The argument could be made that somebody who doesn't know what Apache is really shouldn't be serving webpages.
Apart from that, there are other problem with the dumbing-down approach; for instance, it promises things that it cannot make good on. When you instruct the computer to "share your files", but then you can't share files with the AppleTalk Macs, that's confusing. When you instruct the computer to "serve web pages" but instead your server gets hacked, that's a disaster.
Language need to be consistent, and terms need to be explained. But never dumbed down. People aren't idiots. They don't buy a "program to manipulate images". They buy "Photoshop".
I'm not familiar with grsec, but from a brief glance at the grsec site I don't see how they are alike. grsec appears to be an ACL based security model, whereas exec-shield just makes it a lot harder for the CPU to execute code that was never meant to be executed (from the owner of the machine's point of view...).
the patch was designed to be as efficient as possible. There's a very
minimal (couple of cycles) tracking overhead for every PROT_MMAP
system-call, plus there's the 2-3 cycles cost per context-switch.
Linux just got a little bit less fun
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
Saying that you're an "apolitical engineer" is just a fancy way of saying "I yield to whatever works". Which in itself is just a fancy way to say "I yield to power".
That is not necessarily a bad position. But it is not something I believe in. And I think it is appalling that so many of you hail it like some kind of luminary vision.
Some of you might argue that engineers don't yield to power but to the laws of nature. But then why do engineers build cars that require oil? Why is there no manned mission to Mars? Because of politics. Because of power. The laws of nature have nothing to do with it.
Freedom comes in many guises. How free is a king? How free a hungry man? Freedom for the strong means anguish for the weak. But freedom for the weak is merely annoying for the strong. That is why I support the freedom of the weak, and oppose that which serves merely to increase the freedom of the strong.
I'm with Chello/NL. They have 1.5MBit down, 128Kbit up. Not "on average", but damn near always. Downtime has been perhaps 3 days over the last 4 years. It's cheap (50 euros a month). And the IP address is officially dynamic (gives them the chance to change stuff), but hasn't changed in 4 years.
The reliability and price/performance of ADSL are way overrated. The reliability and price/performance of cable way underrated.
Of course rights are alienable. Want proof? There's a really sweet
prison camp somewhere in Cuba where a big democratic state stashes
people for arbitrary lengths of time without charging them of any
crime and without prospect toward a swift trial.
Spare me your righteous indignation. Besides, your example is irrelevant. The fact that I can lock you up does not invalidate your right to freedom.
If that doesn't happen, those
same humans could take the rights away just as easily as they were
formulated.
You keep missing the point. You cannot take rights away. You can only violate them. This is not something that is up for discussion, but the definition and central assumption without which the whole system is meaningless. Your ignorance as to the idiom is just that: ignorant.
What if aliens took over here?
That's just outlandish nonsense. It has nothing to do with anything, except in that it underscores your immaturity and lack of experience in these matters.
Of course your observation that "human rights" are not universal is true. But that observation is banally obvious and trivial. The point is that we hold these rights to be universal and inalienable, because that forms the core of humanist philosophy.
By the way, I think you will find (if you would actually go through the trouble to establish this for yourselves rather than just crying about injustice from behind your computer) that the prisoners at Guantamano Bay are treated in a way that is largely compatible with most of the UN human rights treaties.
So how well is the DVD Player, hooked up to your TV, handling your
DivX files you put on CD?
About as well as my VCR handles my DVD discs. The point being that no amount of flexibility in handling different media formats will allow for a change in form factor or other change in physical attributes. Which happens more often than you seem to think.
Quite the opposite. You might as well say that, since HTML is system
independant, it means no system-dependant optimizations for your
browser.
The thing is that "codec markup" needs to be expressed in some kind of language. If that language is too high-level, it becomes very difficult or even impossible to generate efficient code from it. Even in the unlikely case that somebody can get his "codec markup" compiler to be reasonably efficient, you would end up with more or less the same situation as today: some platforms will have superb "code markup" compilers, and some will have very bad ones, meaning that some players will be able to play certain content, and other won't because their "code markup" compiler is just too shitty.
On the other hand if your "code markup" is too low-level, you might as well have written the "codec markup" in machine language.
So you are just substituting one problem for another. And it still doesn't provide a solution for the case where the physical media changes.
You are missing the point spectacularly. The whole point of human rights is that they are inalienable. Whether a government respects them or not is completely irrelevant. Government doesn't grant these rights. It can only protect them.
Your point that human rights are "man-made" and therefore arbitrary is also spectacularly irrelevant, in addition to being just plain wrong. Who else could establish human rights if not humans?
I'm sure you believe you stumbled onto something deep and profound, but all you are doing is showing that you don't really understand what the concept of human rights means.
Make it generic so it plays a few types of files and has the ability to be extended and you've got a true framework. Xine and mplayer are frameworks too, more or less, GStreamer can just do more than them.
This is stretching the definition of "framework" to the point where it becomes almost completely meaningless. I might as well say that the bash shell constitutes a "media framework" because I've used dd and cat to edit movies once.
In his exit post, you can actually see that Arpi wanted something similar, more generic interfaces, separate input support (keyboard/joystick) from media support (avi/mpeg), etc. See where he's heading?
Have you _seen_ the mplayer code? It is a mess. Nobody denies that it needs to be refactored. But there is a difference between modularizing parts of a program and gutting the program altogether, until nothing remains but an empty (but oh so beautiful) framework.
In the meantime, I've used the mplayer code dozens of times to perform many, many video related tasks for study, work, and entertainment. Because the code is so straightforward, it is very easy to add your own stuff or change existing stuff until it does what you want. So as far as I am concerned, mplayer *is* Linux' media framework..!
Can you name me some on Linux? And keep in mind that we're just talking about MULTIMEDIA?
The point is not whether it works on Linux, the point is whether there is an open specification. And of those, there are zillions: OpenML, QuickTime, Java Media Framework, GNOME Media Framework, aRts. And these are just some of the most ambitious ones.
Now, after reviewing those links, you'll probably say: "but none of these works! none of them is finished!". And that's exactly my point.
I see a good "multimedia framework" to be the same thing as programming using the GNU tools.
Yes. And that's where you would be wrong. It a completely different thing. One works with text and symbolic representation. The other works with audio and video. There is a reason, you know, why all graphical programming languages to date have failed to gain widespread acceptance: it just doesn't work very well.
Instead of seeing Yet Another video player in gstreamer, you should really be seeing another Mozilla. It's big. It's complicated. It's hard work. People ask what the point of it is. It will be awhile before any good results come out of it. But when(if) it bears fruit, you may well find yourself asking how you did without it.
Uh. While Mozilla is not actually a failure, -- owing more to some incredibly fortuitous circumstances (*cough AOL money cough*) than actual competency on the part of the development team -- Mozilla did fail to satisfy *almost every single goal* that it set out to accomplish. So, yes, why not compare to Mozilla? A slow, bloated, overbearing software project, that's years late? You don't even have to take my word for it: just ask Apple. Hell, ask the Mozilla team themselves: what is Phoenix other than an attempt to salvage Mozilla?
Truly, it's great that Mozilla exists, but the only reason why it's anywhere near useful right now is because the team, after years of overengineering, finally started to worry about how the thing was actually going to be used by actual people. Since that point (about 2 years ago), Mozilla has started to make some great leaps towards usefulness.
A media player is much more useful if you don't have to recompile it to add support for one more format.
Because new formats hit the market... Um... Maybe once a year?
If there was a system-independent plugin mechanism
There would also be no system dependant optimizations.
there wouldn't be so much redundant work, with everyone doing the same things from scratch, for each player, and on each platform.
The work is in figuring out how a file format works and how to decode it at fast as possible with the highest possible quality. Most of the rest is just preference, and you don't even want to generalize that.
Developers are very keen on the cost of even the slightest code duplication, but they rarely consider the cost to the user of having to hunt for and install the latest libraries, the small bugs that are caused by slightly different versions of libraries, and the tripling or even quadrupling of development time that it takes to produce solid resuable code.
I think the last thing the world needs is another media framework. Not that it's a bad idea per se, or that gstreamer is bad. But there are too many perfectly good frameworks already. And they all have one thing in common: while they promise ultimate flexibility and all kinds of ubercool features, in practice, only a few combinations of plugins work really well. And even those would have worked better if they had simply been integrated into a single app.
What we need is code that does heavy lifting. Code that can read and write all sorts of file formats and that can do so at blistering speeds. But that requires mindnumbing attention to detail and painstaking testing on a wide range of different files and machines. So that most people prefer to indulge in the fantasy that all of this difficult work will just somehow evaporate, just as long as there is a good framework: "it's the bureaucracy, stupid". Of course, that rarely, if ever, pans out. At best, the grandiose Framework is reduced an API for manipulating media clips (QuickTime). At worst, it forever remains a flaky research project to satisfy the will-to-power of a few geeks and true believers (http://www.sourceforge.net).
Now that last part was a bit flamebaity. But what I'm trying to say is that instead of spending time on developing a "media framework" that can do "every conceivable thing", is almost always better to spend your time considering which of those "conceivable things" actually makes sense: and implementing that.
There's not much that MS can "add" over and above what Google does.
That's just a failure of the imagination. My friend, embrace and extend. What they will come up with is "secure, integrated" search facilities, and through partnerships they will offer access to media catalogues where you can find.WMAs and.WMVs that have been DRMed to the hilt, perhaps even adding a P2P element. All of this available through single-click desktop access and a non-stop barrage of nag screens ("would you like Windows to catalogue your files and share them on.NET Trusted Media Search? [Not now] [Later] [Yes]")
This is free market evangelism at its shallowest. Sure, the Microsoft solution may be better for you now, but there is every reason to believe that it won't stay that way if Microsoft manages to eliminate Google altogether.
The free market ideologue replies that there will always be credible competition to keep Microsoft on its toes if the market is profitable, but look how well that worked for desktop computer software. The reality is that there are myriad ways in which Microsoft can leverage it's OS monopoly to cross-subsidize and "embrace and extend" it's search engine presence, thus erecting virtually insurmountable barriers to entry for would-be competitors.
You might argue that the web levels the playing field for all, but I would urge you to reconsider. Think "Integrated Information Finder", "Enhanced Media Browser" and "Trusted Search Services".
Re:OS X is in its infancy
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You are missing the point. Classic had all these things that the author is talking about -consistency, spatiality, concreteness- from the very beginning. Those weren't properties that evolved out of a process of refinement: instead they permeated the system throughout and guided every development effort, sometimes to detrimental effect: the 2-fork file concept makes it rather difficult to transmit files for example.
In any case, I agree with the author. Just to name an example, having to "associate" icons with "file types", as both Windows and Nautilus do, is a totally retarded way of doing things. One thing you could do on the Mac was click any icon on the desktop and paste in a new image from the clipboard. Because Classic MacOS files stores icons in the files themselves, this would work, always, even if you put the file on a floppy and moved it to another Mac: the file would retain its icon. This was also true for icon and window positions: thus, you could arrange icons and windows (and the icons within windows) in the way that makes the most sense, then burn a CD that preserves all this information.
The whole mess we have now with "icon databases" that maintain relationships between files and their icons is dumb and broken in comparison. Even now, as filesystems slowly are starting to acquire metadata in the form of file attributes (fifteen years after Classic MacOS), a system like Linux has yet to learn how to copy a file and actually retain the attributes on the copy.
In my more cynical moods, I sometimes think that as long as we have "minimalist" CS types telling us that "files should be flat" and that "everything should happen in userspace" we will continue to suffer schizophrenic, fractured interfaces.
If you're poor, you need the children to look after you. Poverty is not the result of population -- if anything, it is the other way around.
But even that is tenuous. The population argument is very dangerous, and only marginally supported. Consider that the only country implementing restrictive population policies is the People's Republic of China, and you get an idea of the kind of company you're in.
Consider also how slavery and colonialism have affected parts of the world, as well as more recently, American interventionism, including the overthrow of democratically elected governments that were deemed "too left-wing" for comfort.
So yes, you have a responsibility, and therefore, a choice.
For a Hotmail account, I recommend you use getwmail to retrieve the messages, then apply procmail based filters such as junkfilter/SpamAssassin to eliminate unwanted messages.
If your email is worth anything to you, then it makes no sense to rely on a Hotmail account anyway.
If you've never used the internet before - say you're a senior citizen, and you decide to try out the internet - pretty soon you're getting ads for girls sucking off beasts of burden in your inbox - are you likely to stick around?
This is such an improbable argument. It assumes people are ignorant enough to not know about spam, yet savvy enough to spread their email address around on Usenet, web forums, etcetera. My father has been using the Internet for a couple of years now, yet I never hear him complain about spam.
What people must know (and Barry should inform them of) is that one should be wary to give out personal information on the Internet. If you are careless, spam is going to be the least of your problems.
I'm getting quite fed up with all the anti-spam rhetoric around the 'Net. All kinds of figures fly around as to the cost and magnitude of the spam problem, but most of them are obviously biased and the methodology by which they are obtained is genrally fuzzy at best. It reminds one of the figures quoted by the BSA for software piracy, or the figures quoted by the RIAA for music piracy: that is, they factor in all kinds of "intangible" costs, are based on questionable assumptions, and are impossible to verify.
It is clear that spam is a nuisance. But spam filters work miracles, and they don't have to be fashionable Bayesian classifiers either. Simple treshold or trigger based filters work extremely well for individual mail accounts. Such as junkfilter, or SpamAssassin.
Now some people will argue that filters don't solve the problem: by the time the mail arrives in somebody's inbox, the damage has been done, the network resources have been wasted and the CPU time has been spent. But that argument is meaningless without a means to quantify the costs. And again, where are the figures? How can we even reliably estimate the figures?
It stands to reason that many people benefit from inflating the costs of spam. Meanwhile nobody questions the figures because everybody hates spam. Notice how Barry manages to almost, but not quite, evade question #7 in this interview.
The secret to 'info' is Control-S. It will interactively find any string in the hierarchy. Press Control-S, type the word you're looking for, and the cursor will move to the first occurrence of that word. Press Control-S again to go to the next occurrence. Like a charm...
I don't dispute the need of the company to be recompensed for their efforts (I do, by the way, disagree with your contention that nobody except the owner has anything to say about a product that is valuable to millions of people, since that would constitute a dangerous concentration of power -- that is to say, I disagree with your conception of a "free society" as a strictly positive force and the highest attainable goal).
I was merely arguing (somewhat tersely) that there are other motives for doing things besides making money or personal gain.
Right, sending Pioneer 10 into outer space is the greatest accomplishment mankind has ever achieved. Equality under law, suffrage for women, the abolishment of slavery, the virtual eradication of smallpox; they all pale in insignificance compared to Pioneer 10, a hunk of metal drifting aimlessly through space.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, what is your problem? Can you read? Did I say Linux is without problems? Sod off, man. Get off my back.
PS: Yeah, I'm the original poster, and no, I didn't mean to post as an AC.
The argument could be made that somebody who doesn't know what Apache is really shouldn't be serving webpages.
Apart from that, there are other problem with the dumbing-down approach; for instance, it promises things that it cannot make good on. When you instruct the computer to "share your files", but then you can't share files with the AppleTalk Macs, that's confusing. When you instruct the computer to "serve web pages" but instead your server gets hacked, that's a disaster.
Language need to be consistent, and terms need to be explained. But never dumbed down. People aren't idiots. They don't buy a "program to manipulate images". They buy "Photoshop".
I'm not familiar with grsec, but from a brief glance at the grsec site I don't see how they are alike. grsec appears to be an ACL based security model, whereas exec-shield just makes it a lot harder for the CPU to execute code that was never meant to be executed (from the owner of the machine's point of view...).
the patch was designed to be as efficient as possible. There's a very minimal (couple of cycles) tracking overhead for every PROT_MMAP system-call, plus there's the 2-3 cycles cost per context-switch.
That is not necessarily a bad position. But it is not something I believe in. And I think it is appalling that so many of you hail it like some kind of luminary vision.
Some of you might argue that engineers don't yield to power but to the laws of nature. But then why do engineers build cars that require oil? Why is there no manned mission to Mars? Because of politics. Because of power. The laws of nature have nothing to do with it.
Freedom comes in many guises. How free is a king? How free a hungry man? Freedom for the strong means anguish for the weak. But freedom for the weak is merely annoying for the strong. That is why I support the freedom of the weak, and oppose that which serves merely to increase the freedom of the strong.
Today, Linux became a little bit less fun.
The reliability and price/performance of ADSL are way overrated. The reliability and price/performance of cable way underrated.
Spare me your righteous indignation. Besides, your example is irrelevant. The fact that I can lock you up does not invalidate your right to freedom.
If that doesn't happen, those same humans could take the rights away just as easily as they were formulated.
You keep missing the point. You cannot take rights away. You can only violate them. This is not something that is up for discussion, but the definition and central assumption without which the whole system is meaningless. Your ignorance as to the idiom is just that: ignorant.
What if aliens took over here?
That's just outlandish nonsense. It has nothing to do with anything, except in that it underscores your immaturity and lack of experience in these matters.
Of course your observation that "human rights" are not universal is true. But that observation is banally obvious and trivial. The point is that we hold these rights to be universal and inalienable, because that forms the core of humanist philosophy.
By the way, I think you will find (if you would actually go through the trouble to establish this for yourselves rather than just crying about injustice from behind your computer) that the prisoners at Guantamano Bay are treated in a way that is largely compatible with most of the UN human rights treaties.
About as well as my VCR handles my DVD discs. The point being that no amount of flexibility in handling different media formats will allow for a change in form factor or other change in physical attributes. Which happens more often than you seem to think.
Quite the opposite. You might as well say that, since HTML is system independant, it means no system-dependant optimizations for your browser.
The thing is that "codec markup" needs to be expressed in some kind of language. If that language is too high-level, it becomes very difficult or even impossible to generate efficient code from it. Even in the unlikely case that somebody can get his "codec markup" compiler to be reasonably efficient, you would end up with more or less the same situation as today: some platforms will have superb "code markup" compilers, and some will have very bad ones, meaning that some players will be able to play certain content, and other won't because their "code markup" compiler is just too shitty.
On the other hand if your "code markup" is too low-level, you might as well have written the "codec markup" in machine language.
So you are just substituting one problem for another. And it still doesn't provide a solution for the case where the physical media changes.
Your point that human rights are "man-made" and therefore arbitrary is also spectacularly irrelevant, in addition to being just plain wrong. Who else could establish human rights if not humans?
I'm sure you believe you stumbled onto something deep and profound, but all you are doing is showing that you don't really understand what the concept of human rights means.
No -- I might have given that impression -- but: we should finish projects before moving on to new ones.
This is stretching the definition of "framework" to the point where it becomes almost completely meaningless. I might as well say that the bash shell constitutes a "media framework" because I've used dd and cat to edit movies once.
In his exit post, you can actually see that Arpi wanted something similar, more generic interfaces, separate input support (keyboard/joystick) from media support (avi/mpeg), etc. See where he's heading?
Have you _seen_ the mplayer code? It is a mess. Nobody denies that it needs to be refactored. But there is a difference between modularizing parts of a program and gutting the program altogether, until nothing remains but an empty (but oh so beautiful) framework.
In the meantime, I've used the mplayer code dozens of times to perform many, many video related tasks for study, work, and entertainment. Because the code is so straightforward, it is very easy to add your own stuff or change existing stuff until it does what you want. So as far as I am concerned, mplayer *is* Linux' media framework..!
The point is not whether it works on Linux, the point is whether there is an open specification. And of those, there are zillions: OpenML, QuickTime, Java Media Framework, GNOME Media Framework, aRts. And these are just some of the most ambitious ones.
Now, after reviewing those links, you'll probably say: "but none of these works! none of them is finished!". And that's exactly my point.
I see a good "multimedia framework" to be the same thing as programming using the GNU tools.
Yes. And that's where you would be wrong. It a completely different thing. One works with text and symbolic representation. The other works with audio and video. There is a reason, you know, why all graphical programming languages to date have failed to gain widespread acceptance: it just doesn't work very well.
Instead of seeing Yet Another video player in gstreamer, you should really be seeing another Mozilla. It's big. It's complicated. It's hard work. People ask what the point of it is. It will be awhile before any good results come out of it. But when(if) it bears fruit, you may well find yourself asking how you did without it.
Uh. While Mozilla is not actually a failure, -- owing more to some incredibly fortuitous circumstances (*cough AOL money cough*) than actual competency on the part of the development team -- Mozilla did fail to satisfy *almost every single goal* that it set out to accomplish. So, yes, why not compare to Mozilla? A slow, bloated, overbearing software project, that's years late? You don't even have to take my word for it: just ask Apple. Hell, ask the Mozilla team themselves: what is Phoenix other than an attempt to salvage Mozilla?
Truly, it's great that Mozilla exists, but the only reason why it's anywhere near useful right now is because the team, after years of overengineering, finally started to worry about how the thing was actually going to be used by actual people. Since that point (about 2 years ago), Mozilla has started to make some great leaps towards usefulness.
Because new formats hit the market... Um... Maybe once a year?
If there was a system-independent plugin mechanism
There would also be no system dependant optimizations.
there wouldn't be so much redundant work, with everyone doing the same things from scratch, for each player, and on each platform.
The work is in figuring out how a file format works and how to decode it at fast as possible with the highest possible quality. Most of the rest is just preference, and you don't even want to generalize that.
Developers are very keen on the cost of even the slightest code duplication, but they rarely consider the cost to the user of having to hunt for and install the latest libraries, the small bugs that are caused by slightly different versions of libraries, and the tripling or even quadrupling of development time that it takes to produce solid resuable code.
I think the last thing the world needs is another media framework. Not that it's a bad idea per se, or that gstreamer is bad. But there are too many perfectly good frameworks already. And they all have one thing in common: while they promise ultimate flexibility and all kinds of ubercool features, in practice, only a few combinations of plugins work really well. And even those would have worked better if they had simply been integrated into a single app.
What we need is code that does heavy lifting. Code that can read and write all sorts of file formats and that can do so at blistering speeds. But that requires mindnumbing attention to detail and painstaking testing on a wide range of different files and machines. So that most people prefer to indulge in the fantasy that all of this difficult work will just somehow evaporate, just as long as there is a good framework: "it's the bureaucracy, stupid". Of course, that rarely, if ever, pans out. At best, the grandiose Framework is reduced an API for manipulating media clips (QuickTime). At worst, it forever remains a flaky research project to satisfy the will-to-power of a few geeks and true believers (http://www.sourceforge.net).
Now that last part was a bit flamebaity. But what I'm trying to say is that instead of spending time on developing a "media framework" that can do "every conceivable thing", is almost always better to spend your time considering which of those "conceivable things" actually makes sense: and implementing that.
There's not much that MS can "add" over and above what Google does.
.WMAs and .WMVs that have been DRMed to the hilt, perhaps even adding a P2P element. All of this available through single-click desktop access and a non-stop barrage of nag screens ("would you like Windows to catalogue your files and share them on .NET Trusted Media Search? [Not now] [Later] [Yes]")
That's just a failure of the imagination. My friend, embrace and extend. What they will come up with is "secure, integrated" search facilities, and through partnerships they will offer access to media catalogues where you can find
This is free market evangelism at its shallowest. Sure, the Microsoft solution may be better for you now, but there is every reason to believe that it won't stay that way if Microsoft manages to eliminate Google altogether.
The free market ideologue replies that there will always be credible competition to keep Microsoft on its toes if the market is profitable, but look how well that worked for desktop computer software. The reality is that there are myriad ways in which Microsoft can leverage it's OS monopoly to cross-subsidize and "embrace and extend" it's search engine presence, thus erecting virtually insurmountable barriers to entry for would-be competitors.
You might argue that the web levels the playing field for all, but I would urge you to reconsider. Think "Integrated Information Finder", "Enhanced Media Browser" and "Trusted Search Services".
In any case, I agree with the author. Just to name an example, having to "associate" icons with "file types", as both Windows and Nautilus do, is a totally retarded way of doing things. One thing you could do on the Mac was click any icon on the desktop and paste in a new image from the clipboard. Because Classic MacOS files stores icons in the files themselves, this would work, always, even if you put the file on a floppy and moved it to another Mac: the file would retain its icon. This was also true for icon and window positions: thus, you could arrange icons and windows (and the icons within windows) in the way that makes the most sense, then burn a CD that preserves all this information.
The whole mess we have now with "icon databases" that maintain relationships between files and their icons is dumb and broken in comparison. Even now, as filesystems slowly are starting to acquire metadata in the form of file attributes (fifteen years after Classic MacOS), a system like Linux has yet to learn how to copy a file and actually retain the attributes on the copy.
In my more cynical moods, I sometimes think that as long as we have "minimalist" CS types telling us that "files should be flat" and that "everything should happen in userspace" we will continue to suffer schizophrenic, fractured interfaces.
WHAT EVER. Keep paddling, your ship is about to fall out of the sky.
If you're poor, you need the children to look after you. Poverty is not the result of population -- if anything, it is the other way around. But even that is tenuous. The population argument is very dangerous, and only marginally supported. Consider that the only country implementing restrictive population policies is the People's Republic of China, and you get an idea of the kind of company you're in. Consider also how slavery and colonialism have affected parts of the world, as well as more recently, American interventionism, including the overthrow of democratically elected governments that were deemed "too left-wing" for comfort. So yes, you have a responsibility, and therefore, a choice.
If your email is worth anything to you, then it makes no sense to rely on a Hotmail account anyway.
This is such an improbable argument. It assumes people are ignorant enough to not know about spam, yet savvy enough to spread their email address around on Usenet, web forums, etcetera. My father has been using the Internet for a couple of years now, yet I never hear him complain about spam.What people must know (and Barry should inform them of) is that one should be wary to give out personal information on the Internet. If you are careless, spam is going to be the least of your problems.
I'm getting quite fed up with all the anti-spam rhetoric around the 'Net. All kinds of figures fly around as to the cost and magnitude of the spam problem, but most of them are obviously biased and the methodology by which they are obtained is genrally fuzzy at best. It reminds one of the figures quoted by the BSA for software piracy, or the figures quoted by the RIAA for music piracy: that is, they factor in all kinds of "intangible" costs, are based on questionable assumptions, and are impossible to verify.
It is clear that spam is a nuisance. But spam filters work miracles, and they don't have to be fashionable Bayesian classifiers either. Simple treshold or trigger based filters work extremely well for individual mail accounts. Such as junkfilter, or SpamAssassin.
Now some people will argue that filters don't solve the problem: by the time the mail arrives in somebody's inbox, the damage has been done, the network resources have been wasted and the CPU time has been spent. But that argument is meaningless without a means to quantify the costs. And again, where are the figures? How can we even reliably estimate the figures?
It stands to reason that many people benefit from inflating the costs of spam. Meanwhile nobody questions the figures because everybody hates spam. Notice how Barry manages to almost, but not quite, evade question #7 in this interview.
Spam: the non-issue that everyone loves to hate.
The secret to 'info' is Control-S. It will interactively find any string in the hierarchy. Press Control-S, type the word you're looking for, and the cursor will move to the first occurrence of that word. Press Control-S again to go to the next occurrence. Like a charm...
I don't dispute the need of the company to be recompensed for their efforts (I do, by the way, disagree with your contention that nobody except the owner has anything to say about a product that is valuable to millions of people, since that would constitute a dangerous concentration of power -- that is to say, I disagree with your conception of a "free society" as a strictly positive force and the highest attainable goal).
I was merely arguing (somewhat tersely) that there are other motives for doing things besides making money or personal gain.
Uh, maybe because you think the world is a better place if fewer people suffer debilitating disease?
Right, sending Pioneer 10 into outer space is the greatest accomplishment mankind has ever achieved. Equality under law, suffrage for women, the abolishment of slavery, the virtual eradication of smallpox; they all pale in insignificance compared to Pioneer 10, a hunk of metal drifting aimlessly through space.
Geeks suck.