...standing up for your rights is frequently messy and risky...
As I've said before (I think to you) picking political arguments with street cops is pretty poor way to "stand up for your rights". No cop has the time to stand around and argue with people.
In this instance "standing up for your rights" means refusing to comply with the cop's illegal order — and doing so in a polite and respectful manner so the cop doesn't have an excuse to bust you. ("The suspect was combative and disorderly; I had to arrest him to prevent the situation from getting out of control.") If the cop busts you anyway, then you really do have a serious case against them. But if you pick a fight with a cop, even a battle of words, the cop will win every time, and I guarantee you there will be no consequences for them.
Of course, being polite to a cop requires more maturity than some people can manage. But calling immaturity "standing up for your rights" is laughable.
Right, when you deal with dangerous people, don't worry about the possibility that they might bash your head in. So what if your head is now concave? Or if they throw you in a cell with a big hairy guy who's looking for a new boyfriend? You can always sue them later, and that will make everything all right.
Unless, of course, they manage to portray you as a troublemaker and convince the jury that you were a troublemaker and that the cop was just trying to keep order. That would be the likely outcome in this case, even if the dude hadn't signed that admonishment, a signature that is a pretty clear mea culpa.
Here's what grownups do. When in nasty situations, you anticipate what could happen, not what you think should happen. Your ability to punish the other side after the fact probably won't be much consolation. And your ability to do so is not as clear as you think it is. Cops tend to do better in front of juries than the people up against. Maybe you've heard of the odd fat settlement for police misconduct, but that's the exception.
Come to think of it, the very video you linked to is an example of that. The jury looked at the same video, and didn't see any misconduct. What does that tell you?
I'm not saying forced overtime is OK. It would be bad even if it didn't have any effect on your health (which it clearly does). But it's still not as bad as the health effects of gaming for many days without rest.
Some slashdotters seem to think that saying something isn't as bad as you think it is means excusing it. It isn't.
Forced overtime can certainly be bad for your health. But I don't think a few allnighters are going to kill you outright. They might shorten your life a bit.
And some gamers do play themselves to death. That actually happened at small colo provider where I used to work. They often sponsored LAN parties, and once a guy who'd apparently already been awake for a couple days showed up and played continuously for about 24 hours. Then he stood up, walked out to the parking lot, and dropped dead.
Good point about "the professionals". For one thing, Wikileaks is smart enough not to go to Slashdot for legal advice. They'd go to a lawyer, who'd tell you that local authorities can hold a local person accountable for web content, regardless of where it's hosted.
OK, they've finally recognized the problem. But instead of dealing with it, they're trying to kludge around it — and failing miserably. For example, here's the way they render the mailing label at the opening to chapter 2:
ALICE'S RIGHT FOOT, ESQ.
HEARTHRUG,
NEAR THE FENDER,
(WITH ALICE'S LOVE).
For the way it's supposed to look, check out this page
Notice that the Gutenberg version is in all caps, even though the original is in mixed case. The ASCII version spaces out the lines correctly, but uses all caps to indicate italics. Obviously the HTML version was created by taking the ASCII version and feeding it through a filter that tries to guess what tags correspond to the Gutenberg text idioms it sees. It can handle simple conventions like the one you pointed out, where "'How CAN I have done that?'" stands for "'How can I have done that?'" But it can't handle ambiguity (sometimes all caps stands for bold or all caps!) or complicated formatting.
Since we taxpayers paid for most, if not all, of the work being presented, perhaps they all should be free.
Maybe we paid for the work, but we don't pay the money used to operate the web server, which is not owned by the government. As they explain in their FAQs, they need some revenue to cover their costs.
Nobody's going to use a phone-based web server to serve pages to other nodes. How would you even discover the address? Or get through the AT&T firewall?
It's for web applications where both client and server are on the same device. This is actually a very common use case. Google desktop is a good example.
Shakespeare? A minor part of this market. Go into a bookstore, and anything you see that was written in English more than a century ago is very likely available on Gutenberg. Because if a book is at all popular, somebody's bound to scan it in.
And in many cases, even if the book isn't popular. Which, from my point of view, is Gutenberg's main (make that only) virtue: a lot of their content isn't available any other way. And I, for one, never bother with the Gutenberg version if I can afford another version.
Why? Because I hate books where italics, boldface, and other typographical cases are all expressed in ALL CAPITALS. If I'm reading anything that old, it's for pleasure, and this clumsy typography destroys a lot of the pleasure of reading. When are they going to figure out that there are rich text formats that are more accessible to more users than plain text files?
Nothing, I suppose. But why would they bother? To punish Bloomsbury for making free copies available?
Besides, it's not as easy as your making it sound. Bloomsbury does this stuff on a huge scale, so their costs are lower. And that's assuming the other version is printed using traditional methods. Unless your hypothetical economic terrorist was willing to spend a lot of money up front for a print run, they'd have to rely on a print-on-demand system, which has pretty high unit costs. Not break-the-bank high (POD has gotten pretty cheap) but not low enough to compete with a regular printer, never mind undercut them.
It's amusing: all the technologies we're such geeks about rely on economies of scale. Yet nobody around here really seems to understand the concept.
What Phoenix is doing is pushing Windows into a VM, permanently.
Depending on what you mean by "permanently", you can do this now: run Windows from a VM under an ordinary Linux distro. The only difference here is that Linux is running out of the BIOS ROM.
What's the point of running Linux this way? Besides making it harder to update.
Indeed, here's here's a publisher that's incorporating free online copies into its business model. Some authors seem to think that this works well for technical books. I think an author of mass-market books might have more to worry about.
I already curse Firefox: slow, unreliable, too many irritating quirks. I've probably made things worse by installing too many dodgy plugins, but I think it's mostly the fact that its rendering engine is a bloated kludge. Seems to be designed more as a platform for XUL apps than as an efficient, reliable renderer.
I have issues with Chrome too (mainly that they expect me to relearn all my GUI idioms pretty much from scratch). But all in all, it's a much sounder product. Once Chrome's plugin ecosystem reaches critical mass, I'm gone.
Yeah, I know, plugins will probably introduce problems into Chrome as well. I'm counting on Chrome's API designers to to a better job of insulating me from plugin screwups. We'll see.
Specially when there are "seamen [that] had decades of experience" around to choose from
Seamen who mostly lacked the skills need to be an officer, such as literacy.
Newbie commissioned officers often command soldiers and sailors with decades of experience. There are lots of command skills that can't be taught any other way. Not the least of these skills is learning to respect and leverage the wisdom and experience of your "inferiors".
Come to think of it, all hierarchical organizations work this way. I'm one of the oldest people where I work, and am not a manager. So I take order from folks much younger with less experience. Is this discrimination of some sort? No, it's a logical response to the fact that I'd make a cruddy manager.
When you condemn the sanity of 19th-century navies for having 12-year-old officers, your benchmarks are shaped by some big cultural assumption.. This has nothing to do with insanity. It's a change in attitude towards child labor. In 1812, puberty was pretty much the standard time for entering the workforce. Come to think of it, I'm reading a biography of Lincoln, who started working on his father's farm at 3! Even he considered that much too young, but it was a matter of economic necessity, not his father's personality issues.
Now we consider the teens to be a time for maturation and education, not work. All in all, a drastic improvement. Though I often think we've gone too far to the other extreme, judging from all the college grads I see with extremely narrow and prejudiced world views.
Enough with the Ritalin prose. What are you doing beyond getting nasty with everybody who disagrees with you? If your fight against creeping fascism is limited to lame self-righteous bloviating, you are part of the problem, period.
Slashdot Mirror
...standing up for your rights is frequently messy and risky...
As I've said before (I think to you) picking political arguments with street cops is pretty poor way to "stand up for your rights". No cop has the time to stand around and argue with people.
In this instance "standing up for your rights" means refusing to comply with the cop's illegal order — and doing so in a polite and respectful manner so the cop doesn't have an excuse to bust you. ("The suspect was combative and disorderly; I had to arrest him to prevent the situation from getting out of control.") If the cop busts you anyway, then you really do have a serious case against them. But if you pick a fight with a cop, even a battle of words, the cop will win every time, and I guarantee you there will be no consequences for them.
Of course, being polite to a cop requires more maturity than some people can manage. But calling immaturity "standing up for your rights" is laughable.
Right, when you deal with dangerous people, don't worry about the possibility that they might bash your head in. So what if your head is now concave? Or if they throw you in a cell with a big hairy guy who's looking for a new boyfriend? You can always sue them later, and that will make everything all right.
Unless, of course, they manage to portray you as a troublemaker and convince the jury that you were a troublemaker and that the cop was just trying to keep order. That would be the likely outcome in this case, even if the dude hadn't signed that admonishment, a signature that is a pretty clear mea culpa.
Here's what grownups do. When in nasty situations, you anticipate what could happen, not what you think should happen. Your ability to punish the other side after the fact probably won't be much consolation. And your ability to do so is not as clear as you think it is. Cops tend to do better in front of juries than the people up against. Maybe you've heard of the odd fat settlement for police misconduct, but that's the exception.
Come to think of it, the very video you linked to is an example of that. The jury looked at the same video, and didn't see any misconduct. What does that tell you?
I always thought that Cheney shared his "secret location" with Osama bin Laden. I mean, having two of them is kind of wasteful.
For the typical gamer, 40 years.
I'm not saying forced overtime is OK. It would be bad even if it didn't have any effect on your health (which it clearly does). But it's still not as bad as the health effects of gaming for many days without rest.
Some slashdotters seem to think that saying something isn't as bad as you think it is means excusing it. It isn't.
No, we aren't, as said somebody has to have a reason to throw you in jail, which is something the cops never had in this case.
Dude, RTFA, they did throw him in jail.
Uh, no. Even if be had lived, what were his chances of reproducing?
Forced overtime can certainly be bad for your health. But I don't think a few allnighters are going to kill you outright. They might shorten your life a bit.
And some gamers do play themselves to death. That actually happened at small colo provider where I used to work. They often sponsored LAN parties, and once a guy who'd apparently already been awake for a couple days showed up and played continuously for about 24 hours. Then he stood up, walked out to the parking lot, and dropped dead.
"I live in the same county, but not the same city, and therefore could be subject to a search (legal or not) by some of these government agencies."
Good point about "the professionals". For one thing, Wikileaks is smart enough not to go to Slashdot for legal advice. They'd go to a lawyer, who'd tell you that local authorities can hold a local person accountable for web content, regardless of where it's hosted.
Who cares? Somebody who wants to read the book the way the author wrote it.
All is convention. Doesn't mean communicating one way rather than another doesn't matter, you very nice person.
ALICE'S RIGHT FOOT, ESQ.
HEARTHRUG,
NEAR THE FENDER,
(WITH ALICE'S LOVE).
For the way it's supposed to look, check out this page Notice that the Gutenberg version is in all caps, even though the original is in mixed case. The ASCII version spaces out the lines correctly, but uses all caps to indicate italics. Obviously the HTML version was created by taking the ASCII version and feeding it through a filter that tries to guess what tags correspond to the Gutenberg text idioms it sees. It can handle simple conventions like the one you pointed out, where "'How CAN I have done that?'" stands for "'How can I have done that?'" But it can't handle ambiguity (sometimes all caps stands for bold or all caps!) or complicated formatting.
RTFA. These aren't textbooks. They're a series of books on science and ethics edited by a Nobel Prize winner.
Maybe we paid for the work, but we don't pay the money used to operate the web server, which is not owned by the government. As they explain in their FAQs, they need some revenue to cover their costs.
Nobody's going to use a phone-based web server to serve pages to other nodes. How would you even discover the address? Or get through the AT&T firewall?
It's for web applications where both client and server are on the same device. This is actually a very common use case. Google desktop is a good example.
Shakespeare? A minor part of this market. Go into a bookstore, and anything you see that was written in English more than a century ago is very likely available on Gutenberg. Because if a book is at all popular, somebody's bound to scan it in.
And in many cases, even if the book isn't popular. Which, from my point of view, is Gutenberg's main (make that only) virtue: a lot of their content isn't available any other way. And I, for one, never bother with the Gutenberg version if I can afford another version.
Why? Because I hate books where italics, boldface, and other typographical cases are all expressed in ALL CAPITALS. If I'm reading anything that old, it's for pleasure, and this clumsy typography destroys a lot of the pleasure of reading. When are they going to figure out that there are rich text formats that are more accessible to more users than plain text files?
Nothing, I suppose. But why would they bother? To punish Bloomsbury for making free copies available?
Besides, it's not as easy as your making it sound. Bloomsbury does this stuff on a huge scale, so their costs are lower. And that's assuming the other version is printed using traditional methods. Unless your hypothetical economic terrorist was willing to spend a lot of money up front for a print run, they'd have to rely on a print-on-demand system, which has pretty high unit costs. Not break-the-bank high (POD has gotten pretty cheap) but not low enough to compete with a regular printer, never mind undercut them.
It's amusing: all the technologies we're such geeks about rely on economies of scale. Yet nobody around here really seems to understand the concept.
OK, you make a good point. I made the usual slashdotter mistake of only looking at things from my own POV.
193 Freaks? I'm jealous!
What Phoenix is doing is pushing Windows into a VM, permanently.
Depending on what you mean by "permanently", you can do this now: run Windows from a VM under an ordinary Linux distro. The only difference here is that Linux is running out of the BIOS ROM.
What's the point of running Linux this way? Besides making it harder to update.
*And* are willing to pay $9 for "shipping and handling". With a little shopping around, you could probably buy one for less than that.
Indeed, here's here's a publisher that's incorporating free online copies into its business model. Some authors seem to think that this works well for technical books. I think an author of mass-market books might have more to worry about.
HEADLINE: MySQL Creates Open Database Alliance, Plans Refactoring
MySQL the database application? It created a new alliance? It plans to refactor itself? Astonishing, if true.
MySQL the software company? Uh, not, because Monty no longer has any connection with them.
You mean Monty did these things. Not "MySQL". His identification with MySQL is pretty strong, but I don't think they'll merge any time soon!
will web developers start cursing Firefox?
I already curse Firefox: slow, unreliable, too many irritating quirks. I've probably made things worse by installing too many dodgy plugins, but I think it's mostly the fact that its rendering engine is a bloated kludge. Seems to be designed more as a platform for XUL apps than as an efficient, reliable renderer.
I have issues with Chrome too (mainly that they expect me to relearn all my GUI idioms pretty much from scratch). But all in all, it's a much sounder product. Once Chrome's plugin ecosystem reaches critical mass, I'm gone.
Yeah, I know, plugins will probably introduce problems into Chrome as well. I'm counting on Chrome's API designers to to a better job of insulating me from plugin screwups. We'll see.
Lynx is pure bloat with its silly "hyperlinks". I use wget!
Specially when there are "seamen [that] had decades of experience" around to choose from
Seamen who mostly lacked the skills need to be an officer, such as literacy.
Newbie commissioned officers often command soldiers and sailors with decades of experience. There are lots of command skills that can't be taught any other way. Not the least of these skills is learning to respect and leverage the wisdom and experience of your "inferiors".
Come to think of it, all hierarchical organizations work this way. I'm one of the oldest people where I work, and am not a manager. So I take order from folks much younger with less experience. Is this discrimination of some sort? No, it's a logical response to the fact that I'd make a cruddy manager.
When you condemn the sanity of 19th-century navies for having 12-year-old officers, your benchmarks are shaped by some big cultural assumption.. This has nothing to do with insanity. It's a change in attitude towards child labor. In 1812, puberty was pretty much the standard time for entering the workforce. Come to think of it, I'm reading a biography of Lincoln, who started working on his father's farm at 3! Even he considered that much too young, but it was a matter of economic necessity, not his father's personality issues.
Now we consider the teens to be a time for maturation and education, not work. All in all, a drastic improvement. Though I often think we've gone too far to the other extreme, judging from all the college grads I see with extremely narrow and prejudiced world views.
By the way, how old are you?
Enough with the Ritalin prose. What are you doing beyond getting nasty with everybody who disagrees with you? If your fight against creeping fascism is limited to lame self-righteous bloviating, you are part of the problem, period.