As long as you are using it legally (as in, you are running it on a Mac)
Owning a Mac does not entitle you to run whichever version of Mac OS you like. While there is no technical barrier to running, say, an unlicensed copy of 10.4 on a Mac which came with an earlier version, if you haven't got a license for 10.4 you're still breaking the law.
While my Alienware is fast, and it's been decent since the last time I sent it in, I'm counting the days (only a few months to go!) until the warrantee expires [...]
I knew Alienware were pretty crappy, but I didn't know there service was so bad that they'd have you counting the days till you die. If you haven't done it yet, try to get an evening of hookers and cocaine in Vegas before you go. Shit, I'd advise that even to people who aren't terminally ill.
?? Of course, it can. Microsoft owns Windows... Semantec owns Norton Utilities. I own skem. You can buy the ownership of software (if the current owner is willing to sell), although people usually prefer to license it instead -- they get a lot fewer rights, but pay a lot less money.
Did you read the rest of my post? Evidently not. You own the rights to skem, specifically, the copyright. You do not own the code in the same sense that you own, say, your trousers. You can sell the copyright to skem and you can sell licenses to use skem, but you don't own the code as the law does not recognise thoughts and their expressions as ownable.
False analogy. We are not talking about a person, who has unalienable rights, but about something, that can be owned.
What can be owned? Software? Oh no it can't. No under any current law. Nobody owns the software. Somebody has a government-granted artificial monopoly on duplication of the software. That is a big difference. The idea of owning software and other intangible expressions of ideas is pretty terrifying. Do you think telling your friend a joke you heard on TV should be a crime? If ideas and their expressions were property it surely ought to be a crime - telling your friend that joke would be theft.
The biggest improvement I got to my shaving was when i grew a goatee (actually a Vandyke, but whatever). Anyyway, not having to shave around your chin and mouth makes everything a lot easier.
Yeah, but the downside is that you look like a bit of a dick.
Which bit of your dick looks like a man with a goatee?
Are white people incapable of being different from one another. You imply that all white people are the same. I'm pretty sure there is a huge difference between a Bosnian and a Swede.
[...]
Cultural differences do not exist only where the skin pigmentation differs.
To refute the notion of a melting pot I only needed to illustrate that there were significant cultural divisions, not write a detailed breakdown. Yes, there were lots of different kinds of Europeans, with different languages and cultures, but compared to Native Americans or Africans or Japanese those Europeans were (are) pretty damn similar to each other - culturally and racially. In middle of the last millennium, similar race did indeed imply similar (not identical - significant differences did exist) culture. If you can't see that all European cultures are and were comparatively similar you've probably not encountered much in the way of non-European culture.
Cultures and races co-evolve. The evolution of different races is the result of groups of human beings isolated from each other. When people mix they trade, they fuck and they exchange ideas. Different races implies almost no interbreeding, which implies little mixing, which implies little trade or cultural exchange. The same race implies the converse - recent interbreeding and thus cultural exchange. At least, that is the case given enough time. Culture changes faster than race. Race is no longer as reliable an indicator of culture as it was before the advent of global travel and population mixing, but that's only because in evolutionary terms global travel is very recent and hasn't yet had a major impact on genetics. The early signs are there - there is an increasing number of mixed race people to go along with our mixed cultures. With time, the cultural and racial differences will be eroded further as people travel around the world exchanging ideas and bodily fluids. The largest cultural differences do indeed exist between people of different races, though there are of course cultural differences however you divide the population.
Our ancestors came here legally and created a melting pot.
I thought a melting pot in this sense was when cultures mixed. The white Europeans who invaded America killed and opressed the locals and imported slaves to do their work, there wasn't much in the way of cultural exchange. The US may be culturally diverse now, but that's a recent thing. For most of its history the US was entirely dominated by white people; there wasn't a whole lot of mixing going on unless you count plantation owners raping their slaves.
Oh, we still have trial by jury, just not for certain terrorism offences. If there are excpetions it's not really a right any more. I doubt it'll happen to me as I'm neither brown nor Irish, but the idea that you can be tried and convicted without a jury, now even in secret, is still bloody scary.
The only reasonably free country I can think of that doesn't have an effective constitution is the United Kingdom.
The UK hasn't been a free country since we lost the right to trial by jury. If you're accused of terrorism you're fucked. I was going to add 'figurativley', but you will end up in prison and you won't be very popular...
I wonder if they should even be compensated at all. Of course, the theory behind copyright is that we want more content, and therefore, we offer a financial incentive to produce it.
However, I can tell you that most of the content I produce, as well as most of the content I use, are produced _without_ the financial incentive of copyright (Slashdot posts, open source software, Wikipedia articles, etc.)
Copyright doesn't offer a financial incentive, it offers control over distribution. Of course, many people choose to restrict distribution to people who give them money, so the incentive can be financial if you wish. But rather than money the incentive could equally be photographs of cats, exceptionally shiny pebbles, a promise to help an old lady across the street or GPL-style reciprocity. The reciprocal sharing required by the GPL and similar licenses is an incentive to create content and it's enforced by copyright.
I'm all for copyright, but I agree it's being taken too far. I doubt anyone could show me a single work which wouldn't have been created if US copyright still lasted for life + 50 years instead of life + 70. If extending the protection copyright offers doesn't produce more works it's detrimental to society.
This is just dumb. If you're developing for Windows, you have to be a real masochist to try to do it on another platform, especially when you can use any ol' PC that you find laying around.
He's not developing for Windows on another platform, for any useful definition of 'platform' (or for any useful definition of 'environment', as it was described in the summary). He's developing for Windows on... Windows XP. Running on an x86 box. I'm really not sure what's supposed to be so newsworthy about someone running some apps in an OS which happens to be running in a VM. If he was developing for Windows in OS X (rather than in Windows in a VM in OS X) that might be interesting. But he's not. Visual Studio is just another application; that fact that it works in Windows when Windows happens to be running in a VM should come as no surprise to anyone.
I hate it too. It's become quite the buzzword. Also, no offense to most people who "blog", it seems like many of the "blogs" I've read are totally pointless. Stuff like
"So today I was feeling kinda tired and like, I went for a walk and stopped at the local McDonalds. I had a hamburger and it was good but not as good as they usually are... Dunno. I guess it's 'cause I was tired. Then I met up with John..."
Yeah, I know they're not all like that. But most of the ones which I've seen were mostly pointless and kind of boring.
My father, still a hunter, didn't own or play with replica guns or gun toys at any age. That was the one line between reality and fantasy his father would never cross.
[...] and even though laws prohibit a monopoly on local telephone service - they can't do anything for you if the local telco doesn't own any wiring in your building.
It's starting to sound like the monopoly we have in the UK is rather nice. BT own the copper to the house (virtually every house in the UK) but they have to provide space in the exchange and/or route ADSL traffic over ATM to whoever can pay the (influenced by an independednt government-funded industry regulator) price. There are dozens of ISPs to choose from, ranging from cheap to expensive and from poor to excellent. Cable companies and a few other esoteric local options are available too, if you live in the right area.
The proper solution when your country is deliberately crippling your telecoms service is to get another country. You paid for that industry regulation, and if they don't do it that's as good as stealing. Let your country know how you feel, and don't do business with crooks.
You don't need a complicated permission system most of the time, you need a simple system that automatically works and is easy to setup and change on the fly. Windows can't do that.
Can't do what? Perhaps XP Home can't (I've never used it), but every other version of Windows for the past 5 years can.
More fine grained systems are useful for large numbers of users not a home user, defeating it's purpose in windows.
When you say 'more fine grained' are you referring to Access Control Lists? ACLs as implemented in Windows are a whole lot more intuitive for a home user than users and groups. You get a nice dialog box and choose exactly who you want to allow to do what to your files and you're done. You can do the groups thing if you want, but that's an unnecessary complication for a home user.
RIGHTS have zero to do with it. Rights of free association are a governmental thing. Blizzard is a private corporation, providing a service with rules that you agree to before playing.
Corporations are still subject to the law. Discrimination on the basis of race or gender is (generally) illegal; you can't sign that right away.
And we all have to work with bad programmers some time or other. Of course none of us are bad programmers, it's always the other guy.
By the way, you have fun with that whitespace requirement.
Oh, I do. The idea freaked me out a bit at first, till I realised that my code and any other legible code I've ever seen was formatted like that anyway. Now I tend to look at all those {}s in other languages as ugly, redundant and little more than an opportunity for poor code layout to cause confusion. Humans look to indentation to define blocks of code when reading it, why shouldn't the language too?
There's nothing fundamentally male about CS - it's just we discourage women from doing it, thereby robbing ourselves of potentially valuable talent.
If you can accept a strong geek Asperger's/Autism correlation, you automatically accept a gender correlation too (as Asperger's/Autism is more prevalent among males).
Surely there was some kind of trigger in the software that would detect these kind of errors! Windows asks if im sure when I try to delete a file and even then it only sends to to the recyle bin!
Mine doesn't, but that's because I've turned that stupid warning off. Right click on the recycle bin and select properties to find the magic checkbox IIRC (I'm on a Mac right now).
Slashdot Mirror
That was badly phrased. You have to have a Mac recent enough to run 10.4, of course. It aint gonna work on your Quadra...
Owning a Mac does not entitle you to run whichever version of Mac OS you like. While there is no technical barrier to running, say, an unlicensed copy of 10.4 on a Mac which came with an earlier version, if you haven't got a license for 10.4 you're still breaking the law.
I knew Alienware were pretty crappy, but I didn't know there service was so bad that they'd have you counting the days till you die. If you haven't done it yet, try to get an evening of hookers and cocaine in Vegas before you go. Shit, I'd advise that even to people who aren't terminally ill.
What can be owned? Software? Oh no it can't. No under any current law. Nobody owns the software. Somebody has a government-granted artificial monopoly on duplication of the software. That is a big difference. The idea of owning software and other intangible expressions of ideas is pretty terrifying. Do you think telling your friend a joke you heard on TV should be a crime? If ideas and their expressions were property it surely ought to be a crime - telling your friend that joke would be theft.
Which bit of your dick looks like a man with a goatee?
On second thoughts, don't answer that...
To refute the notion of a melting pot I only needed to illustrate that there were significant cultural divisions, not write a detailed breakdown. Yes, there were lots of different kinds of Europeans, with different languages and cultures, but compared to Native Americans or Africans or Japanese those Europeans were (are) pretty damn similar to each other - culturally and racially. In middle of the last millennium, similar race did indeed imply similar (not identical - significant differences did exist) culture. If you can't see that all European cultures are and were comparatively similar you've probably not encountered much in the way of non-European culture.
Cultures and races co-evolve. The evolution of different races is the result of groups of human beings isolated from each other. When people mix they trade, they fuck and they exchange ideas. Different races implies almost no interbreeding, which implies little mixing, which implies little trade or cultural exchange. The same race implies the converse - recent interbreeding and thus cultural exchange. At least, that is the case given enough time. Culture changes faster than race. Race is no longer as reliable an indicator of culture as it was before the advent of global travel and population mixing, but that's only because in evolutionary terms global travel is very recent and hasn't yet had a major impact on genetics. The early signs are there - there is an increasing number of mixed race people to go along with our mixed cultures. With time, the cultural and racial differences will be eroded further as people travel around the world exchanging ideas and bodily fluids. The largest cultural differences do indeed exist between people of different races, though there are of course cultural differences however you divide the population.
I thought a melting pot in this sense was when cultures mixed. The white Europeans who invaded America killed and opressed the locals and imported slaves to do their work, there wasn't much in the way of cultural exchange. The US may be culturally diverse now, but that's a recent thing. For most of its history the US was entirely dominated by white people; there wasn't a whole lot of mixing going on unless you count plantation owners raping their slaves.
Oh, we still have trial by jury, just not for certain terrorism offences. If there are excpetions it's not really a right any more. I doubt it'll happen to me as I'm neither brown nor Irish, but the idea that you can be tried and convicted without a jury, now even in secret, is still bloody scary.
The UK hasn't been a free country since we lost the right to trial by jury. If you're accused of terrorism you're fucked. I was going to add 'figurativley', but you will end up in prison and you won't be very popular...
Copyright doesn't offer a financial incentive, it offers control over distribution. Of course, many people choose to restrict distribution to people who give them money, so the incentive can be financial if you wish. But rather than money the incentive could equally be photographs of cats, exceptionally shiny pebbles, a promise to help an old lady across the street or GPL-style reciprocity. The reciprocal sharing required by the GPL and similar licenses is an incentive to create content and it's enforced by copyright.
I'm all for copyright, but I agree it's being taken too far. I doubt anyone could show me a single work which wouldn't have been created if US copyright still lasted for life + 50 years instead of life + 70. If extending the protection copyright offers doesn't produce more works it's detrimental to society.
He's not developing for Windows on another platform, for any useful definition of 'platform' (or for any useful definition of 'environment', as it was described in the summary). He's developing for Windows on ... Windows XP. Running on an x86 box. I'm really not sure what's supposed to be so newsworthy about someone running some apps in an OS which happens to be running in a VM. If he was developing for Windows in OS X (rather than in Windows in a VM in OS X) that might be interesting. But he's not. Visual Studio is just another application; that fact that it works in Windows when Windows happens to be running in a VM should come as no surprise to anyone.
What makes you think the system can't tell the difference between a rock, a firehose and an RPG?
I thought you meant "Douglas" as in Douglas Hurd, rhyming slang for "turd". But I see the poor guy is actually called Douglas.
Was that deliberate satire?
That explains the dresses then.
It's starting to sound like the monopoly we have in the UK is rather nice. BT own the copper to the house (virtually every house in the UK) but they have to provide space in the exchange and/or route ADSL traffic over ATM to whoever can pay the (influenced by an independednt government-funded industry regulator) price. There are dozens of ISPs to choose from, ranging from cheap to expensive and from poor to excellent. Cable companies and a few other esoteric local options are available too, if you live in the right area.
The proper solution when your country is deliberately crippling your telecoms service is to get another country. You paid for that industry regulation, and if they don't do it that's as good as stealing. Let your country know how you feel, and don't do business with crooks.
Can't do what? Perhaps XP Home can't (I've never used it), but every other version of Windows for the past 5 years can.
When you say 'more fine grained' are you referring to Access Control Lists? ACLs as implemented in Windows are a whole lot more intuitive for a home user than users and groups. You get a nice dialog box and choose exactly who you want to allow to do what to your files and you're done. You can do the groups thing if you want, but that's an unnecessary complication for a home user.
Corporations are still subject to the law. Discrimination on the basis of race or gender is (generally) illegal; you can't sign that right away.
If you can't drink it you shouldn't be cooking with it either.
Who says geeks have no social skills, eh?
And we all have to work with bad programmers some time or other. Of course none of us are bad programmers, it's always the other guy.
Oh, I do. The idea freaked me out a bit at first, till I realised that my code and any other legible code I've ever seen was formatted like that anyway. Now I tend to look at all those {}s in other languages as ugly, redundant and little more than an opportunity for poor code layout to cause confusion. Humans look to indentation to define blocks of code when reading it, why shouldn't the language too?
If you can accept a strong geek Asperger's/Autism correlation, you automatically accept a gender correlation too (as Asperger's/Autism is more prevalent among males).
Mine doesn't, but that's because I've turned that stupid warning off. Right click on the recycle bin and select properties to find the magic checkbox IIRC (I'm on a Mac right now).