That is not an argument for mandatory labeling. That is an argument against labeling which makes false claims.
There is nothing dishonest, or deceitful, about not going out of your way to identify everything anyone could ever possibly want to know and disclose all of it. "Not-forthcoming" is not the same thing as "dishonest".
So buy stuff that does tell you. Problem solved. You don't have a right to demand that millions of people starve to death so that you can indulge your superstitions.
But forcing a label that people won't understand onto things, when we all know that mandatory labels are almost exclusively used for things believed to be harmful, will drive people away from technology that can improve the chances of people actually eating and getting nutrition.
There's no more deceit involved in not specifically going out of your way to arbitrarily distinguish between food genetically modified by one mechanism (selective breeding) and food genetically modified by another, than there is in not specifically letting people know that the magnetic resonance in question is nuclear magnetic resonance.
Going out of your way to give people information which you know they will misunderstand, with the intent that they misunderstand it, is a lot more deceitful.
I should be particularly interested in what he has to say because of his thoroughly-demonstrated grasp of cause and effect, and the law of unintended consequences, right?... Nevermind.
I know theoretically the "this person's ideas have been really awful so far" argument is not a persuasive rebuttal, but it sure does save a lot of time.
1. Non-defamatory claims aren't libel, whether or not they are true, so far as I know. Not all insulting or negative remarks are defamatory. 2. I believe there's some exceptions for stuff having to do with public figures. 3. You can firmly believe something, but not think a court will be convinced of it.
Believing that something someone says about you is untrue is not by any means a rational basis for concluding that a court will consider it to be libel.
Actually, the submitter didn't say it was true. The submitter didn't even say it was not libel. The submitter said he didn't think a court would find it to be libel, based on "free speech rights".
This does not argue that the submitter has a nuanced-enough understanding of the law to justify trying to draw specific conclusions about what the facts are from his speculations as to what a court would rule.
Lawyers are much better than slashdot at telling you what your legal options might be.
Seriously, where do you get this stuff? There's not a lot of obvious overlap between libel law and free speech. At least in the US, the issues are whether material is (1) defamatory and (2) untrue. So far as I know, that's it; if the material's untrue, then saying false things about people is not generally regarded as "free speech". (Note: "untrue" means "provable as a matter of fact to be untrue", not just "I don't think it's true".)
Interesting, I hadn't seen the setting for that. Although the notification center thing bites me pretty frequently. I think it may have been the "four or five fingers" stuff, which is apparently mostly under that multitasking guestures thing. Thank you muchly! Since they used to not exist, I didn't know they had added a setting for them -- and being Apple, they have often enough offered no control over such a feature that it didn't occur to me to go looking. Still want to be able to turn notification center off while in apps, though, since it's almost never what I want, and I have at least some apps in which "drag something from near the top of the screen to somewhere else" was a thing.
Well, now you've gone and done it: You've pointed out that Apple's actually better about this than Canonical.
I hate the way iOS has gradually made it harder and harder for me to interact with the app I have open rather than the OS. Dragging from screen edge, tapping with the wrong number of fingers... All sorts of things get eaten by the OS, so I end up doing something other than interacting with the app.
Now, in their own tragically quite imitable style, Canonical appear to have decided that the problem with the intrusion of the OS into the app's UI is that it does not go far enough.
What exactly is your evidence that there's been no adverse effects?
I was on a plane once where the landing gear indicator insisted that the landing gear wasn't working, and had not actually dropped, but the pilot made the call to land anyway because he heard and felt it drop.
Things like this happen all the time. Did you have some kind of evidence that they are not sometimes caused by cell phones?
I have been told that aircraft mechanics report that airplanes have a certain amount of Hell If We Know It Just Does in their behavior, and specifically that there are known instances where one SPECIFIC plane -- not a model line, just one specific plane -- will behave in slightly unexpected ways near some but not all electronics.
Which is to say: I think that the problem is that they *do* have some real evidence of cases in which electronic devices, especially poorly-shielded ones, or ones which had wireless emitters, had unexpected effects.
I never got a CS degree, and that made it hard to get the first job, but once you have real-world professional experience, I doubt "95%" of companies will pass you over based on the degree.
It's not that it's a bad thing to get the degree, but I think you're overestimating the importance of the degree in comparison to real professional experience and/or reputation.
For reference, I quote it here in case this causes it to get removed there:
Having heard that authors frequently review their own books, I thought I'd give it a try. This is, without a doubt, the best book on portable shell scripting I have ever written. Sadly, it is also the worst book on portable shell scripting I have ever written.
What I can tell you is this: * Before I started writing this book, I thought I was fairly expert in portable shell scripting. * I learned a lot more writing this book than I knew before I started writing it. * This book has ended up being one of my key desk references, which is pretty funny, because you'd think I'd know this stuff by now.
I'm not totally happy with everything about this book. I'm giving it five stars anyway because I can't name anything I think is better for the purpose right now... But I wouldn't mind revising and expanding for a second edition.
Don't let the "beginning" throw you off; this book was a real eye-opener for me, and I'd been writing shell scripts for somewhere between fifteen and twenty years, including production software. On the other hand, if you've got a bit of programming experience, I like to imagine that you really could have this as your first introduction to the shell, and probably do just fine.
It's also considered the most helpful review at the moment. (FWIW, I still use the book as a reference, and apparently so do some of my coworkers.)
Re:Many 1970's sets did NOT include detailed instr
on
Has Lego Sold Out?
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· Score: 1
And you think the boxes of bricks are different?
Look up set 956. Came with exact, detailed, instructions. I know, I built it. 1978.
That would be scary if it were true...
on
Has Lego Sold Out?
·
· Score: 1
But it's not true. The lego sets I got in the mid-to-late-'70s (the 956 "auto chassis" was apparently 1978, and it was far from my first set) came with extremely detailed instructions for building one or two things, including the thing on the front of the box.
They have always provided detailed instructions for how to build stuff, so far as I know. All that's really changed is that now we have pundits who apparently think children cannot be creative unless they are explicitly told to.
While in theory it's true, so far I have never, ever, seen any coding standard, however horrific, that was worse than code which had no conventions or standards at all.
It is a heck of a lot easier to read code which is consistent, and it matters much more that it's consistent than which particular standard you use.
Badly-formatted code is much better at hiding errors. If you want a starting point for learning some of what's going on, check out Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. But long story short:
1. If I see badly-formatted code that ignores coding specs and the like, I generally start with the assumption that whatever I'm chasing down will be in that code. 2. This is nearly always right.
The end I'm going for is "break as many of my brain's existing categories and boundaries as I can". The goal I'm after is increased cognitive flexibility; for that purpose, an unrelated language is way, way, more valuable than one that's very similar.
Learning German tought me roughly nothing about how I thought. Learning Chinese tought me a huge amount about how I thought.
About all I'd say is: Pick a language mostly-unrelated to your own. Bonus points if you expect to have coworkers who speak it natively.
I see a comment saying it won't help you to learn a second language. I am unpersuaded. I generally find that anything I do which makes me more flexible makes me a better programmer. Being able to think in another language can be really useful for shaking up some of your presuppositions and assumptions. On the other hand, so can a philosophy degree.
I learned Chinese well enough to dream in it, and then mostly forgot it over the next decade or two. I still have an easier time understanding Chinese coworkers, because their English is often idiomatic for Chinese. But mostly... I am a more flexible person. I have concepts that there's a word for in Chinese and no word for in English. I learned to handle different ways of thinking about grammar. Overall, a good experience, and not one I regret. It's not as though it's a huge time sink; I'd guess I've spent more time playing video games in any given two-year period than I spent learning Chinese.
Yes, harm. Spreading FUD, spreading confusion, and making open source look more hostile to real use cases. Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I don't, but he's consistently a jerk and a spectacularly bad advocate.
Stallman's not a person I can take seriously when he talks about liberty, for one simple reason:
He's as much a control freak as the MPAA and RIAA are.
The GPLv3 is fundamentally in the same category as DRM; it's there to prohibit you from doing things with something that the author doesn't want you to do. The purpose is not to maximize freedom; it's to maximize one very narrow subset of freedoms, while prohibiting whole classes of others. And the more aggressive and draconian terms, coupled with the ever more elaborate attempts to prevent people from violating the spirit of the law, come down to the same thing that's wrong with the DMCA: You cannot make ethics happen by force. All you can do is replace any consideration of the ethics with a focus on the legal limits.
When I give code away, I give it away. I do not sit around making elaborate rules for how it can be used. I let people make their own calls. That's liberty. Liberty does include the possibility that other people will do things you don't appreciate, such as not choosing to also give things away or give people free reign with their stuff. Okay, fine.
But once people start making elaborate and complicated legal terms for things, which are designed to try to prevent all sort of things they don't like, and maybe they prevent a few things which coulda been okay but whatever... I don't care whether it's the RIAA or the FSF. It's about control, not liberty, and I don't like it.
CoH was 5% of their revenue, I think 3%. It was never, ever, ncsoft's flagship product. They didn't even make it; they bought it from someone else. They saved it from being closed back in the day, and they made money on it, but it's never been their biggest game, or their most successful, or anything like that.
Did you ever actually USE the "Paragon Market"? That was not developed by Paragon. It was developed by ncsoft (or someone else they hired). And it was spectacularly bad; like, I don't think I know anyone who does web development who couldn't probably do a better job in a day. Literally. Not hyperbole, not exaggerating. It was below the level of what you'd get if you went through a standard Rails tutorial.
So what happens if they sell it to someone competent? It does better. And ncsoft loses face.
I am pretty sure they will never sell it, because they don't want people to see just how incompetent they were.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not an argument for mandatory labeling. That is an argument against labeling which makes false claims.
There is nothing dishonest, or deceitful, about not going out of your way to identify everything anyone could ever possibly want to know and disclose all of it. "Not-forthcoming" is not the same thing as "dishonest".
So buy stuff that does tell you. Problem solved. You don't have a right to demand that millions of people starve to death so that you can indulge your superstitions.
But forcing a label that people won't understand onto things, when we all know that mandatory labels are almost exclusively used for things believed to be harmful, will drive people away from technology that can improve the chances of people actually eating and getting nutrition.
There's no more deceit involved in not specifically going out of your way to arbitrarily distinguish between food genetically modified by one mechanism (selective breeding) and food genetically modified by another, than there is in not specifically letting people know that the magnetic resonance in question is nuclear magnetic resonance.
Going out of your way to give people information which you know they will misunderstand, with the intent that they misunderstand it, is a lot more deceitful.
I suspect a lot of it is because it's a meaningless label, which can be used for FUD tactics.
If Linux is so good, why can't we just make sure that anything which runs Linux has a large red sticker saying CAUTION: LINUX on it?
I should be particularly interested in what he has to say because of his thoroughly-demonstrated grasp of cause and effect, and the law of unintended consequences, right? ... Nevermind.
I know theoretically the "this person's ideas have been really awful so far" argument is not a persuasive rebuttal, but it sure does save a lot of time.
Er, what?
1. Non-defamatory claims aren't libel, whether or not they are true, so far as I know. Not all insulting or negative remarks are defamatory.
2. I believe there's some exceptions for stuff having to do with public figures.
3. You can firmly believe something, but not think a court will be convinced of it.
Believing that something someone says about you is untrue is not by any means a rational basis for concluding that a court will consider it to be libel.
Actually, the submitter didn't say it was true. The submitter didn't even say it was not libel. The submitter said he didn't think a court would find it to be libel, based on "free speech rights".
This does not argue that the submitter has a nuanced-enough understanding of the law to justify trying to draw specific conclusions about what the facts are from his speculations as to what a court would rule.
Lawyers are much better than slashdot at telling you what your legal options might be.
Seriously, where do you get this stuff? There's not a lot of obvious overlap between libel law and free speech. At least in the US, the issues are whether material is (1) defamatory and (2) untrue. So far as I know, that's it; if the material's untrue, then saying false things about people is not generally regarded as "free speech". (Note: "untrue" means "provable as a matter of fact to be untrue", not just "I don't think it's true".)
Interesting, I hadn't seen the setting for that. Although the notification center thing bites me pretty frequently. I think it may have been the "four or five fingers" stuff, which is apparently mostly under that multitasking guestures thing. Thank you muchly! Since they used to not exist, I didn't know they had added a setting for them -- and being Apple, they have often enough offered no control over such a feature that it didn't occur to me to go looking. Still want to be able to turn notification center off while in apps, though, since it's almost never what I want, and I have at least some apps in which "drag something from near the top of the screen to somewhere else" was a thing.
Well, now you've gone and done it: You've pointed out that Apple's actually better about this than Canonical.
I hate the way iOS has gradually made it harder and harder for me to interact with the app I have open rather than the OS. Dragging from screen edge, tapping with the wrong number of fingers... All sorts of things get eaten by the OS, so I end up doing something other than interacting with the app.
Now, in their own tragically quite imitable style, Canonical appear to have decided that the problem with the intrusion of the OS into the app's UI is that it does not go far enough.
What exactly is your evidence that there's been no adverse effects?
I was on a plane once where the landing gear indicator insisted that the landing gear wasn't working, and had not actually dropped, but the pilot made the call to land anyway because he heard and felt it drop.
Things like this happen all the time. Did you have some kind of evidence that they are not sometimes caused by cell phones?
I have been told that aircraft mechanics report that airplanes have a certain amount of Hell If We Know It Just Does in their behavior, and specifically that there are known instances where one SPECIFIC plane -- not a model line, just one specific plane -- will behave in slightly unexpected ways near some but not all electronics.
Which is to say: I think that the problem is that they *do* have some real evidence of cases in which electronic devices, especially poorly-shielded ones, or ones which had wireless emitters, had unexpected effects.
I never got a CS degree, and that made it hard to get the first job, but once you have real-world professional experience, I doubt "95%" of companies will pass you over based on the degree.
It's not that it's a bad thing to get the degree, but I think you're overestimating the importance of the degree in comparison to real professional experience and/or reputation.
I posted a review of my own book on Amazon.
For reference, I quote it here in case this causes it to get removed there:
It's also considered the most helpful review at the moment. (FWIW, I still use the book as a reference, and apparently so do some of my coworkers.)
And you think the boxes of bricks are different?
Look up set 956. Came with exact, detailed, instructions. I know, I built it. 1978.
But it's not true. The lego sets I got in the mid-to-late-'70s (the 956 "auto chassis" was apparently 1978, and it was far from my first set) came with extremely detailed instructions for building one or two things, including the thing on the front of the box.
They have always provided detailed instructions for how to build stuff, so far as I know. All that's really changed is that now we have pundits who apparently think children cannot be creative unless they are explicitly told to.
While in theory it's true, so far I have never, ever, seen any coding standard, however horrific, that was worse than code which had no conventions or standards at all.
It is a heck of a lot easier to read code which is consistent, and it matters much more that it's consistent than which particular standard you use.
Badly-formatted code is much better at hiding errors. If you want a starting point for learning some of what's going on, check out Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. But long story short:
1. If I see badly-formatted code that ignores coding specs and the like, I generally start with the assumption that whatever I'm chasing down will be in that code.
2. This is nearly always right.
Yes, the language is simply a means to an end.
The end I'm going for is "break as many of my brain's existing categories and boundaries as I can". The goal I'm after is increased cognitive flexibility; for that purpose, an unrelated language is way, way, more valuable than one that's very similar.
Learning German tought me roughly nothing about how I thought. Learning Chinese tought me a huge amount about how I thought.
Years of work? Oh, come now.
And what is your basis for claiming it won't help?
About all I'd say is: Pick a language mostly-unrelated to your own. Bonus points if you expect to have coworkers who speak it natively.
I see a comment saying it won't help you to learn a second language. I am unpersuaded. I generally find that anything I do which makes me more flexible makes me a better programmer. Being able to think in another language can be really useful for shaking up some of your presuppositions and assumptions. On the other hand, so can a philosophy degree.
I learned Chinese well enough to dream in it, and then mostly forgot it over the next decade or two. I still have an easier time understanding Chinese coworkers, because their English is often idiomatic for Chinese. But mostly... I am a more flexible person. I have concepts that there's a word for in Chinese and no word for in English. I learned to handle different ways of thinking about grammar. Overall, a good experience, and not one I regret. It's not as though it's a huge time sink; I'd guess I've spent more time playing video games in any given two-year period than I spent learning Chinese.
Yes, harm. Spreading FUD, spreading confusion, and making open source look more hostile to real use cases. Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I don't, but he's consistently a jerk and a spectacularly bad advocate.
Stallman's not a person I can take seriously when he talks about liberty, for one simple reason:
He's as much a control freak as the MPAA and RIAA are.
The GPLv3 is fundamentally in the same category as DRM; it's there to prohibit you from doing things with something that the author doesn't want you to do. The purpose is not to maximize freedom; it's to maximize one very narrow subset of freedoms, while prohibiting whole classes of others. And the more aggressive and draconian terms, coupled with the ever more elaborate attempts to prevent people from violating the spirit of the law, come down to the same thing that's wrong with the DMCA: You cannot make ethics happen by force. All you can do is replace any consideration of the ethics with a focus on the legal limits.
When I give code away, I give it away. I do not sit around making elaborate rules for how it can be used. I let people make their own calls. That's liberty. Liberty does include the possibility that other people will do things you don't appreciate, such as not choosing to also give things away or give people free reign with their stuff. Okay, fine.
But once people start making elaborate and complicated legal terms for things, which are designed to try to prevent all sort of things they don't like, and maybe they prevent a few things which coulda been okay but whatever... I don't care whether it's the RIAA or the FSF. It's about control, not liberty, and I don't like it.
What on earth are you talking about?
CoH was 5% of their revenue, I think 3%. It was never, ever, ncsoft's flagship product. They didn't even make it; they bought it from someone else. They saved it from being closed back in the day, and they made money on it, but it's never been their biggest game, or their most successful, or anything like that.
Because they suck at running it.
Did you ever actually USE the "Paragon Market"? That was not developed by Paragon. It was developed by ncsoft (or someone else they hired). And it was spectacularly bad; like, I don't think I know anyone who does web development who couldn't probably do a better job in a day. Literally. Not hyperbole, not exaggerating. It was below the level of what you'd get if you went through a standard Rails tutorial.
So what happens if they sell it to someone competent? It does better. And ncsoft loses face.
I am pretty sure they will never sell it, because they don't want people to see just how incompetent they were.