Here ya go, moderators! Another Score:2 post for you to moderate down! If you're not actually going to use your points for something useful, I might as well have you pit them against my mighty karma!
Oh, come on, people. (Or editors, as I suppose the case probably is.) This was actually one of the few/. posts that's actually made me laugh in awhile. (If you didn't find it amusing, read the thread that all the trolls are pointing to.) Why not at least leave it at 0?
No, it's because you don't believe the GPL (or other Free Software licenses) provide you with any more/better freedom than proprietary licenses.
Please explain to me why objecting to the misuse of a word -- "free", which is a specific and useful term, when applied to software, in its correct form -- immediately makes me an evil "supporter of proprietary licenses." If RMS would use the term "GNU/Free", or "floozixit", or some other term that allows us to use "free" in the same manner as everyone else in the world, I'd be perfectly satisfied. The fact that I always have to specify whether I mean no-cost or GPL-style free every time I use the word on/. is silly.
I do think Naders a moron but thats because I've been Libertarian since '96
So you base your opinion of politicians based solely on the position that your party tells you to have? I think Nader's a moron too, but it's certainly not because my party says so.
That's untrue. It's perfectly legitimate to sell the software itself under the GPL -- there's no need to have any physical product.
Now, it's fact that you have a much better chance of making money if there's a physical product along with your software. But just because something is 'free as in beer' doesn't mean that you can't make money off it.
(Which is why I object to the odd definition of free as it's used by RMS and his followers.)
The problem with this is still the same... as it turns out, it's going to take at least as much information to store the address of a particular sequence of data (on average) that it does to store the data itself. (Sorry to any mathmaticians whose ears I've hurt with that pseudo-explanation, but this is a form that even I can understand, even if it's not absolutely accurate.) Of course, it could well happen that the gigabyte of data you want to store occurs starting at the 20th digit of pi, and so in the occasional case it may work, however, for truly random data, that will be the case only exceedingly rarely.
(For a do-it-yourself version of this, there's a website around -- piquery which allows you to search for a certain substring in the digits of pi. Try plugging in a random sequence of digits, and then look at how many digits it takes to represent the address. For the several I tried, the resulting addresses were all longer than the string I typed, and a couple did not exist. Try it -- it's great fun:)
It seems to me that if someone is stupid enough to agree to a license that takes away their fundamental rights, they should lose them. If a license is completely unacceptable, the appropriate thing to do is to not use the software (or listen to the music, or whatever), not break the license and then claim, "Well, I don't think it ought to be enforced." Agreeing to abide by something and then breaking that agreement does nothing but degrade the image of people who are really willing to make a sacrifice in order to take a stand.
Although I'm not particularly worried about software licensing schemes and so forth, what really is starting to worry me is the attitude that people take that copyright law shouldn't apply to them. (Most prevalent in music trading, of course, but existant in many other forms as well.) I certainly am not looking forward to the day when I have to go down to the bookstore and sign a contract in order to buy a book, just because some people can't be bothered to obey copyright law.
Yep. Offtopic. Right. This article had absolutely nothing to do with IIS or Windows. I applaud the efforts of this moderator who is protecting us from the slippery slope that leads to goatsex.
Yeah, it's late, so nobody will ever read this -- but why is this article deemed to be 'about microsoft?' Honestly, the news is that they might be giving everyone a computer, not that the computers will be running Windows. It seems to me that we have enough ms/linux flame wars that the editors don't have to go out of their way to make opportunity for another one. Matching this story with the borg symbol was highly inappropriate, and sent the discussion off on a completely different (and useless) track.
It seems to me that this was more likely the product of not knowing how to do long division in the first place, not starting to use a calculator in high school. You should be learning long division by fourth and fifth grade, and by the time you reach high school it should be completely second nature, after thousands of repetitions. I question whether you knew it well enough in the first place.
That said, as someone else pointed out, long division is just an algorithm, and not a particularly important one at that. I'd bet that not one high schooler in a thousand could begin to explain why it works; they just know that it does. Doing division by hand is generally time consuming and error-prone, and so you might as well use a calculator. It's a handy thing to know, and good for those in elementary school to learn, but I'd hardly call someone a mathmatical failure if they don't know how to do it.
I didn't use a calculator in HS, or College either. I, personally, don't think calculators should be used in high school math classes.
So just because you didn't use one, you think that they can't be of any use?
It should be prohibited to use a device which undermines what is being taught at the time -- therefore, calculators shouldn't be used in elementary school, when you're being taught arithmetic. (Except in special circumstances, of course -- teaching them to know how to use a calculator is a decent idea.) That's common sense. However, as my HS math teacher put it, he trusted that if we had made it all the way to calculus, that we already knew how to add, subtract, do long division, manipulate algebraic expressions, and so forth. If we didn't, denying us calculators wouldn't do anything -- we wouldn't be able to do the math either way. And allowing calculators makes it possible to do a much wider variety of problems, and to concentrate on the concepts being taught, rather than worrying about low-level things that are secondary to the topic at hand.
Do you also claim that high-level programming languages should be abolished, because it's not necessary to use anything more advanced than assembly? It's really the same idea.
-1, Stupid (aka -1, Disagrees with Me) (At least this way moderators could be honest about their moderations)
+1, The Only Intelligent Post in the Entire Discussion
-1, Sarcasm that Everyone Missed
-1, Cut-And-Paste
+0, Goatse.cx (That way we can adjust them up/down as we would like)
-5, He Insulted The Slashdot Staff And I'll Help Prevent Him from Being Bitchslapped
Actually, given the new system, it might make more sense to not bother with the +/- on moderations at all any more. Just let moderators mark it however they want, and then let people choose whatever values they want to assign to it. For instance, I'd like to make overrated, redundant, and possibly offtopic not count for anything, as they're primarily used to silence opposition while trying to underfly the metamod radar.
Then I ask you again: if using your wealth/time for your benefit is unethical, how do you justify spending any of your time reading slashdot rather than raising money for starving people, or doing something else "productive?" If spending money to recieve a phone call is morally the same as making somebody starve to death, it seems that the time you've wasted writing these notes (or spent doing any other activity -- I do hope that you don't play games / watch TV / go out to dinner / build model rockets / play a musical instrument or do any of those other things which perpetuates the killing of innocent civilians) is just the same.
"How hedonistic and selfish is it to spend your money and your time entertaining yourself by reading and posting to slashdot instead of using those same resources to do some good in the world?"
Why are there so many people that think it should be illegal to enjoy themselves? They bitch all the time about how the Republicans / the Government / Micro$oft / the RIAA / etc. are attempting to control their lives, and then you claim that everyone should devote all their time and money towards the causes that you deem of most importance.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we should be selfish pigs thinking only of ourselves. But your own quality of life is important as well, and no one ought to begrudge someone the opportunity to enjoy themself.
Someone please do tell me if this is now easier with debian.
It isn't. If you don't know exactly what's in your box, and you're not an expert -- Even people who would normally be comfortable with a Linux desktop, for the most part, aren't up to ripping apart their computers and scouring the net for the model numbers -- you'll never get your hardware set up properly.
On a box where I don't know the hardware, my first move is to do an install of Mandrake. I write down all the drivers loaded, etc., and then wipe it and install Debian. But, of course, that's not something that a newbie would want or be able to do -- so in their case, they ought to just stick with Mandrake (or Red Hat, or whatever, although IME mandrake has the best hardware detection.)
Are there any of the 'minimal distributions' combined with a good installer that does a decent job of hardware autodetection? I might be convinced to switch to it, if it could get me away from the silly, two-step, annoying dance I have to do.
Definately. Nobody likes spending money. Really, you just need to convince people that a GHz machine with all sorts of nifty-keen features isn't necessary for what they want.
I don't think that it would do all too well in the home consumer market... People who don't really know what they need always assume they need every little gadget, which bumps the price significantly, and those of us who know what we want build their own. However, I think that you're right about the target market -- schools or small businesses, I think.
My obligitory rant -- school administrators always love upgrading their computer labs. Somehow, they're on the upgrade-every-two-years treadmill, even though the upgrades are unneccesary. (You could type reports, research stuff on the web, and even write programs on a 486 or pentium.) If someone would provide low-end-but-decent computers, at reasonable prices, as well as support etc., and somehow manage to get public schools to go that route instead, they'd be doing a great service, both to the students and to the taxpayers. (And to themselves, as they wallow in their profits.)
I have a child in kindergarten who is learning to read. Most of his classmates are not. Why? Because the school has reading software that paces itself to the student.
Um. We've had ways of teaching kids how to read that paces itself for much longer than computers have been around. It's called a library. You set the kid loose, and he finds something appropriate to his level.
My high school math teacher (had him from precalc/trig through AP calc BC) had the philosophy that "what's allowed on the AP test will be allowed on my tests." Since you can use calculators/notes/programs on the test, he allowed it in his tests as well.
Not only did he have a phenomenal ratio of students that passed the test (80% or so got a 5, and virtually everyone who took the test passed), but most of those who had taken the his class performed significantly better in college math courses than their peers.
Being able to refer to notes doesn't prevent you from learning something -- in fact, it helps you learn to seperate the "theory that you need to understand" from the enormous set of equations that you can always look up if you need.
I usually don't say this, but MOD PARENT UP! This is one of the most well-reasoned, non-paranoid, optimistic, and generally interesting posts I've ever seen to rise above the sea of fatalistic anti-microsoft propaganda that accompanies any stories about them. I don't think he's completely correct, but he's definately more correct than the "micro$oft is stealing my freedoms!" morons.
When I first saw the summary, I just saw the "Freedom or Power?" line and Stallman's name... am I the only one who immediately interpreted it as being an article about whether Stallman wants freedom or power?
Not a new idea, of course -- I'm sure I've seen it on/. before -- but it seems to me that you can ask the same question about the GPL... is it freedom, or is it power? (Each time I hear about the nutzo godlike programmer, I lean more and more towards believing the latter. Maybe the GPL is about freedom for most people, but I'm not so sure about RMS.)
Slashdot Mirror
The answers to the last five are obviously no. It's only the first where there's any question.
You wouldn't believe how slow those spreadsheets can get when they get large enough. It's almost to the point where I think I might upgrade my IIe.
Here ya go, moderators! Another Score:2 post for you to moderate down! If you're not actually going to use your points for something useful, I might as well have you pit them against my mighty karma!
Oh, come on, people. (Or editors, as I suppose the case probably is.) This was actually one of the few /. posts that's actually made me laugh in awhile. (If you didn't find it amusing, read the thread that all the trolls are pointing to.) Why not at least leave it at 0?
Please explain to me why objecting to the misuse of a word -- "free", which is a specific and useful term, when applied to software, in its correct form -- immediately makes me an evil "supporter of proprietary licenses." If RMS would use the term "GNU/Free", or "floozixit", or some other term that allows us to use "free" in the same manner as everyone else in the world, I'd be perfectly satisfied. The fact that I always have to specify whether I mean no-cost or GPL-style free every time I use the word on
So you base your opinion of politicians based solely on the position that your party tells you to have? I think Nader's a moron too, but it's certainly not because my party says so.
Now, it's fact that you have a much better chance of making money if there's a physical product along with your software. But just because something is 'free as in beer' doesn't mean that you can't make money off it.
(Which is why I object to the odd definition of free as it's used by RMS and his followers.)
(For a do-it-yourself version of this, there's a website around -- piquery
which allows you to search for a certain substring in the digits of pi. Try plugging in a random sequence of digits, and then look at how many digits it takes to represent the address. For the several I tried, the resulting addresses were all longer than the string I typed, and a couple did not exist. Try it -- it's great fun
50? It looks an awful lot more like 135 to me...
Although I'm not particularly worried about software licensing schemes and so forth, what really is starting to worry me is the attitude that people take that copyright law shouldn't apply to them. (Most prevalent in music trading, of course, but existant in many other forms as well.) I certainly am not looking forward to the day when I have to go down to the bookstore and sign a contract in order to buy a book, just because some people can't be bothered to obey copyright law.
Yep. Offtopic. Right. This article had absolutely nothing to do with IIS or Windows. I applaud the efforts of this moderator who is protecting us from the slippery slope that leads to goatsex.
Yeah, it's late, so nobody will ever read this -- but why is this article deemed to be 'about microsoft?' Honestly, the news is that they might be giving everyone a computer, not that the computers will be running Windows. It seems to me that we have enough ms/linux flame wars that the editors don't have to go out of their way to make opportunity for another one. Matching this story with the borg symbol was highly inappropriate, and sent the discussion off on a completely different (and useless) track.
That said, as someone else pointed out, long division is just an algorithm, and not a particularly important one at that. I'd bet that not one high schooler in a thousand could begin to explain why it works; they just know that it does. Doing division by hand is generally time consuming and error-prone, and so you might as well use a calculator. It's a handy thing to know, and good for those in elementary school to learn, but I'd hardly call someone a mathmatical failure if they don't know how to do it.
So just because you didn't use one, you think that they can't be of any use?
It should be prohibited to use a device which undermines what is being taught at the time -- therefore, calculators shouldn't be used in elementary school, when you're being taught arithmetic. (Except in special circumstances, of course -- teaching them to know how to use a calculator is a decent idea.) That's common sense. However, as my HS math teacher put it, he trusted that if we had made it all the way to calculus, that we already knew how to add, subtract, do long division, manipulate algebraic expressions, and so forth. If we didn't, denying us calculators wouldn't do anything -- we wouldn't be able to do the math either way. And allowing calculators makes it possible to do a much wider variety of problems, and to concentrate on the concepts being taught, rather than worrying about low-level things that are secondary to the topic at hand.
Do you also claim that high-level programming languages should be abolished, because it's not necessary to use anything more advanced than assembly? It's really the same idea.
-1, Stupid (aka -1, Disagrees with Me) (At least this way moderators could be honest about their moderations)
+1, The Only Intelligent Post in the Entire Discussion
-1, Sarcasm that Everyone Missed
-1, Cut-And-Paste
+0, Goatse.cx (That way we can adjust them up/down as we would like)
-5, He Insulted The Slashdot Staff And I'll Help Prevent Him from Being Bitchslapped
Actually, given the new system, it might make more sense to not bother with the +/- on moderations at all any more. Just let moderators mark it however they want, and then let people choose whatever values they want to assign to it. For instance, I'd like to make overrated, redundant, and possibly offtopic not count for anything, as they're primarily used to silence opposition while trying to underfly the metamod radar.
I know. YHBT. I suppose you don't have to say it.
"How hedonistic and selfish is it to spend your money and your time entertaining yourself by reading and posting to slashdot instead of using those same resources to do some good in the world?"
Why are there so many people that think it should be illegal to enjoy themselves? They bitch all the time about how the Republicans / the Government / Micro$oft / the RIAA / etc. are attempting to control their lives, and then you claim that everyone should devote all their time and money towards the causes that you deem of most importance.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we should be selfish pigs thinking only of ourselves. But your own quality of life is important as well, and no one ought to begrudge someone the opportunity to enjoy themself.
It isn't. If you don't know exactly what's in your box, and you're not an expert -- Even people who would normally be comfortable with a Linux desktop, for the most part, aren't up to ripping apart their computers and scouring the net for the model numbers -- you'll never get your hardware set up properly.
On a box where I don't know the hardware, my first move is to do an install of Mandrake. I write down all the drivers loaded, etc., and then wipe it and install Debian. But, of course, that's not something that a newbie would want or be able to do -- so in their case, they ought to just stick with Mandrake (or Red Hat, or whatever, although IME mandrake has the best hardware detection.)
Are there any of the 'minimal distributions' combined with a good installer that does a decent job of hardware autodetection? I might be convinced to switch to it, if it could get me away from the silly, two-step, annoying dance I have to do.
I don't think that it would do all too well in the home consumer market
My obligitory rant -- school administrators always love upgrading their computer labs. Somehow, they're on the upgrade-every-two-years treadmill, even though the upgrades are unneccesary. (You could type reports, research stuff on the web, and even write programs on a 486 or pentium.) If someone would provide low-end-but-decent computers, at reasonable prices, as well as support etc., and somehow manage to get public schools to go that route instead, they'd be doing a great service, both to the students and to the taxpayers. (And to themselves, as they wallow in their profits.)
Um. We've had ways of teaching kids how to read that paces itself for much longer than computers have been around. It's called a library. You set the kid loose, and he finds something appropriate to his level.
My high school math teacher (had him from precalc/trig through AP calc BC) had the philosophy that "what's allowed on the AP test will be allowed on my tests." Since you can use calculators/notes/programs on the test, he allowed it in his tests as well.
Not only did he have a phenomenal ratio of students that passed the test (80% or so got a 5, and virtually everyone who took the test passed), but most of those who had taken the his class performed significantly better in college math courses than their peers.
Being able to refer to notes doesn't prevent you from learning something -- in fact, it helps you learn to seperate the "theory that you need to understand" from the enormous set of equations that you can always look up if you need.
I usually don't say this, but MOD PARENT UP! This is one of the most well-reasoned, non-paranoid, optimistic, and generally interesting posts I've ever seen to rise above the sea of fatalistic anti-microsoft propaganda that accompanies any stories about them. I don't think he's completely correct, but he's definately more correct than the "micro$oft is stealing my freedoms!" morons.
Well, from that description, it sounds like they tried it, and it turned out to be cursed. ("Sent in some rabbits...")
That was the answer, right?
Not a new idea, of course -- I'm sure I've seen it on