I've begun to think that, given how popular satire and sarcasm are used in casual conversation and in pop culture, and yet how frequently satire and sarcasm are read straight, that it's just not a good way to make a point anymore.
Sometimes, it's better to be known as humorless but sincere.
Also, I heard a bit of Rush Limbaugh claiming that since oil is a natural substance, an oil leak is not a problem. Limbaugh is an idiotic blowhard, but he has an audience, so someone must be capable of believing such absurdities.
If I understand correctly, water is a very good medium for transmission of vibrations. Wouldn't the shockwave from a large explosion likely kill a lot of marine life, before we consider heat, fallout, etc.?
Granted, the big problem with the oil spill is that it will kill a lot of marine life, but it's always possible to make a bad situation worse.
Wow, I had NO IDEA that the reason for the textbook revisions might be that Texas is dominated by right-wing Christian fundamentalists who zealously support US imperialism! That makes it perfectly reasonable and unobjectionable.
There's the old political quip, that freedom of the press only applies to those who have presses.
Think of a Web server as analogous to a printing press. A cheap computer running FLOSS software, such as the LAMP stack, is within the reach of many individuals and small groups.
Furthermore, corporations that use the LAMP stack will finance development of it -- and since it's FLOSS, that works to the benefit of those individuals and small groups. FLOSS becomes an engine of social equalization.
That doesn't work out so well with Apple appliances.
In natural languages, being a fluent speaker of Russian doesn't help much if what's needed is a fluent speaker of the Cantonese dialect of Chinese.
I'm just taking courses on system administration and programming at a community college, and while I gather there are lots of programming tools and techniques I know little about, the languages themselves don't seem much different. For one thing, structures in one language are consciously reproduced in another. Every textbook I've used is careful to compare the syntax of a given loop structure to the syntax used in other languages -- and it's usually just about the same, anyway.
Detention seems a little harsh, but only a little. Sitting in a boring room for an hour or two isn't all that big a deal.
The schools I went to had rules about permissible foods. The school my kids go to has rules about permissible foods, and candy is expressly forbidden. We have a diabetes epidemic, and it's common for kids at public schools without food policies to show up with lunches consisting exclusively of candy and junk food.
Plato (not my favorite philosopher) argued against basing ethics on pleasure with the example that given a chance, a child will eat sweets to the exclusion of healthy food, and get sick. So this isn't exactly a new or unfamiliar phenomenon. A child in third grade isn't usually going to be perfectly competent at balancing pleasure with nutrition and health concerns, and the parent is not present, so it's reasonable for the school to intervene.
Not infinitely. Recording media are physical; pushing bits down a wire takes energy. Strictly speaking, it's not that there's no scarcity, but that scarcity need not be a problem anymore. The costs are not zero, but negligible.
This is an important distinction. Some people will treat information technology as if there were zero costs, and so it's incommensurable with other commodities. But it's not fundamentally different, just the leading edge of abundance. Take, by comparison, food, which is massively and wastefully overproduced, yet people still go hungry.
As I understand, the classic model of free and open source software development is that you pay the programmer for the service of developing software; once the software has been developed, it is made freely available to anyone who wants it.
It's often pointed out that, with few exceptions, most musicians don't make all that much money from recording contracts with major record labels -- even the big names usually make most of their money from concerts, and most musicians make what little money they make by playing in clubs and the like. That is, musicians play music as a service.
Two things related to this crossed my mind the other day: first, that with recordings, we have an odd relationship to music. I've found myself worrying about which of several versions of "The Magnificent Seven" by The Clash is the canonical version of the song. Yet this is nonsensical. The band must have played it many times, with many variations. There must be versions of the song by other bands, each with the band's particular flavor. And at different times, I might prefer a different variation. How odd that I've developed a habit of thinking there is only one true version of a song, which happens to be the one for sale.
The other is that there are a lot of musicians, and the basic fantasy of most musicians -- as I can see from ads for classes for musicians, for instance -- is of playing in front of an enthusiastic crowd of fans. I've occasionally heard newly successful musicians lament that they miss playing in small clubs, where they had a stronger connection to their audience. I don't see much expression of a longing to record a few songs in a studio, then quit. Musicians want to play music, and producing recordings is secondary. On top of that, with modern equipment, recording music and self-publishing it on the Internet isn't far out of reach of even struggling artists.
So, in general, the thing to work out is how to support a reasonable number of creators, and making what they produce freely and widely available. The publishing industry is a spectacularly inefficient way to achieve the former goal, and an outright opponent of the latter.
Fallout 3 was, in many respects, among the best games I've played, in my favorite genre. Yet as much as I enjoyed it, I felt frustrated while playing, because there's too much stuff, and insofar as I'm invested in playing the game, I feel as if I'm somehow obligated to find and use everything in the game. This is fun for a while, but eventually, when you're searching for the 28th Nuka-Cola Quantum or 97th Nirnroot, it gets painfully frustrating -- at least, until you get your next quest reward.
CRPGs suffer from Chekhov's Gun, that is, every element that appears in them is expected to be meaningful. So, you create a game with dozens of distinct types of gun, or medieval weapon, or what have you, and it's expected that you're going to collect and use each one at some point.
Another favorite game of mine was Portal, which was a short game, which basically taught you how to play the game, had a final confrontation, then ended. There weren't really any extraneous elements. That's one direction to go in.
Another direction is the path followed by Neverwinter Nights 1: the initial campaign basically demonstrated the elements of the toolset, which the community used to recreate classic D&D modules and to create new ones, generally on the short side.
You're using some version of Windows. dig is a command-line tool on Linux and Unix. Maybe you can find a port of it to Windows, but it's apparently not available by default.
I've been using Comcast's DNSSEC test servers for months, without any difficulty. They're leading the pack on implementing DNSSEC. In fact, they're advocating its adoption, even though that means giving up their Comcast Domain Helper service.
What I want to know now is why did the trial take so long? And why did it have to go into technical detail? The issue wasn't technological in nature. It was a simple matter of a guy having authority, losing that authority, and refusing to give the tools of that authority back to the owners of the authority.
I would guess that it takes a substantial amount of work to dig the simple matter out of the obfuscating technical details. Even in a non-conflict situation, it's not always clear that a complex technical problem is subordinate to a simple political problem, and when there is a conflict (as in a courtroom) one or more sides may prefer to obscure the real issue under confusing detail.
The community counts a lot. Also, popularity helps a lot, especially for a FLOSS project. When I go looking for walk-throughs or tutorials for some FLOSS application, Ubuntu is nearly always used as an example. Every distribution has its idiosyncrasies, which of course is why there are different distributions, so it makes life easier if the idiosyncrasies of the distribution you're using are specifically addressed.
There are some things I like about Fedora -- in general, that it's more conventional in several respects. Canonical is developing a habit of innovating first, documenting later, for important features -- take Upstart, for instance, which handles startup and shutdown processes.
I notice that I'll read sysadmins saying they like to use Ubuntu on their personal computers, but some other distribution on their servers, usually Debian or CentOS. One expects different things from different computers.
Lucid Lynx added two new themes, Ambiance and Radiance. Only in those two themes do the buttons move to the left. In all the other themes, including the default theme from the previous release, the buttons are still on the right.
I thought that moving the buttons was really annoying -- until I actually used the new theme, when I discovered it didn't bother me in the slightest.
"Many people here don't like patents because of their stifling effect on free software, and rightly so."
I don't like patents because it hinders innovation and impedes the building upon of what could be knowledge known and shared by all. It's effects on free software are secondary to this.
Those are precisely the virtues of free software that we should defend. If you mean that the free software principle should be extended beyond free software, to encourage innovation and the sharing of knowledge, then I agree.
And there's the thing: technologies developed in the course of an effort to develop crewed space exploration are going to be directed towards enabling crewed space exploration. Such technologies may or may not be useful for other applications.
One could imagine lots of enormously challenging projects that would require research and development, resulting in technologies that may or may not be useful for other applications. Since we can't really predict what spinoffs we might find, shouldn't the choice of which such projects to take on be based upon the direct benefit of accomplishing the goal?
It seems to me that colonizing other worlds is, for the foreseeable future, only a fantasy. We don't know enough yet to create a self-sustaining pocket ecosystem. We need to know more about sustainable practices on *this* planet, before we can work out how to create viable ecosystems on other planets.
The Apollo mission didn't create those industries. There was some technology developed in the course of the Apollo project that had broader applications. But, computers were already being developed, plastics were already being developed.
If you want to develop useful new technologies, wouldn't it make more sense to invest directly in research and development, rather than investing in a giant publicity stunt in the hopes that there might be some useful spin-offs?
Here's a bit from the Globe article that caught my attention:
It’s not that Herley believes we should give up on protecting our computers from being hijacked or corrupted simply because safety measures consume time. The problem, he said, is that users are being asked to take too many steps, and more are constantly being added as new threats emerge or evolve. Security professionals have generally assumed that users can’t have too much knowledge in the battle against cyber crime. But that fails to take into account a crucial part of the equation, according to Herley: the worth of users’ time.
“A lot of advice makes sense only if we think user time has no value,” he said.
I'm wondering if this is actually fundamental to the problem. It's notorious that many IT workers are contemptuous, often openly, of non-IT workers. Are the strict rules for secure passwords, and calls for more user education, based on a tendency for IT workers to assume that all workers should share their evaluation of priorities? It's easy to imagine a system administrator who forgets that the maintenance supervisor is more worried about getting the conveyor belt working again than choosing a secure password for his email account.
Slashdot Mirror
I've begun to think that, given how popular satire and sarcasm are used in casual conversation and in pop culture, and yet how frequently satire and sarcasm are read straight, that it's just not a good way to make a point anymore.
Sometimes, it's better to be known as humorless but sincere.
Also, I heard a bit of Rush Limbaugh claiming that since oil is a natural substance, an oil leak is not a problem. Limbaugh is an idiotic blowhard, but he has an audience, so someone must be capable of believing such absurdities.
If I understand correctly, water is a very good medium for transmission of vibrations. Wouldn't the shockwave from a large explosion likely kill a lot of marine life, before we consider heat, fallout, etc.?
Granted, the big problem with the oil spill is that it will kill a lot of marine life, but it's always possible to make a bad situation worse.
Wow, I had NO IDEA that the reason for the textbook revisions might be that Texas is dominated by right-wing Christian fundamentalists who zealously support US imperialism! That makes it perfectly reasonable and unobjectionable.
Visit private schools. They have more flexibility in their curricula, and it's much of how they distinguish themselves.
Sad to say, there's an argument in favor of sending kids to private schools instead of public.
There's the old political quip, that freedom of the press only applies to those who have presses.
Think of a Web server as analogous to a printing press. A cheap computer running FLOSS software, such as the LAMP stack, is within the reach of many individuals and small groups.
Furthermore, corporations that use the LAMP stack will finance development of it -- and since it's FLOSS, that works to the benefit of those individuals and small groups. FLOSS becomes an engine of social equalization.
That doesn't work out so well with Apple appliances.
Did they? Take a look at the history of the Mozilla Project.
In natural languages, being a fluent speaker of Russian doesn't help much if what's needed is a fluent speaker of the Cantonese dialect of Chinese.
I'm just taking courses on system administration and programming at a community college, and while I gather there are lots of programming tools and techniques I know little about, the languages themselves don't seem much different. For one thing, structures in one language are consciously reproduced in another. Every textbook I've used is careful to compare the syntax of a given loop structure to the syntax used in other languages -- and it's usually just about the same, anyway.
Pointers, for example, make a lot more sense when you know they represent memory addresses.
That's a perfectly adequate explanation of the concept.
Thanks for a rational response. Sometimes the fugue from the absolutist libertarians around here gets rather thick.
Detention seems a little harsh, but only a little. Sitting in a boring room for an hour or two isn't all that big a deal.
The schools I went to had rules about permissible foods. The school my kids go to has rules about permissible foods, and candy is expressly forbidden. We have a diabetes epidemic, and it's common for kids at public schools without food policies to show up with lunches consisting exclusively of candy and junk food.
Plato (not my favorite philosopher) argued against basing ethics on pleasure with the example that given a chance, a child will eat sweets to the exclusion of healthy food, and get sick. So this isn't exactly a new or unfamiliar phenomenon. A child in third grade isn't usually going to be perfectly competent at balancing pleasure with nutrition and health concerns, and the parent is not present, so it's reasonable for the school to intervene.
They can also be designed anywhere at all.
If we're lucky, this will undermine nationalism and similar bigotries.
Not infinitely. Recording media are physical; pushing bits down a wire takes energy. Strictly speaking, it's not that there's no scarcity, but that scarcity need not be a problem anymore. The costs are not zero, but negligible.
This is an important distinction. Some people will treat information technology as if there were zero costs, and so it's incommensurable with other commodities. But it's not fundamentally different, just the leading edge of abundance. Take, by comparison, food, which is massively and wastefully overproduced, yet people still go hungry.
As I understand, the classic model of free and open source software development is that you pay the programmer for the service of developing software; once the software has been developed, it is made freely available to anyone who wants it.
It's often pointed out that, with few exceptions, most musicians don't make all that much money from recording contracts with major record labels -- even the big names usually make most of their money from concerts, and most musicians make what little money they make by playing in clubs and the like. That is, musicians play music as a service.
Two things related to this crossed my mind the other day: first, that with recordings, we have an odd relationship to music. I've found myself worrying about which of several versions of "The Magnificent Seven" by The Clash is the canonical version of the song. Yet this is nonsensical. The band must have played it many times, with many variations. There must be versions of the song by other bands, each with the band's particular flavor. And at different times, I might prefer a different variation. How odd that I've developed a habit of thinking there is only one true version of a song, which happens to be the one for sale.
The other is that there are a lot of musicians, and the basic fantasy of most musicians -- as I can see from ads for classes for musicians, for instance -- is of playing in front of an enthusiastic crowd of fans. I've occasionally heard newly successful musicians lament that they miss playing in small clubs, where they had a stronger connection to their audience. I don't see much expression of a longing to record a few songs in a studio, then quit. Musicians want to play music, and producing recordings is secondary. On top of that, with modern equipment, recording music and self-publishing it on the Internet isn't far out of reach of even struggling artists.
So, in general, the thing to work out is how to support a reasonable number of creators, and making what they produce freely and widely available. The publishing industry is a spectacularly inefficient way to achieve the former goal, and an outright opponent of the latter.
I'm inclined to agree with the article.
Fallout 3 was, in many respects, among the best games I've played, in my favorite genre. Yet as much as I enjoyed it, I felt frustrated while playing, because there's too much stuff, and insofar as I'm invested in playing the game, I feel as if I'm somehow obligated to find and use everything in the game. This is fun for a while, but eventually, when you're searching for the 28th Nuka-Cola Quantum or 97th Nirnroot, it gets painfully frustrating -- at least, until you get your next quest reward.
CRPGs suffer from Chekhov's Gun, that is, every element that appears in them is expected to be meaningful. So, you create a game with dozens of distinct types of gun, or medieval weapon, or what have you, and it's expected that you're going to collect and use each one at some point.
Another favorite game of mine was Portal, which was a short game, which basically taught you how to play the game, had a final confrontation, then ended. There weren't really any extraneous elements. That's one direction to go in.
Another direction is the path followed by Neverwinter Nights 1: the initial campaign basically demonstrated the elements of the toolset, which the community used to recreate classic D&D modules and to create new ones, generally on the short side.
You're using some version of Windows. dig is a command-line tool on Linux and Unix. Maybe you can find a port of it to Windows, but it's apparently not available by default.
I've been using Comcast's DNSSEC test servers for months, without any difficulty. They're leading the pack on implementing DNSSEC. In fact, they're advocating its adoption, even though that means giving up their Comcast Domain Helper service.
See their DNSSEC Trial FAQs.
(I had opted out of using Domain Helper anyway, as it's the DNS equivalent of "Clippy" -- help I don't want.)
What I want to know now is why did the trial take so long? And why did it have to go into technical detail? The issue wasn't technological in nature. It was a simple matter of a guy having authority, losing that authority, and refusing to give the tools of that authority back to the owners of the authority.
I would guess that it takes a substantial amount of work to dig the simple matter out of the obfuscating technical details. Even in a non-conflict situation, it's not always clear that a complex technical problem is subordinate to a simple political problem, and when there is a conflict (as in a courtroom) one or more sides may prefer to obscure the real issue under confusing detail.
The community counts a lot. Also, popularity helps a lot, especially for a FLOSS project. When I go looking for walk-throughs or tutorials for some FLOSS application, Ubuntu is nearly always used as an example. Every distribution has its idiosyncrasies, which of course is why there are different distributions, so it makes life easier if the idiosyncrasies of the distribution you're using are specifically addressed.
There are some things I like about Fedora -- in general, that it's more conventional in several respects. Canonical is developing a habit of innovating first, documenting later, for important features -- take Upstart, for instance, which handles startup and shutdown processes.
I notice that I'll read sysadmins saying they like to use Ubuntu on their personal computers, but some other distribution on their servers, usually Debian or CentOS. One expects different things from different computers.
Violence against women isn't funny. Whoever modded this "funny" should be ashamed of themselves.
Lucid Lynx added two new themes, Ambiance and Radiance. Only in those two themes do the buttons move to the left. In all the other themes, including the default theme from the previous release, the buttons are still on the right.
I thought that moving the buttons was really annoying -- until I actually used the new theme, when I discovered it didn't bother me in the slightest.
I was wondering why I haven't noticed any problem with 10.04.
I expect most people are using the proprietary drivers, as the open source nouveau driver for Nvidia doesn't handle 3D.
"Many people here don't like patents because of their stifling effect on free software, and rightly so."
I don't like patents because it hinders innovation and impedes the building upon of what could be knowledge known and shared by all. It's effects on free software are secondary to this.
Those are precisely the virtues of free software that we should defend. If you mean that the free software principle should be extended beyond free software, to encourage innovation and the sharing of knowledge, then I agree.
And there's the thing: technologies developed in the course of an effort to develop crewed space exploration are going to be directed towards enabling crewed space exploration. Such technologies may or may not be useful for other applications.
One could imagine lots of enormously challenging projects that would require research and development, resulting in technologies that may or may not be useful for other applications. Since we can't really predict what spinoffs we might find, shouldn't the choice of which such projects to take on be based upon the direct benefit of accomplishing the goal?
It seems to me that colonizing other worlds is, for the foreseeable future, only a fantasy. We don't know enough yet to create a self-sustaining pocket ecosystem. We need to know more about sustainable practices on *this* planet, before we can work out how to create viable ecosystems on other planets.
The Apollo mission didn't create those industries. There was some technology developed in the course of the Apollo project that had broader applications. But, computers were already being developed, plastics were already being developed.
If you want to develop useful new technologies, wouldn't it make more sense to invest directly in research and development, rather than investing in a giant publicity stunt in the hopes that there might be some useful spin-offs?
Here's a bit from the Globe article that caught my attention:
It’s not that Herley believes we should give up on protecting our computers from being hijacked or corrupted simply because safety measures consume time. The problem, he said, is that users are being asked to take too many steps, and more are constantly being added as new threats emerge or evolve. Security professionals have generally assumed that users can’t have too much knowledge in the battle against cyber crime. But that fails to take into account a crucial part of the equation, according to Herley: the worth of users’ time.
“A lot of advice makes sense only if we think user time has no value,” he said.
I'm wondering if this is actually fundamental to the problem. It's notorious that many IT workers are contemptuous, often openly, of non-IT workers. Are the strict rules for secure passwords, and calls for more user education, based on a tendency for IT workers to assume that all workers should share their evaluation of priorities? It's easy to imagine a system administrator who forgets that the maintenance supervisor is more worried about getting the conveyor belt working again than choosing a secure password for his email account.