I thought my terrible grammar indicated that english is not my first language
You should read some of the crap native English speakers come out with sometimes. At times I feel as though I'm the only person left who actually has some understanding of spelling and grammar...
Only fools and people with the right kind of friends will do otherwise.
And people who will stand up for what they believe in, come what may. They're pretty few and far between these days, though. (That's not necessarily a criticism; I'm not claiming to have the balls to do it either.)
I live and work in London, and even here you cannot describe the surveillance as "pervasive". Most of the CCTV cameras you see are privately owned by the managers/owners of the buildings they're attached to, and are purely for keeping watch on their own premises. There are actually very few "public" CCTV cameras in London, unless you count those on public transport (which is increasinly privately-owned). No, the situation is not ideal, but rest assured that The Man is not watching our every move (at least, not yet - and think of the manpower required to watch the entire population...)
they also have a nasty habit of prosecuting anyone who attempts to defend himself from a criminal attack
Do you have any sources to back that up? I can think of only one case in the last decade or so that made the press - Tony Martin, who shot a fleeing burglar in the back with a shotgun. Believe me, the British press would be all over that sort of story, they've been whipping up a frenzy about the "crumbling, outdated legal system failing victims while being soft on criminals" on and off for years.
Just as Muslims are being tainted in the eyes of many people around the world by the fact that a pack of head-chopping misogynists claim to be Muslims, the anti-war movement in the US suffers from the fact that it's the commie traitors who get the most press.
Similarly, you seem to have decided that we have no right to self defense based on one case that was very poorly reported by the press at the time. We most certainly do have a right to use reasonable force to defend not only ourselves, but anyone who we have reason to believe is in danger of harm.
While I agree with you that actually overthrowing the government most likely wouldn't work, that's nothing to do with the 2nd Amendment. The problem is that any such movement would need near-fanatical support from a large number of people who were willing and able to go up against the authorities, killing and dying for the cause if necessary.
The 2nd Amendment assures you have access to the tools necessary to overthrow a corrupt government; it does not provide the will to use them.
I'm aware that you guys, the slashdot readership, are aware. However, judging from the lack of stories about the ongoing process to fix it, or stories in maintstream media about how broken it is, etc, I'm not convinced that anyone else is either aware or cares about it.
Besides, what I think the OP wants is some kind of an idea about the supposed benefits of the system - after all, someone must have sat down and thought "hey, wouldn't it be great if..." *and* got it approved, so there must be a logical reason for it.
I'm ragingly pissed off at the 360 for Oblivion charing micropayments for "Horse armor" mods
You're pissed off at a console because a software producer decided to charge for a ridiculous add-on? You can buy the horse armour for the PC version too, you know (along with other add-ons that I also can't be bothered with).
Well, that's all very nice, but the GP was talking about being unable to afford an internet connection, not an inability or unwillingness to participate in Sony's planned micropayment strategy.
This is Sony with a sniper rifle zeroing in on the reseller market.
Well duh. They get their cut on the first sale, not on any resales, which may in fact reduce the first sale market a little. Why would they care about resales? (Given that past actions demonstrate an apparent lack of enlightened self interest in such matters)
There was a time when your kids would look after you in your old age, thus avoiding the need to pay someone else to do so and putting off the need to move into a home should you become infirm, perhaps indefinitely.
Also, there's the enlightened self-interest angle; if *no-one* has kids, then the economy collapses as the workforce hits retirement age en masse. Now of course everyone isn't going to just stop having kids, but recently in the UK there have been rumblings about the generally increasing age of the population and falling birth rates.
So, while emotion is almost always the driving factor behind having kids, you don't *need* emotion to find a good reason.
Not only that, but of all the things I never look at, the buttons on my mouse are right up there at the top of the list. I look at my keyboard more often than I look at them, and I touch-type...
Seriously, they're huge, so no problems missing them, and there's only one per finger, so no problem with getting the wrong one. What earthly use would it be to have OLEDs on them?
The problem is that we currently don't have any materials that we can manufacture in sufficient quantities to make the cable out of that can support the weight of the cable. It's not a question of balance, it's a question of strength. If we made a steel cable, for instance, tied it to the back of a rocket and took off for orbit, the cable would break before the rocket made it to orbit.
Nanotube-based materials might change that, but at the moment, we just can't produce enough of them cheaply enough.
Strictly, you don't need to be grounded in order to recieve a shock, you need to have one part of your body (eg a hand) touching an area of high voltage, while another (eg a foot) touches an area of low(er) potential. That creates a potential difference between the two points, which enables current to flow; it is this current that causes the shock. Birds can sit on power lines because the potential difference between their feet is tiny, and so any current that does flow is insignificant.
Now the situation is a little different if the object is charged. Then, when you touch it, charge will tend to flow from it to you (as you are uncharged). If you're touching an area of lower potential, you'll get a shock, just as the GP mentions. If not, then you'll simply become charged. What happens then depends on a number of factors; perhaps you'll bleed the charge off naturally, perhaps you'll retain some of it until you ground yourself and get a delayed shock (just as you do when touching metal after charging yourself on carpet, etc).
I suppose if the thing is charged enough, then the short-lived flow of charge into the body could deliver enough of a shock to be problematic, but I'm an (ex-)physicist, not a physician, so I don't know for sure.
Whereis the cutoff point between a normal high resolution camera and a "super-high" one, anyway?
When you're writing press releases, it's just to the lower resolution side of what you just deployed. When you're writing grant proposals, it's just to the higher resolution side of what you currently have deployed.
If your big criticsm is that this system doesn't prevent the recipient from reproducing the message, well, please just stop typing.
I did read the article, in particular this bit:
The message cannot be forwarded, edited, printed or saved, and, once it's been read, it disappears; nothing is cached anywhere.
Those of us that you're complaining about are simply pointing out that that claim is incorrect. The message most certainly *can* be saved, it just isn't by default.
Screenshots, RAM dumps, network packet dumps, video RAM dumps, running the client (or server, if I'm a rogue admin) in a VM and dumping its RAM, network data, etc; if data enters the RAM of a machine under my control, there's not a whole lot you can do to prevent me from gaining access to it. That might change with trusted computing, secure paths, etc, but even then if I'm determined and skilled enough I can hack the monitor's hardware to intercept the data at the point of display.
Or hell, I could just take photos of the screen.
This might well be secure from the average end user, but there will always be someone who can circumvent it, and in the case of a software hack, it only takes one.
The GPL is essentially useless for web services as it is anyway, since most of them will be PHP
Well I don't know about most of them. Yes, a lot of web stuff is in PHP now, especially stuff that's likely to be GPLed, but I'd hazard a guess that there's far more in compiled or VM languages.
Besides, that's not the point. The point is that the *users* of the service should have access to the source code, not the admin/developer - of course they have. Just being in PHP doesn't give the end user access to the source, they still only get to see the emitted HTML. This change is meant to address those people who are *not* installing it on their server.
So really, the only reason we shouldn't just public domain all this web software now is that the GPL means that no matter how you acquire the software, if you do actually have the source, you're allowed to redistribute.
And that's different from placing it in the public domain how? When you GPL something, you reserve all your rights but grant others the right to modify and resdistribute, under certain conditions. If you place it in the public domain, you waive all rights - everyone still gets the right to modify and redistribute, but without any conditions attached.
Not quite; in the case of Pixar, the software is being used by Pixar employees, and all we get to see is the output. The GPL v2 specifically does not cover the output of GPLed code (I forget if it's in the licence itself or the FAQ), so that's fine by the FSF and is as intended.
In the case of google, however, it is the person performing the search who is actually using (at least some of) the code. Once the content is indexed, nothing happens until I surf to google.co.uk, type in some text and hit submit. At that point, the code is run to retrieve my search results. *I* am directly causing the code to be run, and so am essentially running it myself.
Now, I'm not entirely convinced that that consitutes distribution, or that it's a bad thing, but I respect other people's choice to create a licence that would require source disclosure in that situation; I just can't imagine using that licence myself. (But then, the BSD licence has always appealed to me more than the GPL)
It's not word games and legalese; the software was supplied on certain conditions, and none of those conditions have been violated. The software is *not* being distributed. If I allow you to use it by sitting at my desk and logging on to my machine, it clearly hasn't been distributed. I don't see that that changes if I allow you to ssh in, or if I publish ssh details and allow anyone to use it. By extension, I don't see that it changes just because you connect on port 80 rather than 22 and speak HTTP rather than ssh.
On every phone I've used in the last few years, you've been able to press the right arrow (or equivalent) to avoid the pause. Of course, then you're swapping the pause for another key press...
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen that one, and I've also seen "pyrotechnics engineer".
I think quite a lot of people moaned about "Documents and Settings" because
a) it's quite a lot to type
b) it contains those embedded spaces that can be troublesome for the CLI and some older apps
Given that they wanted to change it, what else would you call it? And at the end of the day, does it matter that it's the same on OS X?
I thought my terrible grammar indicated that english is not my first language
You should read some of the crap native English speakers come out with sometimes. At times I feel as though I'm the only person left who actually has some understanding of spelling and grammar...
Only fools and people with the right kind of friends will do otherwise.
And people who will stand up for what they believe in, come what may. They're pretty few and far between these days, though. (That's not necessarily a criticism; I'm not claiming to have the balls to do it either.)
Since when is it the job of the police to guarantee anyone's safety?
It's kind of implied by the whole "To serve and protect" thing, I think...
The UK has pervasive surveillance
I live and work in London, and even here you cannot describe the surveillance as "pervasive". Most of the CCTV cameras you see are privately owned by the managers/owners of the buildings they're attached to, and are purely for keeping watch on their own premises. There are actually very few "public" CCTV cameras in London, unless you count those on public transport (which is increasinly privately-owned). No, the situation is not ideal, but rest assured that The Man is not watching our every move (at least, not yet - and think of the manpower required to watch the entire population...)
they also have a nasty habit of prosecuting anyone who attempts to defend himself from a criminal attack
Do you have any sources to back that up? I can think of only one case in the last decade or so that made the press - Tony Martin, who shot a fleeing burglar in the back with a shotgun. Believe me, the British press would be all over that sort of story, they've been whipping up a frenzy about the "crumbling, outdated legal system failing victims while being soft on criminals" on and off for years.
Just as Muslims are being tainted in the eyes of many people around the world by the fact that a pack of head-chopping misogynists claim to be Muslims, the anti-war movement in the US suffers from the fact that it's the commie traitors who get the most press.
Similarly, you seem to have decided that we have no right to self defense based on one case that was very poorly reported by the press at the time. We most certainly do have a right to use reasonable force to defend not only ourselves, but anyone who we have reason to believe is in danger of harm.
While I agree with you that actually overthrowing the government most likely wouldn't work, that's nothing to do with the 2nd Amendment. The problem is that any such movement would need near-fanatical support from a large number of people who were willing and able to go up against the authorities, killing and dying for the cause if necessary.
The 2nd Amendment assures you have access to the tools necessary to overthrow a corrupt government; it does not provide the will to use them.
I'm aware that you guys, the slashdot readership, are aware. However, judging from the lack of stories about the ongoing process to fix it, or stories in maintstream media about how broken it is, etc, I'm not convinced that anyone else is either aware or cares about it.
Besides, what I think the OP wants is some kind of an idea about the supposed benefits of the system - after all, someone must have sat down and thought "hey, wouldn't it be great if..." *and* got it approved, so there must be a logical reason for it.
I'm ragingly pissed off at the 360 for Oblivion charing micropayments for "Horse armor" mods
You're pissed off at a console because a software producer decided to charge for a ridiculous add-on? You can buy the horse armour for the PC version too, you know (along with other add-ons that I also can't be bothered with).
Well, that's all very nice, but the GP was talking about being unable to afford an internet connection, not an inability or unwillingness to participate in Sony's planned micropayment strategy.
This is Sony with a sniper rifle zeroing in on the reseller market.
Well duh. They get their cut on the first sale, not on any resales, which may in fact reduce the first sale market a little. Why would they care about resales? (Given that past actions demonstrate an apparent lack of enlightened self interest in such matters)
There was a time when your kids would look after you in your old age, thus avoiding the need to pay someone else to do so and putting off the need to move into a home should you become infirm, perhaps indefinitely.
Also, there's the enlightened self-interest angle; if *no-one* has kids, then the economy collapses as the workforce hits retirement age en masse. Now of course everyone isn't going to just stop having kids, but recently in the UK there have been rumblings about the generally increasing age of the population and falling birth rates.
So, while emotion is almost always the driving factor behind having kids, you don't *need* emotion to find a good reason.
Not only that, but of all the things I never look at, the buttons on my mouse are right up there at the top of the list. I look at my keyboard more often than I look at them, and I touch-type...
Seriously, they're huge, so no problems missing them, and there's only one per finger, so no problem with getting the wrong one. What earthly use would it be to have OLEDs on them?
The problem is that we currently don't have any materials that we can manufacture in sufficient quantities to make the cable out of that can support the weight of the cable. It's not a question of balance, it's a question of strength. If we made a steel cable, for instance, tied it to the back of a rocket and took off for orbit, the cable would break before the rocket made it to orbit.
Nanotube-based materials might change that, but at the moment, we just can't produce enough of them cheaply enough.
I forget the exact figure, but solid matter is something like 99% vacuum. Atomic nuclei are very small and relatively very far apart.
Strictly, you don't need to be grounded in order to recieve a shock, you need to have one part of your body (eg a hand) touching an area of high voltage, while another (eg a foot) touches an area of low(er) potential. That creates a potential difference between the two points, which enables current to flow; it is this current that causes the shock. Birds can sit on power lines because the potential difference between their feet is tiny, and so any current that does flow is insignificant.
Now the situation is a little different if the object is charged. Then, when you touch it, charge will tend to flow from it to you (as you are uncharged). If you're touching an area of lower potential, you'll get a shock, just as the GP mentions. If not, then you'll simply become charged. What happens then depends on a number of factors; perhaps you'll bleed the charge off naturally, perhaps you'll retain some of it until you ground yourself and get a delayed shock (just as you do when touching metal after charging yourself on carpet, etc).
I suppose if the thing is charged enough, then the short-lived flow of charge into the body could deliver enough of a shock to be problematic, but I'm an (ex-)physicist, not a physician, so I don't know for sure.
Whereis the cutoff point between a normal high resolution camera and a "super-high" one, anyway?
When you're writing press releases, it's just to the lower resolution side of what you just deployed. When you're writing grant proposals, it's just to the higher resolution side of what you currently have deployed.
I did read the article, in particular this bit:
Those of us that you're complaining about are simply pointing out that that claim is incorrect. The message most certainly *can* be saved, it just isn't by default.
Which will be why I said Or hell, I could just take photos of the screen.... :)
but the assumption with books was that you were paying a good chunk toward the physical 'stuff' the book is made out of
Perhaps that assumption was incorrect?
Screenshots, RAM dumps, network packet dumps, video RAM dumps, running the client (or server, if I'm a rogue admin) in a VM and dumping its RAM, network data, etc; if data enters the RAM of a machine under my control, there's not a whole lot you can do to prevent me from gaining access to it. That might change with trusted computing, secure paths, etc, but even then if I'm determined and skilled enough I can hack the monitor's hardware to intercept the data at the point of display.
Or hell, I could just take photos of the screen.
This might well be secure from the average end user, but there will always be someone who can circumvent it, and in the case of a software hack, it only takes one.
The GPL is essentially useless for web services as it is anyway, since most of them will be PHP
Well I don't know about most of them. Yes, a lot of web stuff is in PHP now, especially stuff that's likely to be GPLed, but I'd hazard a guess that there's far more in compiled or VM languages.
Besides, that's not the point. The point is that the *users* of the service should have access to the source code, not the admin/developer - of course they have. Just being in PHP doesn't give the end user access to the source, they still only get to see the emitted HTML. This change is meant to address those people who are *not* installing it on their server.
So really, the only reason we shouldn't just public domain all this web software now is that the GPL means that no matter how you acquire the software, if you do actually have the source, you're allowed to redistribute.
And that's different from placing it in the public domain how? When you GPL something, you reserve all your rights but grant others the right to modify and resdistribute, under certain conditions. If you place it in the public domain, you waive all rights - everyone still gets the right to modify and redistribute, but without any conditions attached.
Not quite; in the case of Pixar, the software is being used by Pixar employees, and all we get to see is the output. The GPL v2 specifically does not cover the output of GPLed code (I forget if it's in the licence itself or the FAQ), so that's fine by the FSF and is as intended.
In the case of google, however, it is the person performing the search who is actually using (at least some of) the code. Once the content is indexed, nothing happens until I surf to google.co.uk, type in some text and hit submit. At that point, the code is run to retrieve my search results. *I* am directly causing the code to be run, and so am essentially running it myself.
Now, I'm not entirely convinced that that consitutes distribution, or that it's a bad thing, but I respect other people's choice to create a licence that would require source disclosure in that situation; I just can't imagine using that licence myself. (But then, the BSD licence has always appealed to me more than the GPL)
leeches who play word games and legalese
It's not word games and legalese; the software was supplied on certain conditions, and none of those conditions have been violated. The software is *not* being distributed. If I allow you to use it by sitting at my desk and logging on to my machine, it clearly hasn't been distributed. I don't see that that changes if I allow you to ssh in, or if I publish ssh details and allow anyone to use it. By extension, I don't see that it changes just because you connect on port 80 rather than 22 and speak HTTP rather than ssh.
I'm afraid not.
On every phone I've used in the last few years, you've been able to press the right arrow (or equivalent) to avoid the pause. Of course, then you're swapping the pause for another key press...