I agree; that is simply copyright, just as a map of a route is copyrighted. I seem to have misunderstood your stance; what is it you are complaining about in RMS's argument (other than the fact that he insists on presenting it in the style of an arse-hole)?
But this is based on the idea that a program is something more than a list of instructions. Such a list can not be "licensed" if it is a set of directions from my house to work or if it's how to bake a battenburg cake, so why should it be if its a list of instructions for drawing a box?
I have no problem with "secret recipies" and I have several programs which I have not released in order to protect the company I am joint owner of. BUT: if a program is released I don't see why anyone should have any right to prevent, or control how, other people using it.
Why should you? And if you should why can't you publish a list of ways to get from London to York and then charge everyone that goes by those routes?
You are confusing "government" with "people". Governments are small (in this case very small) numbers of people who's only contact with democracy, if any, is every four to five years in their own home country. These people know that most of their electorate have no knowledge or even interest in what they do at WTO meetings. They do know, on the other hand, that they're going to have to work with the others at the meeting, in some cases on a daily basis, between now and the next election.
Under those circumstances it is much more likely that everyone will agree rather than rock the boat.
Protesting about things which, after all, rarely affect the politicians' lives, for no gain in their own elections while causing a lot of irritation in their working lives is just not something humans of the sort that enter politics do.
Also remember how much the various protests have affected the lives of those at the meetings: not at all. With layers of armed guards around them, why should the WTO people care about the protesters?
That leaves the WTO to only sort out the publication aspects of protest (the web, newspapers, books etc.) in order for everyone involved to have a quiet life, which is mainly what venal people like politicians really want.
And I dont need all those things floating around my desktop.
What things? I have two columns of icons for the things I use a lot, but I put them there
Maybe its configurable but why waste my time when blackbox is how i want it already?
No reason in the world, if it does.
Not to mention theres Ion, maybe a little less "pretty" but it gets the job done.
Didn't like it. Xterm is better.
My god man, the beauty of linux is choice
I agree; I chose WindowMaker and you chose Blackbox. My issue is with distros defaulting to the same old bloatware (KDE/Gnome) and not even mentioning the alternatives.
It's good to see a distro which actually promotes what is THE best (ie most productive and easiest to use) desktop available on any computing platform today.
Hiring a lawyer...is, rather, the equivalent of hiring a security consultant to attempt unauthorized entry to your system, and advise you of needed security measures
Exactly my point: if there were no bastards trying to break into my system I'd not need to employ someone who's good at breaking into systems to tell me where the problems are.
he made a mistake in hiring them only after he was threatened with litigation.
In other words, he didn't need a lawyer until a lawyer was employed against him. My point again.
Does that make him a person from whom society should be protected,
No, it makes him a person who needs to be protected from society in this particular case.
I was getting at the irony that the best people to protect you are often the same type of people that you need protection from. Which you appear to agree with. But then arguing with people regardless of whether you agree with them is your job, right? I should be honoured that you did it for free.
Just as we only need an army to protect us from the sort of people that join the army, we need lawyers to protect us from the sort of people who hire lawyers.
That is, in fifty years, Velikovsky remains unchanged and a valid theory, where the accepted theory has undergone a metamorphis due to what we find out there. Is that not enough to reconsider.
It should be enough to reconsider Velikovsky's "theory": a lack of change in a theory as new data comes in is a sign that you're not actually interested in the data.
Believing Velikovsky's drivel is like saying you still believe in Santa Claus. Indeed, it's worse since at least you were told by lots of people that Santa exists, whereas with Velikovsky there is neither evidence OR peer-pressure as an excuse.
There's no real chance that Gibson will be read in 50 years time; his material is already dated and compares very poorly with Bester who was writing the same sort of stuff 50 years before today and still looks more modern than Neuromancer does now.
Tip for anyone who though The Matrix was original: read Tiger! Tiger!
They they should stop lying about it: they are not using HTML and claiming that they do is false advertising. If they stopped that then I'd have no problem with needing a special browser to view their non-HTML pages.
All I am saying is that if a subset of the Web wants to use totally proprietary programs and data, as long as they pay the costs from their own client base, they should be free to do so.
That is true; the issue here is that they are claiming that they are NOT using a proprietary system. This is false advertising.
It was my understanding that Opera was by definition W3C compliant.
There is no such thing as a browser that is W3C compliant "by definition"; all fall short in some area. Opera is one of the best and certainly has led IE for years in its W3C compliance.
What MS is trying to do here is establish IE as HTML-compliant by definition.
One point that's worth repeating is that the "usable" GUI is frequently the most familiar one; I find WM very usable and fast but I'm used to it. I doubt that I would find Windows easy if I went back to it after three years without it but I found it usable at the time, the things that I didn't like about it (start menu, too many different file icons, etc.) are exactly the things GNOME and KDE spend most of their time trying to duplicate.
I honestly don't think it is possible to make a really good system-wide GUI for people that use their computers a lot. The nature of a GUI puts a ceiling on how efficiently you can use the computer but it does make it easier to reach a working level.
Put it this way: imagine that in 100 years time there still are computers. Do you think they'll be used via GUI's? I think they'll be used via talking to them in English - much closer to the CLI than the GUI.
GUI's are a stop-gap to give normal people at least a crude way of using their machines while waiting for the proper interface to be developed. They are doomed to become as much a part of history as the slide-rule and all the nice books about GUI design theory will one day be as quaint as my "How to Use a Slide-Rule" book by Burns Snodgrass (that's really his name!). The CLI will go the same way too but much more of its philosophy will be applicable to the next generation.
Also, I really like how everything in KDE is integrated, so that I can, for example, type in a URL (be it FTP or HTTP or whatever else is recognized), and it will fire up the appropriate program and go there (like Windows Explorer, but much better).
That is the single crapest feature in KDE. It is still better than GNOME (but then so's not having a computer). Windowmaker is a real working environment; KDE and GNOME are just toys.
Yep, got it. It's very ugly with that toolbar and pop-up notes that tell you that the menu-entries all mean what they say.
TWW
Re:Carpel tunnel syndrome strikes
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2
Really? Ew. I hate typing stuff like THIS without caps-lock.
That's why I MOVED IT (see, still works) to another key rather than getting rid of it totally.
You'd have to move your whole hand over one-off from home row?
Well, I don't know how long your fingers are but I have to move my hand off the home row on a normal Windows keyboard to do ctrl-anything. With Caps Lock as Ctrl, I only need to move my hand one key to the left and then back again afterwards. Try it: I find it a lot easier on my wrists.
TWW
Re:Carpel tunnel syndrome strikes
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2
Life with Linux and even Windows is much easier if you redefine your keyboard so that the Caps-Lock key is control (I move Caps Lock to the odd little Windows-key with the arrow pointing at a menu).
I can't imagine why the Caps Lock key was placed where it is on PC keyboards; Ctrl is much more frequently used even under Windows.
TWW
Re:emacs history, direction ?
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2
Jippity! I'm asking for some help and I get marked as flamebait?!?
Sometimes even trolls get mod points. That's what meta-moderation is for.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no problem with "secret recipies" and I have several programs which I have not released in order to protect the company I am joint owner of. BUT: if a program is released I don't see why anyone should have any right to prevent, or control how, other people using it.
Why should you? And if you should why can't you publish a list of ways to get from London to York and then charge everyone that goes by those routes?
Under those circumstances it is much more likely that everyone will agree rather than rock the boat.
Protesting about things which, after all, rarely affect the politicians' lives, for no gain in their own elections while causing a lot of irritation in their working lives is just not something humans of the sort that enter politics do.
Also remember how much the various protests have affected the lives of those at the meetings: not at all. With layers of armed guards around them, why should the WTO people care about the protesters? That leaves the WTO to only sort out the publication aspects of protest (the web, newspapers, books etc.) in order for everyone involved to have a quiet life, which is mainly what venal people like politicians really want.
TWW
Yes.
You do realise that is full opinionated right?
Absolutely!
Maybe its fast, but blackbox is faster.
Haven't tried it yet.
And I dont need all those things floating around my desktop.
What things? I have two columns of icons for the things I use a lot, but I put them there
Maybe its configurable but why waste my time when blackbox is how i want it already?
No reason in the world, if it does.
Not to mention theres Ion, maybe a little less "pretty" but it gets the job done.
Didn't like it. Xterm is better.
My god man, the beauty of linux is choice
I agree; I chose WindowMaker and you chose Blackbox. My issue is with distros defaulting to the same old bloatware (KDE/Gnome) and not even mentioning the alternatives.
TWW
How can you be subjected to nudity? How would you handle having a bath??
TWW
What work of yours has been affected by the DMCA and what did you do about it?
Exactly my point: if there were no bastards trying to break into my system I'd not need to employ someone who's good at breaking into systems to tell me where the problems are.
he made a mistake in hiring them only after he was threatened with litigation.
In other words, he didn't need a lawyer until a lawyer was employed against him. My point again.
Does that make him a person from whom society should be protected,
No, it makes him a person who needs to be protected from society in this particular case.
I was getting at the irony that the best people to protect you are often the same type of people that you need protection from. Which you appear to agree with. But then arguing with people regardless of whether you agree with them is your job, right? I should be honoured that you did it for free.
Just as we only need an army to protect us from the sort of people that join the army, we need lawyers to protect us from the sort of people who hire lawyers.
It should be enough to reconsider Velikovsky's "theory": a lack of change in a theory as new data comes in is a sign that you're not actually interested in the data.
Believing Velikovsky's drivel is like saying you still believe in Santa Claus. Indeed, it's worse since at least you were told by lots of people that Santa exists, whereas with Velikovsky there is neither evidence OR peer-pressure as an excuse.
TWW
Tip for anyone who though The Matrix was original: read Tiger! Tiger!
TWW
TWW
That is true; the issue here is that they are claiming that they are NOT using a proprietary system. This is false advertising.
TWW
There is no such thing as a browser that is W3C compliant "by definition"; all fall short in some area. Opera is one of the best and certainly has led IE for years in its W3C compliance.
What MS is trying to do here is establish IE as HTML-compliant by definition.
BTW, this is an HTML issue rather than HTTP.
TWW
It's more like Channel 3 saying they require HDTV and then only one brand (the HDTV brand) working on it.
Clearly you do not understand what the purpose of HTML or the Web is.
How is this any worse than a site that requires me to use QuickTime to view something?
It's worse because at least the QT site isn't lying about what you need and why.
TWW
TWW
Actually, there was a patch out the same day, available from all good kernel mirrors.
TWW
I honestly don't think it is possible to make a really good system-wide GUI for people that use their computers a lot. The nature of a GUI puts a ceiling on how efficiently you can use the computer but it does make it easier to reach a working level.
Put it this way: imagine that in 100 years time there still are computers. Do you think they'll be used via GUI's? I think they'll be used via talking to them in English - much closer to the CLI than the GUI.
GUI's are a stop-gap to give normal people at least a crude way of using their machines while waiting for the proper interface to be developed. They are doomed to become as much a part of history as the slide-rule and all the nice books about GUI design theory will one day be as quaint as my "How to Use a Slide-Rule" book by Burns Snodgrass (that's really his name!). The CLI will go the same way too but much more of its philosophy will be applicable to the next generation.
TWW
ftp://zeniiib.linux.theplanet.co.uk/pub/distrib
Without the space: like this
TWW
That is the single crapest feature in KDE. It is still better than GNOME (but then so's not having a computer). Windowmaker is a real working environment; KDE and GNOME are just toys.
TWW
TWW
That's why I MOVED IT (see, still works) to another key rather than getting rid of it totally.
You'd have to move your whole hand over one-off from home row?
Well, I don't know how long your fingers are but I have to move my hand off the home row on a normal Windows keyboard to do ctrl-anything. With Caps Lock as Ctrl, I only need to move my hand one key to the left and then back again afterwards. Try it: I find it a lot easier on my wrists.
TWW
I can't imagine why the Caps Lock key was placed where it is on PC keyboards; Ctrl is much more frequently used even under Windows.
TWW
Sometimes even trolls get mod points. That's what meta-moderation is for.
TWW
TWW