I wonder how long it'll take before it's "discovered" that wife-beaters are "born that way." It's clearly a very common tendency for men to control women any way they can, often using violence. I'll bet you wouldn't have to look too hard to find biological reasons for their behavior, something which can't be said for pedophilia or homosexuality.
Men are free to screw unbelieving women. Are you implying that the behavior of the men in that article was condoned by Islam or any Muslim community? The article doesn't even contain the word "Islam" or "Muslim." It says that the Asian men sought white girls because their culture wouldn't accept them having sex with Asian girls. It does not even say that their culture condoned their having sex with white girls.
Everything I've heard about Islam indicates that all sex outside of marriage is unacceptable, though women who violate that may be punished more harshly than men in some cases.
I can't agree more. I'm always amazed that some people think binary prefixes are a bad idea. Of course, they don't reduce confusion overnight, since people have to get used to them. However, I expect the detractors to gradually fade away. Unlike the "standard" system of inches, pounds, and Fahrenheit, the status quo of using the SI prefixes for either powers of ten or two at whim hasn't had very many decades to solidify.
You're painting with some very broad strokes there. I receive completely DRM-free and free of cost HDTV broadcast all the time. AFAIK, the FCC neither requires nor allows any kind of DRM on ATSC broadcast, though it has been threatened and defeated (hopefully indefinitely) in the form of the "broadcast flag."
Also, IPTV does not refer to any particular system or standard, but just the general approach of sending TV over IP. I don't know how many different IPTV systems there are, but there are probably some that don't use DRM.
Just to nitpick: HDMI doesn't require HDCP all the time, which is why you can plug an HDMI display into a DVI output using a simple converter cable and you can plug a DVI display into an HDMI output as long as the signal is not HDCP encrypted.
However, I do agree with your main point that DRM is becoming more pervasive and most people buying into it are completely unaware or apathetic. Because I'm opposed to DRM on grounds of principle and because it limits my DIY options, I get my TV and movies from broadcast ATSC and DVDs (the DRM is inconsequential) instead of digital cable and BluRay. When bypassing BluRay DRM is as easy to bypass as CSS, I'll get some of those. Of course, the former options are a lot less expensive too, and I like saving money. I am very aware that not very many people are going to limit their options like I do.
So, what's the "right model?" I like FLOSS because it's about freedom and choice for both author and user. When I choose to use a FLOSS package, I don't prefer one licensing model over another, but if I were creating one from scratch, I'd choose the license that was most appropriate for the intended use, which might be GPL, LGPL, or a BSD-like one.
Yeah, pulseaudio's working pretty well for me on Hardy. Flash even works well with pulseaudio with the libflashsupport package. There are some apps, such as Wine and some SDL apps that still have trouble, though.
Just because someone who favors gun control fears other people, it doesn't follow that someone against gun control doesn't fear other people. A realistic person admits that we all fear other people to some extent. No one would ever need or a desire a deadly weapon to be used against another person if people didn't fear people.
There are *nixy xml manipulation tools like XMLStarlet. However, using XPath isn't quite a straightforward as grep. If you want to use traditional *nix tools on the text in an ODT (Open Document Text) document, the simplest approach is to export a plain text file from one of the several ODT editors like AbiWord, Google Docs, or of course, OpenOffice.
As I said before, plain text is a good format for many documents. For documents published by a government agency, I'd think it would be good to make them available in several standard formats, such as plain text (for the type of use you're describing), HTML, PDF (for printing), and perhaps ODF. For reading or searching, I'd tend to think one of the first three would be better than ODF, since they're more widely supported. If the recipient of the document would need to edit it and send it on to someone else, ODF is probably better.
Those kinds of policy decisions should be outside the scope of the format specification. Each of the formats I mentioned has specific advantages and disadvantages, so none of them is the best choice for every situation. Whenever a committee designs a specification that is supposed to do everything imaginable, it ends up too big and complex to be implemented well. I suspect ODF is already more bloated than it should be, though it seems to be much simpler than OOXML. If you want make a plain text document available, it's not hard to extract the text from the ODF original; all those details don't need to be added to an already large spec.
I've wondered about using or extending XHTML as well. Apparently, there has been an effort in that direction for a while called Compound Document Formats which has had a much lower profile than ODF or OOXML. It does seem promising for basic functionality, but I get the impression it's intended more as target format like regular HTML or PDF than as an editing format like ODF. I'll definitely be watching it to see how useful it turns out to be for simple stuff.
If plain text is all you need, then use plain text. I do all the time. However, clearly many people do need a more sophisticated format for things such as word processor documents and spreadsheets. Using different approaches to represent the same information in the same format, such as plain text and XML, only complicates most tools that have to deal with that format, which will lead to more bugs and slower progress.
While sed, awk, and grep are sufficient for very basic transformations and I use them frequently, they are not sufficient for the kind of complex formatting people expect from a modern word processor or spreadsheet. Awk and sed are ugly languages when you try to push them beyond very basic tasks.
Don't get me started on using C to write text processing applications. That's one of the tasks it's particularly poorly suited to. I can't begin to imagine how much time would be saved fixing grave security vulnerabilities due to buffer overflows that could have been avoided if people had used a language with real string handling or at least a C library that does the dirty work.
While XML is far from perfect, it is very well supported by libraries and tools written in almost every language known to man, including C. If writing a tool to deal with an XML document is more complex than to deal with a plain text document, it's probably because the XML format has more features. If the XML format is too complex, it should probably be replaced or simplified. I'm sure you're aware that the simplest XML document is something like:
MySQL is released under the GNU GPL. This means that it can be used and incorporated into commercial software as long as that sofware is compatible with the GPL. It is just as much Free Software and Open Source as any other code released under the GPL, like GCC and Linux. You don't have to pay anyone anything.
Any software linking with the MySQL client library must be compatible with the GPL, but I don't see any reason why a different implementation of the protocol would necessarily be bound by the GPL. So if you wanted to use MySQL to hold data for a GPL-incompatible application, such as a proprietary one, the most you should have to do is write a new client.
Wouldn't it make more sense to exploit the extensibility of XML and have multiple levels or modules of the spec like XHTML? Rather than having multiple representations of the same information in one package, allow implementations to ignore the parts of the document outside their scope.
Yes, I agree that addresses at the relevant domain should be used. If you don't want to do anything with the replies, just have the MTA discard all messages to that address. If you use noreply@example.com or noreply@noreply.com, you have no control over what happens to replies. Forging a From: to save the load of bogus replies is silly, since it's probably small. Even if it's big, it's still your responsibility.
While I can't find an MX record for example.com, there is an A record for it and a web page in accordance with http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt, so it's a poor choice for an email address that shouldn't go anywhere.
I agree with most of the post, but I wonder why you're having so much trouble with the PVR-150. Currently, I'm using Linux 2.6.22 (from Ubuntu Gutsy) which includes ivtv 1.0.0. I didn't have to do anything to get the PVR-150 working. When the machine booted, ivtv loaded and/dev/video0 existed. MythTV's configuration could certainly be easier, but the only issue I have with the PVR-150 is that it stops working sometimes after the machine resumes from suspending (S3).
I don't know who's been making an argument for requiring licensing for all computer use, but that's even more stupid than TFA. In both cases, the best remedy to the perceived and actual problems is education.
No one's debating what? The question of legalizing nuclear weapons was already proposed by someone else. My point is merely that if a line is drawn somewhere (a position I agree with) then it makes more sense to consider types of weapons that can be obtained by a significant number of individuals. While I don't think it makes sense for individuals to own the types of weapons commonly described as capable of "mass destruction," I think that's a large distance from automatic weapons such as sub machine guns and select-fire rifles.
Yes, you're exactly right. I don't think there's much point in debating whether nuclear arms should be legalized at this point. However, debating legalization of biological and chemical weapons, as well as large amounts of conventional explosives has much more practical applications, mainly because they're much easier and cheaper to obtain. By the way, I'm not in favor of legalizing them.
Well, I guess I don't know exactly how much is the minimum cost to build or buy a nuclear weapon. However, I'm sure there are extremely few individuals that have the resources to obtain one. I think currently there are few enough that anyone who did own one would be under intense scrutiny and severe criticism. However, the technology is getting cheaper all the time, so it might not be that long before we need to worry about individuals with nukes.
The value of a certain class of weapon is largely in relation to what one's opponent is using. If one needs to protect oneself from a burglar with a revolver or a corrupt cop with a semi-automatic pistol, one doesn't need a fully-automatic weapon. But, if one needs to protect oneself from the US Army with their M-4s, M-249s, various heavy machine guns, tanks, and artillery, one needs as much firepower as possible.
It's a good point that trademarks only apply in a specific field. Perhaps it would have been better to choose a less generic name, such as the original one, StarOffice.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how long it'll take before it's "discovered" that wife-beaters are "born that way." It's clearly a very common tendency for men to control women any way they can, often using violence. I'll bet you wouldn't have to look too hard to find biological reasons for their behavior, something which can't be said for pedophilia or homosexuality.
Everything I've heard about Islam indicates that all sex outside of marriage is unacceptable, though women who violate that may be punished more harshly than men in some cases.
I can't agree more. I'm always amazed that some people think binary prefixes are a bad idea. Of course, they don't reduce confusion overnight, since people have to get used to them. However, I expect the detractors to gradually fade away. Unlike the "standard" system of inches, pounds, and Fahrenheit, the status quo of using the SI prefixes for either powers of ten or two at whim hasn't had very many decades to solidify.
You're painting with some very broad strokes there. I receive completely DRM-free and free of cost HDTV broadcast all the time. AFAIK, the FCC neither requires nor allows any kind of DRM on ATSC broadcast, though it has been threatened and defeated (hopefully indefinitely) in the form of the "broadcast flag."
Also, IPTV does not refer to any particular system or standard, but just the general approach of sending TV over IP. I don't know how many different IPTV systems there are, but there are probably some that don't use DRM.
Just to nitpick: HDMI doesn't require HDCP all the time, which is why you can plug an HDMI display into a DVI output using a simple converter cable and you can plug a DVI display into an HDMI output as long as the signal is not HDCP encrypted.
However, I do agree with your main point that DRM is becoming more pervasive and most people buying into it are completely unaware or apathetic. Because I'm opposed to DRM on grounds of principle and because it limits my DIY options, I get my TV and movies from broadcast ATSC and DVDs (the DRM is inconsequential) instead of digital cable and BluRay. When bypassing BluRay DRM is as easy to bypass as CSS, I'll get some of those. Of course, the former options are a lot less expensive too, and I like saving money. I am very aware that not very many people are going to limit their options like I do.
So, what's the "right model?" I like FLOSS because it's about freedom and choice for both author and user. When I choose to use a FLOSS package, I don't prefer one licensing model over another, but if I were creating one from scratch, I'd choose the license that was most appropriate for the intended use, which might be GPL, LGPL, or a BSD-like one.
Yeah, pulseaudio's working pretty well for me on Hardy. Flash even works well with pulseaudio with the libflashsupport package. There are some apps, such as Wine and some SDL apps that still have trouble, though.
Just because someone who favors gun control fears other people, it doesn't follow that someone against gun control doesn't fear other people. A realistic person admits that we all fear other people to some extent. No one would ever need or a desire a deadly weapon to be used against another person if people didn't fear people.
There are *nixy xml manipulation tools like XMLStarlet. However, using XPath isn't quite a straightforward as grep. If you want to use traditional *nix tools on the text in an ODT (Open Document Text) document, the simplest approach is to export a plain text file from one of the several ODT editors like AbiWord, Google Docs, or of course, OpenOffice.
As I said before, plain text is a good format for many documents. For documents published by a government agency, I'd think it would be good to make them available in several standard formats, such as plain text (for the type of use you're describing), HTML, PDF (for printing), and perhaps ODF. For reading or searching, I'd tend to think one of the first three would be better than ODF, since they're more widely supported. If the recipient of the document would need to edit it and send it on to someone else, ODF is probably better.
Those kinds of policy decisions should be outside the scope of the format specification. Each of the formats I mentioned has specific advantages and disadvantages, so none of them is the best choice for every situation. Whenever a committee designs a specification that is supposed to do everything imaginable, it ends up too big and complex to be implemented well. I suspect ODF is already more bloated than it should be, though it seems to be much simpler than OOXML. If you want make a plain text document available, it's not hard to extract the text from the ODF original; all those details don't need to be added to an already large spec.
I've wondered about using or extending XHTML as well. Apparently, there has been an effort in that direction for a while called Compound Document Formats which has had a much lower profile than ODF or OOXML. It does seem promising for basic functionality, but I get the impression it's intended more as target format like regular HTML or PDF than as an editing format like ODF. I'll definitely be watching it to see how useful it turns out to be for simple stuff.
While sed, awk, and grep are sufficient for very basic transformations and I use them frequently, they are not sufficient for the kind of complex formatting people expect from a modern word processor or spreadsheet. Awk and sed are ugly languages when you try to push them beyond very basic tasks.
Don't get me started on using C to write text processing applications. That's one of the tasks it's particularly poorly suited to. I can't begin to imagine how much time would be saved fixing grave security vulnerabilities due to buffer overflows that could have been avoided if people had used a language with real string handling or at least a C library that does the dirty work.
While XML is far from perfect, it is very well supported by libraries and tools written in almost every language known to man, including C. If writing a tool to deal with an XML document is more complex than to deal with a plain text document, it's probably because the XML format has more features. If the XML format is too complex, it should probably be replaced or simplified. I'm sure you're aware that the simplest XML document is something like:
MySQL is released under the GNU GPL. This means that it can be used and incorporated into commercial software as long as that sofware is compatible with the GPL. It is just as much Free Software and Open Source as any other code released under the GPL, like GCC and Linux. You don't have to pay anyone anything.
Any software linking with the MySQL client library must be compatible with the GPL, but I don't see any reason why a different implementation of the protocol would necessarily be bound by the GPL. So if you wanted to use MySQL to hold data for a GPL-incompatible application, such as a proprietary one, the most you should have to do is write a new client.
Wouldn't it make more sense to exploit the extensibility of XML and have multiple levels or modules of the spec like XHTML? Rather than having multiple representations of the same information in one package, allow implementations to ignore the parts of the document outside their scope.
Yes, I agree that addresses at the relevant domain should be used. If you don't want to do anything with the replies, just have the MTA discard all messages to that address. If you use noreply@example.com or noreply@noreply.com, you have no control over what happens to replies. Forging a From: to save the load of bogus replies is silly, since it's probably small. Even if it's big, it's still your responsibility.
While I can't find an MX record for example.com, there is an A record for it and a web page in accordance with http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt, so it's a poor choice for an email address that shouldn't go anywhere.
As long it's not Advanced Tea Substitute.
I agree with most of the post, but I wonder why you're having so much trouble with the PVR-150. Currently, I'm using Linux 2.6.22 (from Ubuntu Gutsy) which includes ivtv 1.0.0. I didn't have to do anything to get the PVR-150 working. When the machine booted, ivtv loaded and /dev/video0 existed. MythTV's configuration could certainly be easier, but the only issue I have with the PVR-150 is that it stops working sometimes after the machine resumes from suspending (S3).
I don't know who's been making an argument for requiring licensing for all computer use, but that's even more stupid than TFA. In both cases, the best remedy to the perceived and actual problems is education.
No one's debating what? The question of legalizing nuclear weapons was already proposed by someone else. My point is merely that if a line is drawn somewhere (a position I agree with) then it makes more sense to consider types of weapons that can be obtained by a significant number of individuals. While I don't think it makes sense for individuals to own the types of weapons commonly described as capable of "mass destruction," I think that's a large distance from automatic weapons such as sub machine guns and select-fire rifles.
Yes, you're exactly right. I don't think there's much point in debating whether nuclear arms should be legalized at this point. However, debating legalization of biological and chemical weapons, as well as large amounts of conventional explosives has much more practical applications, mainly because they're much easier and cheaper to obtain. By the way, I'm not in favor of legalizing them.
Well, I guess I don't know exactly how much is the minimum cost to build or buy a nuclear weapon. However, I'm sure there are extremely few individuals that have the resources to obtain one. I think currently there are few enough that anyone who did own one would be under intense scrutiny and severe criticism. However, the technology is getting cheaper all the time, so it might not be that long before we need to worry about individuals with nukes.
Right now, legalizing possession of nuclear weapons by US citizens wouldn't have any effect, since no one can afford to make or buy them.
The value of a certain class of weapon is largely in relation to what one's opponent is using. If one needs to protect oneself from a burglar with a revolver or a corrupt cop with a semi-automatic pistol, one doesn't need a fully-automatic weapon. But, if one needs to protect oneself from the US Army with their M-4s, M-249s, various heavy machine guns, tanks, and artillery, one needs as much firepower as possible.
I think it's more likely the "healing" refers to reconnecting to the main network when a connection is lost.
It's a good point that trademarks only apply in a specific field. Perhaps it would have been better to choose a less generic name, such as the original one, StarOffice.