I get so tired of people who quote "Sturgeon's Law" as if it meant something. So 90% of everything is crap? Is 90% of what you say crap?
Sturgeon's Law is just a lame excuse for a genre that attracts a lot of bad writers. Don't get me wrong, I love SF. It's just that everybody who's sat through an episode of Star Trek thinks they know how to write it.
Sorry, everything on Slashdot seems to have a sarcastic tinge these days...
By the way, about that student who claimed to have been visited by DHS agents wanting a word with him about his interest in the late Chairman's best seller. Turns out he made it up.
A possibility that should have occurred to me. Still, it's not pleasant to know that federal agents have the authority to track what we read. The fact that they haven't used it yet is neither here nor there.
Hey what am I an encyclopedia? You should go look it up. (Preferrably in something more erudite than Wikipedia.) But since there's just a bit of sarcasm in your post, I guess I'm obligated to oblige:
Examples of totalitarian states: any of the notorious "thought control" states: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, any of the many one-party Marxist countries. They're characterized by their "total" control, not just of people's lives, but even of the way they think.
Police states, by contrast, don't care what people think, as long as they do what they're told. Examples: the proverbial "banana republic" in the developing world, pre-Soviet Russia, much of central Europe (particularly Austria) during the 19th century. The stereotypical corrupt rural county in the U.S. (not as many as there used to be, thank God) certainly counts as a sort of pocket police state.
Now, the American right wing is full of people who love to convert the U.S. into a Protestant Theocracy, where everybody "lives by the bible". But President W, to his credit, isn't one of them. He doesn't want to ban the works of Mao, he just wants to know every time somebody checks them out of the library. That's social micromanagement, not thought control. Which defines the difference between "police state" and "totalitarianism" right there.
He might be a lawyer, and he might not. Who cares?
Somebody who takes his advice and gets in trouble because of it. Sure, lawyers are fallible — but they still know a lot of shit.
You're on some kind "personal responsibility" bandwagon that I'm not going to try to decipher, because it's not relevant to the topic at hand. Which is: You've gotten a cease and desist letter, what should you do? Whatever you do, it better not be based on the opinion of somebody who knows just enough law to get you in trouble.
Also, I guess the "illegal" part is bogus as far as the site owner goes.
You could be right — but you still need to qualify such a statement with IANAL. Ideally, one should never make decisions about how to respond to this kind of demand without talking to a lawyer. Then again, if you can't afford a lawyer, it makes sense to comply even if you think the demand is bogus. Which is what seems to have happened with the site in question.
I've looked into the Objective C and Xcode environment but compared to Microsoft's.NET solutions, it doesn't impress me at all. I think Apple can do a lot better.
Sure it can — as long as Apple is willing to spend as much as Microsoft spends on Visual Studio for a user base that's a tiny fraction of the size.
I'm not saying you can't compete with Microsoft. But there's an advantage that Microsoft has that gives them a huge advantage, and that nobody seems to want to consider: Economies of Scale.
Well, Santa Claus may have originated as a Christian saint, but his current legend surely has a pagan look to it. I mean elves, flying reindeer? But that's all a commercial creation that has nothing to do with religion, Christian or pagan. During the 19th century, the growing industrial/commercial sector took the quaint custom of giving anonymous gifts on Christmas (originally done on Saint Nicholas's feast day, December 6) and pumped it up into the current December consumption binge. Naturally, Santa was used in advertising from a very early date, and imaginative copywriters and artists started inventing the details which are now traditional. It's worth noting that Santa's Elves are entirely a commercial invention — originally, "elf" was just a generic term for a magical being.
My favorite Santa Claus detail is the color of his coat. Originally, he wore a simple brown coat trimmed with fur. Around 1905, Coca Cola started doing ads showing Santa wearing their corporate colors: red and white. And Santa's worn red ever since!
Free for the first hit? Your comparison is ridiculous - they've made it free so that you can use it for educational and non-commercial purposes. If you want to do commercial development, pay them. I see nothing wrong in that - it's the way businesses work.
In particular, it's the way IDE vendors work. All of them provide free or cheap versions for academic and open-source development, and expensive versions for enterprise development. That includes IBM, which for all practical purposes still owns Eclipse. True, they've transformed the basic Eclipse product into a freeware, open-source project. But that doesn't stop them from building various "Enterprise Studio" products on it — some of which sell for $10K a seat!
No offense, but I suspect you don't even have $100 million. By contrast, Microsoft is valued at $282 billion, with annual revenue of $40 billion. So the backdated fines amount to 0.25% of their annual income. The equivalent for someone with an average middle-class income (say $50K) is $125. Not enough to cover one speeding ticket.
Obligatory Simpsons ref: Mr. Burns is hauled into court for dumping nuclear waste in the city park. He's fined $3 million. He whips out his checkbook and says, "I'll take that statue of justice too!"
One reason American politics is so fucked up: Americans are damned ignorant. Like not knowing the difference between a totalitarian state and a police state.
In Perl 6 we actually give the programmer control over the individual grammar rules and even sub-rules, so that you can replace little bits and pieces of the grammar.
I guess 5 ways to do every little thing just wasn't enough...
Thanks for the link, but by the time I would get around to implementing it, the Goldtouch keyboard I ordered to use at work will have arrived. Not only does it put all the modifier keys Where God Meant Them To Be, it splits apart so you can position your hands naturally. Plus it's the narrowest serious keyboard in production, so you don't have to reach halfway across your desk to use your mouse.
Speaking of which, does anybody else except Sun still sell mechanical mice?
Oh yeah, I know about Xmodmap. Used to be the first thing I'd install when I was setting up a Sun workstation. Alas, it doesn't work on the evil Sun Ray terminals Sun now forces all its non-developer employees to use. Notice I said "terminals". Officially it's a "thin client", but it doesn't do anything that fits in the client-server model. It's just a graphics terminal, with all the actual computing taking place on a central host. Yes, Time-Sharing is back!
What this poster is asking is "why did sun swap the location of the capslock and control keys?".
I asked what I said I asked. And anyway, Sun did no such thing. Early Unix systems used teletypes and video terminals that emulated teletypes. On such terminals, the Control key is in the middle row on the far left — the same place it still is on most Sun keyboards.
If a modifier key is heavily used, then the natural place for is duplicated and near the bottom. That way you can hold it down with the pinky of one hand while you're pressing the modified key with your other hand. Which is what IBM eventually did with the Control and Alt keys. Sun did the same thing with their Meta keys. Which says to me that they considered the Meta key to be extremely important and the Control not important at all.
No such luck. There's only one each of CTRL and CAPS LOCK, and they're both on the left Here's an image and here's another. As I said, it's a major mystery why they moved CAPS LOCK to the bottom row (it's only been in the middle since the invention of the typewriter!), but what really drives me crazy is not having the backspace key in the top row.
Believe it or not, there are folks who love this arrangement, and spend hundreds of bucks so they can use Sun keyboards on their PCs!
Sun does make a "PC" keyboard for people like me, but if there's a USB port I prefer to plug in my own Goldtouch keyboard.
What, we're getting paranoid about people who travel abroad now?
For the sake of argument, let's accept that DHS has information, most of which they can't disclose, that leads them to suspect that this dude has links to terrorist organizations. There are many reasonable responses to that intelligence, all of which involve an important word: quietly. You quietly gather information about the suspect, with an eye to building a criminal case against him. You quietly spy on him, hoping he will lead you to bigger fish. What you certainly do not do is wait until he does something that's probably innocuous, then send a couple of agents to his house and reveal all your suspicions to him. If he's a real terrorist, he'll um, quietly cancel his next cell meeting. And if he's just an honest citizen...
In any case, the "he was showing a pattern" claim smells like something they cooked up after the fact. Like much of the post-9/11 bullshit we've seen, this "watch list" bullshit is just a way for politicians and bureaucrats to pump up their numbers and prove that they're "doing something" and "being proactive". So lots of ordinary citizens get hassled because they checked out library books that were on a watch list, or attempted to board a plane using a name that was on a watch list. Meanwhile, real terrorists buy their copys of The Little Red Book for cash at Borders, and travel under assumed names.
He had to do an ILL just to get the Little Red Book? His own library must be sadly underfunded and/or badly run. The LRB is not exactly great writing, but it is the best known work of a man who was the undisputed ruler of a billion people for decades.
I've actually done that. I even once managed to get my referal ID into a link in the main Slashdot story that I had submitted. Am I rolling in wealth? Not hardly. I got less than $10 from that one story, and about $25 for 3 or 4 years of link whoring. Curiously enough, most of the commissions I've gotten have not been for the books I linked to, but for other stuff people bought after following my links!
Slashdot Mirror
Sturgeon's Law is just a lame excuse for a genre that attracts a lot of bad writers. Don't get me wrong, I love SF. It's just that everybody who's sat through an episode of Star Trek thinks they know how to write it.
So you don't care about the discussion, yet you're participating in it anyway. Time to get a life!
Examples of totalitarian states: any of the notorious "thought control" states: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, any of the many one-party Marxist countries. They're characterized by their "total" control, not just of people's lives, but even of the way they think.
Police states, by contrast, don't care what people think, as long as they do what they're told. Examples: the proverbial "banana republic" in the developing world, pre-Soviet Russia, much of central Europe (particularly Austria) during the 19th century. The stereotypical corrupt rural county in the U.S. (not as many as there used to be, thank God) certainly counts as a sort of pocket police state.
Now, the American right wing is full of people who love to convert the U.S. into a Protestant Theocracy, where everybody "lives by the bible". But President W, to his credit, isn't one of them. He doesn't want to ban the works of Mao, he just wants to know every time somebody checks them out of the library. That's social micromanagement, not thought control. Which defines the difference between "police state" and "totalitarianism" right there.
You're on some kind "personal responsibility" bandwagon that I'm not going to try to decipher, because it's not relevant to the topic at hand. Which is: You've gotten a cease and desist letter, what should you do? Whatever you do, it better not be based on the opinion of somebody who knows just enough law to get you in trouble.
I'm not saying you can't compete with Microsoft. But there's an advantage that Microsoft has that gives them a huge advantage, and that nobody seems to want to consider: Economies of Scale.
My favorite Santa Claus detail is the color of his coat. Originally, he wore a simple brown coat trimmed with fur. Around 1905, Coca Cola started doing ads showing Santa wearing their corporate colors: red and white. And Santa's worn red ever since!
Yeah, I've known that for about 20 years. What I've never been able to figure out is why every brainless pronouncement he makes is news.
OK smart guy, what is the difference?
Obligatory Simpsons ref: Mr. Burns is hauled into court for dumping nuclear waste in the city park. He's fined $3 million. He whips out his checkbook and says, "I'll take that statue of justice too!"
One reason American politics is so fucked up: Americans are damned ignorant. Like not knowing the difference between a totalitarian state and a police state.
You only use TLJ if you're doing an action pic. For a romantic comedy you use the sexy starlet de jour.
Speaking of which, does anybody else except Sun still sell mechanical mice?
Oh yeah, I know about Xmodmap. Used to be the first thing I'd install when I was setting up a Sun workstation. Alas, it doesn't work on the evil Sun Ray terminals Sun now forces all its non-developer employees to use. Notice I said "terminals". Officially it's a "thin client", but it doesn't do anything that fits in the client-server model. It's just a graphics terminal, with all the actual computing taking place on a central host. Yes, Time-Sharing is back!
If a modifier key is heavily used, then the natural place for is duplicated and near the bottom. That way you can hold it down with the pinky of one hand while you're pressing the modified key with your other hand. Which is what IBM eventually did with the Control and Alt keys. Sun did the same thing with their Meta keys. Which says to me that they considered the Meta key to be extremely important and the Control not important at all.
Believe it or not, there are folks who love this arrangement, and spend hundreds of bucks so they can use Sun keyboards on their PCs!
Sun does make a "PC" keyboard for people like me, but if there's a USB port I prefer to plug in my own Goldtouch keyboard.
Thank God Sun now supports USB keyboard...
Spoil sport!
For the sake of argument, let's accept that DHS has information, most of which they can't disclose, that leads them to suspect that this dude has links to terrorist organizations. There are many reasonable responses to that intelligence, all of which involve an important word: quietly. You quietly gather information about the suspect, with an eye to building a criminal case against him. You quietly spy on him, hoping he will lead you to bigger fish. What you certainly do not do is wait until he does something that's probably innocuous, then send a couple of agents to his house and reveal all your suspicions to him. If he's a real terrorist, he'll um, quietly cancel his next cell meeting. And if he's just an honest citizen...
In any case, the "he was showing a pattern" claim smells like something they cooked up after the fact. Like much of the post-9/11 bullshit we've seen, this "watch list" bullshit is just a way for politicians and bureaucrats to pump up their numbers and prove that they're "doing something" and "being proactive". So lots of ordinary citizens get hassled because they checked out library books that were on a watch list, or attempted to board a plane using a name that was on a watch list. Meanwhile, real terrorists buy their copys of The Little Red Book for cash at Borders, and travel under assumed names.
Good point. And of course ordering a book from China by a certain well-known Chinese terrorist is cause for concern!
He had to do an ILL just to get the Little Red Book? His own library must be sadly underfunded and/or badly run. The LRB is not exactly great writing, but it is the best known work of a man who was the undisputed ruler of a billion people for decades.
I've actually done that. I even once managed to get my referal ID into a link in the main Slashdot story that I had submitted. Am I rolling in wealth? Not hardly. I got less than $10 from that one story, and about $25 for 3 or 4 years of link whoring. Curiously enough, most of the commissions I've gotten have not been for the books I linked to, but for other stuff people bought after following my links!