Except for self defence one human should not take another humans god given life, period.
Which "god" would that be? The "god" of the Bible is a mass murderer. His churches and followers have committed mass murder in his name. Furthermore, the Bible and the Koran both contain the death penalty for many offenses.
The supposed reverence for life by modern Christian churches is a selective, cynical political ploy; it has nothing to do with morality.
When you have to ask you have a problem with morality.
I ask you because the reason matters. If you oppose the death penalty for the right reasons, you can take the moral high ground. Obviously, you don't, since you ground your morality in supposedly "god given" rights. When your church teaches you differently again, you'll be out there murdering again, because your morality lacks reflection and foundation.
So, yeah, you have a problem with morality: you lack it.
So what if it went to "an airport"? The airport is served--and served well--by a ferry.
No, this wasn't a national "smear campaign", this was corruption in politics; it was an attempt by local developers to enrich themselves at the tax payer's expense. If the airport traffic and development of the island actually had justified building a bridge, then the bridge could have been paid for privately. That's something any red-blooded, free-market Republican should understand.
What software, in your opinion, is "better" than MS Office that's available today?
For most people, Google Docs meets their needs better: it's cheaper, easier to "install", easier to use, easier to script.
For people who do need to do stuff locally, LibreOffice is also better for most people: it's cheaper, it has a traditional user interface, and it gets the job done.
And then there's also the question of advanced features that Office has - they may only be used by 1% of the company,
These "advanced" features are usually used for collaboration, security, and/or analytics, and there are far better solutions out there than those built into MS Office. You save yourself a lot of trouble by keeping people from using MS Office for those purposes.
If your company has a need (even in a small proportion of users) for the advanced features of Office
Nobody ever has a "need" for the "advanced features of [MS] Office"; there are better solutions for each and every one of them.
This was impossible in OO.org without loading a module, and I can't ask users to do that. Word is kludgy, and I had to write some macros to support it, but it did work.
Whether you "need to load a module" or not is a question of distribution and packaging, not the office suite. On many Linux distributions, OpenOffice's mail merge is a package or comes preinstalled. Furthermore, it's questionable whether mail-merge should be inside the word processor at all or a separate application. If that's the best you can come up with, we have to conclude that OpenOffice is match for MS Office.
Personally, I haven't had any need to fire up MS Office in years, neither for compatibility, nor for any of its functionality.
Excel is simply unmatched in its balance of ease-of-use and ease in scripting, despite it's many warts.
I find Google Apps a lot easier to script. And they run in any browser, no install required, and none of the security issues that come with MS Office.
Instead of attacking proprietary software and companies like Microsoft by saying they're the root of evil, MAKE BETTER SOFTWARE.
The world is littered with the corpses of companies that made better software than Microsoft and got killed by Microsoft's dirty tricks. Microsoft has never competed fairly.
And even when they are not doing something illegal or monopolistic, they are still not winning on quality: Windows Mobile, WP7, Bing, and Xbox exist only because Microsoft is sinking a shitload of money into them, merely to produce something that is at best comparable to what startups and other companies produce on a shoestring. "Quality" not only includes the product itself, but also its price and its development cost, and on those metrics, Microsoft is probably the worst company in the business.
First of all, statements like "50% accuracy" are nearly useless; you need to know both precision and recall. And to the degree that "50% accuracy" tells you anything, it tells you that the system is pretty bad.
Finally, the countermeasure for this is the same as the countermeasure for other automated speech analysis techniques: play some singing or theater in the background.
Oh, please, in the US copyright is used all the time to prevent unwanted speech all the time. Even Slashdot itself suffered from such censorship.
The threat of copyright infringement lawsuits is used frequently, but if you actually saw things through in court, you'd likely prevail on free speech grounds, provided your use of any copyrighted material is fair.
No, Facebook is not "commercially exploiting" them; they are merely a company that has been asked by the copyright owner to publish these pictures, not significantly different from a printer or a billboard operator.
Well, see, in countries where there's decent privacy laws,it's illegal to take a picture of somebody where that person is the subject of the photo, and then to publish that photo without their permission.
You mean like communist Russia? Saudi Arabia?
What people can't and shouldn't be able to do you is libel you with the photo (by creating the impression that you were doing something you weren't actually doing) or use you as a model for commercial gain. Both of those are civil matters, not criminal matters, meaning the individual affected by the conduct can recover damages, but the state cannot prosecute you for it.
If you're out on a public street, you can be photographed and the photo can get published; that's part of how democracies and free societies ought to work. Turning photography on public streets into a criminal justice issue, however, is unacceptable and incompatible with democracy.
The fact that nations like Germany and France have such laws isn't an indication of better privacy protection in those nations, it's an indication that these nations still have totalitarian tendencies.
it dates all the way back to the ~1100 AD crusades. The only justification for those wars was because muslims thought the "wrong" ideas
Oh, there was plenty more justification than that... like the fact that Muslims were occupying large parts of Spain, Italy, and Greece, oppressing people, and attacking many Christian nations.
Apple's real genius was, as usual, to figure out how to fix other people's broken and half-completed ideas, put it into a pretty box, and market it up the wazoo.
Stop misquoting people; it's dishonest.
And, no, Apple usually doesn't "fix" other people's ideas, they usually just package and market them better (and then try to take credit for them). Often, they just do a death-march and beat other people to market with some new product category by a few months. Or they cut corners on the software and hardware until they undercut other people's prices (that hasn't happened recently, but it was true on the original Mac, for example). Apple has great execution, they just lack innovation and honesty.
It just comes naturally to everyone, you don't have to think about using it when you're using it (for most things, anyway).
And in what way is the Apple UI more intuitive than the Palm or Hiptop UI was?
Apple is great at cashing in on all the mistakes their competitors inevitably make due to incompetence, marketing/corporate trying to do the designing and/or insisting on sub-par component suppliers. Stop making mistakes and you'll stop Apple.
Yes, that we can agree on; note how "better technology" and "innovation" are not on your list.
This is something that Google needs to work on. They really need to add a feature that requires you to authorize things like that when they come up.
Windows and Symbian tried that. I don't think it made things more secure for most people, because the same people who didn't look at the permissions when installing just clicked OK anyway.
For geeks, a user-configurable option to do that might be nice; for most users, it's probably useless.
iOS was designed from the ground up for a mobile, battery dependent device.
iOS wasn't "designed from the ground up" for anything; iOS is a derivative of OS X, which is a derivative of NeXT, which is a derivative Mach, Stepstone, and GNU tools, and incorporates some ideas and designs from Smalltalk-80 libraries. iOS is a slight variant of a old workstation operating system.
Could be that the combination of battery tech, and OS thriftiness will get you 4 or 5 years before the battery needs to be replaced. At that point the cost of Apple's service is not really that bad
Except that a 4-5 year old Apple device will have serious limitations and incompatibilities compared to current versions of iOS. Realistically, Apple users need to upgrade every 1-2 years, just like everybody else, and then the higher price very much matters.
It's an instinct, hard-wired into people's brains to ensure the survival of the species. Most people follow their instincts. Congratulations on being so intellectual that you managed to over-ride this programming. Now let's talk about how your highly evolved genes are going to be passed on. Oh wait...
Strangely enough, evolution doesn't necessarily favor those who spread their genes around the most. Some species have entire societies in which most individuals are physically incapable of reproducing, yet they all contribute. And cheating on your wife is not necessarily a good way of spreading your genes around either.
They're real genius was in seeing the ability's of smartphones and being able to harness the power. If anyone can remember the days before Iphone, Smartphones were available but they were as difficult to use as a linux command line.
Palms were as easy to use as iPhones. The Danger Hiptop was even easier to use than the Palm or the iPhone, cheaper, and, incidentally, the predecessor of Android. It also had an app store.
Apple's real genius was, as usual, to figure out how to cash in on other people's ideas, put it into a pretty box, and market it up the wazoo.
Judging by what actually happened, the answer would be "yes", but the outcome would have differed, and taken far longer to realize overall. After all, there have been tablets for 10 years now, and portable mp3 players out long before the iPod.
No, it wouldn't have taken much longer: everybody's developments is driven by hardware availability. Once screens, processors, and batteries become cheap and small enough, these devices happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Which "god" would that be? The "god" of the Bible is a mass murderer. His churches and followers have committed mass murder in his name. Furthermore, the Bible and the Koran both contain the death penalty for many offenses.
The supposed reverence for life by modern Christian churches is a selective, cynical political ploy; it has nothing to do with morality.
I ask you because the reason matters. If you oppose the death penalty for the right reasons, you can take the moral high ground. Obviously, you don't, since you ground your morality in supposedly "god given" rights. When your church teaches you differently again, you'll be out there murdering again, because your morality lacks reflection and foundation.
So, yeah, you have a problem with morality: you lack it.
Given how ridiculous the Mormon religion is and how intrinsically intolerant it is towards others, why should people not at least joke about it?
So what if it went to "an airport"? The airport is served--and served well--by a ferry.
No, this wasn't a national "smear campaign", this was corruption in politics; it was an attempt by local developers to enrich themselves at the tax payer's expense. If the airport traffic and development of the island actually had justified building a bridge, then the bridge could have been paid for privately. That's something any red-blooded, free-market Republican should understand.
For most people, Google Docs meets their needs better: it's cheaper, easier to "install", easier to use, easier to script.
For people who do need to do stuff locally, LibreOffice is also better for most people: it's cheaper, it has a traditional user interface, and it gets the job done.
These "advanced" features are usually used for collaboration, security, and/or analytics, and there are far better solutions out there than those built into MS Office. You save yourself a lot of trouble by keeping people from using MS Office for those purposes.
Nobody ever has a "need" for the "advanced features of [MS] Office"; there are better solutions for each and every one of them.
Whether you "need to load a module" or not is a question of distribution and packaging, not the office suite. On many Linux distributions, OpenOffice's mail merge is a package or comes preinstalled. Furthermore, it's questionable whether mail-merge should be inside the word processor at all or a separate application. If that's the best you can come up with, we have to conclude that OpenOffice is match for MS Office.
Personally, I haven't had any need to fire up MS Office in years, neither for compatibility, nor for any of its functionality.
I find Google Apps a lot easier to script. And they run in any browser, no install required, and none of the security issues that come with MS Office.
Instead of attacking proprietary software and companies like Microsoft by saying they're the root of evil, MAKE BETTER SOFTWARE.
The world is littered with the corpses of companies that made better software than Microsoft and got killed by Microsoft's dirty tricks. Microsoft has never competed fairly.
And even when they are not doing something illegal or monopolistic, they are still not winning on quality: Windows Mobile, WP7, Bing, and Xbox exist only because Microsoft is sinking a shitload of money into them, merely to produce something that is at best comparable to what startups and other companies produce on a shoestring. "Quality" not only includes the product itself, but also its price and its development cost, and on those metrics, Microsoft is probably the worst company in the business.
First of all, statements like "50% accuracy" are nearly useless; you need to know both precision and recall. And to the degree that "50% accuracy" tells you anything, it tells you that the system is pretty bad.
Finally, the countermeasure for this is the same as the countermeasure for other automated speech analysis techniques: play some singing or theater in the background.
Oh, please, in the US copyright is used all the time to prevent unwanted speech all the time. Even Slashdot itself suffered from such censorship.
The threat of copyright infringement lawsuits is used frequently, but if you actually saw things through in court, you'd likely prevail on free speech grounds, provided your use of any copyrighted material is fair.
No, Facebook is not "commercially exploiting" them; they are merely a company that has been asked by the copyright owner to publish these pictures, not significantly different from a printer or a billboard operator.
Well, see, in countries where there's decent privacy laws,it's illegal to take a picture of somebody where that person is the subject of the photo, and then to publish that photo without their permission.
You mean like communist Russia? Saudi Arabia?
What people can't and shouldn't be able to do you is libel you with the photo (by creating the impression that you were doing something you weren't actually doing) or use you as a model for commercial gain. Both of those are civil matters, not criminal matters, meaning the individual affected by the conduct can recover damages, but the state cannot prosecute you for it.
If you're out on a public street, you can be photographed and the photo can get published; that's part of how democracies and free societies ought to work. Turning photography on public streets into a criminal justice issue, however, is unacceptable and incompatible with democracy.
The fact that nations like Germany and France have such laws isn't an indication of better privacy protection in those nations, it's an indication that these nations still have totalitarian tendencies.
Other people's intellectual property has never stopped Apple before, so why should it do so now?
Yeah, but there still is an important distinction between "being receptive" and actually committing mass murder.
Convicted criminals, yes. The moral problem with that would be... what exactly?
Given its history, I think that sentence applies much more to Europeans.
Oh, there was plenty more justification than that... like the fact that Muslims were occupying large parts of Spain, Italy, and Greece, oppressing people, and attacking many Christian nations.
Stop misquoting people; it's dishonest.
And, no, Apple usually doesn't "fix" other people's ideas, they usually just package and market them better (and then try to take credit for them). Often, they just do a death-march and beat other people to market with some new product category by a few months. Or they cut corners on the software and hardware until they undercut other people's prices (that hasn't happened recently, but it was true on the original Mac, for example). Apple has great execution, they just lack innovation and honesty.
And in what way is the Apple UI more intuitive than the Palm or Hiptop UI was?
Yes, that we can agree on; note how "better technology" and "innovation" are not on your list.
Windows and Symbian tried that. I don't think it made things more secure for most people, because the same people who didn't look at the permissions when installing just clicked OK anyway.
For geeks, a user-configurable option to do that might be nice; for most users, it's probably useless.
iOS wasn't "designed from the ground up" for anything; iOS is a derivative of OS X, which is a derivative of NeXT, which is a derivative Mach, Stepstone, and GNU tools, and incorporates some ideas and designs from Smalltalk-80 libraries. iOS is a slight variant of a old workstation operating system.
Except that a 4-5 year old Apple device will have serious limitations and incompatibilities compared to current versions of iOS. Realistically, Apple users need to upgrade every 1-2 years, just like everybody else, and then the higher price very much matters.
The iPad 2 hardware is nice. Too bad it doesn't run Android or WebOS.
Strangely enough, evolution doesn't necessarily favor those who spread their genes around the most. Some species have entire societies in which most individuals are physically incapable of reproducing, yet they all contribute. And cheating on your wife is not necessarily a good way of spreading your genes around either.
"Not soon enough."
More importantly, they had to give the app permission to send texts. Very few apps need that permission.
Android has third party repositories.
And they are generally safe, since apps need to request permission to text--third party app store or not.
Palms were as easy to use as iPhones. The Danger Hiptop was even easier to use than the Palm or the iPhone, cheaper, and, incidentally, the predecessor of Android. It also had an app store.
Apple's real genius was, as usual, to figure out how to cash in on other people's ideas, put it into a pretty box, and market it up the wazoo.
No, it wouldn't have taken much longer: everybody's developments is driven by hardware availability. Once screens, processors, and batteries become cheap and small enough, these devices happen.
Now, the program in question is really doing nothing that wrong
No, it isn't. Did I say anywhere that it was?