I'm sure there's going to be a niche for that, but "embedded" like my CS professor used to call it was anything that was smaller than a laptop, like say my cell phone. Today my cell phone has 512MB of RAM and absolutely nobody wants "standardized assembly programming" for that. So if you exclude everyone that's into desktop, mobile or server software, the market for C programmers should be a small niche full of people making washing machines, microwaves, traffic lights and the like. Instead C is still being used a for a ton of high-level software. I think mainly because C# is controlled by Microsoft and Java has had it's own reasons, not because C is the best tool for the job. I like C++/Qt because Qt takes a lot of the C++ fiddling out of it, but I'd love to see something better.
Look, most people have working legs so all those wheelchair ramps are a hinderance.
Without trying to kick downwards on anyone with disabilities, yes they are. Accessibility takes extra effort and extra cost and without laws that require it most places wouldn't bother. Keeping two UIs feature-complete and in sync isn't free, it adds work and somebody has to do it. Either someone goes "I added this box to the GUI that does $foo, no I haven't made a CLI switch for it, if you want it code it yourself" or "I added a command line switch, no I didn't update the GUI, if you want it code it yourself". The only way it's going to happen is if the project is really anal about it and won't accept changes that don't cover both UIs. That's not going to happen in 99.9% of the projects out there.
But its intent clearly was to preserve the freedoms of software users, one of which is the freedom to redistribute the software. You don't really have to "doubt the intent" of the GPL at all, since RMS has written extensively on the subject. He clearly does not believe that the user's right to redistribute software undermines the ability of people to create software for a living.
I don't recall him ever saying anything like that, in fact several of his quotes have made it out almost like a choice between making money on proprietary and doing the "right thing". One classic RMS quote:
You know, if you were *really* going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software.
On why he decided against writing proprietary software:
I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.
On money:
I've always lived cheaply. I live like a student, basically. And I like that because it means that money is not telling me what to do. I can do what I think is important for me to do. It freed me to do what seemed worth doing. So make a real effort to avoid getting sucked into all of the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans... because, if you do that, then the people with the money will dictate what you do with your life. You won't be able to do what's really important to you.
He has as far as I can tell never had a family to take care of, for 8 years from 1990 to 1998 his only address was his office, he's an unpaid research affiliate at MIT and according to most sources spent day and night coding. I don't know if he was eating Ramen noodles but he's been living off next to nothing. To the degree that it's possible to make money on GPL software he's no example of that, in fact he's the last person on earth I'd look to for guidance on how to make money.
Whether you've properly identified each peer in the swarm is completely irrelevant to the question of whether the peers were interacting or not. That's a valid point in court sure, but the question here was what the relationship between two peers in the swarm is, not two people sharing an Internet connection. I think the argument for that is pretty weak, imagine a drug hotspot - a known meeting point (like a tracker) where lots of people are buying and selling drugs (up/downloading), I don't think you can just round up everyone that's traded drugs in that area for the last year and say they've conspired to go there for drug trade. The sellers come because there's buyers, the buyers come because there's sellers but they haven't planned it together with anyone else.
You are probably not going to send a detective to the computer used by one defendant and find any evidence against the other defendant. The defendants don't know each other, and they haven't communicated with each other.
If clients kept logs you could probably find substantial evidence on other peers they've downloaded from/uploaded to. Their BitTorrent clients have communicated, or if not directly then the swarm has. Persons A and B may very well be convicted of a conspiracy even if they've never talked to each other but to a mastermind C. Since you need uploaders to have downloaders you can't say you've committed any copyright violation alone. I would focus on the lack of coordination, imagine a secure door. The first seed opens the door, the other peers take advantage of it by holding it open (seeding) but they're not really cooperating with anyone. Each person just does as he wants and when the last person holding the door opens (the last seed disappears) the door closes.
But only if you deal in actual, physical gold which is not what 99% of the gold market does. In practice people don't actually take possession of it, it's just stored in an approved vault and they don't issue cashier's checks that you can pass around anonymously so you're even less anonymous than cash. And even if you do get physical gold it usually comes with a certificate like this which you can see is numbered. Maybe that's okay if you got it anonymously but if you bought it some other way you'll have to melt it down and without a certificate the value will be greatly reduced as you run the risk of fraud and you'll need to have a metallurgical analysis - essentially a remelt by an approved institution - to get it back into the normal gold system. So sure, if you can find someone who takes lumps of gold...
In good times that's easy to say, but in tough times and faced with paying $50 more many people end up in the store thinking "I really could use that money, and my #1 priority is looking out for myself, my family and the local community. This $50 won't make or break the US economy, but it matters a lot to me. I'll get the American next time, when the economy's better..." even if that's not what they tell their friends.
So who's job is it to look out for the best interests of the country? Is that one of those mystery jobs that Americans just don't want to do?
Well as I understand it if this is a tax, then Congress has the right to collect taxes so if people aren't happy with the way they're being taxed they should elect a different Congress. I think this mystery job is called "voting". As for the majority imposing their taxes on the minority that's probably most of them. You don't expect the SUV owners to approve of gas taxes do you? And so the people that have no health insurance obviously oppose a tax on people that don't have health insurance. Congress collect taxes with consent of the people, not consent of the taxed.
If the US wants to prosecute a US citizen for something he did in Denmark, who's going to do something about it? Nobody, that's who because what happens to you when you return to your own country is an internal matter. Denmark isn't going to invade the US to protect foreign citizens against persecution for things they did in Denmark. If you want to leave most the laws behind, go abroad. If you want to leave all the laws behind, get a new citizenship. Until then you're stuck with the rules of the old one, just like you're stuck with domestic law until some other country grants you admission.
Vista made me switch, KDE3.5 vs Vista was actually not that unfair a fight. It was like XP except with a future, or at least so I thought. The challenge getting people across was (and probably is) mostly that people are tied to their Windows applications, I remember thinking to myself now I'm relearning something that I know a perfectly good Windows tool for - but I saw it as a form of investment. Long story short 3.5 was EOL'd, KDE released the 4.x series and Microsoft released Win7. It turns out where I thought Windows was headed for a dead end there was light on the other side of the tunnel and KDE just went off the rails. I didn't need to be in such a rush to get off XP (which I agree was 2k with an annoying skin, but still a huge upgrade from 98), and I'm not going to be in any rush to get off Win7. Even if Win8 is bad, nobody's getting pushed out the door.
Microsoft's biggest competition is its older versions.
Not really, they're just delayed because there's practically zero chance any of these companies will try a Mac/Linux migration. So they'll migrate to Windows X-1 with a couple service packs since it's tried and trusted but eventually they do a 2K or XP or Vista or Win7 migration - and they're rarely skipping a version because going two forwards means double as many changes and it's too "fresh" so in fact they make exactly as many migrations as the rest - just later.
stop trying to force this metro UI garbage down every bodies throat. UI design is NOT a once size fits all endeavor!
On a personal level, I agree. On a corporate level, I'm afraid I largely disagree. Corporations are full of people that will suck up IT's time with their very own customized desktop. The weight of the few that could actually make themselves more productive and not take up undue resources is outweighed by the many who'd just wasting company time being equally or less effective. That goes for development too, I remember one story about a lady who wanted to make all sorts of little adjustments to layouts, captions, alignments and so on, the developer billing by the hour. It quickly ended when her boss found out and told her to stop wasting time and money on insignificant details like that, but she didn't feel that cost. She just wanted it her way and didn't care how much company resources she was wasting.
Not all of them, no, but there are more than I can list, who *already* say "pirate my music, come to my concerts". How many other industries are there where the producers actually *encourage* their customers to break the law? That alone should be enough of a sign that the law, and the system, are *broken*.
If it was their songs, they wouldn't need to ask customers to pirate it as they could release it for free download. They want to both sell the rights and give it away for free too, Winnie the Pooh would be proud.
Another thing we have here in sweden is that you can file for a sort of debt cleanup... this is only for people that will never be able to pay off the money in any timely fashion and will result in that all debts will be cleared out from you.
You might want to check the law for exceptions to that, at least here in Norway debts from court rulings is not treated the same way as regular debt and you can't get rid of those that "easily".
Norway's options were: 1. Don't sign it and stay outside of the single market, effectively killing most trade that is not oil or fish (as all the other stuff is easier to get elsewhere).
Any idea how big a bargaining chip that is? We could have had a free trade agreement like for example Switzerland does, without all the EU hooks. But sure, you pick from the options they offered us so we'd vote the way they wanted.
...the lack of virtual desktops, the lack of window shading, the lack of built in ssh, the lack of filesystems in user space, the lack software repositories and all sorts of shitty little things I've had to deal with. Windows is no better than Linux in regards to the amount of tinkering you have to do to get a usable system.
We're talking about two different things, you're talking about functionality I'm talking about the functionality actually functioning as intended. If you want me to start listing all the things Linux doesn't have like 98% of the games, ms office, photoshop etc. I think you'll agree that cuts both ways. Of course the mantra has been repeated often enough that many eyes make all bugs shallow but I find that's only true for code with a high eyeball/LoC ratio. Many projects are happy to have a developer working on it at all so beggars can't be choosers when it comes to code quality, while in closed source shops you typically have some forced review.
When EU citizens vote wrong, they're forced to vote again and again until they give the right answer.
Or they just ignore it. In 1994 we in Norway had a referendum and the people rejected EU membership despite an overwhelming majority in favor in parliament. What did the politicians do? Sign an EEC agreement which means 5000+ EU directives have been passed into Norwegian law. And then the politicians complain about the lack of influence and access because we're not real members, acting like it's our fault. Yeah because since we had the audacity to say no the politicians had to buttrape us. Totally our fault.
My KDE desktop worked great "out of the box". No tinkering required. However, tinkering is an option if you want to take that road.
No, tinkering is what you end up with when things don't work as expected. Small things like my side mouse buttons not working, or the wifi actually being supported but requiring a very bleeding edge kernel, the sound volume resetting to 0 on every reboot, the upgrade process failing and all sorts of little shitty things I've had to deal with. And the KDE launch bar has crashed on me more times than Windows explorer has. And I've done the distro/version/reinstall merry-go-round as people insist it must be my borked distro/version/install that is the problem only to find it's a great waste of time as they all have different bugs. At best you solved one bug and got one new, at worst it solved nothing and gave you two more.
I still hear that now, that the next version that came six months after I left for Windows 7 fixed everything and now it's all good. Except I heard that being repeated 6-7 times for the 3.5 years I ran Linux and it was never true, why should I believe it now? It's been cried wolf too many times for me to believe in. I'm not sure I like where Windows and OS X is going, last time I switched from Windows XP to Linux over Vista. But this time I'm not switching again, it's more the "You can wipe Win7 from my computer over my cold, dead body" style. And hope that somebody comes to their senses, but I'm not betting on it being the OSS crowd. I am considering Android though, but it's not exactly run by the community.
Now of course it will be compared to the iPad, but what's this obsession that if you're not the market leader, you're not worth buying? If that were the case there'd be no market for Android phones, or even WM7 phones. Is there perhaps some deep-seated personal feeling that if you don't buy number one, you're by extension not a winner and instead a second-class individual? Or is it just the apps?
None of the above, it's simply market reach: "An iPad killer? Read to find out" is an article for everyone who likes to pretend they're informed and ahead of the curve on what's next and an article current iPad owners should read. "An iPad alternative? Read to find out" sounds like it's something only people that don't already have an iPad should read. It doesn't sound like there's anything next-gen about it, it's just on par with what's already out there - and hopefully a bit cheaper. Just like you have nice-to-have and need-to-have, this article sounds like a nice-to-read but not necessary to stay updated.
Relax, they are just kids and the act of randomly vandalizing is just part of the learning process
That you think random acts of vandalism is a natural part of growing up speaks volumes of you and presumably the shitstain you grew up in. While I'm not going to make any claims of sainthood the people that went past pranks and looting the apple tree and into pure vandalism were mostly assholes that had no respect for other people or other people's property or other people's work. Hey there's a nice garden where someone has worked many hours to make a flower bed, let's just tear it up for the lulz. That you're trying to psychobabble that into being society's fault sounds like a pathetic excuse.
I can't believe their wasting their time to go after these teenage kids. There's plenty more where they came from, and ruining their future is only going to give the pro-lulzsec crowd ammunition. (...) I'm fairly my having a brain excludes me from being part of those clowns. What these people who do their best to take down groups like LulzSec, Anonymous, etc. don't understand is that you can't take them down. This isn't a militia, a terrorist organization, or a code monkey who wants to get back at the work that laid him off: this is an idea, and a very powerful one.
No, they're the same kind of rebel teenagers that used to do vandalism and tagging and in general rage against the machine when I grew up. They got no plan, no agenda except to strike out randomly and cause mayhem, with gang leaders shouting "let's flip that car" but little more than that, a mindless beast with zero attention span. Script kiddies and their wannabe groupies that would like to be script kiddies are exactly the same in online form, and I don't mind the police giving them a good slap and telling them to grow up. Go back to what you wrote, when did you last see very powerful clowns? Even when they do cause mayhem, they're still just clowns.
I don't see that happening in Norway at the moment due to public opposition to such "unfair" taxes. It would be far better if it was done over the national budget without the extra cost of invoicing students, families and the elderly. As one of the many that don't have a TV, don't pay the TV license and rarely watch your content, I strongly oppose more licenses. I would not mind paying a fee if I actually watched your content.
Well I do have a TV, I do pay the license because I have a subscription to other channels but I rarely if ever watch NRK and wouldn't pay for it if I had the choice. And despite you not paying, you can watch pretty much anything you want at nrk.no/nett-tv. It is just not fair at all. I think it's long overdue that the NRK license either moved to either being a subscription service or a public service, tying it to whether you have a TV receiver or not was probably a good idea in 1960s when they had a monopoly and a single distribution channel but not today. With the move to digital broadcasts everyone has a box capable of this so there's no technical excuse for this.
Yup, in case of a real disaster how many old usable computers and TVs could we find lying around? I could probably have a dozen crappy old cell phones in a day if I just asked around the office if they got any lying around. It's starting to get fewer and fewer companies but most companies are at least a little bit geographically distributed.
They rode bicycles without a helmet -- nanny state hadn't passed mandatory helmet laws for bicycles back then -- and didn't die!
You can drive for many, many years without a seat belt too, until the day you come to a very sudden and brutal stop. Serious head trauma is not a "learning experience" but more of a maiming experience. Cuts, scrapes and bruises, a twisted ankle or a few broken bones are learning experiences and plenty painful enough, generally without the risk of long-term/permanent injury or death. Besides they are going to bang their head in lesser ways, according to my parents I did a good headbutt with the living room table as I came running and slipped.
In general I would say it's better to throw them out the door with as much padding as you deem necessary than to let them sit inside without it. I know I'd be much more ready to let my kids get into traffic and go places on their own with a helmet than without one, so it's not limiting them it's liberating them. Your head is the most important asset you got and it's only going to be more important in the future, the need for warm bodies is growing less and less each day. If there's any part of the body you should take care of, it's that.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure there's going to be a niche for that, but "embedded" like my CS professor used to call it was anything that was smaller than a laptop, like say my cell phone. Today my cell phone has 512MB of RAM and absolutely nobody wants "standardized assembly programming" for that. So if you exclude everyone that's into desktop, mobile or server software, the market for C programmers should be a small niche full of people making washing machines, microwaves, traffic lights and the like. Instead C is still being used a for a ton of high-level software. I think mainly because C# is controlled by Microsoft and Java has had it's own reasons, not because C is the best tool for the job. I like C++/Qt because Qt takes a lot of the C++ fiddling out of it, but I'd love to see something better.
10. Can choke people over a videophone
vs
10. Carries exploding shark repellant at all times
I think it's a tie.
If you can get a "Can choke people over the Internet" upgrade with that, then hell no that's no tie. You can keep your shark repellant...
Look, most people have working legs so all those wheelchair ramps are a hinderance.
Without trying to kick downwards on anyone with disabilities, yes they are. Accessibility takes extra effort and extra cost and without laws that require it most places wouldn't bother. Keeping two UIs feature-complete and in sync isn't free, it adds work and somebody has to do it. Either someone goes "I added this box to the GUI that does $foo, no I haven't made a CLI switch for it, if you want it code it yourself" or "I added a command line switch, no I didn't update the GUI, if you want it code it yourself". The only way it's going to happen is if the project is really anal about it and won't accept changes that don't cover both UIs. That's not going to happen in 99.9% of the projects out there.
But its intent clearly was to preserve the freedoms of software users, one of which is the freedom to redistribute the software. You don't really have to "doubt the intent" of the GPL at all, since RMS has written extensively on the subject. He clearly does not believe that the user's right to redistribute software undermines the ability of people to create software for a living.
I don't recall him ever saying anything like that, in fact several of his quotes have made it out almost like a choice between making money on proprietary and doing the "right thing". One classic RMS quote:
You know, if you were *really* going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software.
On why he decided against writing proprietary software:
I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.
On money:
I've always lived cheaply. I live like a student, basically. And I like that because it means that money is not telling me what to do. I can do what I think is important for me to do. It freed me to do what seemed worth doing. So make a real effort to avoid getting sucked into all of the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans ... because, if you do that, then the people with the money will dictate what you do with your life. You won't be able to do what's really important to you.
He has as far as I can tell never had a family to take care of, for 8 years from 1990 to 1998 his only address was his office, he's an unpaid research affiliate at MIT and according to most sources spent day and night coding. I don't know if he was eating Ramen noodles but he's been living off next to nothing. To the degree that it's possible to make money on GPL software he's no example of that, in fact he's the last person on earth I'd look to for guidance on how to make money.
Whether you've properly identified each peer in the swarm is completely irrelevant to the question of whether the peers were interacting or not. That's a valid point in court sure, but the question here was what the relationship between two peers in the swarm is, not two people sharing an Internet connection. I think the argument for that is pretty weak, imagine a drug hotspot - a known meeting point (like a tracker) where lots of people are buying and selling drugs (up/downloading), I don't think you can just round up everyone that's traded drugs in that area for the last year and say they've conspired to go there for drug trade. The sellers come because there's buyers, the buyers come because there's sellers but they haven't planned it together with anyone else.
You are probably not going to send a detective to the computer used by one defendant and find any evidence against the other defendant. The defendants don't know each other, and they haven't communicated with each other.
If clients kept logs you could probably find substantial evidence on other peers they've downloaded from/uploaded to. Their BitTorrent clients have communicated, or if not directly then the swarm has. Persons A and B may very well be convicted of a conspiracy even if they've never talked to each other but to a mastermind C. Since you need uploaders to have downloaders you can't say you've committed any copyright violation alone. I would focus on the lack of coordination, imagine a secure door. The first seed opens the door, the other peers take advantage of it by holding it open (seeding) but they're not really cooperating with anyone. Each person just does as he wants and when the last person holding the door opens (the last seed disappears) the door closes.
Gold:
[x] Cashless
[x] High-Value
[x] Anonymous
But only if you deal in actual, physical gold which is not what 99% of the gold market does. In practice people don't actually take possession of it, it's just stored in an approved vault and they don't issue cashier's checks that you can pass around anonymously so you're even less anonymous than cash. And even if you do get physical gold it usually comes with a certificate like this which you can see is numbered. Maybe that's okay if you got it anonymously but if you bought it some other way you'll have to melt it down and without a certificate the value will be greatly reduced as you run the risk of fraud and you'll need to have a metallurgical analysis - essentially a remelt by an approved institution - to get it back into the normal gold system. So sure, if you can find someone who takes lumps of gold...
In good times that's easy to say, but in tough times and faced with paying $50 more many people end up in the store thinking "I really could use that money, and my #1 priority is looking out for myself, my family and the local community. This $50 won't make or break the US economy, but it matters a lot to me. I'll get the American next time, when the economy's better..." even if that's not what they tell their friends.
So who's job is it to look out for the best interests of the country? Is that one of those mystery jobs that Americans just don't want to do?
Well as I understand it if this is a tax, then Congress has the right to collect taxes so if people aren't happy with the way they're being taxed they should elect a different Congress. I think this mystery job is called "voting". As for the majority imposing their taxes on the minority that's probably most of them. You don't expect the SUV owners to approve of gas taxes do you? And so the people that have no health insurance obviously oppose a tax on people that don't have health insurance. Congress collect taxes with consent of the people, not consent of the taxed.
If the US wants to prosecute a US citizen for something he did in Denmark, who's going to do something about it? Nobody, that's who because what happens to you when you return to your own country is an internal matter. Denmark isn't going to invade the US to protect foreign citizens against persecution for things they did in Denmark. If you want to leave most the laws behind, go abroad. If you want to leave all the laws behind, get a new citizenship. Until then you're stuck with the rules of the old one, just like you're stuck with domestic law until some other country grants you admission.
Vista made me switch, KDE3.5 vs Vista was actually not that unfair a fight. It was like XP except with a future, or at least so I thought. The challenge getting people across was (and probably is) mostly that people are tied to their Windows applications, I remember thinking to myself now I'm relearning something that I know a perfectly good Windows tool for - but I saw it as a form of investment. Long story short 3.5 was EOL'd, KDE released the 4.x series and Microsoft released Win7. It turns out where I thought Windows was headed for a dead end there was light on the other side of the tunnel and KDE just went off the rails. I didn't need to be in such a rush to get off XP (which I agree was 2k with an annoying skin, but still a huge upgrade from 98), and I'm not going to be in any rush to get off Win7. Even if Win8 is bad, nobody's getting pushed out the door.
Microsoft's biggest competition is its older versions.
Not really, they're just delayed because there's practically zero chance any of these companies will try a Mac/Linux migration. So they'll migrate to Windows X-1 with a couple service packs since it's tried and trusted but eventually they do a 2K or XP or Vista or Win7 migration - and they're rarely skipping a version because going two forwards means double as many changes and it's too "fresh" so in fact they make exactly as many migrations as the rest - just later.
stop trying to force this metro UI garbage down every bodies throat. UI design is NOT a once size fits all endeavor!
On a personal level, I agree. On a corporate level, I'm afraid I largely disagree. Corporations are full of people that will suck up IT's time with their very own customized desktop. The weight of the few that could actually make themselves more productive and not take up undue resources is outweighed by the many who'd just wasting company time being equally or less effective. That goes for development too, I remember one story about a lady who wanted to make all sorts of little adjustments to layouts, captions, alignments and so on, the developer billing by the hour. It quickly ended when her boss found out and told her to stop wasting time and money on insignificant details like that, but she didn't feel that cost. She just wanted it her way and didn't care how much company resources she was wasting.
Not all of them, no, but there are more than I can list, who *already* say "pirate my music, come to my concerts". How many other industries are there where the producers actually *encourage* their customers to break the law? That alone should be enough of a sign that the law, and the system, are *broken*.
If it was their songs, they wouldn't need to ask customers to pirate it as they could release it for free download. They want to both sell the rights and give it away for free too, Winnie the Pooh would be proud.
Another thing we have here in sweden is that you can file for a sort of debt cleanup... this is only for people that will never be able to pay off the money in any timely fashion and will result in that all debts will be cleared out from you.
You might want to check the law for exceptions to that, at least here in Norway debts from court rulings is not treated the same way as regular debt and you can't get rid of those that "easily".
Norway's options were: 1. Don't sign it and stay outside of the single market, effectively killing most trade that is not oil or fish (as all the other stuff is easier to get elsewhere).
Any idea how big a bargaining chip that is? We could have had a free trade agreement like for example Switzerland does, without all the EU hooks. But sure, you pick from the options they offered us so we'd vote the way they wanted.
We're talking about two different things, you're talking about functionality I'm talking about the functionality actually functioning as intended. If you want me to start listing all the things Linux doesn't have like 98% of the games, ms office, photoshop etc. I think you'll agree that cuts both ways. Of course the mantra has been repeated often enough that many eyes make all bugs shallow but I find that's only true for code with a high eyeball/LoC ratio. Many projects are happy to have a developer working on it at all so beggars can't be choosers when it comes to code quality, while in closed source shops you typically have some forced review.
When EU citizens vote wrong, they're forced to vote again and again until they give the right answer.
Or they just ignore it. In 1994 we in Norway had a referendum and the people rejected EU membership despite an overwhelming majority in favor in parliament. What did the politicians do? Sign an EEC agreement which means 5000+ EU directives have been passed into Norwegian law. And then the politicians complain about the lack of influence and access because we're not real members, acting like it's our fault. Yeah because since we had the audacity to say no the politicians had to buttrape us. Totally our fault.
My KDE desktop worked great "out of the box". No tinkering required. However, tinkering is an option if you want to take that road.
No, tinkering is what you end up with when things don't work as expected. Small things like my side mouse buttons not working, or the wifi actually being supported but requiring a very bleeding edge kernel, the sound volume resetting to 0 on every reboot, the upgrade process failing and all sorts of little shitty things I've had to deal with. And the KDE launch bar has crashed on me more times than Windows explorer has. And I've done the distro/version/reinstall merry-go-round as people insist it must be my borked distro/version/install that is the problem only to find it's a great waste of time as they all have different bugs. At best you solved one bug and got one new, at worst it solved nothing and gave you two more.
I still hear that now, that the next version that came six months after I left for Windows 7 fixed everything and now it's all good. Except I heard that being repeated 6-7 times for the 3.5 years I ran Linux and it was never true, why should I believe it now? It's been cried wolf too many times for me to believe in. I'm not sure I like where Windows and OS X is going, last time I switched from Windows XP to Linux over Vista. But this time I'm not switching again, it's more the "You can wipe Win7 from my computer over my cold, dead body" style. And hope that somebody comes to their senses, but I'm not betting on it being the OSS crowd. I am considering Android though, but it's not exactly run by the community.
Now of course it will be compared to the iPad, but what's this obsession that if you're not the market leader, you're not worth buying? If that were the case there'd be no market for Android phones, or even WM7 phones. Is there perhaps some deep-seated personal feeling that if you don't buy number one, you're by extension not a winner and instead a second-class individual? Or is it just the apps?
None of the above, it's simply market reach:
"An iPad killer? Read to find out" is an article for everyone who likes to pretend they're informed and ahead of the curve on what's next and an article current iPad owners should read.
"An iPad alternative? Read to find out" sounds like it's something only people that don't already have an iPad should read. It doesn't sound like there's anything next-gen about it, it's just on par with what's already out there - and hopefully a bit cheaper. Just like you have nice-to-have and need-to-have, this article sounds like a nice-to-read but not necessary to stay updated.
Relax, they are just kids and the act of randomly vandalizing is just part of the learning process
That you think random acts of vandalism is a natural part of growing up speaks volumes of you and presumably the shitstain you grew up in. While I'm not going to make any claims of sainthood the people that went past pranks and looting the apple tree and into pure vandalism were mostly assholes that had no respect for other people or other people's property or other people's work. Hey there's a nice garden where someone has worked many hours to make a flower bed, let's just tear it up for the lulz. That you're trying to psychobabble that into being society's fault sounds like a pathetic excuse.
I can't believe their wasting their time to go after these teenage kids. There's plenty more where they came from, and ruining their future is only going to give the pro-lulzsec crowd ammunition. (...) I'm fairly my having a brain excludes me from being part of those clowns. What these people who do their best to take down groups like LulzSec, Anonymous, etc. don't understand is that you can't take them down. This isn't a militia, a terrorist organization, or a code monkey who wants to get back at the work that laid him off: this is an idea, and a very powerful one.
No, they're the same kind of rebel teenagers that used to do vandalism and tagging and in general rage against the machine when I grew up. They got no plan, no agenda except to strike out randomly and cause mayhem, with gang leaders shouting "let's flip that car" but little more than that, a mindless beast with zero attention span. Script kiddies and their wannabe groupies that would like to be script kiddies are exactly the same in online form, and I don't mind the police giving them a good slap and telling them to grow up. Go back to what you wrote, when did you last see very powerful clowns? Even when they do cause mayhem, they're still just clowns.
I don't see that happening in Norway at the moment due to public opposition to such "unfair" taxes. It would be far better if it was done over the national budget without the extra cost of invoicing students, families and the elderly. As one of the many that don't have a TV, don't pay the TV license and rarely watch your content, I strongly oppose more licenses. I would not mind paying a fee if I actually watched your content.
Well I do have a TV, I do pay the license because I have a subscription to other channels but I rarely if ever watch NRK and wouldn't pay for it if I had the choice. And despite you not paying, you can watch pretty much anything you want at nrk.no/nett-tv. It is just not fair at all. I think it's long overdue that the NRK license either moved to either being a subscription service or a public service, tying it to whether you have a TV receiver or not was probably a good idea in 1960s when they had a monopoly and a single distribution channel but not today. With the move to digital broadcasts everyone has a box capable of this so there's no technical excuse for this.
Yup, in case of a real disaster how many old usable computers and TVs could we find lying around? I could probably have a dozen crappy old cell phones in a day if I just asked around the office if they got any lying around. It's starting to get fewer and fewer companies but most companies are at least a little bit geographically distributed.
They rode bicycles without a helmet -- nanny state hadn't passed mandatory helmet laws for bicycles back then -- and didn't die!
You can drive for many, many years without a seat belt too, until the day you come to a very sudden and brutal stop. Serious head trauma is not a "learning experience" but more of a maiming experience. Cuts, scrapes and bruises, a twisted ankle or a few broken bones are learning experiences and plenty painful enough, generally without the risk of long-term/permanent injury or death. Besides they are going to bang their head in lesser ways, according to my parents I did a good headbutt with the living room table as I came running and slipped.
In general I would say it's better to throw them out the door with as much padding as you deem necessary than to let them sit inside without it. I know I'd be much more ready to let my kids get into traffic and go places on their own with a helmet than without one, so it's not limiting them it's liberating them. Your head is the most important asset you got and it's only going to be more important in the future, the need for warm bodies is growing less and less each day. If there's any part of the body you should take care of, it's that.