My wife wears a relative minimum of makeup, mostly a little eyeshadow and mascara. Point is, it was never a surprise to see what she looks like in the morning.
Similar here except that my wife wears no makeup at all most of the time. She has little time and no real interest in painting her face for vanity and she's allergic and/or sensitive to a lot of that stuff anyway. I think she's beautiful with or without makeup so she doesn't have to wear it on my account. If I don't find her attractive in her natural state, no amount of makeup is really going to fix that.
But I'd be interested in what men's reaction was the first time they saw their wife or girlfriend without makeup.
If someone is surprised what their lady looks like without makeup then they are involved with a very vain and/or very insecure person. Maybe things are different where you live but most of the women I interact with regularly wear little to no makeup as a routine matter and I've seen all of them without frequently. Why would you want to be involved with someone that concerned with hiding their actual appearance the majority of the time? I like a pretty face as much as the next person but if you aren't reasonably attractive to begin with, no amount of face paint is going to fool anyone. If someone can actually tell that someone is wearing makeup then it is either badly applied and/or excessive - usually both in my experience. It's like guys wearing a hair piece to hide balding and then thinking nobody can tell.
In my case it was actually more of surprise to me the first I saw my wife IN makeup.
She does have one friend who's husband has never seen her without. She puts it on in the morning, sleeps in it, then washes her face and goes through it again.
Wow. That person seems severely insecure and very likely her husband is contributing to the problem either intentionally or unintentionally. Nothing wrong with wearing makeup just like there is nothing wrong with dressing up nicely. Appearances do matter and taking the time to show that you care about your appearance is reasonable. There comes a point however when it tips from concern over appearance into insecurity and/or vanity. This person seems to have left that line pretty far behind them.
this will live or die depending on how many ad interuptions there are and how they will be.
If the number is greater than zero it is dead to me already.
it looks that, for now at least, it's mostly older movies that have been made available. i quickly scrolled through the recommended lists, and there were no movies that i hadn't seen before, nothing recent from the last 5 years (or more).
In other words, it's yet another shitty catalog of old movies that nobody really cares about anymore. How bored does one have to be to find something like that to be a worthwhile use of your time?
Frankly, I don't see why it took so long for this to be a thing. It's basically like viewing a movie on TV except the ads are more targeted.
I'm confused. Are you somehow implying that is a good thing? Personally I prefer to watch movies without any ads at all much less targeted ones that still somehow manage to have no relevance to me.
Copyrights and patents do not overlap and serve different purposes.
The very fact that software can be both copyrighted and patented shows your argument to be incorrect as a practical matter. Furthermore the core purpose of both is to address the free rider problem. Copyright deals with it for documented creative works and patents are supposed to deal with it for tangible practical inventions but they are solving the same problem in two different domains with different practical requirements.
The existence of copyright does not mean that patents don't apply to software.
Obviously but one can make a very reasonable argument that because software is copyrighted, patents should not and need not apply to software. Software at its core is nothing more than a fancy math formula. It's instructions to a machine. I have yet to see any credible argument detailing how society benefits if we should allow patents on mathematical formulas or any other intangible idea like a business process.
Correct, and furthermore, the entire purpose of patents is to teach others your inventive ideas to further technical advancement.
That is the purported purpose of patents. It is not in practice the actual purpose of them as things stand today. The de-facto purpose of patents is to protect the profits of the company holding the patent. It's fairly rare that patents today ever describe something that would be unknown otherwise to practitioners in the field. This is not to say patents are pointless/useless but they certainly have been co-opted and are in need of reform.
The suggestion that patents lack "faIr use" is absurd.
This is by and large correct. If I copy someone's patented widget in my own garage for my own use, nobody is going to give a shit. Companies only care about patents to the extent they can either profit from them or protect their profits with them.
Well, that is free... as in free utterly without restrictions.
The restrictions come later when the code is turned into a product. Are you seriously going to argue that BSD code in a proprietary product isn't a de-facto restriction? All they are doing is leaving it to someone else to decide what the restrictions are but there invariably are restrictions once you use the code to actually do something useful.
You can't make the core thing not free, but you can freely take it and put it into your commercial product.
See that's where you lose the plot. The core thing isn't the code. The code is just a means to an end. What matters is whether the product is free, not the parts of that product. Code is just text. Useless by itself.
The initial recipient is free to do whatever they want, and there is no obligation to pass that along to someone else. As in when you get it, you are 100% free to do what you wish, and don't have any obligations to anybody else.
That seems logical to those who don't think about it very deeply but it completely misses the bigger picture. Nobody uses code. Code is just instructions. What matters is what people DO with the code and what the restrictions on the product are. Your argument only makes sense if you think the code is the only thing that matters. If you use a license like BSD that you know damn well is going to go into closed-source products then you do not get to make the argument that you are preserving freedom for the people who use those products. All you are doing is increasing freedom for some at the expense of many more later on.
You seem to presume that using BSD code in a non-open source manner makes the original code non-open source.
I'm well aware of how BSD code works and never even implied such a thing. What you are missing is that I could give a rip about that. I care about whether the product made with the code can be modified or not. THAT is what freedom means. The code itself is just useless text.
"Do what you want with this" doesn't do a damn thing to the original code - it's still out there, and it's still free for anyone else to do with as they please.
Yes I understand all that and it is irrelevant. The problem is that you are confusing the code with the product made with the code. Maximal "freedom" (for lack of a better word) for the code does not equal maximal freedom for the things made with the code. Code by itself is USELESS until you put it into a product. I care about the product remaining free in the open source or FSF meaning of the word.
BSD's "Do what you want with this" is certainly a lot more free than "If you do anything with this, you have to give everything you do back to us".
You think freedom has something to do with the code. It doesn't - at least to me. Freedom is the ability to modify THE PRODUCT that the code enables. I want to be able to modify what AWS does with the code if it suits me to do so. The code is just the means to that end. I don't care about code, I care about what it lets me do. BSD let's people do things that prevent me from modifying the product to suit my needs and therefore is less "free" at the end of the day. Using a license that you know is going to result in closed-source products and then pretending you are increasing freedom with regard to those products is to completely miss the fucking plot.
This is exactly what the BSD people were on about when they insisted on the "freedom" to take the code and make it proprietary.
I've always been puzzled by that "logic". BSD people argue that they aren't free unless they can do anything with the software including making it no longer free. That seems to be a self defeating argument. It's sort of analogous to the question of whether an omnipotent god has the ability to make itself no longer omnipotent. I don't have any problem with someone favoring a BSD style license for their code but to call it "free" seems illogical or at least misleading to me because it inevitably will become not-free even if it starts that way.
"However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market."
This is what CEOs always say just before they are about to get ass-raped by those very same "imitators" they are bashing. I have no knowledge of the MongoDB product at all but I have a hard time believing that it has any special sauce that Amazon cannot at least in theory replicate and/or improve upon to the point that users will no longer care about the differences. Not saying that will happen but there isn't anything preventing it from happening either.
Don't recall claiming you did but you do serve up a lot of bullshit here on slashdot. Still can't tell if you are a troll or an idiot but I'm favoring both.
Have fun with your spyware.
Windows 10 "spying" on me is pretty far down my list of concerns when it comes to shady companies watching my activities.
For example, Windows 7 ran OK on a regular hard drive. Windows 10 -needs- a SSD to be able to function.
Don't know where you got this made up fact. I'm typing this on a PC that has Windows 10 and does not have an SSD and it runs just fine. (well... as fine as Windows ever runs)
The minimum size has grown as well, where W10 pretty much needs 120+ gigs of space with all the Market and user installed shoverware, and that's before adding relevant apps.
More bullshit. I'll agree it's pretty bloated but it demonstrably does not require that much space. If you have that much shovel-ware installed, switch PC vendors. On the machine I'm running right now Windows takes about 45GB of space. You can argue that's still too much and I'd probably agree with you but it's 1/3 of what you are claiming.
If you want to bash Windows there are plenty of opportunities that do not require making up nonsense.
Because none of my computers run Windows 10. If you aren't running Linux in 2019, you aren't paying attention.
Really? Or maybe it's that linux literally doesn't have critical software I need to do my job nor any suitable substitutes. I'm an accountant and an engineer. (not as weird a combo as it sounds) There literally is no functional equivalent to even something as basic as QuickBooks on linux. Never mind our MRP software, CAD software, various other engineering software and other tools that are indispensable to our work. Even when there are substitutes they generally are crap.
Believe me I'd switch to linux in a heartbeat if it were actually practical to do so but it isn't and very likely won't be any time soon in my day job. Works great for some of our servers though. At work we run Windows 10 for our desktops and while it has its warts, it gets the job done. Don't love it but linux desktop options aren't making me swoon with envy unfortunately.
Does free speech give me the right to go into private meetings?
How is that relevant here? Where is the private meeting? We're talking about an online comment available to basically anyone in the general public.
They are not being blocked from expressing themselves, but being blocked from expressing themselves in a specific place.
The problem is that the politicians are discriminating who gets to express their opinion in that place/time. Allowing politicians complete control over every venue they interact with is a TERRIBLE idea. There is a compelling public interest in preventing politicians from blocking out people who don't agree with them in public venues. Either allow comments from all or from none but the point is they don't get to pick only the comments they agree with.
If the answer is online is a public place, then there is little privacy online.
Duh. Yes online is a public place and the politician should have no reasonable expectation of privacy there.
Blocking an obnoxious user from your page doesn't infringe on their speech.
Not true at all, particularly when it comes to a politician in a public context. And just because you think someone are obnoxious does not mean your sentiments are shared. Furthermore the entire point of the first amendment is that you have an iron clad right to be obnoxious provided you don't endanger anyone or cause material or economic damange by doing so.
They can still post their comments, be they valid or obnoxious and obscene trolling on their own page as well as at other locations.
That's like saying someone cannot petition their leaders because they are able to say what they want in a cornfield where no one is listening. If someone wants public office they don't get to pick and choose who gets to express their opinion or where they express it. If they allow comments from some they have to allow comments from all.
I may be missing something but I see this akin to asking a police officer to remove someone who is heckling and disrupting a city council meeting.
You are missing something. A city council meeting bears no resemblance whatsoever to an online forum nor is the purpose of them even vaguely similar. An page like the one in question here is effectively a public debate with the public. The politician chose to have a public page and there is some baggage that comes with that. There is a difference between interrupting the ability of the elected officials to do their job and elected officials selectively suppressing the free speech rights of people they don't care for or whose opinions they don't agree with.
Even if the individual is a reporter, blocking them does not prevent other journalists from participating on the site and reporting what is discussed there.
So now you are promoting censoring the press too. You seem to think that blocking one individual reporter somehow is justifiable and that it would stop there. You think politicians should have a right to only participate with the parts of the press who agree with them? BAD idea.
And blocking one individual or even a few from posting on the elected official's page does not deny anyone else the ability to read official statements or quasi-official opinions that may be posted there.
If the point of the page is to simply post official statements then there is no need for ANYONE to be able to post comments. They don't get to pick and choose only the comments or people they like. Elected officials represent everyone, whether or not they agree with them.
Rice fields are pretty great for ecosystems. They help migrating birds, for example, and walking through them you see all kinds of wildlife.
I don't think you understand the question or the meaning of the term ecosystem. Rice fields REPLACE a diverse and complicated ecosystem with a monoculture one. While that might benefit a few species, it's a net loss to the environment for the benefit of feeding humans. In most cases it doesn't matter too much until you get to the point where too much land has been purposed for farming and there is no food or other vital resources available to species that need that sort of ecosystem to survive. Monarch caterpillars depend on some rather specific plants to survive (namely milkweed) which humans treat as a pest and remove from farmland. So they get sprayed with insecticides and a critical food supply gets removed from the ecosystem.
Just because some species can coexist compatibly with human agriculture doesn't mean that it's "great for ecosystems". Quite the opposite in most cases.
The number of poor in China that have access to nearly zero electricity probably skews their per capita measure that doesn't address anything other than "they are a developing nation".
Doesn't matter because China's absolute pollution numbers in many cases barely exceed those of the US despite having 4X the population. Sure their per-capita numbers are skewed somewhat but not in the way you are implying. The US punches FAR above its weight in producing pollution even in spite of substantial amounts of regulation aimed at curbing it. The US is the second largest producer of carbon emissions right behind China despite having 1/4 the population. The US produces far more carbon than India in both absolute and per-capita numbers despite have a far smaller population.
Per capita is useful for some things and to get an idea of a broad idea but using it as the end all be all comparison is not accurate in the slightest. It doesn't tell you what is polluting more.
That's true but what it does tell you is how heavy the footprint is relative to the expectations given the number of people. You should expect a country with a larger population to have a larger absolute pollution footprint, all other things being equal. Per-capita numbers tell you when a country is allowing some (or all) of their population to pollute more than is reasonable given the size of the population.
Every time I see posts about hard drives getting bigger, I wonder: how long until they're no longer practical due to concerns about data safety? Backing up a large drive is already difficult.
Backing up a large drive has ALWAYS been difficult. The only thing that changes is the size of the number. Some of my early machines have 40MB hard drives and I had no practical means to back up that much data at the time. Now it might be 40TB but the problem is the same and so are many of the solutions. Back then we had tape, second hard drives, removable discs. Today we have... tape, hard drives and removable disks (solid state or optical instead of floppies). The more things change the more they stay the same.
Then again, I would really like to see them make this kind of progress with SSD... A 10TB SSD would be a wonderful thing.:)
No -- there should be tariffs on Chinese goods and services to account for their poor environmental and human rights practices.
Ummm you are aware that the US is the biggest polluter per-capita in the world of any major industrialized country, right? The only reason China exceeds us on some measures in absolute numbers is because they have 4X the number of people. You are aware that our current administration is right this moment doing everything they can to permit companies to pollute their greedy little hearts out right?
And the US human rights record is nothing stellar either. I point you at Guantanamo Bay, several recent wars of adventure in the Middle East, the percentage of people (esp minorities) the US has behind bars which is higher than China, and the list goes on. If you want to delve into our not distant past there is plenty to choose from there too. Hell, it was in living memory for some of us when black people were subject to Jim Crow laws. The US might be better in some ways than China but our hands are FAR from clean on civil rights.
My car is older and it has a slot for a tape deck or radio.
I'm passingly curious what you plan to do when it dies...
When I can select a song to play from a list (be it on a phone or PC), I tend to spend too much time thinking what should I play next.
All phones and PCs these days have playlists which you can listen to in order just like a tape if you want. Nothing forces you to fiddle with them. Also they have voice interfaces so you don't even have to take your eyes off the road while driving to use them. I understand using constraints to deal with a bad habit though so if it works for you who am I to judge?
What I do is decide what tape I want to listen to and then take it to my car.
So make a playlist and then play it. Same effect with less hassle. Use an iPod shuffle or similar if you don't trust yourself to not fiddle with it.
Each advance was a real technological advancement that made music sound better
That's because we were starting from nothing. Eventually we got to Good Enough and there was no reason to progress further.
People started to value convenience over quality. MP3s on shitty earbuds became the standard
It's adorable you think people used cassette tapes or vinyl records because of their quality. They used them because they were the ONLY realistic options at the time. The moment CDs came out people dumped vinyl records and cassettes like they had the plague. Vinyl records and cassettes are huge pains in the ass. The moment MP3s were available they did the same to CDs. Why? The new formats were FAR more convenient and the quality was Good Enough. For those who care high quality records were and still are available.
Hopefully, people of the future will continue the quest for audio quality,
No need. We have awesome technology for high quality audio WHEN WE NEED IT. Most of the time we don't. Most people just want to listen to a beat they like in reasonable fidelity and in a convenient format. If they really need a high quality recording then there are ways to get that. Your argument is like claiming everyone should walk around with a $5,000 DSLR camera instead of their smartphone camera even when they don't actually need or want the extra capabilities, bulk, and cost.
Take good care of your albums and they will reward you with rich, warm, pop-free sound for a lifetime.
Not if you actually play them they won't. You are putting a sharp metal needle on a soft plastic record. Even with the best possible care you will inevitably damage the vinyl record merely by playing it even if nothing else goes wrong which is seldom the case. If you think you can avoid this you haven't actually lived with vinyl records or played them with any regularity.
Eventually some dust gets on them, either a fine layer of white glue or some good light cleaners, or both will take care of that.
Eventually? Try almost immediately. Dust is everywhere. And dust will be the least of your problems in the long run. Any time you have a media which relies on physical contact it is going to wear and be damaged over time. Vinyl records are no exception to physics.
I have enough spare tubes to last a lifetime, and when my turntable plays through it it's like a spiritual experience. The warmth and beauty of that has to be experienced.
I am very dubious your claim would survive a double blind study. And if a turntable playing is a spiritual experience for you then you need to get out more. Sorry, that's a little harsh but you sound like every lunatic audiophile I've ever run into who goes nattering on about "warmth" and "fidelity" and other nonsense that they want to believe they can hear out of confirmation bias. If you love listening to vinyl records on some good old equipment then you be you. But forgive me if I don't share the same appreciation for the "experience".
I use cassettes to listen to music in my car and on a portable player primarily.
I'm sorry. That must be an awful existence.
You are aware that you can connect digital music players via adapters to play through a tape deck without having the awful experience of actually using tapes, right?
I already have a lot of cassettes - recording them to CDs (though CDs are bigger than cassettes, so it would be less convenient) or other digital formats would take a long time. It is easier to record the new CD I bought to a cassette so I can listen to it in my car.
What's even easier is to rip a new CD to your smartphone and then use that to listen to it. FAR less hassle than recording a CD to a fricken cassette tape.
I tried connecting my phone to the tape deck and playing mp3s. The problem was that I was too tempted to skips songs etc that it distracted me (I would select the next song at an intersection, not notice that the light is already green etc). With a tape, I just put it in and I listen to it until the end of side B. Also, connecting the phone, starting the player program is an additional thing to do when I start the car.
Seriously? You be you but if this is your reasoning understand you are many standard deviations away from normal. If you are that easily distracted I worry you probably shouldn't be driving a car in the first place. Plus I've never met anyone who didn't try to fast forward tapes while driving or fiddle distractedly with changing tapes.
I can't play a record in my car, even if there were record players that did not skip on a slightly bumpy road, they would probably wear out the records pretty fast.
I can't play a tape in my car either. Hasn't been a car made with a tape player as standard equipment in quite a while. Last car made with a tape player as standard equipment was sold back in 2010.
And if I connect my phone to the car, then instead of just driving and listening I am tempted to play with the phone trying to select the next song at every opportunity (red light, stopping for a pedestrian etc).
If this is your argument in favor of tapes, it's a terrible argument. If you think people didn't play with their tape decks (fast forwarding) to skip to their favorite bits you haven't driven in a car with a tape deck. People played with their tape decks while driving ALL THE TIME.
With a tape, I just put it in and listen until the end of side B.
And then put a gun in your mouth at the next stop light out of boredom. Plus you have to keep a library of tapes in your car unless you are a psycho who likes listening to the same thing endlessly. No thanks. I lived through the cassette era growing up and have no desire to repeat.
Vinyl and film I can understand, but magnetic medium just doesn't hold up.
Vinyl and film don't last either. Anyone who thinks they last hasn't actually worked with them enough to know that fact. You play vinyl records by putting a very sharp needle on a very soft bit of plastic. Expecting the record to not wear/scratch/deform/etc with repeated playings is delusional. Film degrades over time and has to periodically be transferred to new medium. Otherwise it will eventually decay and be lost. Countless films from years gone by have been lost when the film decayed.
I don't understand why anybody would want a cassette tape.
The answer is mostly one of a few reasons. 1) People who have a cassette tape player and tapes and who are happy with it and don't want to change. Similar reasoning to people sticking with obsolete PCs that get a job done even when better options are available. I have a few people who work for me who listen to some old audio tapes to this day. 2) Hipsters. 3) People trying to get data from old cassettes. 4) There are always a few people who stubbornly refuse to move on from any given technology.
That said, cassette tapes SUCK and need to die in a fire sooner rather than later. If you actually are a hipster buying one in a pathetic attempt to be ironically hip then you need to die in the same fire...
Your tapes and records are in shitty shape if you hear hiss and crackle.
I have new for you. ALL tapes sooner or later get in shitty shape. I'm old enough to predate the CD so I grew up with this tech. Pretty much all tapes and records end up in bad shape if you play them a meaningful number of times.
The best part about analog music? No DRM and no bit rot.
That hiss and crackle IS a form of bit rot. It's data being lost through the waveform being deformed.
Also your notion that there was no DRM is not quite true. There is no practical way to make a perfect copy of a tape or vinyl record and making copies requires equipment and physical media. This is de-facto a form of DRM via inconvenience and cost. Just because it isn't based in cryptography doesn't change the fact that it makes making copies prohibitively difficult. Copying a tape or vinyl record is essentially no different than playing it through speakers and then recording the playing. You get a copy but it's not a perfect copy.
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My wife wears a relative minimum of makeup, mostly a little eyeshadow and mascara. Point is, it was never a surprise to see what she looks like in the morning.
Similar here except that my wife wears no makeup at all most of the time. She has little time and no real interest in painting her face for vanity and she's allergic and/or sensitive to a lot of that stuff anyway. I think she's beautiful with or without makeup so she doesn't have to wear it on my account. If I don't find her attractive in her natural state, no amount of makeup is really going to fix that.
But I'd be interested in what men's reaction was the first time they saw their wife or girlfriend without makeup.
If someone is surprised what their lady looks like without makeup then they are involved with a very vain and/or very insecure person. Maybe things are different where you live but most of the women I interact with regularly wear little to no makeup as a routine matter and I've seen all of them without frequently. Why would you want to be involved with someone that concerned with hiding their actual appearance the majority of the time? I like a pretty face as much as the next person but if you aren't reasonably attractive to begin with, no amount of face paint is going to fool anyone. If someone can actually tell that someone is wearing makeup then it is either badly applied and/or excessive - usually both in my experience. It's like guys wearing a hair piece to hide balding and then thinking nobody can tell.
In my case it was actually more of surprise to me the first I saw my wife IN makeup.
She does have one friend who's husband has never seen her without. She puts it on in the morning, sleeps in it, then washes her face and goes through it again.
Wow. That person seems severely insecure and very likely her husband is contributing to the problem either intentionally or unintentionally. Nothing wrong with wearing makeup just like there is nothing wrong with dressing up nicely. Appearances do matter and taking the time to show that you care about your appearance is reasonable. There comes a point however when it tips from concern over appearance into insecurity and/or vanity. This person seems to have left that line pretty far behind them.
this will live or die depending on how many ad interuptions there are and how they will be.
If the number is greater than zero it is dead to me already.
it looks that, for now at least, it's mostly older movies that have been made available. i quickly scrolled through the recommended lists, and there were no movies that i hadn't seen before, nothing recent from the last 5 years (or more).
In other words, it's yet another shitty catalog of old movies that nobody really cares about anymore. How bored does one have to be to find something like that to be a worthwhile use of your time?
Frankly, I don't see why it took so long for this to be a thing. It's basically like viewing a movie on TV except the ads are more targeted.
I'm confused. Are you somehow implying that is a good thing? Personally I prefer to watch movies without any ads at all much less targeted ones that still somehow manage to have no relevance to me.
Copyrights and patents do not overlap and serve different purposes.
The very fact that software can be both copyrighted and patented shows your argument to be incorrect as a practical matter. Furthermore the core purpose of both is to address the free rider problem. Copyright deals with it for documented creative works and patents are supposed to deal with it for tangible practical inventions but they are solving the same problem in two different domains with different practical requirements.
The existence of copyright does not mean that patents don't apply to software.
Obviously but one can make a very reasonable argument that because software is copyrighted, patents should not and need not apply to software. Software at its core is nothing more than a fancy math formula. It's instructions to a machine. I have yet to see any credible argument detailing how society benefits if we should allow patents on mathematical formulas or any other intangible idea like a business process.
Correct, and furthermore, the entire purpose of patents is to teach others your inventive ideas to further technical advancement.
That is the purported purpose of patents. It is not in practice the actual purpose of them as things stand today. The de-facto purpose of patents is to protect the profits of the company holding the patent. It's fairly rare that patents today ever describe something that would be unknown otherwise to practitioners in the field. This is not to say patents are pointless/useless but they certainly have been co-opted and are in need of reform.
The suggestion that patents lack "faIr use" is absurd.
This is by and large correct. If I copy someone's patented widget in my own garage for my own use, nobody is going to give a shit. Companies only care about patents to the extent they can either profit from them or protect their profits with them.
Well, that is free ... as in free utterly without restrictions.
The restrictions come later when the code is turned into a product. Are you seriously going to argue that BSD code in a proprietary product isn't a de-facto restriction? All they are doing is leaving it to someone else to decide what the restrictions are but there invariably are restrictions once you use the code to actually do something useful.
You can't make the core thing not free, but you can freely take it and put it into your commercial product.
See that's where you lose the plot. The core thing isn't the code. The code is just a means to an end. What matters is whether the product is free, not the parts of that product. Code is just text. Useless by itself.
The initial recipient is free to do whatever they want, and there is no obligation to pass that along to someone else. As in when you get it, you are 100% free to do what you wish, and don't have any obligations to anybody else.
That seems logical to those who don't think about it very deeply but it completely misses the bigger picture. Nobody uses code. Code is just instructions. What matters is what people DO with the code and what the restrictions on the product are. Your argument only makes sense if you think the code is the only thing that matters. If you use a license like BSD that you know damn well is going to go into closed-source products then you do not get to make the argument that you are preserving freedom for the people who use those products. All you are doing is increasing freedom for some at the expense of many more later on.
You seem to presume that using BSD code in a non-open source manner makes the original code non-open source.
I'm well aware of how BSD code works and never even implied such a thing. What you are missing is that I could give a rip about that. I care about whether the product made with the code can be modified or not. THAT is what freedom means. The code itself is just useless text.
"Do what you want with this" doesn't do a damn thing to the original code - it's still out there, and it's still free for anyone else to do with as they please.
Yes I understand all that and it is irrelevant. The problem is that you are confusing the code with the product made with the code. Maximal "freedom" (for lack of a better word) for the code does not equal maximal freedom for the things made with the code. Code by itself is USELESS until you put it into a product. I care about the product remaining free in the open source or FSF meaning of the word.
BSD's "Do what you want with this" is certainly a lot more free than "If you do anything with this, you have to give everything you do back to us".
You think freedom has something to do with the code. It doesn't - at least to me. Freedom is the ability to modify THE PRODUCT that the code enables. I want to be able to modify what AWS does with the code if it suits me to do so. The code is just the means to that end. I don't care about code, I care about what it lets me do. BSD let's people do things that prevent me from modifying the product to suit my needs and therefore is less "free" at the end of the day. Using a license that you know is going to result in closed-source products and then pretending you are increasing freedom with regard to those products is to completely miss the fucking plot.
This is exactly what the BSD people were on about when they insisted on the "freedom" to take the code and make it proprietary.
I've always been puzzled by that "logic". BSD people argue that they aren't free unless they can do anything with the software including making it no longer free. That seems to be a self defeating argument. It's sort of analogous to the question of whether an omnipotent god has the ability to make itself no longer omnipotent. I don't have any problem with someone favoring a BSD style license for their code but to call it "free" seems illogical or at least misleading to me because it inevitably will become not-free even if it starts that way.
"However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market."
This is what CEOs always say just before they are about to get ass-raped by those very same "imitators" they are bashing. I have no knowledge of the MongoDB product at all but I have a hard time believing that it has any special sauce that Amazon cannot at least in theory replicate and/or improve upon to the point that users will no longer care about the differences. Not saying that will happen but there isn't anything preventing it from happening either.
I don't serve you.
Don't recall claiming you did but you do serve up a lot of bullshit here on slashdot. Still can't tell if you are a troll or an idiot but I'm favoring both.
Have fun with your spyware.
Windows 10 "spying" on me is pretty far down my list of concerns when it comes to shady companies watching my activities.
For example, Windows 7 ran OK on a regular hard drive. Windows 10 -needs- a SSD to be able to function.
Don't know where you got this made up fact. I'm typing this on a PC that has Windows 10 and does not have an SSD and it runs just fine. (well... as fine as Windows ever runs)
The minimum size has grown as well, where W10 pretty much needs 120+ gigs of space with all the Market and user installed shoverware, and that's before adding relevant apps.
More bullshit. I'll agree it's pretty bloated but it demonstrably does not require that much space. If you have that much shovel-ware installed, switch PC vendors. On the machine I'm running right now Windows takes about 45GB of space. You can argue that's still too much and I'd probably agree with you but it's 1/3 of what you are claiming.
If you want to bash Windows there are plenty of opportunities that do not require making up nonsense.
Because none of my computers run Windows 10. If you aren't running Linux in 2019, you aren't paying attention.
Really? Or maybe it's that linux literally doesn't have critical software I need to do my job nor any suitable substitutes. I'm an accountant and an engineer. (not as weird a combo as it sounds) There literally is no functional equivalent to even something as basic as QuickBooks on linux. Never mind our MRP software, CAD software, various other engineering software and other tools that are indispensable to our work. Even when there are substitutes they generally are crap.
Believe me I'd switch to linux in a heartbeat if it were actually practical to do so but it isn't and very likely won't be any time soon in my day job. Works great for some of our servers though. At work we run Windows 10 for our desktops and while it has its warts, it gets the job done. Don't love it but linux desktop options aren't making me swoon with envy unfortunately.
Does free speech give me the right to go into private meetings?
How is that relevant here? Where is the private meeting? We're talking about an online comment available to basically anyone in the general public.
They are not being blocked from expressing themselves, but being blocked from expressing themselves in a specific place.
The problem is that the politicians are discriminating who gets to express their opinion in that place/time. Allowing politicians complete control over every venue they interact with is a TERRIBLE idea. There is a compelling public interest in preventing politicians from blocking out people who don't agree with them in public venues. Either allow comments from all or from none but the point is they don't get to pick only the comments they agree with.
If the answer is online is a public place, then there is little privacy online.
Duh. Yes online is a public place and the politician should have no reasonable expectation of privacy there.
Blocking an obnoxious user from your page doesn't infringe on their speech.
Not true at all, particularly when it comes to a politician in a public context. And just because you think someone are obnoxious does not mean your sentiments are shared. Furthermore the entire point of the first amendment is that you have an iron clad right to be obnoxious provided you don't endanger anyone or cause material or economic damange by doing so.
They can still post their comments, be they valid or obnoxious and obscene trolling on their own page as well as at other locations.
That's like saying someone cannot petition their leaders because they are able to say what they want in a cornfield where no one is listening. If someone wants public office they don't get to pick and choose who gets to express their opinion or where they express it. If they allow comments from some they have to allow comments from all.
I may be missing something but I see this akin to asking a police officer to remove someone who is heckling and disrupting a city council meeting.
You are missing something. A city council meeting bears no resemblance whatsoever to an online forum nor is the purpose of them even vaguely similar. An page like the one in question here is effectively a public debate with the public. The politician chose to have a public page and there is some baggage that comes with that. There is a difference between interrupting the ability of the elected officials to do their job and elected officials selectively suppressing the free speech rights of people they don't care for or whose opinions they don't agree with.
Even if the individual is a reporter, blocking them does not prevent other journalists from participating on the site and reporting what is discussed there.
So now you are promoting censoring the press too. You seem to think that blocking one individual reporter somehow is justifiable and that it would stop there. You think politicians should have a right to only participate with the parts of the press who agree with them? BAD idea.
And blocking one individual or even a few from posting on the elected official's page does not deny anyone else the ability to read official statements or quasi-official opinions that may be posted there.
If the point of the page is to simply post official statements then there is no need for ANYONE to be able to post comments. They don't get to pick and choose only the comments or people they like. Elected officials represent everyone, whether or not they agree with them.
Rice fields are pretty great for ecosystems. They help migrating birds, for example, and walking through them you see all kinds of wildlife.
I don't think you understand the question or the meaning of the term ecosystem. Rice fields REPLACE a diverse and complicated ecosystem with a monoculture one. While that might benefit a few species, it's a net loss to the environment for the benefit of feeding humans. In most cases it doesn't matter too much until you get to the point where too much land has been purposed for farming and there is no food or other vital resources available to species that need that sort of ecosystem to survive. Monarch caterpillars depend on some rather specific plants to survive (namely milkweed) which humans treat as a pest and remove from farmland. So they get sprayed with insecticides and a critical food supply gets removed from the ecosystem.
Just because some species can coexist compatibly with human agriculture doesn't mean that it's "great for ecosystems". Quite the opposite in most cases.
The number of poor in China that have access to nearly zero electricity probably skews their per capita measure that doesn't address anything other than "they are a developing nation".
Doesn't matter because China's absolute pollution numbers in many cases barely exceed those of the US despite having 4X the population. Sure their per-capita numbers are skewed somewhat but not in the way you are implying. The US punches FAR above its weight in producing pollution even in spite of substantial amounts of regulation aimed at curbing it. The US is the second largest producer of carbon emissions right behind China despite having 1/4 the population. The US produces far more carbon than India in both absolute and per-capita numbers despite have a far smaller population.
Per capita is useful for some things and to get an idea of a broad idea but using it as the end all be all comparison is not accurate in the slightest. It doesn't tell you what is polluting more.
That's true but what it does tell you is how heavy the footprint is relative to the expectations given the number of people. You should expect a country with a larger population to have a larger absolute pollution footprint, all other things being equal. Per-capita numbers tell you when a country is allowing some (or all) of their population to pollute more than is reasonable given the size of the population.
Every time I see posts about hard drives getting bigger, I wonder: how long until they're no longer practical due to concerns about data safety? Backing up a large drive is already difficult.
Backing up a large drive has ALWAYS been difficult. The only thing that changes is the size of the number. Some of my early machines have 40MB hard drives and I had no practical means to back up that much data at the time. Now it might be 40TB but the problem is the same and so are many of the solutions. Back then we had tape, second hard drives, removable discs. Today we have... tape, hard drives and removable disks (solid state or optical instead of floppies). The more things change the more they stay the same.
Then again, I would really like to see them make this kind of progress with SSD... A 10TB SSD would be a wonderful thing. :)
How about 30TB?
No -- there should be tariffs on Chinese goods and services to account for their poor environmental and human rights practices.
Ummm you are aware that the US is the biggest polluter per-capita in the world of any major industrialized country, right? The only reason China exceeds us on some measures in absolute numbers is because they have 4X the number of people. You are aware that our current administration is right this moment doing everything they can to permit companies to pollute their greedy little hearts out right?
And the US human rights record is nothing stellar either. I point you at Guantanamo Bay, several recent wars of adventure in the Middle East, the percentage of people (esp minorities) the US has behind bars which is higher than China, and the list goes on. If you want to delve into our not distant past there is plenty to choose from there too. Hell, it was in living memory for some of us when black people were subject to Jim Crow laws. The US might be better in some ways than China but our hands are FAR from clean on civil rights.
After all, pollution doesn't respect borders.
That's true so the US should stop doing it.
My car is older and it has a slot for a tape deck or radio.
I'm passingly curious what you plan to do when it dies...
When I can select a song to play from a list (be it on a phone or PC), I tend to spend too much time thinking what should I play next.
All phones and PCs these days have playlists which you can listen to in order just like a tape if you want. Nothing forces you to fiddle with them. Also they have voice interfaces so you don't even have to take your eyes off the road while driving to use them. I understand using constraints to deal with a bad habit though so if it works for you who am I to judge?
What I do is decide what tape I want to listen to and then take it to my car.
So make a playlist and then play it. Same effect with less hassle. Use an iPod shuffle or similar if you don't trust yourself to not fiddle with it.
Each advance was a real technological advancement that made music sound better
That's because we were starting from nothing. Eventually we got to Good Enough and there was no reason to progress further.
People started to value convenience over quality. MP3s on shitty earbuds became the standard
It's adorable you think people used cassette tapes or vinyl records because of their quality. They used them because they were the ONLY realistic options at the time. The moment CDs came out people dumped vinyl records and cassettes like they had the plague. Vinyl records and cassettes are huge pains in the ass. The moment MP3s were available they did the same to CDs. Why? The new formats were FAR more convenient and the quality was Good Enough. For those who care high quality records were and still are available.
Hopefully, people of the future will continue the quest for audio quality,
No need. We have awesome technology for high quality audio WHEN WE NEED IT. Most of the time we don't. Most people just want to listen to a beat they like in reasonable fidelity and in a convenient format. If they really need a high quality recording then there are ways to get that. Your argument is like claiming everyone should walk around with a $5,000 DSLR camera instead of their smartphone camera even when they don't actually need or want the extra capabilities, bulk, and cost.
Take good care of your albums and they will reward you with rich, warm, pop-free sound for a lifetime.
Not if you actually play them they won't. You are putting a sharp metal needle on a soft plastic record. Even with the best possible care you will inevitably damage the vinyl record merely by playing it even if nothing else goes wrong which is seldom the case. If you think you can avoid this you haven't actually lived with vinyl records or played them with any regularity.
Eventually some dust gets on them, either a fine layer of white glue or some good light cleaners, or both will take care of that.
Eventually? Try almost immediately. Dust is everywhere. And dust will be the least of your problems in the long run. Any time you have a media which relies on physical contact it is going to wear and be damaged over time. Vinyl records are no exception to physics.
I have enough spare tubes to last a lifetime, and when my turntable plays through it it's like a spiritual experience. The warmth and beauty of that has to be experienced.
I am very dubious your claim would survive a double blind study. And if a turntable playing is a spiritual experience for you then you need to get out more. Sorry, that's a little harsh but you sound like every lunatic audiophile I've ever run into who goes nattering on about "warmth" and "fidelity" and other nonsense that they want to believe they can hear out of confirmation bias. If you love listening to vinyl records on some good old equipment then you be you. But forgive me if I don't share the same appreciation for the "experience".
I use cassettes to listen to music in my car and on a portable player primarily.
I'm sorry. That must be an awful existence.
You are aware that you can connect digital music players via adapters to play through a tape deck without having the awful experience of actually using tapes, right?
I already have a lot of cassettes - recording them to CDs (though CDs are bigger than cassettes, so it would be less convenient) or other digital formats would take a long time. It is easier to record the new CD I bought to a cassette so I can listen to it in my car.
What's even easier is to rip a new CD to your smartphone and then use that to listen to it. FAR less hassle than recording a CD to a fricken cassette tape.
I tried connecting my phone to the tape deck and playing mp3s. The problem was that I was too tempted to skips songs etc that it distracted me (I would select the next song at an intersection, not notice that the light is already green etc). With a tape, I just put it in and I listen to it until the end of side B. Also, connecting the phone, starting the player program is an additional thing to do when I start the car.
Seriously? You be you but if this is your reasoning understand you are many standard deviations away from normal. If you are that easily distracted I worry you probably shouldn't be driving a car in the first place. Plus I've never met anyone who didn't try to fast forward tapes while driving or fiddle distractedly with changing tapes.
I can't play a record in my car, even if there were record players that did not skip on a slightly bumpy road, they would probably wear out the records pretty fast.
I can't play a tape in my car either. Hasn't been a car made with a tape player as standard equipment in quite a while. Last car made with a tape player as standard equipment was sold back in 2010.
And if I connect my phone to the car, then instead of just driving and listening I am tempted to play with the phone trying to select the next song at every opportunity (red light, stopping for a pedestrian etc).
If this is your argument in favor of tapes, it's a terrible argument. If you think people didn't play with their tape decks (fast forwarding) to skip to their favorite bits you haven't driven in a car with a tape deck. People played with their tape decks while driving ALL THE TIME.
With a tape, I just put it in and listen until the end of side B.
And then put a gun in your mouth at the next stop light out of boredom. Plus you have to keep a library of tapes in your car unless you are a psycho who likes listening to the same thing endlessly. No thanks. I lived through the cassette era growing up and have no desire to repeat.
Vinyl and film I can understand, but magnetic medium just doesn't hold up.
Vinyl and film don't last either. Anyone who thinks they last hasn't actually worked with them enough to know that fact. You play vinyl records by putting a very sharp needle on a very soft bit of plastic. Expecting the record to not wear/scratch/deform/etc with repeated playings is delusional. Film degrades over time and has to periodically be transferred to new medium. Otherwise it will eventually decay and be lost. Countless films from years gone by have been lost when the film decayed.
I don't understand why anybody would want a cassette tape.
The answer is mostly one of a few reasons. 1) People who have a cassette tape player and tapes and who are happy with it and don't want to change. Similar reasoning to people sticking with obsolete PCs that get a job done even when better options are available. I have a few people who work for me who listen to some old audio tapes to this day. 2) Hipsters. 3) People trying to get data from old cassettes. 4) There are always a few people who stubbornly refuse to move on from any given technology.
That said, cassette tapes SUCK and need to die in a fire sooner rather than later. If you actually are a hipster buying one in a pathetic attempt to be ironically hip then you need to die in the same fire...
Your tapes and records are in shitty shape if you hear hiss and crackle.
I have new for you. ALL tapes sooner or later get in shitty shape. I'm old enough to predate the CD so I grew up with this tech. Pretty much all tapes and records end up in bad shape if you play them a meaningful number of times.
The best part about analog music? No DRM and no bit rot.
That hiss and crackle IS a form of bit rot. It's data being lost through the waveform being deformed.
Also your notion that there was no DRM is not quite true. There is no practical way to make a perfect copy of a tape or vinyl record and making copies requires equipment and physical media. This is de-facto a form of DRM via inconvenience and cost. Just because it isn't based in cryptography doesn't change the fact that it makes making copies prohibitively difficult. Copying a tape or vinyl record is essentially no different than playing it through speakers and then recording the playing. You get a copy but it's not a perfect copy.