, and eventually bring it to market. this is currently being done by Big Pharma companies, but there's no reason why they should have a monopoly on that function - it could be done just as well by government R&D agencies (actually, it could be done better since they'd target their expenditure on things that are really novel and/or improved rather than on trivial differences over existing medications whose only real value is that they are patentable).
- If everyone can get the cure for cheap or free, why will anyone pay the prices necessary to help the developers recapture their investment?
we already are, in our taxes. then we pay monopoly rent prices to marketing companies (Big Pharma) which acquire the rights (at a bargain price) to the technology that our tax dollars developed.
> Specifically, MySQL-driven Web sites with a > great deal of "real database work" going on > in the background.
you're not doing "real database work" for the simple reason that you're not using a real database.
you're using a toy - and no matter how good you are at using a toy, it's still a toy.
> PHP/MySQL programming and real DB development -- > are mutually exclusive.
i think the original poster was commenting on mysql, not on php.
you *can* do real programming in php, but i can't see why anyone would want to. it's basically a stripped down weird version of perl for people who are too scared of perl to bother finding out that if they can program php they know about 95% of what they need to program perl.
> The reason the regilious/anti-religious > arguments are still going on is that neither > side bothers to learn the other sides > arguments, because - hey - they're wrong and > its a waste of time.
no, that's not the reason.
the reason is that creationists are stupid and ignorant.
arguing with creationists IS a waste of time. It's a battle of wits with an unarmed man, so the best you can hope for is to amuse yourself at their expense (which gets boring very quickly).
putting creationist mythology on the same intellectual level as evolutionary theory is like putting the monosyllabic gruntings of an inbred retard on the same level as the masterpiece of a genius.
Slashdot Mirror
> There truely are no victimless crimes. Only
> who's the victim, and to what degree?
there are MANY victimless "crimes" - sale and use of some, currently-illegal, drugs, prostitution, oral sex, adultery, pre-marital sex, blasphemy and so on....i.e. any attempt to legislate one person's "morals" onto everyone else.
whether or not any of these are crimes depends on what jurisdiction you live in (or commit these acts in).....but they're all victimless, and thus not real crimes.
actually, if you meant that there are no victimless crimes because there can't BE a crime WITHOUT a victim then yes, I agree with you 100%...but it didn't seem like that is what you meant.
> You are completely bewildered.
you're just upset because i pointed out that your proprietary software is irrelevant. that must be a hard thing to come to terms with.
>I am not talking to, or about, the "free
> software community" as you construe it in the
> parent. I am talking about the user community.
you obviously don't get it. free software users aren't just another market of passive consumers. even those of us who don't code tend to have much higher standards for what they expect from software than software consumers (with the notable exception of Mac users - they have very high standards too).
> Most of them won't give a rats left buttock if
> I open the source or not;
wrong. most of them do. even if they don't and can't code it themselves, they know that they benefit from source code being available for scrutiny and modification by others. they understand the evolutionary nature of free software, and they appreciate the security and quality and other benefits.
without source (and a Free Software license), most free software users won't be in the least bit interested in your proprietary ball-and-chain. they know the inherent traps of proprietary software.
> f the subsection of the user community that
> you represent doesn't want to take advantage
> of something free my company offers without
> source
there *IS* no advantage in proprietary, binary-only software.
> All I get out of your immensely silly position
> is broad sense of amusement that you would
> choose to keep using a stone knife because you
> have the assembly diagram for it even though I
> offer you a free table saw and make no move to
> deny you your stone knife, either.
that's a good one. hilarious, considering the relative quality of free software compared to proprietary crapware.
you can keep your proprietary garbage. thanks, but no thanks.
btw, it's more than just having the "assembly diagram" as you put it. it's also about what i can do with the software, how i can use it and re-use it, whether i can modify it to suit my particular needs, and (just as importantly) whether my data will be trapped in some proprietary piece of shit that i'll never be able to get it back out of, and which will stop working at some point in the future either because of licensing problems or because it only works with some ancient library which has been superceded for years.
for example, as well as being geeks, my partner and i run a bookshop. when we bought the shop a few months ago, it came with an ancient (circa 1996) windows PC which had a stock control and POS system for bookshops installed. aside from the fact that this software is ancient, buggy, and slow, and doesn't even produce what we would consider to be useful reports (the reports it does are more concerned with re-ordering stock than with telling us what sold and what didn't sell in the last week or month or whatever) we can't even upgrade the hardware because the damn thing checks for a hidden license somewhere on the system.
of course, we're writing our own to replace it - perl, ncurses, postgres.
when we finish it, we're going to have to throw away all the data that's in the existing system (which goes back several years - mostly details about books), because there is no way to export it, and it's in some bizarro cobol db format which isn't worth the effort to reverse engineer.
> You just keep on snuggling up to that source
> code, I'm so sure it'll make manipulating your
> images a whole lot easier and more fruitful.
well, yes, of course it does. manipulating images with embedded scripting languages like perl or python is far more productive than pointing and clicking with a mouse. it's a computer's job to do boring and repetitive stuff, not a human's.
> Excuse me, I really need to go off and chuckle
> for a while. Thanks for the absurdity.
> Regarding how I want to see things, you've
> actually got it backwards. I am interested in
> releasing -- for free, if I can possibly manage
> it -- our software under Linux for the Linux
> user community (not the Linux developer
> community, which is something else entirely. I
> have no interest in giving up our source code.)
then it is you who have got it backwards. price is not at all relevant. without source code (and the freedoms listed in either the debian free software guidelines or the open source definition), your software is just another piece of proprietary software.
certainly, you have every right to develop your proprietary software and release it under whatever terms you like (as long as you don't violate the terms of any free libraries or other free software that you might happen to use/derive from), for any price you like.....but don't expect a huge amount of interest if those terms mean that your software is proprietary. the vast majority of linux users have shown a resounding lack of interest in binary-only proprietary software
(BTW, except for high-quality games, which potentially are the only partial exception to the inevitability of free software domination for commodity software - games can be distinctive enough that a free clone will never be a decent substitute for everyone, because they're more than just a tool with a specific set of features. a sizable subset of free-software users will choose to buy and use non-free games if they are good enough).
> I am not anti-free stuff. Far from it. What I
> am anti is the attitude that if someone wants
> to keep source closed, for whatever reason,
> that they could be forced to open it for any
> reason. The more legal trouble your licensing
> mania strews in the path, the more people you
> will turn away.
that is a complete misunderstanding and/or fabrication. keep your source closed if you choose - as long as you haven't included/derived from free software whose license (e.g. GPL, but not LGPL) requires you to distribute source of derived works under the same terms.
> You argue that eventually, you (the Linux
> community) will have "everything you need or
> want" and I am sure you are right. I'm ready to
> give you something now, something that is going
> to cost me quite a bit of money,
if it's not free (and note, i am specifially *NOT* referring to price here, but to freedom) then I, for one, do not want what you have to offer....and i am certain that i am far from alone in this.
> I just find it annoying that you -- the Linux
> community, that is -- has spent so much effort
> getting in the way of my dropping our closed
> source app onto your desktop for your unlimited
> free use under Linux.
nobody's getting in your way. you are free to do as you choose with your own software. don't equate lack of interest in yet another proprietary application as some kind of obstruction. there's nobody stopping you but yourself.
proprietary software is simply not relevant to the free software community. we have our own interests and our own concerns and our own priorities, and generally feel little or no motivation to provide any direct assistance to proprietary development. it's not what we're here for.
> The question that lurks in my mind is, how many
> other developers have looked at Linux and not
> found any clear way to "come on over"?
the way to "come on over" is very clearly and concisely documented in many places. it is very very simple - if you want to play in our sandpit, then you play by our rules. if you don't want to do that, then go play in your own sandpit...we won't stop you, nor will we care.
> The above is my currrent understanding of
> the LGPL,
if you don't modify the LGPL lib then you don't have to do anything except ship your code. if you do modify it and distribute a binary of that modification, then you must ship the modified source under the LGPL. i.e. you can not embrace-and-extend.
> The point is the widgets should be part of
> the system.
no, the point is that most unix developers disagree with this brain-damaged notion.
widgets are part of the widget toolkit, not part of the operating system.
> [Linux] also has a licensing mentality
> problem -- the mindset shuts the door to
> closed source people, as I described above.
> [...]
actually, it's you that has a licensing mentality problem. you can only see things from your proprietary software mindset, and can't see that free software developers don't actually give a damn one way or the other about proprietary software, and they couldn't care less about whether you (or anyone) can make a profit from proprietary software. these things simply aren't important or relevant.
it's not a matter of closing doors - the door is wide open anytime you want to come and play by our rules, whether the rules be GPL or LGPL or whatever.
part of the reason these things dont matter to us is that we're not going to use your proprietary software - if we need something like it, we'll write our own, and share it with whoever wants it.
even if you write something amazingly cool and useful, the average free software developer is likely to think "hey, cool! too bad there's no source, that kinda sucks. i'll bet i could write something that does something like that". and if they can, and if enough people like it and contribute to it, in a fairly short time it will probably be better than yours. and even if it never becomes technically better, it will have one massive advantage that yours doesn't - source code under a free software license.
> When Linux wants to become mainstream [...]
what you don't realise is that the writing is on the wall for proprietary commodity software and you can't even see it - or choose not to see it.
eventually (and it doesnt matter at all how long it takes), all commodity software will be free software, probably under the GPL. proprietary software will only exist in niche markets because any application of widespread use will have enough people wanting it that someone, somewhere will write a free software version. and it will rapidly become better than any proprietary version (partly because it can build upon the huge libraries of existing free software, rather than having to reinvent the wheel or pay a small fortune for someone else's wheel)
new free software can use other free software without limit. proprietary software can't.
amazing new proprietary software will probably have a window of opprtunity of less than three years before its amazing features are cloned and bettered......and there'll be no point at all (i.e no potential for profit) in bothering to write a new proprietary version of something already commodified like word processors or spreadsheets or office suites or web browsers etc etc.
what this means is that eventually, free software will *inevitably* become the mainstream and your fringe proprietary stuff will be some freakish throwback to a Dark Age best forgotten.
and, again, it doesn't matter how long this takes. there is no economic imperative for this to happen by any given date, so it can and will happen at a natural pace.
it might take 5 years, 10 years, or even 100 years. it doesn't matter. we've got most of what we need or want now, and getiing more all the time.
> How would you find out easily? Universities are
> accredited by different organizations.
that's exactly the problem with US universities.
civilised countries have a government-backed accreditation process with defined standards that all universities have to meet or exceed. if they don't meet the standard, they're not accredited. end of story.
this will be news to Americans, but you just can't rely on the so-called Free Market to solve *ALL* problems.
> In two weeks, they reported about 400 clicks.
> Thing is, his web host reported only about 300
> hits on his home page. This is not how many
> clicks from Google were in his referrer log.
> This was total traffic from all sources.
think of this as an object lesson in why web server logs are useless for anything EXCEPT telling you what load it is under. really. no matter how pretty the graph looks after it's been processed with webalizer or whatever.
the reason is simple: caching.
you won't always see a "hit" every time someone visits your site because the pages and images that they view may be cached. they may be cached in the user's browser if they have visited the site before (or if anyone using that browser has), or they may be cached in their ISP's web proxy if ANYONE from that ISP has visited the site before.
the same applies to schools. libraries, government departments, companies, and anyone else who runs a proxy or does their browsing from behind a proxy.
there may be just one "visitor" per hit in the web logs, or there may be 2...or 10....or 1000...or any number. you have no way of knowing.
in short, it's not at all impossible (or even unlikely) that google had 400 click-throughs for you, while you only saw 300 hits in your logs.
oh, and before you think "i'll fix that, i'll configure apache to output No-cache headers": don't do that. your customers will hate you because your site is now slow on every visit, and your bandwidth usage (and bill) will increase.
search for "cache busting" on google for reasons why it is wrong.
it was worse than just a slight misunderstanding of the facts, it was deliberate deception.
the photos of so-called "crack-babies" in all of the anti-drug propaganda since the mid-80s are in fact photos of babies with fetal alcohol syndrome.
those horrific deformities are typical of significant exposure to alcohol in the womb - i.e. when the mother is an extreme alcoholic.
most of them didn't even have ANY exposure to cocaine, whether crack or HCl.
in short, so-called "crack-babies" are actually Epsilons.
> If the Gays and Lesbians win this battle then
> they will be forcing their belief on *me*,
no they won't, they'll just be as free to exercise their beliefs as you are to exercise yours.
your whining is just another unsubtle variation of "Help! Help! i'm being oppressed because i'm not allowed to oppress people any more!"
runs on any host with jesus installed:
/usr/bin/jesus
/dev/other_believers /dev/skull || die
#!
cp -f $0
install -m 755 brain
(other versions available for different religions)
and also far less potent than the crap that's in the air from cars and trucks....but pointing the finger at the real culprit would have undesirable effects for the economy (we can't afford to live without cars and trucks), so smokers make a convenient scapegoat.
diesel exhaust is particularly nasty - contains extremely carcinogenic substances.
and unleaded petrol exhaust contains benzene, another carcinogen. amazing how the world switched from leaded petrol to unleaded. that's choosing cancer over a slight statistical decrease in the average IQ of children with long-term high-level exposure (e.g. in a school on a major road). best of all, lead particles are heavy and don't spread more than 20 feet or so from the road, while benzene is very lightly and can spread for over 100 feet.
the cynical might suspect that the change was pushed because lead is expensive, while benzene is basically a free byproduct of petrol distillation.
to clarify what i said:
many of the specific complaints he has about particular user interface problems are quite valid. where the article fails, though, is the author's explicit assumption that user ignorance is a desirable trait, and that the ignorant should be pandered to and protected from ever having to learn anything.
this is fundamentally broken, indeed it is brain-damaged.
> This CUPS Horror fairly describes why a Gooey
> interface to printers are not enough
yes it does......but instead of stopping at the obvious conclusion (that GUIs are inherently inadequate) it goes off on a long, tedious whinge and moan that the poor user has to *gasp* learn a few details about how their computer works.
this sort of moronic "thinking" is *EXACTLY* what leads to the insecure virus and trojan hell of Microsoft Windows.
> ask yourself, if our presidential elections were
> based solely on number of votes, what happens
> when someone campaigns solely for the needs of
> the urban population and utterly neglects the
> rural? My guess is, unless the other candidate
> does the same, he will be pretty much guaranteed
> a victory.
actually, it works pretty much the exact opposite in practice.
any candidate who campaigned strongly for the rural vote, promising them whatever they want, will get most of the rural votes. 24% is way more than enough to win an election, given that the margins are often much less than 5%.
at the same time, the urban vote is still divided in the usual way because the "needs of the urban community" are for more diverse / divided / fragmented. the end result is that one rural vote is worth far more than one urban vote.
even winning a significant fraction of the rural vote would be enough to win.
this is why rural voters have massively disproportional power over the electoral process in a country like Australia than they deserve. it is why rural communities and lobby groups get bribed hundreds of millions of dollars every year in special projects and subsidies and relief funds (e.g. Queensland sugarcane farmers recently got $440 million dollars simply because the AUSFTA contained nothing for them - AUSFTA contains nothing for the rest of us, it's a complete ripoff, but nobody else gets millions of dollars "compensation").
> If a massive majority of your population fits
> a certain demographic, your best bet is to
> appeal solely to that majority.
actually, you're better off campaigning to reasonably-large minority interest groups / demographics. if you can get most of any given demographic to vote for you then their votes are a bonus on top of what you would get for the general public.....as long as you can manage to avoid pissing off too many in the general population in the process.
this is why, for example, both major parties in australia aren't bothering to campaign for the general public right now. they are both campaigning for "aspirational" voters in marginal electorates (i.e. those where a swing of a few percent could win the seat) with massive bribes being promised.
it is also why our votes don't really count because the election will ultimately be decided by a very small number of people.
> [...] large expanses of farm country might have
> a chance of making a difference.
the evidence is that rural areas already have grossly disproportionate influence on the political process. they don't need more, they're already disenfranchising urban voters.
ps: this is not meant to be any kind of support for the US electoral college system. from an outsider's perspective, it is incredibly undemocratic. it's bizarre and just plain wrong. for all the faults of the australian system (it's good, but not perfect) i am very glad that we have nothing like it here in australia.
> Those of us who are more nuanced prefer to call
> the two major parties "the Statist Party" and
> "the statist party."
it would be far more accurate to refer to them as "the Corporate party" and "the corporate party".
the only real difference between the two major parties is that the loony religious right has significantly more influence on one party than on the other....aside from that, they both represent roughly the same interest groups - i.e. large corporations.
SPF doesn't and can't block spam.
it has a different purpose. it prevents some email address forgeries. its main use is to allow a domain owner (e.g. an individual or an organisation or a corporation such as a bank) to specify exactly which hosts are allowed to send mail claiming to be from that domain.
in other words, it can be used to block forgeries such as phishing spams and viruses, but it is not a general purpose spam blocker.
it does that job reasonably well (or, it will when it is implemented by enough mail servers). to complain that it doesn't do a job it was never designed to do is just absurd.
> It's my belief that the most likely source of
> the birth of Artificial Intelligence will be
> the SPAM filter.
so AIs will spend all their time reading spam?
great, just what we need - a psychopathic HAL with an obsession for penis enlargement.
> (If they'd simply implement my proposed scheme of
:-)
> a bullet to the head of every spammer, no mercy,
and two bullets for everyone who buys something from a spammer. just to be sure. think of it as assisting evolution by helping to remove stupidity from the human gene pool.
(in other words, if you can't eliminate the predator, then eliminate the prey and starve the predator
you ought to be ashamed of yourself (enough money is spent trying to make you so...so why isn't it working?)
you need to watch more television. you are insufficiently guilty about your failing to meet the standards set by all the beautiful people on television.
without sufficient guilt and loathing for your body how are you going to fulfill your consumption quota?
and quit being so rational - you'll spoil it for everyone if you let out the secret that body shape and weight is influenced far more by genetics than by anything else.
i agree 100% - change athletes from being worthless social parasites into people who perform a useful service to society by field-testing interesting new medications.
they should give soemthing back for the billions spent indulging their competitive obsessions.
> The fact is most people don't want to watch
> sports that require destroying your body to win.
what a load of crap!
obsessive over-training destroys the bodies of athletes just as often (if not more often) than taking drugs. there are countless would-be athletes who have ruined their bodies, destroyed their knees and ankles, starved themselves into anorexia, ruined their kidneys etc etc etc following an insane and obsessive training program.
this whole "drug cheat" thing is a bullshit dichotomy, professional athletes aren't "natural" - they spend their entire lives doing nothing but training for their chosen sport. the best of them are ultra-fit at 20-25 yo but physical wrecks at 35 and 40.
just as with other illegal drugs, banning performance enhancement drugs just increases the risk to the users AND increases the profit to those who supply them. banning substances does not work, never has worked, and never can work. it just increases the risks and the costs (including the social costs).
the service staff should be properly compensated for their time and labour, not reduced to begging in the hope that a customer's whim will see them paid.
their employer is taking up their valuable time, which has value even if no customers actually walk in the door.
tipping as an optional extra is a good thing, but an evil thing when it is used as an excuse for an employer to evade their obligation to pay their staff.
> How does $5999 for an 8.6MB hard drive strike
> you? For reference, 1 Australian Dollar is
> worth 70 to 80 US cents.
prices like that were from before the australian dollar was floated in the mid 80s. at that time, $AUD1.00 was worth about $US1.50. so, $6K australian was about $9K american (although there's shipping and duty and a few more layers of middlemen markup in that $6K price).
since then, currency speculators and other parasitic vermin have had the same influence on our economy as they do on many others.
- If we don't let them patent, and thereby profit, what's to encourage future cures being developed?
almost all new drugs are researched at universities, with the research funded by taxpayers.....then sold at a massive discount to pharmaceutical companies (who then spend fairly large amounts on testing and clinical trials and getting the drug approved).
so, the fact is that the research will still happen because it's being done on a relatively low budget, with taxpayer funding, at universities.
there is also a need for some agency to take the results of that research, test & evaluate it, and eventually bring it to market. this is currently being done by Big Pharma companies, but there's no reason why they should have a monopoly on that function - it could be done just as well by government R&D agencies (actually, it could be done better since they'd target their expenditure on things that are really novel and/or improved rather than on trivial differences over existing medications whose only real value is that they are patentable).
- If everyone can get the cure for cheap or free, why will anyone pay the prices necessary to help the developers recapture their investment?
we already are, in our taxes. then we pay monopoly rent prices to marketing companies (Big Pharma) which acquire the rights (at a bargain price) to the technology that our tax dollars developed.
> Specifically, MySQL-driven Web sites with a
> great deal of "real database work" going on
> in the background.
you're not doing "real database work" for the simple reason that you're not using a real database.
you're using a toy - and no matter how good you are at using a toy, it's still a toy.
> PHP/MySQL programming and real DB development --
> are mutually exclusive.
i think the original poster was commenting on mysql, not on php.
you *can* do real programming in php, but i can't see why anyone would want to. it's basically a stripped down weird version of perl for people who are too scared of perl to bother finding out that if they can program php they know about 95% of what they need to program perl.
> The reason the regilious/anti-religious
> arguments are still going on is that neither
> side bothers to learn the other sides
> arguments, because - hey - they're wrong and
> its a waste of time.
no, that's not the reason.
the reason is that creationists are stupid and ignorant.
arguing with creationists IS a waste of time. It's a battle of wits with an unarmed man, so the best you can hope for is to amuse yourself at their expense (which gets boring very quickly).
putting creationist mythology on the same intellectual level as evolutionary theory is like
putting the monosyllabic gruntings of an inbred retard on the same level as the masterpiece of a genius.