...as a consultant then yes. In fact, often the whole IT department. The desktop guys will wipe and image your installation if you trash it and there's usually installation packages for the main development tools, but otherwise you get no support. It's assumed that if you work in IT you either know what you're doing, or at least you have the good sense to not break what you don't know.
Why? Simply the rate of tools/users, which makes it very inefficient to do it any other way. For example, I regularly locally use an import/export tool which is only useful to 2-3 people in the whole company and there's a new version with every point release of the server. File a submission form and have an installation package created? Wait for one of the blessed system administrators to install it, who'll do nothing but run around and be internal overhead? Forget it, you trust me to manage a server used by hundreds of people but not my lone box? It's like handing me scalpels with one hand and safety scissors with the other. One thing I've come to accept though is web filters, it's amazing what people will do at work. I don't pretend to be a saint or anything close, but the worst I tend to do at work is read slashdot - the rest happens on my time, my internet connection and my own PC.
Over the years it has gotten more and more clear to me that (counter-intuitively perhaps) it is entirelty possible for very intelligent, learned and hard working men to be religious fanatics, homicidal maniacs, perverts, terrorists, psychopaths, all-round assholes or all of the above. Moral outlook and intelligence don't seem to be very strongly related at all.
I think it's more that being very intelligent, you are far more likely to believe in your own understanding of reality and moral system regardless of everyone else. These people probably believed they could see a great conspiracy against Islam, which only they saw exactly because they were intelligent and educated. They could see through the deceptions and coverups and link events together to reveal the master plan while the rest of the world was blind. Everything that speaks in favor of your world view is true, everything that speaks against is a deception - it is the ultimate in confirmation bias. Higher intelligence would not help, it would only reinforce that belief.
One thing that is fairly clear about most of society's rules, it'd be a lot better for me if they applied to everyone but me. Morality aside, you want the others to be hens and you the fox in the henhouse. Now I'm not trying to defend anyone, but practical reality is that many people aren't intelligent enough to be criminals. They get caught, they go to jail, the risk/reward works out in favor of not breaking the law. High intelligence can swing those odds in your favor, and to paraphrase Al Capone: "You can get farther with morality and threat of jail time than you can with just morality." So I don't think it directly impacts morality, but it certainly gives capability to those who are already morally corrupt.
Right question, wrong occasion. I actually laughed at this one, don't know when I last laughed at a Soviet Russia joke. The memes do in general get annoying though...
Simple. If they really did use a proper algorithm, then NSA would be on par with any 3rd world nation. That is why there are still crypto export restrictions, very powerful organizations don't want a level playing field. It's not about spying on your own, everyone can do that but it's about spying on everyone else. And the only reason it will get fixed is because of foreign and corporate espionage, not because you don't like them snooping. Still, I guess you should appriciate the things that do get fixed...
It's just that more people are willing to contribute, when they feel that fruits of their labor can't be just "taken" as freely as BSD license allows.
Bullshit, and there are plenty of very popular projects which would demonstrate the contrary
Naming two is certainly not evidence. Pick any metric you want, sourceforge license types, Linux vs *BSD commits, gcc vs whatever BSD has, anything that reasonably pits them towards each other.
I've occasionally heard people say that if there was no copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL, but I don't buy that -- if you really believe that, why not use BSD or MIT?
Copyright: We can't take their binaries, they can't take our source. No copyright: We can take their binaries, they can take our source. You: Please bend over and give them the source anyway.
(I'm assuming here a new high speed railway would require a new less bendy track than already exists)
Yeah, that's the big one. Here in Norway they have been talking about our railway system, we have turns down to 300m radius because Norway is full of hills and mountains and fjords and we've mostly just improved existing track since WWII. Even to reach a normal European standard they should be 1200m radius, and to run a "normal" high-speed line then 4500m. I'm guessing this train will hardly turn at all except at stations to keep that average, you can probably draw the line with a ruler point to point. Many places the geography itself becomes the biggest challenge, all the bridges and tunnels you have to build make it prohibitively expensive.
While Linus caused an crystallization point for hundreds of developers he did not write the thing alone. these people were already there. More or less waiting for something like this to happen. Most of them were already part of the Minix mailing list. So most likely Linux was already waiting to happen then. From my own time as an undergraduate. all the good programmers wanted to write an OS.
A lot of people are in the wishful thinking brigade of "It would be cool to..." without ever walking the walk, they just like to dream about it. I know it with myself that it's pretty easy to dream up grand projects, something completely different to drive them to practical completion. I'm sure some people would have created a basic OS just to let it fizzle for lack of interest or because of final exams or because they got a job or got a girlfriend or family or didn't really like all the hard real-life problems or didn't cope well QA'ing code submissions as opposed to coding or any one of the million things that leads to dead halfassed projects on sourceforge. Linus wasn't just the spark that set off a community, he's been the one driving the community with massive amounts of code written by him personally and the persistance to drive the project to maturity. There's a lot of people who could have played the supporting roles, but there's few who could have walked in his shoes. I'm not so sure anyone would have.
For those of you who first started using PCs less than ten years ago, he's referring to the lack of stability Windows suffered from back then.
Are you from the future?
You jest but today it is about 10 years on the dot since Windows became stable. That's when I replaced the (for me) horribly, horribly unstable Win98 with Windows 2000 RTM which came in late 1999. In those ten years I've had maybe as many many crashes as I had in a month on Win98. It's funny, around 1999 I was first playing around with Linux and was thinking "OMG this is so much better than Win98, 2000 will be the year of the Linux desktop". It took me until 2007 before I switched, and YotLD has yet to come. But anyone who says that's because the market is standing still is silly. Every OS including Windows, MacOS/OS X and Linux has improved tremendously and whoever doesn't invent will quickly disappear to nothingness.
I'd say starting off with any programming language, even the easy ones, is quite boring and it seems very far until you do anything "fun". I would use something like a scripable game, like say NWN2 or similar. Let him figure out the basics of variables, assignment, branching, looping and state from there and the result will be a little quests you can play. If and only if he's got interest in that I'd start him off with a real language. Pick something with a nice IDE so you don't have to know the standard library by heart, vi and emacs is so last century even with syntax highlighting. Then you can give him a bit more clues on memory management as appropriate for the language (RAII is vital to C++, for example), creating GUIs, read/write files and send/recieve over the network. That should cover most the basics, I'd leave databases alone unless he really wants to make something best driven by a database.
Umm.. are you sure it's not that near-million people long list of everyone remotely touched by an arab which has been on slashdot before? If so, I understand why they didn't find the needle in the haystack.
I think not. From what I know of industrial robots, they can do repetitive tasks, but have no adaptability. Good on assembly lines, but useless when even the most basic decision-making is required.
I don't think that's true anymore, if you can make a reasonable parametrization of the task then robots do it. Like they can handle any x*y*z package within reasonable bounds but not oddly shaped stuff and things like that. We might be far away from the general household robot, but they do have a lot more sensors and rely more on those than the old "blind" robots who'd to the same operation no matter what was happening.
Actually you wouldn't want to drink a bottle of lab ethanol--it's probably denatured, i.e. made unfit to drink by addition of nasty stuff like methanol. This is because most places exempt denatured alcohol from the extra taxes on drinkable alcohol.
Not likely. Most lab ethanol is made "undrinkable" by adding crappy tasting shit or laxatives, very rarely methanol as that'll actually blind/kill you. I know because we had to look up WTF was in it before we drank it, it tasted like crap but got you drunk and otherwise no ill effects. And there's two kinds, the "regular" kind which is corrupted like that and the 96% pure ethanol variety, which contains nothing of the sorts though only doctors get the latter in small quanities. It was never much but enough to get us started with perfect taste, it contained nothing but alcohol and could be mixed with anything.
Speaking as one that got very drunk on it tonight, the better question is if alcohol "should" be illegal. On that scale it's high but all things considered, prohibition would be worse. Letting every other drug free would be worse. We're living in a little bubble where we do one unhealthy thing and you put it up as if we'd do alcohol or cannabis or LSD or ecstacy. Truth is there'd probably be a lot of ands in there. Living without stimulants is hard, if you took away coffee most people would freak. I've "picked my poison", and I know it's not ideal. But somehow I don't thing letting every lesser drug free would improve the situation. My 0,02c, YMMV.
Highly selective inbreeding tends to lower genetic diversity and cause many bad recessive diseases to appear. And while these foxes may survive in the artificially created environment we create, they're certainly "devolving" in their ability to survive in the wild. Not very different from the other animals we've domesticated, but I certainly understand the use of the word even if it doesn't agree with a biologist's definition. In their definition both are genes adapting to the environment, so to them it's the same process. But I think in practise you'd notice a big difference if we humans failed to maintain that environment and left our farm animals and pets to survive on their own.
It's not as though we haven't heard Creationists' arguments hinging upon the expectation that every step in evolution depends on a perfect storm of genetic error...
And it makes me laugh every time. What stronger evolutionary pressure could there be than not producing healthy offspring? That's bound to proliferate genes that provide redundancy or abort unviable mutations and provide stability. It's not like every generation must or should be a wild genetic experiment, survial comes first and slight adaptation comes second, mostly climate changes are slow processes too.
Seriously, the security has been pretty damn good since 9/11 for one reason alone, the passengers won't let you take over anymore. Before it'd be ransom or release of prisoners or whatever, sit tight and you'd probably survive. Now you have to literally make the plane unable to fly yourself, and firecrackers are damn far from doing it. Anything burning will cause a panic inside the cabin but nothing like the structural damage required to bring the plane down. For that you need explosives, probably a shaped charge at some critical point too as an open charge is surprisingly ineffective compared to the alternative.
Re:a game that tells the truth about religion
on
Religion in Video Games
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
A society who has no death penalty or sense of objective morality historically leads to less & less morality and more violence.
Yeah, because the US with its death penalty and religious freaks has less criminals per capita and less violence than Europe.
I agree that killing people for not converting to Christianity is wrong. But, by definition, those who practice such things are not Christians.
No, you're just pretending that all the Christians you don't like aren't Christians. Christianity was spread by killing those who wouldn't convert, it's well documented that's how it happened here in Norway (around 1000 AD) and the Church was fully supporting it. Most famous are of course the Crusades that were blessed by the Pope himself, but there are many more. They only stopped most the killing because the competition was dead, the roman mythology, the greek mythology, the norse mythology, the keltic mythology, all dead. And if you think the missionary efforts during colonization weren't backed up with a lot of lethal force, you are dreaming. The african tribal religions, the Mayan religion, the Aztec religion, the native American religions were all crushed by conquest and forcibly raising the population in the Christian tradition. You're just reaching for the moral high ground but you stand on a pile of skeletons.
Corrected? Doesn't "middlemen who control a large part of the business" and "middlemen who cut into their bottom line" amount to the same? If the distributor can easily switch to a different supplier (e.g. Walmart) the distributor gets a fat share, if the supplier can easily switch to a different distributor (e.g. Apple) the supplier gets a fat share. Unless you have a stupid middle man, but don't count on that to last...
Hmm... Maybe you are too young to know, but the list view was the default since forever, in all software. Its why ls is named ls.
Well in the really old days of DOS and text mode UNIX you didn't really have a choice. A lot of people attach easier to icons (Internet = blue E anyone?) than text and I still find icons are very valuable for their size. That goes both for mini-icons in file lists, bookmark lists and so on. Even Win7's big application taskbar icons, though I don't like it that much for launching.
If thier ideology works, Linux would have decent 40% market share by now but it has hardly grown at all in the past 10 years. Linux is exactly where it was 10 years and really not any easier to use. The nightmares and headaches with installation, the infuriating and incomplete documention, the hours of studying and troubleshooting, and the obnoxious elitist assholes on IRC who think that all users including grandma should be able to edit source code are all still there.
Linux is at 1% because Win7 beats the pants off Win98 and Snow Leopard beats the pants off MacOS 6. Linux is at 1% because Microsoft slashed the price of Windows for netbooks, don't think that would have happened if only Windows and OS X was competing. They have improved but so has Linux and it has survived and hangs on to the market it has, not disappearing into nothingness. With AMD releasing specs for the most advanced hardware you can find except maybe the CPU, a fully powered modern computer run by open source is closer to reality than it's been in many years. Not so many years ago open source wireless internet was allegedly "impossible", and now there's many drivers in the kernel. Some laptops have issues with power management or other parts, but many also don't so it's certainly possible with open source. The whole "this can't happen without binary blobs" is quite simply false yet the same lie gets spread around.
Your whole argument relies on the false premise that there's be a business motivation to release good binary drivers when there's no business motivation to release code or specs. That there's a business motivation to update drivers for old hardware to use 64 bits, or to other architectures or to make it SMP safe or to ever use newer and better versions of the binary interface. Every bug in a Linux driver would automatically be a low-priortiy bug by the low market share and often for being old hardware that's no longer in sale and no longer generates revenue. Linux binary drivers would always be second class after Windows binary drivers. Even nVidia's blob, good as it might be, is that way. Open source drivers is the only way Linux could ever hope to be better. For example, the hardware video acceleration in flash everyone keeps talking about is because it's closed source. My open source video player does fullscreen 1080p video acceleration without problems, thank you very much. Most of my other great annoyances are dealing with proprietary protocols, like the IM clients that never quite seem to reverse engineer them fully. Of course, I could just use the official Linux client. Hey wait, it doesn't exist and an ABI would do nothing to fix that.
If Linux became more of a half-breed closed source thing than it already is with me using the nVidia binary for now, I'd just go use Windows and run as much open source as I could on top. Open and closed source just does not mix well in the same program, the kernel being one of them. You lose pretty much all the advantages of open source and gain pretty much all the disadvantages of closed source. I'd rather take my chances and hope that some day Windows/OS X will run out of wiggly transparent multitouch cubes to innovate with and let Linux catch up because it is improving on open source alone. And everybody that has gotten rid of using a binary driver over e.g. ndiswrapper and started using a native one seems happier. In this game of chicken and egg Linux is winning and the business case for shutting yourself out of the Linux market gets poorer every day.
Seems like other torrent sites should take note. Never acknowledge the existence of copyrighted content on your site or specifically facilitate access to it (e.g. "top 20" lists)
Unfortunately, this would make them suck real bad as the reason things are decent is that fakes, crap, viruses and whatnot is filtered. Even if not by the site owner then a set of moderators and editors and administrators with whoever runs it on top, and those rules and organization will be put at your feet. However they are trying to do something similar with magnet links, and basically say this is just a simple link that points elsewhere and we're discussing it. Not sure if that'll help though.
Why is a US Court adjudicating a case involving a Canadian citizen and his Canadian website?
Beause the court finds that he has induced infringements taking place in the US. I think it's the same legal theory that'll let a US court prosecute you if you shoot someone standing on the US side of the border from Canada, though the Internet tends to make such logic absurd. Don't expect any sudden bursts of logic though.
It doesn't matter if you don't get paid what you're worth, as long as you aren't going to be paid better anywhere else. Because what's your game options, quit and get a different job that sees even less of your value? Go independent and try to bill rates that high? Join a start-up and try to get that much of the total? Quit or take a long vacation and pray they'll miss you enough to take you back on a higher salary? Yeah right.
A lot of people might know internally what you did, but it's hard to convince outsiders that the projects you did really were that hard and you were that crucial to the solution and your solution was that great. Maybe even your boss knows you're brillant and he's rather fire the whole team and hand the money to you if that was what's needed to make you stay, but it will never come to that. Because who else would pay you that much money? Nobody. I guess maybe if you got some entrepreneurial skills and build the company around yourself it might happen, but that takes a very special kind of people which rarely overlaps with mastering coding.
IANAL, but that clause would be trivial to toss out
Lawyer: "I'm not a software developer, but it's trivial to use that java library in a C# application"
That's about how many orders of wrong you are here. I also play my share of lawyer on slashdot, but I know how to read cornell.edu - and it's amazing how much better the discussion would be if most people had - but I also know when to STFU and not make a fool out of myself. Like in this case UCC 2-316. Exclusion or Modification of Warranties. which quite clearly states that you can exclude any implied warranty of fitness or merchantability. You may get around that if you prove the disclaimers are unconscionable, but that's a tall order and not in any case trivial. Maybe for things that are more malice or fraud than incompetence, or in case of personal injury which is why software often explicitly exclude any such use.
Slashdot Mirror
...as a consultant then yes. In fact, often the whole IT department. The desktop guys will wipe and image your installation if you trash it and there's usually installation packages for the main development tools, but otherwise you get no support. It's assumed that if you work in IT you either know what you're doing, or at least you have the good sense to not break what you don't know.
Why? Simply the rate of tools/users, which makes it very inefficient to do it any other way. For example, I regularly locally use an import/export tool which is only useful to 2-3 people in the whole company and there's a new version with every point release of the server. File a submission form and have an installation package created? Wait for one of the blessed system administrators to install it, who'll do nothing but run around and be internal overhead? Forget it, you trust me to manage a server used by hundreds of people but not my lone box? It's like handing me scalpels with one hand and safety scissors with the other. One thing I've come to accept though is web filters, it's amazing what people will do at work. I don't pretend to be a saint or anything close, but the worst I tend to do at work is read slashdot - the rest happens on my time, my internet connection and my own PC.
Over the years it has gotten more and more clear to me that (counter-intuitively perhaps) it is entirelty possible for very intelligent, learned and hard working men to be religious fanatics, homicidal maniacs, perverts, terrorists, psychopaths, all-round assholes or all of the above. Moral outlook and intelligence don't seem to be very strongly related at all.
I think it's more that being very intelligent, you are far more likely to believe in your own understanding of reality and moral system regardless of everyone else. These people probably believed they could see a great conspiracy against Islam, which only they saw exactly because they were intelligent and educated. They could see through the deceptions and coverups and link events together to reveal the master plan while the rest of the world was blind. Everything that speaks in favor of your world view is true, everything that speaks against is a deception - it is the ultimate in confirmation bias. Higher intelligence would not help, it would only reinforce that belief.
One thing that is fairly clear about most of society's rules, it'd be a lot better for me if they applied to everyone but me. Morality aside, you want the others to be hens and you the fox in the henhouse. Now I'm not trying to defend anyone, but practical reality is that many people aren't intelligent enough to be criminals. They get caught, they go to jail, the risk/reward works out in favor of not breaking the law. High intelligence can swing those odds in your favor, and to paraphrase Al Capone: "You can get farther with morality and threat of jail time than you can with just morality." So I don't think it directly impacts morality, but it certainly gives capability to those who are already morally corrupt.
How are Soviet Russia jokes even funny anymore?
Right question, wrong occasion. I actually laughed at this one, don't know when I last laughed at a Soviet Russia joke. The memes do in general get annoying though...
Simple. If they really did use a proper algorithm, then NSA would be on par with any 3rd world nation. That is why there are still crypto export restrictions, very powerful organizations don't want a level playing field. It's not about spying on your own, everyone can do that but it's about spying on everyone else. And the only reason it will get fixed is because of foreign and corporate espionage, not because you don't like them snooping. Still, I guess you should appriciate the things that do get fixed...
It's just that more people are willing to contribute, when they feel that fruits of their labor can't be just "taken" as freely as BSD license allows.
Bullshit, and there are plenty of very popular projects which would demonstrate the contrary
Naming two is certainly not evidence. Pick any metric you want, sourceforge license types, Linux vs *BSD commits, gcc vs whatever BSD has, anything that reasonably pits them towards each other.
I've occasionally heard people say that if there was no copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL, but I don't buy that -- if you really believe that, why not use BSD or MIT?
Copyright:
We can't take their binaries, they can't take our source.
No copyright:
We can take their binaries, they can take our source.
You:
Please bend over and give them the source anyway.
(I'm assuming here a new high speed railway would require a new less bendy track than already exists)
Yeah, that's the big one. Here in Norway they have been talking about our railway system, we have turns down to 300m radius because Norway is full of hills and mountains and fjords and we've mostly just improved existing track since WWII. Even to reach a normal European standard they should be 1200m radius, and to run a "normal" high-speed line then 4500m. I'm guessing this train will hardly turn at all except at stations to keep that average, you can probably draw the line with a ruler point to point. Many places the geography itself becomes the biggest challenge, all the bridges and tunnels you have to build make it prohibitively expensive.
While Linus caused an crystallization point for hundreds of developers he did not write the thing alone. these people were already there. More or less waiting for something like this to happen. Most of them were already part of the Minix mailing list. So most likely Linux was already waiting to happen then. From my own time as an undergraduate. all the good programmers wanted to write an OS.
A lot of people are in the wishful thinking brigade of "It would be cool to..." without ever walking the walk, they just like to dream about it. I know it with myself that it's pretty easy to dream up grand projects, something completely different to drive them to practical completion. I'm sure some people would have created a basic OS just to let it fizzle for lack of interest or because of final exams or because they got a job or got a girlfriend or family or didn't really like all the hard real-life problems or didn't cope well QA'ing code submissions as opposed to coding or any one of the million things that leads to dead halfassed projects on sourceforge. Linus wasn't just the spark that set off a community, he's been the one driving the community with massive amounts of code written by him personally and the persistance to drive the project to maturity. There's a lot of people who could have played the supporting roles, but there's few who could have walked in his shoes. I'm not so sure anyone would have.
For those of you who first started using PCs less than ten years ago, he's referring to the lack of stability Windows suffered from back then.
Are you from the future?
You jest but today it is about 10 years on the dot since Windows became stable. That's when I replaced the (for me) horribly, horribly unstable Win98 with Windows 2000 RTM which came in late 1999. In those ten years I've had maybe as many many crashes as I had in a month on Win98. It's funny, around 1999 I was first playing around with Linux and was thinking "OMG this is so much better than Win98, 2000 will be the year of the Linux desktop". It took me until 2007 before I switched, and YotLD has yet to come. But anyone who says that's because the market is standing still is silly. Every OS including Windows, MacOS/OS X and Linux has improved tremendously and whoever doesn't invent will quickly disappear to nothingness.
I'd say starting off with any programming language, even the easy ones, is quite boring and it seems very far until you do anything "fun". I would use something like a scripable game, like say NWN2 or similar. Let him figure out the basics of variables, assignment, branching, looping and state from there and the result will be a little quests you can play. If and only if he's got interest in that I'd start him off with a real language. Pick something with a nice IDE so you don't have to know the standard library by heart, vi and emacs is so last century even with syntax highlighting. Then you can give him a bit more clues on memory management as appropriate for the language (RAII is vital to C++, for example), creating GUIs, read/write files and send/recieve over the network. That should cover most the basics, I'd leave databases alone unless he really wants to make something best driven by a database.
Umm.. are you sure it's not that near-million people long list of everyone remotely touched by an arab which has been on slashdot before? If so, I understand why they didn't find the needle in the haystack.
I think not. From what I know of industrial robots, they can do repetitive tasks, but have no adaptability. Good on assembly lines, but useless when even the most basic decision-making is required.
I don't think that's true anymore, if you can make a reasonable parametrization of the task then robots do it. Like they can handle any x*y*z package within reasonable bounds but not oddly shaped stuff and things like that. We might be far away from the general household robot, but they do have a lot more sensors and rely more on those than the old "blind" robots who'd to the same operation no matter what was happening.
Actually you wouldn't want to drink a bottle of lab ethanol--it's probably denatured, i.e. made unfit to drink by addition of nasty stuff like methanol. This is because most places exempt denatured alcohol from the extra taxes on drinkable alcohol.
Not likely. Most lab ethanol is made "undrinkable" by adding crappy tasting shit or laxatives, very rarely methanol as that'll actually blind/kill you. I know because we had to look up WTF was in it before we drank it, it tasted like crap but got you drunk and otherwise no ill effects. And there's two kinds, the "regular" kind which is corrupted like that and the 96% pure ethanol variety, which contains nothing of the sorts though only doctors get the latter in small quanities. It was never much but enough to get us started with perfect taste, it contained nothing but alcohol and could be mixed with anything.
Speaking as one that got very drunk on it tonight, the better question is if alcohol "should" be illegal. On that scale it's high but all things considered, prohibition would be worse. Letting every other drug free would be worse. We're living in a little bubble where we do one unhealthy thing and you put it up as if we'd do alcohol or cannabis or LSD or ecstacy. Truth is there'd probably be a lot of ands in there. Living without stimulants is hard, if you took away coffee most people would freak. I've "picked my poison", and I know it's not ideal. But somehow I don't thing letting every lesser drug free would improve the situation. My 0,02c, YMMV.
Highly selective inbreeding tends to lower genetic diversity and cause many bad recessive diseases to appear. And while these foxes may survive in the artificially created environment we create, they're certainly "devolving" in their ability to survive in the wild. Not very different from the other animals we've domesticated, but I certainly understand the use of the word even if it doesn't agree with a biologist's definition. In their definition both are genes adapting to the environment, so to them it's the same process. But I think in practise you'd notice a big difference if we humans failed to maintain that environment and left our farm animals and pets to survive on their own.
It's not as though we haven't heard Creationists' arguments hinging upon the expectation that every step in evolution depends on a perfect storm of genetic error...
And it makes me laugh every time. What stronger evolutionary pressure could there be than not producing healthy offspring? That's bound to proliferate genes that provide redundancy or abort unviable mutations and provide stability. It's not like every generation must or should be a wild genetic experiment, survial comes first and slight adaptation comes second, mostly climate changes are slow processes too.
The security theater?
Seriously, the security has been pretty damn good since 9/11 for one reason alone, the passengers won't let you take over anymore. Before it'd be ransom or release of prisoners or whatever, sit tight and you'd probably survive. Now you have to literally make the plane unable to fly yourself, and firecrackers are damn far from doing it. Anything burning will cause a panic inside the cabin but nothing like the structural damage required to bring the plane down. For that you need explosives, probably a shaped charge at some critical point too as an open charge is surprisingly ineffective compared to the alternative.
A society who has no death penalty or sense of objective morality historically leads to less & less morality and more violence.
Yeah, because the US with its death penalty and religious freaks has less criminals per capita and less violence than Europe.
I agree that killing people for not converting to Christianity is wrong. But, by definition, those who practice such things are not Christians.
No, you're just pretending that all the Christians you don't like aren't Christians. Christianity was spread by killing those who wouldn't convert, it's well documented that's how it happened here in Norway (around 1000 AD) and the Church was fully supporting it. Most famous are of course the Crusades that were blessed by the Pope himself, but there are many more. They only stopped most the killing because the competition was dead, the roman mythology, the greek mythology, the norse mythology, the keltic mythology, all dead. And if you think the missionary efforts during colonization weren't backed up with a lot of lethal force, you are dreaming. The african tribal religions, the Mayan religion, the Aztec religion, the native American religions were all crushed by conquest and forcibly raising the population in the Christian tradition. You're just reaching for the moral high ground but you stand on a pile of skeletons.
And the only business with a reality destortion field bigger than Steve Jobs.
Corrected? Doesn't "middlemen who control a large part of the business" and "middlemen who cut into their bottom line" amount to the same? If the distributor can easily switch to a different supplier (e.g. Walmart) the distributor gets a fat share, if the supplier can easily switch to a different distributor (e.g. Apple) the supplier gets a fat share. Unless you have a stupid middle man, but don't count on that to last...
Hmm... Maybe you are too young to know, but the list view was the default since forever, in all software. Its why ls is named ls.
Well in the really old days of DOS and text mode UNIX you didn't really have a choice. A lot of people attach easier to icons (Internet = blue E anyone?) than text and I still find icons are very valuable for their size. That goes both for mini-icons in file lists, bookmark lists and so on. Even Win7's big application taskbar icons, though I don't like it that much for launching.
If thier ideology works, Linux would have decent 40% market share by now but it has hardly grown at all in the past 10 years. Linux is exactly where it was 10 years and really not any easier to use. The nightmares and headaches with installation, the infuriating and incomplete documention, the hours of studying and troubleshooting, and the obnoxious elitist assholes on IRC who think that all users including grandma should be able to edit source code are all still there.
Linux is at 1% because Win7 beats the pants off Win98 and Snow Leopard beats the pants off MacOS 6. Linux is at 1% because Microsoft slashed the price of Windows for netbooks, don't think that would have happened if only Windows and OS X was competing. They have improved but so has Linux and it has survived and hangs on to the market it has, not disappearing into nothingness. With AMD releasing specs for the most advanced hardware you can find except maybe the CPU, a fully powered modern computer run by open source is closer to reality than it's been in many years. Not so many years ago open source wireless internet was allegedly "impossible", and now there's many drivers in the kernel. Some laptops have issues with power management or other parts, but many also don't so it's certainly possible with open source. The whole "this can't happen without binary blobs" is quite simply false yet the same lie gets spread around.
Your whole argument relies on the false premise that there's be a business motivation to release good binary drivers when there's no business motivation to release code or specs. That there's a business motivation to update drivers for old hardware to use 64 bits, or to other architectures or to make it SMP safe or to ever use newer and better versions of the binary interface. Every bug in a Linux driver would automatically be a low-priortiy bug by the low market share and often for being old hardware that's no longer in sale and no longer generates revenue. Linux binary drivers would always be second class after Windows binary drivers. Even nVidia's blob, good as it might be, is that way. Open source drivers is the only way Linux could ever hope to be better. For example, the hardware video acceleration in flash everyone keeps talking about is because it's closed source. My open source video player does fullscreen 1080p video acceleration without problems, thank you very much. Most of my other great annoyances are dealing with proprietary protocols, like the IM clients that never quite seem to reverse engineer them fully. Of course, I could just use the official Linux client. Hey wait, it doesn't exist and an ABI would do nothing to fix that.
If Linux became more of a half-breed closed source thing than it already is with me using the nVidia binary for now, I'd just go use Windows and run as much open source as I could on top. Open and closed source just does not mix well in the same program, the kernel being one of them. You lose pretty much all the advantages of open source and gain pretty much all the disadvantages of closed source. I'd rather take my chances and hope that some day Windows/OS X will run out of wiggly transparent multitouch cubes to innovate with and let Linux catch up because it is improving on open source alone. And everybody that has gotten rid of using a binary driver over e.g. ndiswrapper and started using a native one seems happier. In this game of chicken and egg Linux is winning and the business case for shutting yourself out of the Linux market gets poorer every day.
Seems like other torrent sites should take note. Never acknowledge the existence of copyrighted content on your site or specifically facilitate access to it (e.g. "top 20" lists)
Unfortunately, this would make them suck real bad as the reason things are decent is that fakes, crap, viruses and whatnot is filtered. Even if not by the site owner then a set of moderators and editors and administrators with whoever runs it on top, and those rules and organization will be put at your feet. However they are trying to do something similar with magnet links, and basically say this is just a simple link that points elsewhere and we're discussing it. Not sure if that'll help though.
Why is a US Court adjudicating a case involving a Canadian citizen and his Canadian website?
Beause the court finds that he has induced infringements taking place in the US. I think it's the same legal theory that'll let a US court prosecute you if you shoot someone standing on the US side of the border from Canada, though the Internet tends to make such logic absurd. Don't expect any sudden bursts of logic though.
It doesn't matter if you don't get paid what you're worth, as long as you aren't going to be paid better anywhere else. Because what's your game options, quit and get a different job that sees even less of your value? Go independent and try to bill rates that high? Join a start-up and try to get that much of the total? Quit or take a long vacation and pray they'll miss you enough to take you back on a higher salary? Yeah right.
A lot of people might know internally what you did, but it's hard to convince outsiders that the projects you did really were that hard and you were that crucial to the solution and your solution was that great. Maybe even your boss knows you're brillant and he's rather fire the whole team and hand the money to you if that was what's needed to make you stay, but it will never come to that. Because who else would pay you that much money? Nobody. I guess maybe if you got some entrepreneurial skills and build the company around yourself it might happen, but that takes a very special kind of people which rarely overlaps with mastering coding.
IANAL, but that clause would be trivial to toss out
Lawyer: "I'm not a software developer, but it's trivial to use that java library in a C# application"
That's about how many orders of wrong you are here. I also play my share of lawyer on slashdot, but I know how to read cornell.edu - and it's amazing how much better the discussion would be if most people had - but I also know when to STFU and not make a fool out of myself. Like in this case UCC 2-316. Exclusion or Modification of Warranties. which quite clearly states that you can exclude any implied warranty of fitness or merchantability. You may get around that if you prove the disclaimers are unconscionable, but that's a tall order and not in any case trivial. Maybe for things that are more malice or fraud than incompetence, or in case of personal injury which is why software often explicitly exclude any such use.