Hey guys, I found this cool new product!
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Gaming the App Store
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I heard Microsoft is releasing this new operating system, Windows 7. From what I tried on the beta release candidate, it seems like Microsoft really cleaned out the bloat - it's fast, it doesn't crash like Vista and it's way more secure. I'm normally a Linux fan but I'm going to get one for my desktop cause some of the features are just too good to miss.
There is no irony. Trademarks are not intellectual property - their purpose is to prevent people from impersonating you and harming your brand image, copyrights and patents prevent people from copying your work/invention and unfairly competing against you by selling it without having to pay development costs.
Voters are generally emotionally biased toward fighting crime even when it isn't very useful - there was an experiment done where people were asked to choose between spending money to combat thing A and national parks destroyed by [deer/poachers]. The group that got poachers was much more likely to choose that over thing A than the group that got the deer.
Skill-based systems, where there is only one class and all of the customization is done with talents, are interesting. They are only truly interesting when there is synergy between some skills - for example, a skill that makes you shoot bolts 40% faster and a skill that gives each of your bolts a chance to stun for 2 seconds synergize well because the second skill becomes stronger if you have the first one. The key to balancing them IMO is to have a few synergies that clearly stand out, so you have to have them, but you don't have enough skill points to get all of them so you have to settle for some. That way you only have to balance all the powerful synergies (multiplicatively stacking damage multipliers, short term damage increase + high burst damage, temporary shield + ability that makes you vulnerable but benefits you in some other way are some ideas that I've seen) and still have a lot of customization.
No - by default you do not have the right to redistribute GPL code at all due to copyright. Copyright applies to everyone, even if you never licensed the software. The GPL gives you rights to redistribute the software under certain conditions. Thus, if you set up one company to download GPL software and transfer the software to another company, the other company can still only redistribute under the GPL's restrictions.
Zombies aren't the threat people make them out to be. Under the rules in the Zombie Survival Guide (if you get bitten, you feel symptoms in 4h, fall unconscious in 16h, become a zombie in 24h; zombies move at 1.5 feet per second (45cm/s) and their gait makes it easy to tell them apart; zombies have the brain of an insect, so they can't use guns or even knives; the zombie's brain (the only way to kill a zombie is by taking out the brain) is located in the frontal lobe), even if 5% of the population instantly became zombies and started biting people the military would quickly kill them all.
Take a CD or other round object, put a mark on it at one point on the edge to represent the planet, and start spinning it in your hands so that it is in front of you and the axis of rotation is vertical. Take note of the direction the mark is moving in - clockwise or counterclockwise - from your point of view. Then, while continuing to rotate it the same way, add another rotation (much slower than the first so you can clearly see the effect) whose axis is into your chest. Once you rotate the disk like this for 180 degrees (so that you are now looking at the bottom of it), and you are still continuing to spin it the way you were spinning it at first, notice that the disk is now spinning the other way and the mark, if it was originally going clockwise, is now going counterclockwise.
Your argument is "evil is good because it encourages people to protect themselves from other evil". We see many incarnations of this fallacy even here on Slashdot - "Go Conficker! Finally people will start downloading updates!" "419 scammers are good, it helps weed out those idiots that trust people on the internet"
The fallacy is that protecting yourself has a cost - the cost of time and bandwidth to install updates, the cost to the security community to make the updates, the opportunity cost of lost business deals, the time spent authenticating people to make sure they are who they say there are, etc. If there was less evil, there would be less need to pay any of these costs, and society as a whole would run more efficiently.
The original post that started this discussion was talking about sex with invalid consent, not sex without consent. The second case is violent, but the first is not violent - there is no violent force or threat of violent force, it's all consensual, it's just that the consent is invalid (eg. person is too young). So normal rape is violent, but "statutory rape" is not.
This isn't about GNU/Linux zealotry or any kind of idealism, it's about basic accountability, especially for something so fundamentally important to democracy. Everyone needs to be able to see how the system works (99.99% of people won't understand/bother to read the source, but the public will trust 30000 individuals that all confirm whether the source is good or bad and the public will not trust three or four spokesmen from some closed-door auditing companies). A good open system is physically impossible (or very very*10^126 difficult) to crack even with full code access. There is, of course, the added problem of ensuring that the source and only the source runs on the machine, but these two conditions are linked with an AND, not an OR - if the code is not definitely valid it doesn't matter what else is going on - it's not secure, period.
Slashdot Mirror
Please enlighten me.
I heard Microsoft is releasing this new operating system, Windows 7. From what I tried on the beta release candidate, it seems like Microsoft really cleaned out the bloat - it's fast, it doesn't crash like Vista and it's way more secure. I'm normally a Linux fan but I'm going to get one for my desktop cause some of the features are just too good to miss.
1) Buy paintball gun.
2) Go to town, start shooting cameras
3) ?????
4) Very high maintenance expenses!
There is no irony. Trademarks are not intellectual property - their purpose is to prevent people from impersonating you and harming your brand image, copyrights and patents prevent people from copying your work/invention and unfairly competing against you by selling it without having to pay development costs.
Wait, you want it to take 5 minutes to boot from your normal OS to the game and then 5 minutes to switch back?
This is a good thing.
Toronto
100 feet
Think you can fool us into thinking you're actually Canadian, eh?
Voters are generally emotionally biased toward fighting crime even when it isn't very useful - there was an experiment done where people were asked to choose between spending money to combat thing A and national parks destroyed by [deer/poachers]. The group that got poachers was much more likely to choose that over thing A than the group that got the deer.
I like this. Instead of countries picking their athletes, we could randomly pick people to go. Would be much more interesting.
Skill-based systems, where there is only one class and all of the customization is done with talents, are interesting. They are only truly interesting when there is synergy between some skills - for example, a skill that makes you shoot bolts 40% faster and a skill that gives each of your bolts a chance to stun for 2 seconds synergize well because the second skill becomes stronger if you have the first one. The key to balancing them IMO is to have a few synergies that clearly stand out, so you have to have them, but you don't have enough skill points to get all of them so you have to settle for some. That way you only have to balance all the powerful synergies (multiplicatively stacking damage multipliers, short term damage increase + high burst damage, temporary shield + ability that makes you vulnerable but benefits you in some other way are some ideas that I've seen) and still have a lot of customization.
No - by default you do not have the right to redistribute GPL code at all due to copyright. Copyright applies to everyone, even if you never licensed the software. The GPL gives you rights to redistribute the software under certain conditions. Thus, if you set up one company to download GPL software and transfer the software to another company, the other company can still only redistribute under the GPL's restrictions.
Microsoft's claims that Linux notebooks have return rates four or five times higher than Windows machines.
the numberof Linux returns are approximately the same as those for Windows netbooks.
So Linux has a 16-20% notebook market share? Or is the summary's language screwed up?
Zombies aren't the threat people make them out to be. Under the rules in the Zombie Survival Guide (if you get bitten, you feel symptoms in 4h, fall unconscious in 16h, become a zombie in 24h; zombies move at 1.5 feet per second (45cm/s) and their gait makes it easy to tell them apart; zombies have the brain of an insect, so they can't use guns or even knives; the zombie's brain (the only way to kill a zombie is by taking out the brain) is located in the frontal lobe), even if 5% of the population instantly became zombies and started biting people the military would quickly kill them all.
like, say, FIXING things you hate?
We kinda did that with the DDOS recently.
IMO, cruelty = assigining a negative value to others' well being, selfishness = assigning a zero value to others' well being. Both are evil.
Well God is righteous and you're just following his righteous commands... this is a tough one
Oh, oh, I know! The victims are evil!
The death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.
Take a CD or other round object, put a mark on it at one point on the edge to represent the planet, and start spinning it in your hands so that it is in front of you and the axis of rotation is vertical. Take note of the direction the mark is moving in - clockwise or counterclockwise - from your point of view. Then, while continuing to rotate it the same way, add another rotation (much slower than the first so you can clearly see the effect) whose axis is into your chest. Once you rotate the disk like this for 180 degrees (so that you are now looking at the bottom of it), and you are still continuing to spin it the way you were spinning it at first, notice that the disk is now spinning the other way and the mark, if it was originally going clockwise, is now going counterclockwise.
Your argument is "evil is good because it encourages people to protect themselves from other evil". We see many incarnations of this fallacy even here on Slashdot - "Go Conficker! Finally people will start downloading updates!" "419 scammers are good, it helps weed out those idiots that trust people on the internet"
The fallacy is that protecting yourself has a cost - the cost of time and bandwidth to install updates, the cost to the security community to make the updates, the opportunity cost of lost business deals, the time spent authenticating people to make sure they are who they say there are, etc. If there was less evil, there would be less need to pay any of these costs, and society as a whole would run more efficiently.
laws are some sort of unchangeable and divine Truth
No, that's only if the law has a catchy name written in Latin.
The original post that started this discussion was talking about sex with invalid consent, not sex without consent. The second case is violent, but the first is not violent - there is no violent force or threat of violent force, it's all consensual, it's just that the consent is invalid (eg. person is too young). So normal rape is violent, but "statutory rape" is not.
This isn't about GNU/Linux zealotry or any kind of idealism, it's about basic accountability, especially for something so fundamentally important to democracy. Everyone needs to be able to see how the system works (99.99% of people won't understand/bother to read the source, but the public will trust 30000 individuals that all confirm whether the source is good or bad and the public will not trust three or four spokesmen from some closed-door auditing companies). A good open system is physically impossible (or very very*10^126 difficult) to crack even with full code access. There is, of course, the added problem of ensuring that the source and only the source runs on the machine, but these two conditions are linked with an AND, not an OR - if the code is not definitely valid it doesn't matter what else is going on - it's not secure, period.
Aliens will come and use it. Unless they're already running Windows.
WoW is done with OpenGL, I believe (that's why it's so Wine-friendly, and runs on Mac too).
You CANNOT be "found innocent". The allowed verdicts are "guilty" and "not guilty" in a criminal court. Innocent is what you are before the trial.