I didn't find anything worthwhile in this article. Granted, I couldn't stomach it all the way through to the end, but I doubt it got much better.
A good commentary, IMHO, presents well-documented facts to support an opinion and is capable of persuading someone of differing opinion, or no opinion, and less facts to change their point of view. This article was nothing but a string of accusations with no substantiation. Sure, the cartoons were amusing, but this type of writing accomplishes nothing but entertaining others of the same viewpoint and giving them a false sense of justification and vindication.
Let me conclude by saying that I do not necessarily disagree with the viewpoint presented. I simply disagree with the notion that this presentation of that viewpoint represents anything approaching journalism.
How do you think CD prices SHOULD be determined? If the market will bear prices of $18/CD, why shouldn't the companies be allowed to charge that?
Personally, I buy a lot of albums from independent labels, and if I do buy major label stuff, I get it used, or when it's so old the stores just want to get rid of it. There aren't a lot of bands I'd pay $18 for a CD by.
That said, there are obviously enough teenie-boppers out there willing to spend $18 of mom and dad's money on the new Britney Spears album to keep the labels in business.
If you don't like the price, don't pay it! Having the government step in almost invariably just makes a big, fat mess of things. And law suits like this just get my goat anyway. It's not about what's just or what's right, it's just about some schmuck who sees an oportunity to make a buck. You've gotta love America, the only company in the world where you can make a million bucks by spilling hot coffee on yourself!
MPEG4 seems to encompas a lot more than just 2-D video compression, such as scene composition, and more. See this link for more than you ever wanted to know about the MPEG-4 standard.
I find it very hard to write on any touchpad I have ever used. The tactile feedback is all wrong. Also, if it is a screen you are "writing" on, where what you write appears beneath the pen, the depth is confusing. If it is not a screen, and you can't see what you've written at all, it's even worse. I suppose I could get used to it, but I just really don't think it is the "natural" interface they try to promote it as. It always feels very awkward to me.
In addition, there's apt, which updates your system incredibly easily. In fact, there was a recent post on debian-devel where a user updated from 1.3 (released 3 years ago) to frozen quite easily.
When I went from 1.3 to 2.0, it was pure pain. The main obstacle was the move to glibc. I followed the upgrade instructions as closely as I knew how, but still ended up with stuff broken. Don't get me wrong, I like Debian, and still use it, but I find it difficult to believe someone went from 1.3 to 2.2 "quite easily".
Personally, I thought it was hillarious, and I fell for it (not to the extent of placing an order mind you), though, in retrospect there are many give-aways that it was a hoax.
Anyone who was offended by this needs to lighten up and take the world a little less seriously. It's much better for your health!
Re:Another Idea for Keeping the Page Up...
on
Geek Flavor
·
· Score: 1
Well, a start would be making index.html read only (and not owned by the public account). If you protected that, and provided links from there to pages that could be modified, or perhaps provided a way to register new content through a script that would add a link to it, it might be a *little* more stable. The bottom line, though, is that every community has lame losers who get their rocks off by fscking sh*t up for others, and there is nothing we can do put protect ourselves from them and hope they find someone else to bug.
And the guys who threw the tea in the harbor should have been hung.
Civil disobedience is as american as apple pie, and it gets a heck of a lot more attention than any "legal means" of protest. If bad laws are not broken, no one will realize they are bad.
Perhaps the reason girls don't go for geek guys is because we use the Discovery channel as a guide to appropriate mating signals?
:-)
Actually, there are plenty of girls out there who go for geek guys. I've dated several of them. OK, maybe not "plenty". Probably not enough to, er, "supply" all the geek guys of the world with a girlfriend. Keep in mind also, that there is a marked difference between "girls who go for geek guys" and "girl geeks". Most of the girls I have dated have not been "geeks", at least not in the IT sense of the word.
Every time I read about the courts over-turning some insidious, obviously unconstitutional law, my first thought is "Good. Things are still right in the world, and someone is acting to preserve the ideas our country was founded on." The next thought that comes to mind, however, is "Why does it take the COURTS to do this?" Why don't the law-makers, the elected officials whom we have (theoretically) chosen to create the rules best suited to serve our society, care about the constitution? They seem to see it as an obstacle to be overcome in obtaining their objectives and personal agendas. I suppose that is all the more reason to thank whatever gods you may or may not believe in that the courts seem to take their responsibility to society seriously....
From the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution to the digital revolution, all have had profound effects on the lives of those alive when they happened. The *focus* of those effects has been different each time around. I don't think it is possible to say that the advances in information technologies are more or less important than indoor plumbing, or sliced bread, or the cotton gin. The digital revolution is still in the process of transforming our lives. It is changing the way goods are bought and sold, it is changing the ways we communicate with one another, and, perhaps most importantly, it is increasingly blurring the concepts of national boundaries, our ideas about property and ownership thereof (particularly "intellectual property"), and many other ideas that have remained largely unchanged for centuries. I'm as excited as the next guy about not having to crap in a hole in the ground, but let's not sell the digital revolution short. This is still only the beginning.
Personally, I don't see how this is any different than a TV station which refuses to pull defamatory advertising.
It's more like a cable company refusing to black-out defamatory advertising one of the channels they carry broadcast. Is the maintainer of the medium responsible for the content, or the originator of the content? The big difference here, is with the internet, content originators are frequently individuals and therefore not cushy targets for lawsuits. The maintainers of the medium, however, have money.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't find anything worthwhile in this article. Granted, I couldn't stomach it all the way through to the end, but I doubt it got much better.
A good commentary, IMHO, presents well-documented facts to support an opinion and is capable of persuading someone of differing opinion, or no opinion, and less facts to change their point of view. This article was nothing but a string of accusations with no substantiation. Sure, the cartoons were amusing, but this type of writing accomplishes nothing but entertaining others of the same viewpoint and giving them a false sense of justification and vindication.
Let me conclude by saying that I do not necessarily disagree with the viewpoint presented. I simply disagree with the notion that this presentation of that viewpoint represents anything approaching journalism.
At least one person gets it.
How do you think CD prices SHOULD be determined? If the market will bear prices of $18/CD, why shouldn't the companies be allowed to charge that?
Personally, I buy a lot of albums from independent labels, and if I do buy major label stuff, I get it used, or when it's so old the stores just want to get rid of it. There aren't a lot of bands I'd pay $18 for a CD by.
That said, there are obviously enough teenie-boppers out there willing to spend $18 of mom and dad's money on the new Britney Spears album to keep the labels in business.
If you don't like the price, don't pay it! Having the government step in almost invariably just makes a big, fat mess of things. And law suits like this just get my goat anyway. It's not about what's just or what's right, it's just about some schmuck who sees an oportunity to make a buck. You've gotta love America, the only company in the world where you can make a million bucks by spilling hot coffee on yourself!
MPEG4 seems to encompas a lot more than just 2-D video compression, such as scene composition, and more. See this link for more than you ever wanted to know about the MPEG-4 standard.
I find it very hard to write on any touchpad I have ever used. The tactile feedback is all wrong. Also, if it is a screen you are "writing" on, where what you write appears beneath the pen, the depth is confusing. If it is not a screen, and you can't see what you've written at all, it's even worse. I suppose I could get used to it, but I just really don't think it is the "natural" interface they try to promote it as. It always feels very awkward to me.
In addition, there's apt, which updates your system incredibly easily. In fact, there was a recent post on debian-devel where a user updated from 1.3 (released 3 years ago) to frozen quite easily.
When I went from 1.3 to 2.0, it was pure pain. The main obstacle was the move to glibc. I followed the upgrade instructions as closely as I knew how, but still ended up with stuff broken. Don't get me wrong, I like Debian, and still use it, but I find it difficult to believe someone went from 1.3 to 2.2 "quite easily".
Personally, I thought it was hillarious, and I fell for it (not to the extent of placing an order mind you), though, in retrospect there are many give-aways that it was a hoax.
Anyone who was offended by this needs to lighten up and take the world a little less seriously. It's much better for your health!
Well, a start would be making index.html read only (and not owned by the public account). If you protected that, and provided links from there to pages that could be modified, or perhaps provided a way to register new content through a script that would add a link to it, it might be a *little* more stable. The bottom line, though, is that every community has lame losers who get their rocks off by fscking sh*t up for others, and there is nothing we can do put protect ourselves from them and hope they find someone else to bug.
And the guys who threw the tea in the harbor should have been hung.
Civil disobedience is as american as apple pie, and it gets a heck of a lot more attention than any "legal means" of protest. If bad laws are not broken, no one will realize they are bad.
Perhaps the reason girls don't go for geek guys is because we use the Discovery channel as a guide to appropriate mating signals?
:-)
Actually, there are plenty of girls out there who go for geek guys. I've dated several of them. OK, maybe not "plenty". Probably not enough to, er, "supply" all the geek guys of the world with a girlfriend. Keep in mind also, that there is a marked difference between "girls who go for geek guys" and "girl geeks". Most of the girls I have dated have not been "geeks", at least not in the IT sense of the word.
Every time I read about the courts over-turning some insidious, obviously unconstitutional law, my first thought is "Good. Things are still right in the world, and someone is acting to preserve the ideas our country was founded on." The next thought that comes to mind, however, is "Why does it take the COURTS to do this?" Why don't the law-makers, the elected officials whom we have (theoretically) chosen to create the rules best suited to serve our society, care about the constitution? They seem to see it as an obstacle to be overcome in obtaining their objectives and personal agendas. I suppose that is all the more reason to thank whatever gods you may or may not believe in that the courts seem to take their responsibility to society seriously....
From the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution to the digital revolution, all have had profound effects on the lives of those alive when they happened. The *focus* of those effects has been different each time around. I don't think it is possible to say that the advances in information technologies are more or less important than indoor plumbing, or sliced bread, or the cotton gin. The digital revolution is still in the process of transforming our lives. It is changing the way goods are bought and sold, it is changing the ways we communicate with one another, and, perhaps most importantly, it is increasingly blurring the concepts of national boundaries, our ideas about property and ownership thereof (particularly "intellectual property"), and many other ideas that have remained largely unchanged for centuries. I'm as excited as the next guy about not having to crap in a hole in the ground, but let's not sell the digital revolution short. This is still only the beginning.