If you think the "official news" is objective, then you've never been on site at a news happening and then later seen it reported... TV, newspaper, they slant equally, though they prefer different techniques.
Slashdot is, at least, blatant about presenting slanted news. I've been on site where NBC (this was prior to MSNBC) was recording for rebroadcast. When I later saw the report it took a significant amount of time (about half the footage) before I finally realized what they were "reporting" on. It was marvelously jiggered, by careful choice of shots.
I do think that THAT news was only "edited" to be more interesting, and not for any political purpose, but in more political stories the means of slanting what was presented were obvious.
The "official news" should be called "Pravda". (A word meaning "the official word" rather than, as occasionally translated, "the truth".) Or perhaps "Maat". (An antique Egyptian word with, I believe, the same meaning.) (Another translation of Pravda which would apply to current US news it "the party line", though the word "party" would need some creative interpretation...but then so does "official" in my term "official news".)
If it isn't reasonable, be quite skeptical about believing that it happened. E.g.: Why did the Luddites smash the machines? Look it up. Popular myth got it totally wrong. They just didn't want to starve. And the brouhaha about "give us back our 21 days" when the calendar was changed from Julian to Gregorian was also reasonable. The people were being charged an extra 2/3 of a month rent...and many of them were living at a subsistence level already.
Don't believe the news media. They lie on purpose...sometimes harmlessly, and sometimes not.
Ada has two main problems (probably linked). The lack of garbage collection and the inconvenience of using variable length strings. In most other respects I rate it a superior language. (Not the best, but considerably better than C++.)
C and C++ suffer from pointers and macros. They make "clever" code unmaintainable. And that the default mechanism for addressing an array should be via a pointer is atrocious! (The language doesn't require it, but several early dialects severely penalized the use of array indexing. So a history developed.) That said, with sufficient discipline it's now quite possible to write good maintainable code in C and C++. But, like Ada, it doesn't have garbage collection. (Wait for C++ 2010?) Still, the wild use of pointers and macros are much worse than just lacking a garbage collector.
Java is a language I keep coming back to and running away screaming from. It's an excellent basic language design, but it's LIBRARIES!!! They're extensive and many of them are nice, but other have vile user interfaces. And needing a chain of three libraries, each declared with a separate variable, to write a file in the "proper manner", UGH!!
Eiffel is a language I had great hopes for. Had. It had excellent mechanisms for dealing with multiple inheritance. It was clean, elegant, sweet. It devolved into only two variants. One by the original language designer, who wanted to maintain sole authorship of the design, and the other by a group at a French University, who declared that their version was experimental, and came out with a new design that broke nearly all existing libraries (and there weren't that many). So the language is not progressing well. I may be less functional now than it was a decade ago. (I used to use SmallEiffel, which has been renamed SmartEiffel and made incompatible.)
Python and Ruby are rather nice, but slow compared to the other languages that I been discussing. (In fact they're slow compared to Perl.)
Currently I use Python if speed isn't needed, and I'm keeping an eye on D (Digital Mars D) for when I need speed. It's not quite there yet (libraries more than any other reason), but if it can avoid the Java-ization of its libraries, then it looks like a winner.
Frequently the simplicity is due to more complex system libraries. Nothing wrong with that, but it has costs along with its benefits.
System libraries will generally be faster than interpreted solutions. But they can easily introduce version dependencies. OTOH, you can't really avoid them. The Perl interpreter itself is a system library...but even compiled code tends to make use of lots of system libraries (excluding statically linked code).
There are some problems best solved through regular expressions.
OTOH, in my experience even Ruby code that does what is needed (with minimal help from regular expressions) is both faster and more maintainable than a long complex regular expression. And Ruby is one of the slower languages. (Possibly because so much regular expression is embedded into it...though that's just a WAG.)
I that's your metric, you should clearly choose APL. (I think the current version is called J, as the older version required special keyboards and typeballs.)
The proper term for that is fascist. The definition comes from Mussolini. (Mussolini probably didn't deserve quite as much bad press as he got...just most of it.)
My luck with the forums has been pretty good. Perhaps you need to rephrase your help requests? Some of the one's I've seen there's no way that anyone could help. Others don't really have anything to do with Ubuntu. I'm not surprised when those don't get helpful answers.
OTOH, I'll admit that I usually search the forums for a solution before asking for help, and I usually find the answer already there. (Sometimes it takes a few iterations to get the search terms just right, but that's a lot faster then waiting for someone to reply.)
I do prefer KDE over Gnome by a significant margin, but I sure don't like SUSE. Kubuntu is acceptable, but I usually use Debian. (Well, the SUSE info is now a few versions back, so things may be different, I suppose.)
OTOH, you said OpenSUSE. I can't really comment about that, as I don't know it. I don't really have any direct knowledge of SUSE in any dialect since Novell made their deal with MS. (And I'm not likely to unless I hear that they've released significant version upgrades into GPL3. Otherwise I don't trust their deal with MS. [They revealed parts, and they kept parts hidden, and we don't know WHAT the hidden parts say.])
If you are arguing that the restraining order was legal...well, two judges have agreed with you.
It's stupid, harmful, obnoxious, and of doubtful constitutionality, but it appears to be legal as defined by the courts of New York. (What, you say "doubtful constitutionality" should mean it's not legal? I agree. But the legal system doesn't.)
Both. Also the procedures used to get this mess officially anointed as a Standard. ("Standard" has to be capitalized in that sentence, because the only sense in which it is a standard is a a part of the name of the ISO.)
A standard is supposed to be the appropriate way to do something. The ISO fails this totally. It's not just that it favors one company over everyone else, it's that the standard as voted on was never seen by those voting. It appears that this "standard" will be something that can't be implemented by anyone (except in the trivial sense that allows a claim the cp is an implementation). An organization that approves such a farce as a Standard is not deserving of any regard or respect.
Note that the standard is so broken that, in a trivial sense, nearly anything can claim to be standards compliant, and in a stronger sense it appears that nobody can implement it. But there are also no tests for compliance, so anyone can claim to be complaint without fear. As such it's totally worthless. Two standards compliant programs cannot be relied upon to read and write the same files, and perhaps not even their own.
N.B.: This is not an argument based upon the standard as adopted. That apparently hasn't been written yet.
If you choose to believe that some particular god exists, justify it as more plausible than the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I assert that this is impossible. Prove me wrong.
P.S.: I am a theist of a sort, but my gods are non-local resonances established out of self-similar DNA existing in multiple identical physical incarnations. And they are the basis of mind and consciousness. They do not act directly in the macro-world of external human perception, but rather on the worlds of internalized human (and, some, other mammalian) perception.
Remember, the only world that you can see exists as a model within you head. Including your model of your head. That is the world in which that gods in which I believe act.
But it's made it a LOT easier for those ordering the attack. The "body count" among the "pilots" is nil. So what if they commit suicide in a few years? By that time the guy will be out of office, and anyway he could certainly believably claim ignorance. A guy killing himself doesn't have the same emotional impact as a guy getting killed. (Not lesser, just different.)
Think of all the soldiers that came back ruined from Viet Nam. How many voices were raised against Johnson or Nixon because of *that*? I didn't hear more than about 20. But when people were getting killed, there was a vast peace movement. (Well, they handled that by centralizing control of the media. They didn't make *that* mistake again. None of the major media cover peace demonstrations this time, so nobody even hears about them.)
It's time for someone to invent a "Hunter-seeker". Automated assassination tools would make wars nearly as dangerous for the "leader"s as ever. (Not much, but some.) It wouldn't be the tremendous public disapproval, but when the tools for manipulating the mass attention are monopolized, then other approaches are necessary. And if someone really believes that a war is justifiable, then it's only proper that they bet their OWN life.
I'll agree that he overstated his case...but then so did you. Force is involved. Not life-threatening, at least not immediately (usually), but still, force.
What would you call it if a miner was told he had to work in an unsafe environment without air filters? Wouldn't it be reasonable to say that force of some sort must be used to get him to agree to put his life in danger in a very uncomfortable environment? Yet such is common.
To claim that no force is involved in contract negotiations is ludicrously unreasonable. To ask what amount of force is fair is reasonable.
To my mind, a non-compete agreement is unreasonable unless the company is willing to pay you your prior wage for the entire duration of the non-compete.
Actually, it does. The reason is that it is the companies that produce the movies, etc., now that bought the grotesque copyright laws that exist. Bought. (Fairly cheaply, too, as I recall, though I don't recall precise numbers [not even to thousands]. The exact figures came out a few years ago for various congressional representatives, and were spread to several places for a few days. Then they stopped being news, and the oath-breakers remained unpunished. Some of them are still in office. [E.g. Feinstein and Boxer...though they might have seen it as supporting the local industry, and thus legitimate. Others have no such excuse.])
War is supposedly declared via a 2/3 vote of the Senate. If such has been taken, I am not aware of it. If not, then as far as the constitution is concerned we are not in a state of war.
Quantum computing is NOT the cold fusion of our industry. The fusion, perhaps. It may be just too technically difficult to implement except in an extremely trivial manner. But that kind of barrier does tend to fall in time. And unexpectedly.
I expect us to go from "20 years to fusion" to "fusion whenever we decide to build it" in one day.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe
on
Is Hushmail Still Safe?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, a rising ocean drowns all seacoasts.
You may not care what happens to the world, but what happens to the world WILL affect YOU.
You had a good experience. Many do. But it's all up to the individual TSA agent.
My sister got held off a plane when attempting to leave Vegas for Oakland. No reason was ever provided. They don't have to have a reason. Maybe someone just wanted to search her thoroughly. No explanation. (Well, that's not strictly true. There was an explanation, but when, later, the explanation was checked it turned out to be a lie.) This happened at an extremely unfortunate time, and she was extremely distraught about missing the plane. She missed last time she ever had a chance to see some people that she was close to. Senselessly.
Actually, based on my experience, Open Source *is* considerably more trustworthy. It sure isn't perfect, but what is?
I think you're mistaking quality for trustworthiness. Open Source is frequently of far inferior quality to Closed Source. It may or may not improve more quickly. At some point, though, you reach the point where all common functions are handled properly by both products, and from that point forwards Open Source is generally superior (in quality). In trustworthiness it was superior all along. If there's a bug, you're much more likely to be able to find out about it in Open Source. (If you can't tell, someone else can, and they can post their knowledge in a searchable place.) Also if there is an intentional trap...well, such things just don't tend to occur in Open Source, because everyone EXPECTS that they would be caught if they happened. (This expectation isn't always valid, but it's got a fair batting average.)
And if they are anonymously defaming people by name, without providing verifiable evidence, then I'm not at all sure they SHOULD be protected.
The only reason that I can see for protecting such people is in order that anonymous political speech be protected. If it already isn't being protected, as the evidence seems to show, then I see no reason to protect anonymous libelers at all.
I didn't get the impression that most of the users were to be programmers, and apparently he was explicitly instructed to find a text editor with version tracking. Naturally that's basically impossible.
What would probably be acceptable, if it could be found, would be a programmer's editor that had it's own file format which kept track of changes, and a *really good* export feature which turned the current version into export text (in your choice of ASCII, UTF-8,-16, or -32).
Version control is a good choice for programmers, but with current interfaces (that I know) not for much of anyone else.
OTOH, if it *IS* for programmers, perhaps he could talk his management into accepting his favorite version control system. (*IS* there a best version control system right now? How would he choose between svn, bazaar, mercury [aka hg], and git [or even cvs]? [I.e., on what basis other than familiarity?])
Actually I generally choose the software I choose because of details of its expressiveness. E.g., I choose Gnumeric as my spreadsheet *because* it doesn't automatically capitalize words that I don't want capitalized. Presumably other spreadsheets have the same feature, but at the time it was Gnumeric vs. OpenOffice vs. KSpread...and that was the deciding factor.
Other times...you can damn well bet that I choose my computer language because of it's expressiveness. Also because of other features, but expressiveness is mandatory.
Games? Please be serious. Copyright is the only reasonable protection. (Though I would assert that if a game is protected via DRM it doesn't merit copyright protection...not unless the DRM is time-limited, and when it expires the source is open. Otherwise is defies the intention of copyright as defined by the constitution. And the media would need to still be readable when the copyright expired.)
Slashdot Mirror
For certain meanings of fix.
If you think the "official news" is objective, then you've never been on site at a news happening and then later seen it reported ... TV, newspaper, they slant equally, though they prefer different techniques.
Slashdot is, at least, blatant about presenting slanted news. I've been on site where NBC (this was prior to MSNBC) was recording for rebroadcast. When I later saw the report it took a significant amount of time (about half the footage) before I finally realized what they were "reporting" on. It was marvelously jiggered, by careful choice of shots.
I do think that THAT news was only "edited" to be more interesting, and not for any political purpose, but in more political stories the means of slanting what was presented were obvious.
The "official news" should be called "Pravda". (A word meaning "the official word" rather than, as occasionally translated, "the truth".) Or perhaps "Maat". (An antique Egyptian word with, I believe, the same meaning.) (Another translation of Pravda which would apply to current US news it "the party line", though the word "party" would need some creative interpretation...but then so does "official" in my term "official news".)
If it isn't reasonable, be quite skeptical about believing that it happened. E.g.:
Why did the Luddites smash the machines?
Look it up. Popular myth got it totally wrong. They just didn't want to starve. And the brouhaha
about "give us back our 21 days" when the calendar was changed from Julian to Gregorian was also reasonable. The people were being charged an extra 2/3 of a month rent...and many of them were living at a subsistence level already.
Don't believe the news media. They lie on purpose...sometimes harmlessly, and sometimes not.
Ada has two main problems (probably linked). The lack of garbage collection and the inconvenience of using variable length strings. In most other respects I rate it a superior language. (Not the best, but considerably better than C++.)
C and C++ suffer from pointers and macros. They make "clever" code unmaintainable. And that the default mechanism for addressing an array should be via a pointer is atrocious! (The language doesn't require it, but several early dialects severely penalized the use of array indexing. So a history developed.) That said, with sufficient discipline it's now quite possible to write good maintainable code in C and C++. But, like Ada, it doesn't have garbage collection. (Wait for C++ 2010?) Still, the wild use of pointers and macros are much worse than just lacking a garbage collector.
Java is a language I keep coming back to and running away screaming from. It's an excellent basic language design, but it's LIBRARIES!!! They're extensive and many of them are nice, but other have vile user interfaces. And needing a chain of three libraries, each declared with a separate variable, to write a file in the "proper manner", UGH!!
Eiffel is a language I had great hopes for. Had. It had excellent mechanisms for dealing with multiple inheritance. It was clean, elegant, sweet. It devolved into only two variants. One by the original language designer, who wanted to maintain sole authorship of the design, and the other by a group at a French University, who declared that their version was experimental, and came out with a new design that broke nearly all existing libraries (and there weren't that many). So the language is not progressing well. I may be less functional now than it was a decade ago. (I used to use SmallEiffel, which has been renamed SmartEiffel and made incompatible.)
Python and Ruby are rather nice, but slow compared to the other languages that I been discussing. (In fact they're slow compared to Perl.)
Currently I use Python if speed isn't needed, and I'm keeping an eye on D (Digital Mars D) for when I need speed. It's not quite there yet (libraries more than any other reason), but if it can avoid the Java-ization of its libraries, then it looks like a winner.
Frequently the simplicity is due to more complex system libraries. Nothing wrong with that, but it has costs along with its benefits.
System libraries will generally be faster than interpreted solutions. But they can easily introduce version dependencies. OTOH, you can't really avoid them. The Perl interpreter itself is a system library...but even compiled code tends to make use of lots of system libraries (excluding statically linked code).
There are some problems best solved through regular expressions.
OTOH, in my experience even Ruby code that does what is needed (with minimal help from regular expressions) is both faster and more maintainable than a long complex regular expression. And Ruby is one of the slower languages. (Possibly because so much regular expression is embedded into it...though that's just a WAG.)
I that's your metric, you should clearly choose APL. (I think the current version is called J, as the older version required special keyboards and typeballs.)
The proper term for that is fascist. The definition comes from Mussolini. (Mussolini probably didn't deserve quite as much bad press as he got...just most of it.)
My luck with the forums has been pretty good. Perhaps you need to rephrase your help requests? Some of the one's I've seen there's no way that anyone could help. Others don't really have anything to do with Ubuntu. I'm not surprised when those don't get helpful answers.
OTOH, I'll admit that I usually search the forums for a solution before asking for help, and I usually find the answer already there. (Sometimes it takes a few iterations to get the search terms just right, but that's a lot faster then waiting for someone to reply.)
I do prefer KDE over Gnome by a significant margin, but I sure don't like SUSE. Kubuntu is acceptable, but I usually use Debian. (Well, the SUSE info is now a few versions back, so things may be different, I suppose.)
OTOH, you said OpenSUSE. I can't really comment about that, as I don't know it. I don't really have any direct knowledge of SUSE in any dialect since Novell made their deal with MS. (And I'm not likely to unless I hear that they've released significant version upgrades into GPL3. Otherwise I don't trust their deal with MS. [They revealed parts, and they kept parts hidden, and we don't know WHAT the hidden parts say.])
If you are arguing that the restraining order was legal...well, two judges have agreed with you.
It's stupid, harmful, obnoxious, and of doubtful constitutionality, but it appears to be legal as defined by the courts of New York. (What, you say "doubtful constitutionality" should mean it's not legal? I agree. But the legal system doesn't.)
Both. Also the procedures used to get this mess officially anointed as a Standard. ("Standard" has to be capitalized in that sentence, because the only sense in which it is a standard is a a part of the name of the ISO.)
A standard is supposed to be the appropriate way to do something. The ISO fails this totally. It's not just that it favors one company over everyone else, it's that the standard as voted on was never seen by those voting. It appears that this "standard" will be something that can't be implemented by anyone (except in the trivial sense that allows a claim the cp is an implementation). An organization that approves such a farce as a Standard is not deserving of any regard or respect.
Note that the standard is so broken that, in a trivial sense, nearly anything can claim to be standards compliant, and in a stronger sense it appears that nobody can implement it. But there are also no tests for compliance, so anyone can claim to be complaint without fear. As such it's totally worthless. Two standards compliant programs cannot be relied upon to read and write the same files, and perhaps not even their own.
N.B.: This is not an argument based upon the standard as adopted. That apparently hasn't been written yet.
Me too. It makes me quite glad that the only credit card I ever gave PayPal has since expired.
Not that I'm doubting the word of the government authorities, mind you.
They *could* be being honest for a change.
If you choose to believe that some particular god exists, justify it as more plausible than the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I assert that this is impossible. Prove me wrong.
P.S.: I am a theist of a sort, but my gods are non-local resonances established out of self-similar DNA existing in multiple identical physical incarnations. And they are the basis of mind and consciousness. They do not act directly in the macro-world of external human perception, but rather on the worlds of internalized human (and, some, other mammalian) perception.
Remember, the only world that you can see exists as a model within you head. Including your model of your head. That is the world in which that gods in which I believe act.
But it's made it a LOT easier for those ordering the attack. The "body count" among the "pilots" is nil. So what if they commit suicide in a few years? By that time the guy will be out of office, and anyway he could certainly believably claim ignorance. A guy killing himself doesn't have the same emotional impact as a guy getting killed. (Not lesser, just different.)
Think of all the soldiers that came back ruined from Viet Nam. How many voices were raised against Johnson or Nixon because of *that*? I didn't hear more than about 20. But when people were getting killed, there was a vast peace movement. (Well, they handled that by centralizing control of the media. They didn't make *that* mistake again. None of the major media cover peace demonstrations this time, so nobody even hears about them.)
It's time for someone to invent a "Hunter-seeker". Automated assassination tools would make wars nearly as dangerous for the "leader"s as ever. (Not much, but some.) It wouldn't be the tremendous public disapproval, but when the tools for manipulating the mass attention are monopolized, then other approaches are necessary. And if someone really believes that a war is justifiable, then it's only proper that they bet their OWN life.
I'll agree that he overstated his case...but then so did you. Force is involved. Not life-threatening, at least not immediately (usually), but still, force.
What would you call it if a miner was told he had to work in an unsafe environment without air filters? Wouldn't it be reasonable to say that force of some sort must be used to get him to agree to put his life in danger in a very uncomfortable environment? Yet such is common.
To claim that no force is involved in contract negotiations is ludicrously unreasonable. To ask what amount of force is fair is reasonable.
To my mind, a non-compete agreement is unreasonable unless the company is willing to pay you your prior wage for the entire duration of the non-compete.
Actually, it does. The reason is that it is the companies that produce the movies, etc., now that bought the grotesque copyright laws that exist. Bought. (Fairly cheaply, too, as I recall, though I don't recall precise numbers [not even to thousands]. The exact figures came out a few years ago for various congressional representatives, and were spread to several places for a few days. Then they stopped being news, and the oath-breakers remained unpunished. Some of them are still in office. [E.g. Feinstein and Boxer...though they might have seen it as supporting the local industry, and thus legitimate. Others have no such excuse.])
War is supposedly declared via a 2/3 vote of the Senate. If such has been taken, I am not aware of it. If not, then as far as the constitution is concerned we are not in a state of war.
Quantum computing is NOT the cold fusion of our industry. The fusion, perhaps. It may be just too technically difficult to implement except in an extremely trivial manner. But that kind of barrier does tend to fall in time. And unexpectedly.
I expect us to go from "20 years to fusion" to "fusion whenever we decide to build it" in one day.
Well, a rising ocean drowns all seacoasts.
You may not care what happens to the world, but what happens to the world WILL affect YOU.
You had a good experience. Many do. But it's all up to the individual TSA agent.
My sister got held off a plane when attempting to leave Vegas for Oakland. No reason was ever provided. They don't have to have a reason. Maybe someone just wanted to search her thoroughly. No explanation. (Well, that's not strictly true. There was an explanation, but when, later, the explanation was checked it turned out to be a lie.) This happened at an extremely unfortunate time, and she was extremely distraught about missing the plane. She missed last time she ever had a chance to see some people that she was close to. Senselessly.
Actually, based on my experience, Open Source *is* considerably more trustworthy. It sure isn't perfect, but what is?
I think you're mistaking quality for trustworthiness. Open Source is frequently of far inferior quality to Closed Source. It may or may not improve more quickly. At some point, though, you reach the point where all common functions are handled properly by both products, and from that point forwards Open Source is generally superior (in quality). In trustworthiness it was superior all along. If there's a bug, you're much more likely to be able to find out about it in Open Source. (If you can't tell, someone else can, and they can post their knowledge in a searchable place.) Also if there is an intentional trap...well, such things just don't tend to occur in Open Source, because everyone EXPECTS that they would be caught if they happened. (This expectation isn't always valid, but it's got a fair batting average.)
And if they are anonymously defaming people by name, without providing verifiable evidence, then I'm not at all sure they SHOULD be protected.
The only reason that I can see for protecting such people is in order that anonymous political speech be protected. If it already isn't being protected, as the evidence seems to show, then I see no reason to protect anonymous libelers at all.
I didn't get the impression that most of the users were to be programmers, and apparently he was explicitly instructed to find a text editor with version tracking. Naturally that's basically impossible.
What would probably be acceptable, if it could be found, would be a programmer's editor that had it's own file format which kept track of changes, and a *really good* export feature which turned the current version into export text (in your choice of ASCII, UTF-8,-16, or -32).
Version control is a good choice for programmers, but with current interfaces (that I know) not for much of anyone else.
OTOH, if it *IS* for programmers, perhaps he could talk his management into accepting his favorite version control system. (*IS* there a best version control system right now? How would he choose between svn, bazaar, mercury [aka hg], and git [or even cvs]? [I.e., on what basis other than familiarity?])
Actually I generally choose the software I choose because of details of its expressiveness. E.g., I choose Gnumeric as my spreadsheet *because* it doesn't automatically capitalize words that I don't want capitalized. Presumably other spreadsheets have the same feature, but at the time it was Gnumeric vs. OpenOffice vs. KSpread...and that was the deciding factor.
Other times...you can damn well bet that I choose my computer language because of it's expressiveness. Also because of other features, but expressiveness is mandatory.
Games? Please be serious. Copyright is the only reasonable protection. (Though I would assert that if a game is protected via DRM it doesn't merit copyright protection...not unless the DRM is time-limited, and when it expires the source is open. Otherwise is defies the intention of copyright as defined by the constitution. And the media would need to still be readable when the copyright expired.)