Why is it more important that advertisers have the ability to advertise a single price all over the country than consumers being able to easily tell what something actually costs once they're in a store?
This seems like a really weird (or at least one-sided) argument.
What exactly are you typing? I used my N900 to irc on regularly (like, always) and I cannot imagine being able to do it anywhere near as properly without a keyboard.
I got myself a stratosphere ii now because of the keyboard, and while it's better than no keyboard I sadly can't type as fast (or accurate) on it as I could on the N900.
You can't begin by saying that they have had no influence at all and then immediately go on to say that they have "vulgarized the debate" so much that politicians wouldn't even dare touch the issue. That's kind of impossible.
I think you are wrong on both points. Both the green party and the left party now have stances on copyright that are very similar to the ones that the pirate party have propagated. The pirate party were also quite visible in the media at times, although I'm sure they were ignored by many.
I think that the public debate before the entry of the pirate party (and the pirate bureau) was one of "I want free stuff" against "we need to pay the artists", after their entry it turned more sophisticated and idealogical. I think this is a good thing.
Of course, there are also complete nuts in the party, and some of the arguments put forward aren't particularly good. I never really liked the former party leader.
However, Christian Engström seems to be doing some good down in the European Parliament right now, and as a force against what I perceive to have been a very one-sided "we need longer copyrights, and we need to jail everyone as soon as they copy one song!!!1" discourse I think they have been a very valuable force.
Eh, what the hell? You are complaining that his "rant" posted online isn't intellectual? Why would his rant need to be more intellectual than a simple statement of facts regarding the censorship (I use the term loosely here) of the video? And can you point me to where he ever makes the claim that being posted on slashdot proves that he won the debate?
Based on your comment I don't think you've bothered to read more than a few random words of these stories and the associated blog posts.
I'm just speculating here, but it may well be the cause that John Haught said something under pressure that didn't accord with the teaching of the Catholic Church, and now he doesn't want it getting outthere.
If his job were to - as you speculate - rely on him remaining intellectually dishonest in public, I don't quite see how that's a redeeming factor..
A good reason to get our act together and throw parts of our civilization out into space, perhaps? I mean, better do it now before something like this cripples our space-travel abilities forever and war for resources wipes out the rest of us.
You could argue about whether it matters if we survive as a species or not, but I would argue that we are almost obliged to try our best at doing just that. What else could be more important, if you at all care about anything except your short-term survival and enjoyment of life.
Wouldn't have helped in this case since the article too talks about opt-in. Maybe all you can wish from the slashdot editors is that they read the linked articles before posting a story (which would have cleared them in this case) but there are times they have obviously not done even this.
Replying to myself, it seems to actually be opt-in. Good thing I just answered the Slashdot reader survey with a complaint about misleading and/or outright false stories.
Can you see a problem with attacking the science just because you don't agree with the policies people are trying to push based on it?
I mean, if someone claims that the fact that the earth orbits around the sun means that we must adopt communism, the right thing to attack is the said "communism policy" by point out the step where they go wrong in their logic ("The earth does indeed go around the sun, but this is why I think this should not lead to communism.").
The wrong thing to do is to start to spew nonsense about how the sun is actually orbiting around the earth.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who was left wondering what the hell this was all about.
The short story: "Mailinator is a free, disposable email service". Some site operators wants to block people with this service from registering. There's a way of listing all the domains used by Mailinator (by generating a bunch of new throwaway addresses?). Mailinator in turn has a way to detect when a script is trying to go through this list.
The amazing idea is to detect when a script is scraping this list, and feed it bogus data like "gmail.com".
Not to mention the utter stupidity of having newbs search for programs that they don't even know exist instead of a nice menu organized by category.
I am not sure if you are aware or not, but gnome-shell does have a menu organized by category. Activities->Applications.
I find myself actually liking gnome-shell once I got over the initial "shock".:-) I'm also using Unity (Ubuntu 11.04) on my laptop and, while perhaps looking a bit sleeker, something doesn't feel quite right.
I'm not a fan of ATI's drivers in general (I use the open source r600g at the moment and it's working fine for me), but obviously "empty blackness" is not the norm - not even for the closed source drivers.
Another possible related thing: "Empty blackness" would be what you get with X nowadays before any window manager or similar is started (did you try clicking somewhere if you were using twm?). I can see why they removed the pretty horrible patterned background that was the default earlier, but there are some drawbacks..
You cannot pull of a "all green chaos attack" as in "the italian job" (safety systems protect unsafe situations), but you can cause major gridlock with ease if you know what you are doing.
Surely it's "just" a matter of bypassing the electronics all together and keep the green light lit by powering it directly? Perhaps controlled by your own electronics to be able to have some control over the behavior. You'd need physical access, of course..
I'm usually not the one to buy into any conspiracy theories, but in the case of Microsoft I make exceptions drawn from experience.:-P
I simply don't quite buy the "it makes Windows 7 better"-argument. Why would they not simply be happy to use the lack of H.264-support as a way to get people to use Internet Explorer instead?
Whether I'm the "pissed" communist you want to paint me as or not I will leave to another debate, my point is simply that I see this more as a way of forcing mozilla to give up their stance than a way to improve the experience for Windows 7 users. If their priorities were different, I'm pretty sure Microsoft would be happy to use this leverage to get more people to switch to Internet Explorer instead.
Also, this doesn't just affect distributions. It basically means that anyone who wants to distribute a full browser needs to pay pretty expensive royalties, which would mean that in practice it would be limited to those who have enough money to pay for one.
You can view it however you want and it might not even be particularly wrong as such, but to me it seems like a pretty obvious attack on WebM and open standards for HTML5 video. h264 is not open and firefox will never be able to ship with it.
Yes, you can outsource the problem to things like gstreamer, but the problem still remains - you will be unable to ship a complete open source system that plays video on the web and doesn't depend on any legally dubious patented stuff. As I've understood it, mozilla has avoided taking this approach in order to be able to steer the development onto the more open alternative.
I've been considering donating, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Perhaps partly because it's not entirely clear to me why exactly they need all the money they are trying to gather. Right now, my "local" donation page says that half of the money would go to the Wikimedia Foundation and half of it to Wikimedia Sverige, "which, in Sweden, acts to make knowledge freely available to everybody."
I'd happily help keep the servers running, but how much of my money would end up helping that part of it all? I guess I will end up donating some small sum anyway in the end, though, because I do use wikipedia a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it more important that advertisers have the ability to advertise a single price all over the country than consumers being able to easily tell what something actually costs once they're in a store? This seems like a really weird (or at least one-sided) argument.
What exactly are you typing? I used my N900 to irc on regularly (like, always) and I cannot imagine being able to do it anywhere near as properly without a keyboard. I got myself a stratosphere ii now because of the keyboard, and while it's better than no keyboard I sadly can't type as fast (or accurate) on it as I could on the N900.
I wonder how many years he'll be gone from society if he discovers minecraft..
You can't begin by saying that they have had no influence at all and then immediately go on to say that they have "vulgarized the debate" so much that politicians wouldn't even dare touch the issue. That's kind of impossible.
I think you are wrong on both points. Both the green party and the left party now have stances on copyright that are very similar to the ones that the pirate party have propagated. The pirate party were also quite visible in the media at times, although I'm sure they were ignored by many.
I think that the public debate before the entry of the pirate party (and the pirate bureau) was one of "I want free stuff" against "we need to pay the artists", after their entry it turned more sophisticated and idealogical. I think this is a good thing.
Of course, there are also complete nuts in the party, and some of the arguments put forward aren't particularly good. I never really liked the former party leader.
However, Christian Engström seems to be doing some good down in the European Parliament right now, and as a force against what I perceive to have been a very one-sided "we need longer copyrights, and we need to jail everyone as soon as they copy one song!!!1" discourse I think they have been a very valuable force.
Another happy user of Gnome 3 here.
I think now that extensions are out, and distros can start using them again, Ubuntu will make a comback.
Ubuntu doesn't even come with gnome-shell installed by default, why would they profit (much) from this?
Could you clarify what you mean by this, preferably with a reference?
Eh, what the hell? You are complaining that his "rant" posted online isn't intellectual? Why would his rant need to be more intellectual than a simple statement of facts regarding the censorship (I use the term loosely here) of the video? And can you point me to where he ever makes the claim that being posted on slashdot proves that he won the debate?
Based on your comment I don't think you've bothered to read more than a few random words of these stories and the associated blog posts.
You'll be happy to know that this has been improved in gnome 3.2.
I'm just speculating here, but it may well be the cause that John Haught said something under pressure that didn't accord with the teaching of the Catholic Church, and now he doesn't want it getting outthere.
If his job were to - as you speculate - rely on him remaining intellectually dishonest in public, I don't quite see how that's a redeeming factor..
A good reason to get our act together and throw parts of our civilization out into space, perhaps? I mean, better do it now before something like this cripples our space-travel abilities forever and war for resources wipes out the rest of us.
You could argue about whether it matters if we survive as a species or not, but I would argue that we are almost obliged to try our best at doing just that. What else could be more important, if you at all care about anything except your short-term survival and enjoyment of life.
Wouldn't have helped in this case since the article too talks about opt-in. Maybe all you can wish from the slashdot editors is that they read the linked articles before posting a story (which would have cleared them in this case) but there are times they have obviously not done even this.
Replying to myself, it seems to actually be opt-in. Good thing I just answered the Slashdot reader survey with a complaint about misleading and/or outright false stories.
I would buy your argument if it was opt-in. Why does it need to be opt-out?
Can you see a problem with attacking the science just because you don't agree with the policies people are trying to push based on it?
I mean, if someone claims that the fact that the earth orbits around the sun means that we must adopt communism, the right thing to attack is the said "communism policy" by point out the step where they go wrong in their logic ("The earth does indeed go around the sun, but this is why I think this should not lead to communism.").
The wrong thing to do is to start to spew nonsense about how the sun is actually orbiting around the earth.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who was left wondering what the hell this was all about.
The short story: "Mailinator is a free, disposable email service". Some site operators wants to block people with this service from registering. There's a way of listing all the domains used by Mailinator (by generating a bunch of new throwaway addresses?). Mailinator in turn has a way to detect when a script is trying to go through this list.
The amazing idea is to detect when a script is scraping this list, and feed it bogus data like "gmail.com".
I think you might have missed the whole idea with patents and how patent law differs from copyright law..
Not to mention the utter stupidity of having newbs search for programs that they don't even know exist instead of a nice menu organized by category.
I am not sure if you are aware or not, but gnome-shell does have a menu organized by category. Activities->Applications.
:-) I'm also using Unity (Ubuntu 11.04) on my laptop and, while perhaps looking a bit sleeker, something doesn't feel quite right.
I find myself actually liking gnome-shell once I got over the initial "shock".
I'm not a fan of ATI's drivers in general (I use the open source r600g at the moment and it's working fine for me), but obviously "empty blackness" is not the norm - not even for the closed source drivers.
Another possible related thing: "Empty blackness" would be what you get with X nowadays before any window manager or similar is started (did you try clicking somewhere if you were using twm?). I can see why they removed the pretty horrible patterned background that was the default earlier, but there are some drawbacks..
Real estate crisis IN OUTER SPACE
Can we here perhaps see the next step for patent trolls when they're done adding ON THE INTERNET to every old inventions?
You cannot pull of a "all green chaos attack" as in "the italian job" (safety systems protect unsafe situations), but you can cause major gridlock with ease if you know what you are doing.
Surely it's "just" a matter of bypassing the electronics all together and keep the green light lit by powering it directly? Perhaps controlled by your own electronics to be able to have some control over the behavior. You'd need physical access, of course..
I'm usually not the one to buy into any conspiracy theories, but in the case of Microsoft I make exceptions drawn from experience. :-P
I simply don't quite buy the "it makes Windows 7 better"-argument. Why would they not simply be happy to use the lack of H.264-support as a way to get people to use Internet Explorer instead?
Whether I'm the "pissed" communist you want to paint me as or not I will leave to another debate, my point is simply that I see this more as a way of forcing mozilla to give up their stance than a way to improve the experience for Windows 7 users. If their priorities were different, I'm pretty sure Microsoft would be happy to use this leverage to get more people to switch to Internet Explorer instead.
Also, this doesn't just affect distributions. It basically means that anyone who wants to distribute a full browser needs to pay pretty expensive royalties, which would mean that in practice it would be limited to those who have enough money to pay for one.
You can view it however you want and it might not even be particularly wrong as such, but to me it seems like a pretty obvious attack on WebM and open standards for HTML5 video. h264 is not open and firefox will never be able to ship with it.
Yes, you can outsource the problem to things like gstreamer, but the problem still remains - you will be unable to ship a complete open source system that plays video on the web and doesn't depend on any legally dubious patented stuff. As I've understood it, mozilla has avoided taking this approach in order to be able to steer the development onto the more open alternative.
I've been considering donating, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Perhaps partly because it's not entirely clear to me why exactly they need all the money they are trying to gather. Right now, my "local" donation page says that half of the money would go to the Wikimedia Foundation and half of it to Wikimedia Sverige, "which, in Sweden, acts to make knowledge freely available to everybody."
I'd happily help keep the servers running, but how much of my money would end up helping that part of it all? I guess I will end up donating some small sum anyway in the end, though, because I do use wikipedia a lot.