I can backup all my documents to an external drive with a simple drag-and-drop. I can't imagine trying to do that with a CLI.
Really? Typing 'rsync -av/home/user/mnt/external' takes longer than drag & drop? How would you do something like backing up all PDFs (and only pdfs) in a tree with a GUI? Does drag & drop recognize when two files are identical and only transfer files that have changed? Can it resume an interrupted transfer without copying the entire thing again? Can drag & drop transfer from host to host with compression? Can it verify the transfer went correctly by checksums?
In my experience, using rsync is not only faster and easier than a GUI, but far more capable as well. The GUI is suitable if and only if you're transferring a random set of files (i.e. one that you cannot specify with a glob or regex), otherwise the CLI is a much, much better option.
Don't blame the pirates. Pirates were doing ISPs a favor by using USENET. Something pirated over USENET only travels over the public internet once. Then every user of the ISP can download it on the ISPs network at no cost to the ISP. Kill USENET and those pirates go back to P2P where every download goes across the public internet at least once per user.
No, it wasn't pirates. It was spam. Binaries and discussion coexisted very well on USENET for many years. It was the spam that killed the discussion, and drove most people away. If people could still use USENET instead of web forums, no ISP would be killing USENET.
Reading about this today, I found that the scope of this particular decision is less scary than I initially assumed -- it's limited to prisoners who meet a standard as being "sexually dangerous", so they're not just being held without due process. Apparently this applies to about 100 prisoners nationwide.
The thing is with governments, if you give them an inch they take a mile. And when they overstep their authority, there's never, ever, ever, even the tiniest little bit of repercussion for it. I would feel safer with every one of those 100 molesters on the street than living under a government that has the power to imprison anyone indefinitely.
They're not rare, but they are pretty expensive. Most other common retro computers can be had for $20-40 or so. For an Amiga, you're looking at closer to $100.
However, what I found out was that I myself didn't understand Marxism.
I think you still don't understand marxism.
The ideas that are taught are things like classless societies are the best
I have been a student at 3 colleges, employed at one other, and a youthful hanger on at yet another. I've never heard of such a thing. Students may be exposed to the idea of classless societies, in the proper historical context, but that's not the same thing.
Gov't forced re-distribution
What, you mean taxes? Given that most universities would not exist without taxes, I'll give you that one. But taxes != marxism, so I don't know what your point is.
even among Conservatives we have a championing of the proletariat
In a democracy, if you want the most votes you have to cater to the most people. Under capitalism, the proletariat is always the largest class. It only makes sense that appealing to the lower classes would be a good strategy to get votes. Not that this has anything to do with Marxism.
But being a humanist is no different than being a Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist. I just think it is rather unfair that Secular Humanists and the like are considered enlightened but the former are considered backwards thinking brainwashed idiots.
What does secular humanism have to do with anything? We were talking about Marxism. But, to answer your question, secular humanism is the idea that evidence and not magical thinking is the way to improve our lives. The reason we're considered enlightened is because we're right. Science has brought us indoor lighting, motor vehicles, refrigeration, computing machines, vaccines, and so on. Magical thinking has brought us... um.. trees with twinkly lights.
The only thing we have a dearth of is free time. Instead of focusing on making more, lets take the time we would have used to produce excess and enjoy life instead. If we have too many people and not enough work, distribute the work around equitably. We could all work 20 hour weeks if our society weren't so focused on production as the only measure of value.
Quit painting "corporate" America as the evil and "government" as the good slayer of dragons; they're a two-headed beast, often times the two are indistinguishable.
You're right, to a point. Both corporations and the government are the enemy. But as Chomsky says at least governments are potentially democratic. Corporations are pure tyrannies.
I find it "curious" that this corporate takeover happened exactly when slow and shitty dialup died and DSL and Cable became popular. I guess there is something inherent in broadband that let the big mean corporations rise up...So what am I supposed to conclude from THIS? That the corporations... improved things? (note: most ISPs even then were corporate-owned; I think you just really hate the word "corporate," so I can't be sure what you even mean by it).
Here's where you go all wrong. It's not the corporations that made the internet better, it's the technology. That corporations control cable in a way that they don't control dial-up (e.g. anyone can talk to anyone else over the phone network) is just a historical accident. Send the government in to force the cable companies to lease bandwidth to smaller isps (after all they built that network with the help of the public.), that way we get all the benefits of the better technology, and the benefits of smaller ISPs.
Government made the internet, and they goddamn well better get a handle on the corporate takeover of it before it turns completely into cable television.
The president is personally responsible for every bill he does not veto. Only one appropriations bill was passed over Reagan's veto. Therefore he must have agreed to all other appropriations under his term. That makes him pretty damn guilty in my book. Reagan as a force for smaller government is a myth. The man was a disaster for his domestic economic policies, domestic social policies (war on drugs), and foreign policy (iran contra).
Open source means that everyone who has access to the binary has access to the source too. If you're not distributing the software (I hope we're not distributing missile control systems), then you have no obligation to distribute the source. There's also no implication that you have to accept patches from anyone. All that matters is that those who use the software have the ability to maintain it themselves.
So nothing you brought up really excludes the possibility of using the GPL for missile control software. The fact that it's so specialized makes the GPL less useful, but it doesn't make it a bad idea. If the government isn't getting the sources for this kind of software, then it can't check whether it does what it's supposed to do, and it can't shop around for contractors to make modifications to it. These are both reasons why we would want missile launcher code to be licensed to the government under some open source license. It would be better if the government owned the copyright to such code. Can you share a bit on how these projects actually tend to be licensed?
Strangely enough, popularity is often a really bad indicator of quality. There's a reason Budweiser is the top beer in the US and American Idol has been the top rated TV show for many years now.
"I find most mules fit into the latter group, and you can usually tell because these individuals often will admit to having set up a new account for the job" separate from where they keep their meager savings or checking. When pressed as to why they did this, if they're honest most will say they weren't sure about the whole arrangement and wanted to protect their investments just in case their employers turned out to be less-than-honest."
I keep separate a bank account for activities like PayPal. Does that mean that if PayPal is found to be fraudulent I'm going to be presumed to have known?
Running portal on a Mac right now, it's infinitely superior to anything achieved through emulation.
Good thing Wine doesn't emulate anything. It's a reimplementation, not emulation, and there's no reason in principle that it can't perform just as well as the real thing. Many games, if they use libraries that Wine has implemented well do work just as well as the real thing.
If you can't think of enough ways to graphically display information to fill a 250 page book, that says more about your lack of imagination than the utility of a plotting library.
I hadn't considered that tap to click was configurable, I'll have to try that. Mouse acceleration however, is really hard to get right. Accelerate it enough so that one drag of the finger gets you across the screen, and you end up with a pointer so sensitive that you can't click on anything small.
Trackballs take more space. That's really all there is to it.
I wasn't aware that trackpoints were "ubiquitous among laptop manufacturers". Who makes them besides Lenovo? I thought everyone had moved to those awful track pads. You know, the ones that take several strokes to move the pointer across the screen and click if you tap too hard.
Sure, it's not the best pointing device out there. Either a mouse or a trackball is going to be necessary for any serious clicking around. But for those times that you just need to move the mouse a bit and go back to typing, the keyboard clit is awesome. That actually describes most of my mousing so I'd love to have one of these. By any measurement it's far, far better than those crappy touchpads everyone is using these days. Those are simply unusable for any purpose.
After getting my clicky Das Keyboard a couple years ago, I thought I was done buying keyboards. But I'm lusting after that Unicomp. I wonder if you can get it with black keys.
Think about it: What good are those old X-boxes now? You can't play online with them, and Single player was NEVER very impressive on them. They don't have HD capabilities, so even XBMC isn't useful anymore. They are junk. Not even useful for nostalgia's sake like an old Atari, NES, or SNES. And the old games? Money down the drain. Hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars per person just gone.
Utter bullshit. I never played my Xbox online, so I don't miss it at all. There are plenty of good single player games on the system. I haven't played half the worthwhile single player games yet. They also serve very well as media players if you don't care about HD (I don't), and quick and easy MAME boxes. My Xbox is every bit as useful today as the day I bought it.
That same $50 means a lot more to a little indie game developer who is in the business of giving gamers what they want, instead of telling gamers what they want and delivering crap. I don't care if I hurt EA or Ubisoft or whoever. I care about helping the little guy.
Slashdot Mirror
I can backup all my documents to an external drive with a simple drag-and-drop. I can't imagine trying to do that with a CLI.
Really? Typing 'rsync -av /home/user /mnt/external' takes longer than drag & drop? How would you do something like backing up all PDFs (and only pdfs) in a tree with a GUI? Does drag & drop recognize when two files are identical and only transfer files that have changed? Can it resume an interrupted transfer without copying the entire thing again? Can drag & drop transfer from host to host with compression? Can it verify the transfer went correctly by checksums?
In my experience, using rsync is not only faster and easier than a GUI, but far more capable as well. The GUI is suitable if and only if you're transferring a random set of files (i.e. one that you cannot specify with a glob or regex), otherwise the CLI is a much, much better option.
Binaries on USENET are more efficient for the ISP than binaries on P2P, so that's not an issue.
Web forums can be accessed from anywhere. Newsgroups, well, you could using certain web interfaces.
That's what SSH and slrn are for.
Newsgroup readers are usually very complex.
They are also highly capable. Web forums are lacking in features.
In the end though, you're right. While technically superior, it's the social factors (moderation, spam) that killed USENET.
Don't blame the pirates. Pirates were doing ISPs a favor by using USENET. Something pirated over USENET only travels over the public internet once. Then every user of the ISP can download it on the ISPs network at no cost to the ISP. Kill USENET and those pirates go back to P2P where every download goes across the public internet at least once per user.
No, it wasn't pirates. It was spam. Binaries and discussion coexisted very well on USENET for many years. It was the spam that killed the discussion, and drove most people away. If people could still use USENET instead of web forums, no ISP would be killing USENET.
Did anyone consider that the ugly may commit more crimes?
He valued families so much he wanted two of them.
Reading about this today, I found that the scope of this particular decision is less scary than I initially assumed -- it's limited to prisoners who meet a standard as being "sexually dangerous", so they're not just being held without due process. Apparently this applies to about 100 prisoners nationwide.
The thing is with governments, if you give them an inch they take a mile. And when they overstep their authority, there's never, ever, ever, even the tiniest little bit of repercussion for it. I would feel safer with every one of those 100 molesters on the street than living under a government that has the power to imprison anyone indefinitely.
I don't understand the surprise that someone has a working 1986 computer.
Don't forget, PJ is a girl.
They're not rare, but they are pretty expensive. Most other common retro computers can be had for $20-40 or so. For an Amiga, you're looking at closer to $100.
However, what I found out was that I myself didn't understand Marxism.
I think you still don't understand marxism.
The ideas that are taught are things like classless societies are the best
I have been a student at 3 colleges, employed at one other, and a youthful hanger on at yet another. I've never heard of such a thing. Students may be exposed to the idea of classless societies, in the proper historical context, but that's not the same thing.
Gov't forced re-distribution
What, you mean taxes? Given that most universities would not exist without taxes, I'll give you that one. But taxes != marxism, so I don't know what your point is.
even among Conservatives we have a championing of the proletariat
In a democracy, if you want the most votes you have to cater to the most people. Under capitalism, the proletariat is always the largest class. It only makes sense that appealing to the lower classes would be a good strategy to get votes. Not that this has anything to do with Marxism.
But being a humanist is no different than being a Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist. I just think it is rather unfair that Secular Humanists and the like are considered enlightened but the former are considered backwards thinking brainwashed idiots.
What does secular humanism have to do with anything? We were talking about Marxism. But, to answer your question, secular humanism is the idea that evidence and not magical thinking is the way to improve our lives. The reason we're considered enlightened is because we're right. Science has brought us indoor lighting, motor vehicles, refrigeration, computing machines, vaccines, and so on. Magical thinking has brought us... um.. trees with twinkly lights.
Yeah, I know. IHBT.
The only thing we have a dearth of is free time. Instead of focusing on making more, lets take the time we would have used to produce excess and enjoy life instead. If we have too many people and not enough work, distribute the work around equitably. We could all work 20 hour weeks if our society weren't so focused on production as the only measure of value.
Quit painting "corporate" America as the evil and "government" as the good slayer of dragons; they're a two-headed beast, often times the two are indistinguishable.
You're right, to a point. Both corporations and the government are the enemy. But as Chomsky says at least governments are potentially democratic. Corporations are pure tyrannies.
I find it "curious" that this corporate takeover happened exactly when slow and shitty dialup died and DSL and Cable became popular. I guess there is something inherent in broadband that let the big mean corporations rise up...So what am I supposed to conclude from THIS? That the corporations... improved things? (note: most ISPs even then were corporate-owned; I think you just really hate the word "corporate," so I can't be sure what you even mean by it).
Here's where you go all wrong. It's not the corporations that made the internet better, it's the technology. That corporations control cable in a way that they don't control dial-up (e.g. anyone can talk to anyone else over the phone network) is just a historical accident. Send the government in to force the cable companies to lease bandwidth to smaller isps (after all they built that network with the help of the public.), that way we get all the benefits of the better technology, and the benefits of smaller ISPs.
Government made the internet, and they goddamn well better get a handle on the corporate takeover of it before it turns completely into cable television.
Or what? You'll vote against them? Oh noes!
I was too busy giggling about "UBM" to notice. UBM? I do!
The president is personally responsible for every bill he does not veto. Only one appropriations bill was passed over Reagan's veto. Therefore he must have agreed to all other appropriations under his term. That makes him pretty damn guilty in my book. Reagan as a force for smaller government is a myth. The man was a disaster for his domestic economic policies, domestic social policies (war on drugs), and foreign policy (iran contra).
Open source means that everyone who has access to the binary has access to the source too. If you're not distributing the software (I hope we're not distributing missile control systems), then you have no obligation to distribute the source. There's also no implication that you have to accept patches from anyone. All that matters is that those who use the software have the ability to maintain it themselves.
So nothing you brought up really excludes the possibility of using the GPL for missile control software. The fact that it's so specialized makes the GPL less useful, but it doesn't make it a bad idea. If the government isn't getting the sources for this kind of software, then it can't check whether it does what it's supposed to do, and it can't shop around for contractors to make modifications to it. These are both reasons why we would want missile launcher code to be licensed to the government under some open source license. It would be better if the government owned the copyright to such code. Can you share a bit on how these projects actually tend to be licensed?
Strangely enough, popularity is often a really bad indicator of quality. There's a reason Budweiser is the top beer in the US and American Idol has been the top rated TV show for many years now.
"I find most mules fit into the latter group, and you can usually tell because these individuals often will admit to having set up a new account for the job" separate from where they keep their meager savings or checking. When pressed as to why they did this, if they're honest most will say they weren't sure about the whole arrangement and wanted to protect their investments just in case their employers turned out to be less-than-honest."
I keep separate a bank account for activities like PayPal. Does that mean that if PayPal is found to be fraudulent I'm going to be presumed to have known?
Running portal on a Mac right now, it's infinitely superior to anything achieved through emulation.
Good thing Wine doesn't emulate anything. It's a reimplementation, not emulation, and there's no reason in principle that it can't perform just as well as the real thing. Many games, if they use libraries that Wine has implemented well do work just as well as the real thing.
If you can't think of enough ways to graphically display information to fill a 250 page book, that says more about your lack of imagination than the utility of a plotting library.
I hadn't considered that tap to click was configurable, I'll have to try that. Mouse acceleration however, is really hard to get right. Accelerate it enough so that one drag of the finger gets you across the screen, and you end up with a pointer so sensitive that you can't click on anything small.
Trackballs take more space. That's really all there is to it.
I wasn't aware that trackpoints were "ubiquitous among laptop manufacturers". Who makes them besides Lenovo? I thought everyone had moved to those awful track pads. You know, the ones that take several strokes to move the pointer across the screen and click if you tap too hard.
Sure, it's not the best pointing device out there. Either a mouse or a trackball is going to be necessary for any serious clicking around. But for those times that you just need to move the mouse a bit and go back to typing, the keyboard clit is awesome. That actually describes most of my mousing so I'd love to have one of these. By any measurement it's far, far better than those crappy touchpads everyone is using these days. Those are simply unusable for any purpose.
After getting my clicky Das Keyboard a couple years ago, I thought I was done buying keyboards. But I'm lusting after that Unicomp. I wonder if you can get it with black keys.
Think about it: What good are those old X-boxes now? You can't play online with them, and Single player was NEVER very impressive on them. They don't have HD capabilities, so even XBMC isn't useful anymore. They are junk. Not even useful for nostalgia's sake like an old Atari, NES, or SNES. And the old games? Money down the drain. Hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars per person just gone.
Utter bullshit. I never played my Xbox online, so I don't miss it at all. There are plenty of good single player games on the system. I haven't played half the worthwhile single player games yet. They also serve very well as media players if you don't care about HD (I don't), and quick and easy MAME boxes. My Xbox is every bit as useful today as the day I bought it.
That same $50 means a lot more to a little indie game developer who is in the business of giving gamers what they want, instead of telling gamers what they want and delivering crap. I don't care if I hurt EA or Ubisoft or whoever. I care about helping the little guy.