if matter is being created at the centre of the universe,
There's no such place as "the center of the universe." The typical analogy goes like this:
Imagine that you are an ant (or better yet, a two-dimensional being) on the surface of an enormous balloon, which is being inflated over time. The universe, as you conceive of it, is the surface of the balloon. You can travel anywhere along its surface, but that is all you can see. That is to say, the notion of "up" or "down" don't make any sense to you. Probably, you won't live long enough to explore more than a fraction of its surface, and if it's sufficiently large, it will appear flat to you, but your universe is the surface of a sphere. Now, where is the center of the universe? Well, it's inside the sphere, not on the surface. Unless you suddenly acquire the ability to travel into a higher dimension (in this analogy, the third dimension), not only are you unable to reach it, but you can't even point to it on a map. Our universe is the same way, except with more dimensions.
As to the point of new matter being created somewhere in the universe, this is a violation of the Law of Conservation of Matter-Energy. I don't know if there's some circumstance in which this law doesn't apply, but I've never heard of such a thing.
a while back, there was this news about a software company got sue and loss the battle. Because the judge considered the CSS is digitial lock, and anyone who break the lock violate the law. (sorry i cant find the article anymore)
I suspect you're referring to Universal, et al. v. Reimerdes, et al., a.k.a. "MPAA v. 2600". 2600 Magazine (not a software company) printed the source code of DeCSS in one of its issues, and was sucessfully sued by the members of the MPAA. The outcome of the case was a permanent injunction against 2600; that is to say, the whole outcome of years of litigation was, "Take that source code off your site, don't ever link to it, and don't ever print it in your dead-tree edition."
I can't honestly think of any other DVD-related case where the MPAA or DVD-CCA actually won, so that's why I'm guessing you're mistaken about the defendant being a software company. (If I'm the one who's mistaken, though, I've no doubt I'll be corrected shortly.)
At this point, it's nuts not to use a restricted email address for mailing lists...
That fine and dandy, but what about my situation? I contributed very small patches (<20 lines each) to a couple of projects last year, and now my email address appears in Changelogs which someone has thoughtfully put up on the Web for Google to index.
At most, a lie would end up with a temporary surge in interest towards Christianity, with a huge drop off in interest once people think they've been lied to.
You're joking, right? "True believers" cannot be convinced that pious frauds are fraudulent. This is why pious frauds happen. It bolsters the beliefs of those who are already convinced, and gives them yet another anecdote to use in arguments with non-believers.
Also, I don't know if any distributions still do this, but I used to have an old version of RedHat that defaulted to aliasing rm to rm -i; ditto for cp and mv. It seems newbie-friendly, but it really just encourages carelessness in the event they find themselves on a different system.
Others have pointed out that root for an end-user is a bad idea, so here's a couple of other ideas off the top of my head.
Avoid putting. or ~/bin in your PATH if possible. If you absolutely must do so, put them at the end.
Don't walk away from the machine without locking it (not Linux-specific, but it bears mentioning).
"rm does not move a file to the trash; it's gone for real"
Don't hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.
"Copy and paste" can be as easy as "highlight and middle-click."
When I try to come up with a list of Don'ts for computers, I think of my dad. He's the living embodiment of the phrase, "A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing" (No, Dad, you can't save disk space by getting rid of that.dll). Most users won't ever bring up an xterm, but people get bored at work, and then they start looking for interesting ways to entertain themselves.
I once asked for the same thing, and a former developer said it might be possible to write Scheme scripts to do that. I don't know Scheme, so I figured that if I'm going to have to muck about in their code anyway, I might as well go all out.
Do you work part-time? The Federal minimum wage is $5.15/hr*. If you have a full-time job, that's $10,712 per year.
Exempt employees (which is what this discussion is really about) are people who work unpaid overtime, so part-time work is outside the scope of this discussion.
-- * I'm pretty sure wait-staff and other tip-income earners can be paid a lower wage, but am not completely certain.
Should we not install linux
on computers with a non open source BIOS ?
What about devices with firmware already loaded and where it need not
be loaded by a driver from an OS, should we "ban" those as well ?
The GPL is about code distribution, not everything that gets executed. If a Debian.iso came with a hex dump of a custom BIOS, then Yes, it should be removed for GPL-compatibility reasons. Really, it's not that hard to grok: if you distribute the code in a GPL'd product, you need to make the source available.
The thing I really need to finally set aside X is an ncurses-based front-end to GnuCash. If I'm lucky enough to have some free time this summer, I think I'll finally sit down and try to do something about it.
After throwing away 10-20 years of education and work.
I know America's educational system is for crap, but it's not so bad that nothing can transfer to another job.
Unfair
Oh, I'm sorry. Did the world suddenly become fair when I wasn't looking? That's good to know; I guess my uncle's brain tumor will be going into remission any minute now.
I splurged and got the DVD-ROM version of Riven (I had just purchased a new PC and needed something to flaunt its abilities). Maybe that was part of my problem with Exile: CD-switching. Also, while I liked Brad Dourif's villian in Exile, I couldn't help spending the whole game thinking of his character on Voyager. That took me out of the game (my own fault, admittedly).
So? Publicists are "in the industry;" that doesn't mean their opinions count for anything. You'll need to be a little more specific if you want any credibility.
Personally, I thought Exile was the weakest in the series (I didn't play Uru online, just the single-player mode). In Exile, everything felt like a puzzle; nothing seemed to organically belong in the story. Also, the route from one puzzle to the next seemed a little too linear for my taste. Maybe that was just the way the storyline was written, but it constantly felt like: "Hi! Here's a puzzle for you to solve. When you've finished, follow the only road it opened until you come to the next puzzle." At least in Riven, it wasn't always obvious when something was part of a puzzle or not.
Oh, sure. My point in mentioning mutt in particular, though, was that putting HTML in the message won't really accomplish much (that, and the fact that I actually use mutt).
All in all, it seems like a really neat idea, but if I have to pay for POP3/IMAP/whatever access, I'll pass; GMX is currently meeting my needs (minus the need for an occasional trip to Babel Fish), and my outgoing emails don't have ads tacked on the end.
...your friend will start seeing some ads from Dell on his mail page.
[Emphasis mine.]
This brings up a question I haven't really seen addressed just yet: Is the whole point of this service that you can't download email to your local machine via POP or whatever? I mean, you can't really serve ads to me via mutt.
You have the right to set your price wherever you like, but it's the market that dictates what something is worth, not you. If you sell one copy at that price, but ten people end up having it, you software is worth $100.
We don't write software for charity, monkey boys.
Name-calling. Nice.
We do it because there is a tool (or game, or application) that needs to be made, and we were the ones to do it. That took time, and if I plan to feed my family, I need re-imbursement for that time.
If your time is so valuable, perhaps you should have secured funding before writing whatever it is you wrote.
If the price I charge for my software is way way out of line with it's value, then you won't buy it,...
...he'll pirate it...
...and I will have to lower my price, improve my product, or go out of business. If you can't find a cheaper tool to do the required task from another source, then the price I charge for my software is probably fair.
The "cheaper tool to do the required task" is the pirated version of your software. The other source is the warez scene, or wherever it is that your software can be had for free (did it ever occur to you that someone whose investment you're "defending" was the one who loosed your software onto the world?).
The world does not exist where we could remove copy protection and still expect to make sales. Don't try to pretend that it does - that position is clearly naive.
It is equally naive to think that an infinitely replicable resource can be sold more than once for more than a pittance.
That the copy protection is easily broken is irrelevant - the fact that it exists at all is an indication that we did not intend to let this software be copied in any trivial fashion.
The market doesn't give a rat's ass about what you want.
Look, I'm not trying to defend copyright infringement, but you're working with a flawed business model. Take me, for example: I work for a corporation, writing software for their internal use. I have one customer: my employer. In exchange for a steady (and not small) income, I write software to whatever specifications they demand (and they demand a lot!). Why couldn't you do something similar? Go to the twenty largest customers for your software and say, "For $100,000 I'll write a piece of software that does X. You'll all get first dibs on it, and for another sum of money, you'll get tech support, bug fixes, etc."
You're assuming people fill out an NCOA card before they move. I didn't do this last time, and junk mail is only just starting to show up again (I moved in September).
Rubbish. Everyone who isn't a Tool or an Idiot knows that the world is built on a mis-named heptagon, creating seven simultaneous days. They call them "week-days" for a reason, bub.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no such place as "the center of the universe." The typical analogy goes like this:
Imagine that you are an ant (or better yet, a two-dimensional being) on the surface of an enormous balloon, which is being inflated over time. The universe, as you conceive of it, is the surface of the balloon. You can travel anywhere along its surface, but that is all you can see. That is to say, the notion of "up" or "down" don't make any sense to you. Probably, you won't live long enough to explore more than a fraction of its surface, and if it's sufficiently large, it will appear flat to you, but your universe is the surface of a sphere. Now, where is the center of the universe? Well, it's inside the sphere, not on the surface. Unless you suddenly acquire the ability to travel into a higher dimension (in this analogy, the third dimension), not only are you unable to reach it, but you can't even point to it on a map. Our universe is the same way, except with more dimensions.
As to the point of new matter being created somewhere in the universe, this is a violation of the Law of Conservation of Matter-Energy. I don't know if there's some circumstance in which this law doesn't apply, but I've never heard of such a thing.
I suspect you're referring to Universal, et al. v. Reimerdes, et al. , a.k.a. "MPAA v. 2600". 2600 Magazine (not a software company) printed the source code of DeCSS in one of its issues, and was sucessfully sued by the members of the MPAA. The outcome of the case was a permanent injunction against 2600; that is to say, the whole outcome of years of litigation was, "Take that source code off your site, don't ever link to it, and don't ever print it in your dead-tree edition."
I can't honestly think of any other DVD-related case where the MPAA or DVD-CCA actually won, so that's why I'm guessing you're mistaken about the defendant being a software company. (If I'm the one who's mistaken, though, I've no doubt I'll be corrected shortly.)
That fine and dandy, but what about my situation? I contributed very small patches (<20 lines each) to a couple of projects last year, and now my email address appears in Changelogs which someone has thoughtfully put up on the Web for Google to index.
It was part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, but Utnapishtim built the ark.
You're joking, right? "True believers" cannot be convinced that pious frauds are fraudulent. This is why pious frauds happen. It bolsters the beliefs of those who are already convinced, and gives them yet another anecdote to use in arguments with non-believers.
As long as we're on the topic...
sed s/foo/bar/g < in.txt > in.txt
Whoops! (had a coworker do this just yesterday)
Also, I don't know if any distributions still do this, but I used to have an old version of RedHat that defaulted to aliasing rm to rm -i; ditto for cp and mv. It seems newbie-friendly, but it really just encourages carelessness in the event they find themselves on a different system.
Others have pointed out that root for an end-user is a bad idea, so here's a couple of other ideas off the top of my head.
When I try to come up with a list of Don'ts for computers, I think of my dad. He's the living embodiment of the phrase, "A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing" (No, Dad, you can't save disk space by getting rid of that .dll). Most users won't ever bring up an xterm, but people get bored at work, and then they start looking for interesting ways to entertain themselves.
I once asked for the same thing, and a former developer said it might be possible to write Scheme scripts to do that. I don't know Scheme, so I figured that if I'm going to have to muck about in their code anyway, I might as well go all out.
Tab completion... now that's an idea.
Do you work part-time? The Federal minimum wage is $5.15/hr*. If you have a full-time job, that's $10,712 per year.
Exempt employees (which is what this discussion is really about) are people who work unpaid overtime, so part-time work is outside the scope of this discussion.
--
* I'm pretty sure wait-staff and other tip-income earners can be paid a lower wage, but am not completely certain.
The GPL is about code distribution, not everything that gets executed. If a Debian .iso came with a hex dump of a custom BIOS, then Yes, it should be removed for GPL-compatibility reasons. Really, it's not that hard to grok: if you distribute the code in a GPL'd product, you need to make the source available.
The thing I really need to finally set aside X is an ncurses-based front-end to GnuCash. If I'm lucky enough to have some free time this summer, I think I'll finally sit down and try to do something about it.
I know America's educational system is for crap, but it's not so bad that nothing can transfer to another job.
Oh, I'm sorry. Did the world suddenly become fair when I wasn't looking? That's good to know; I guess my uncle's brain tumor will be going into remission any minute now.
Adapt or die.
I splurged and got the DVD-ROM version of Riven (I had just purchased a new PC and needed something to flaunt its abilities). Maybe that was part of my problem with Exile: CD-switching. Also, while I liked Brad Dourif's villian in Exile, I couldn't help spending the whole game thinking of his character on Voyager. That took me out of the game (my own fault, admittedly).
So? Publicists are "in the industry;" that doesn't mean their opinions count for anything. You'll need to be a little more specific if you want any credibility.
Personally, I thought Exile was the weakest in the series (I didn't play Uru online, just the single-player mode). In Exile, everything felt like a puzzle; nothing seemed to organically belong in the story. Also, the route from one puzzle to the next seemed a little too linear for my taste. Maybe that was just the way the storyline was written, but it constantly felt like: "Hi! Here's a puzzle for you to solve. When you've finished, follow the only road it opened until you come to the next puzzle." At least in Riven, it wasn't always obvious when something was part of a puzzle or not.
Oh, sure. My point in mentioning mutt in particular, though, was that putting HTML in the message won't really accomplish much (that, and the fact that I actually use mutt).
All in all, it seems like a really neat idea, but if I have to pay for POP3/IMAP/whatever access, I'll pass; GMX is currently meeting my needs (minus the need for an occasional trip to Babel Fish), and my outgoing emails don't have ads tacked on the end.
Bizzare. I actually read the FAQ before posting, and I don't remember seeing that. Must... ingest... caffeine.
This brings up a question I haven't really seen addressed just yet: Is the whole point of this service that you can't download email to your local machine via POP or whatever? I mean, you can't really serve ads to me via mutt.
You have the right to set your price wherever you like, but it's the market that dictates what something is worth, not you. If you sell one copy at that price, but ten people end up having it, you software is worth $100.
Name-calling. Nice.
If your time is so valuable, perhaps you should have secured funding before writing whatever it is you wrote.
...he'll pirate it...
The "cheaper tool to do the required task" is the pirated version of your software. The other source is the warez scene, or wherever it is that your software can be had for free (did it ever occur to you that someone whose investment you're "defending" was the one who loosed your software onto the world?).
It is equally naive to think that an infinitely replicable resource can be sold more than once for more than a pittance.
The market doesn't give a rat's ass about what you want.
Look, I'm not trying to defend copyright infringement, but you're working with a flawed business model. Take me, for example: I work for a corporation, writing software for their internal use. I have one customer: my employer. In exchange for a steady (and not small) income, I write software to whatever specifications they demand (and they demand a lot!). Why couldn't you do something similar? Go to the twenty largest customers for your software and say, "For $100,000 I'll write a piece of software that does X. You'll all get first dibs on it, and for another sum of money, you'll get tech support, bug fixes, etc."
Mea culpa. Obviously, I was thinking of a different database (btw, NCOA database is also for sale).
You're assuming people fill out an NCOA card before they move. I didn't do this last time, and junk mail is only just starting to show up again (I moved in September).
Where I work, the notices about system downtime (for upgrades, or whatever) are sent out by ______ Hacker.
uuencode
Rubbish. Everyone who isn't a Tool or an Idiot knows that the world is built on a mis-named heptagon, creating seven simultaneous days. They call them "week-days" for a reason, bub.
Indeed. As the mean age increases, the rate of social change will decrease, as "the status quo" becomes an proportionately larger voting block.