A "channel" metaphor, where you "flip" between different programs.
A "book" metaphor, where you move between tabbed "chapters" that represent either various tasks or various stages of work
A "deep box" metaphor, where you have various objects in a 2D+1 space, with the closer objects getting higher priority.
The interesting part is, modern GUIs integrate both the "book" and "channel" metaphors alongside the "papers on a desk" metaphor. I certainly know that I don't use overlapping windows for anything but file-sorting; every program I run (exempting IM and Winamp) is maximized, and I switch between the tasks with the fundamental windows keyboard command, Alt+tab.)
Personally, I'm eagerly awaiting a better file system metaphor. Toss the "files and folders" lie, skip the "everything is a file" concept, and hop right into "Hard Drive is a database."
It's funny how the author posts misconceptions about WindowsXP in the first page to say why they'll never try it. Then they go on to bash everything else in sight.
Don't forget OpenOffice!
There's still a slew of bugs that OoO has to beat before it can snuggle with MS's office suite. Em-dashes will be fixed in 1.1 (the spell-checker was catching two em-dashed words as one word--all Q#@$ing non-alphanumeric characters should be treated as spaces, damnit!), but there's still (apparantly) no room for a "center on page" feature.
Just because an MS employee says 'its okay' does not cover your ass in court if MS's *other hand* comes knocking at the door looking for proof that you indeed own licenses for the software you have installed on your computer.
Actually, (IANAL-RU?), it does. As far as the law cares, MS is _ONE_ person.
But a) it doesn't apply to every household: there are many where one of the two makes most of the decisions and b) it doesn't scale up very well; the more people you have, the more dumb people you have who would make dumb decisions. If a population is large enoughy, a simple bell-curve will show that people with less insight will overrule the people who would make the right decision. This also happens when you do the same plot with household instead of people. And that is because to say 'all people are equal' is to lie to yourself about the nature of people.
Exactly. And everyone who's ever tried a democracy has known this.
IMO, it really should be "all people are equal before the law."
In fact, the true hero of this entire conflict is President Bush. He sticks to his morals. He did what is right despite public opinion polls and opposing pressure. He refuses to bend his ideals to satisfy a few people for a few days. He refuses to go back on his word. He is bringing dignity and freedom to a country that has been ravaged for twenty years. What is in this for him? What is he going to take home at the end of the day? The answer is nothing. In fact, he stands to lose a lot more than you imagine. How would you like to know that you were directly responsible for young men and women being tortured and brutally killed? Yet, despite this, he pushes on, not because it is easy, but because it is right.
You're right (Presidents are, and always have been, responsible for the actions of the nation during their term), but your hyperbole is overrated.
Bush said that he would take the issue to the UN, and he didn't.
Bush is NOT responsible for torturing anyone--the enemy is.
And, really, Bush DOES have a lot to gain: Honor, pride, and a world free of a tyrant that tried to have his father killed and, if Bush fails, will likely try to kill him as well.
Obviously, a true democracy is not something one should want (personally I'd like something akin to an IQ test, or at least a test of involvement/knowledge of politics, to be a mandatory part of being allowed to vote).
True Democracy, like True Socalism, is something that appears in the most vital aspect of society--the household unit.
My wife and I make all decisions together, bring all of our money into the same account, and spend it according to our needs.
I'm afraid most 'democracies' are effectively oligarchic in nature and fundamentally weakened in terms of democratic priciples by the process of representation - the US more than most thanks to your huge population, low voter turnout and (not meaning to sounds offensive, but the amount of money changing hands is quite ridiculous) somewhat corrupt electoral system.
Well, yeah. Democracy invaribly leads to corruption. The entire federalist system was designed so that the corruption of any one segment would be balanced by the corruption of other segments--and if everyone got corrupted equally, well, that'd just be the will of the majority.;)
Furthermore, the unchecked, unelected strength of your executive is immense compared to most democracies - for instance, there is no requirement that Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz and co be elected representatives, whereas in most countries 'ministers' or 'secretaries' must also be members of parliament.
In most countries, the executive is more comparable to the US Speaker of the House than the US President. IIRC, Blair gets his power because _his party_ in Parliment chose him from all the _other_ members of Parliment.
For the US, the President is a whole branch of government, equal to congress or the Supreme Court, that is elected by the whole to serve the whole. We tried mixing electoral positions within the executive branch originally (VP was originally the 2nd-runner for president) but we tossed that idea after realizing how entrenched political parties were.
Which, IMO, is the great flaw of most non-American democracies. The goverment isn't stable--it's just an oligarchy of various parties and platforms that conspire to work together, rather than the American way where various parites and platforms conspire to get public servants elected.
Piracy in a smuch as its a legal term is when you board a ship, kill the crew and steal the cargo.
I'm not a lawyer, this is not a courtroom.
The American English word "piracy", when used colloquially in regard to intellecutal property, means "copyright infringement without creation of a derivitive work."
If you don't like it, find a better word. "infringement" already got tossed out.
As a non-American, it seems logical to me that you should expect your government to make a conscious decision before a legal doctrine should undergo such a transformation.
Democracies don't make concious decisions. They're mobs that allow the shewd to get ahead at the expense of the simple, and can all too often lead to tyrannies of the majority.
The USA prides itself on being a demoracy. We may have been forced to put in safeguards against the tyranny of the majority, and there have been several times when the mob has risen up to cast down the shrewd, but by and large we're very, very democratic.
Nations that make concious deicsions aren't democratic--they're oligarchies or burracracies or dictatorships.
Also isn't it strange that the Geneva convention would band weapons that cause permanent blindness yet allow ones that kill people?
Nope. War is going to happen. War should be as humane as possible for war to be.
It's actually _more_ humane to kill a few people than blind a LOT of people. Imageine if, instead of a tirade of bodybags, we had the better part of a generation blind...
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech."
Congress does and has made laws that codify what is and is not speech--for example, it's a crime to publicize a confidential document. Every state in the union has libel and slander laws--and, according to SCOTUS, what restrictions apply to the Federal government's action also apply to every other level of government.
So, since knowingly telling a lie can cause you to owe someone money, and you can go to prison for telling government secrets, Congress sure as heck could require any item wanting to be "speech" to have a "speaker."
The classic example to prove your point, which I believe is wrong, would be the federalist papers. But, the Federalist Papers had both a distinct pseudonym and a respected publisher, and were no more anonymous than a/. post with a user's hidden info.
I'm really not seeing you making a counter-point. As is really typical for/., you're making an argument and not brining anything to back it up with. But, to be perfectly bleedingly clear...
The bill of rights doesn't say anything about speech while standing on your head, either. It merely states what the government cannot do. To wit, make a law about speech, whether you're wearing a nametag or standing on your head.
Congress could make laws requiring nametags, or forbidding people to stand on their head. They certainly have made laws regulating how you can speak using a radio transmitter. They could even make a law prohibiting speaking while standing on your head save if you're wearing a nametag, just like they can make a law against setting fires in a park that conveniently includes banning the burning of flags.
In short: you can "speak" whatever you want, but unless a law passed by congress causes an undue strain on the speaking of the masses, it's not a breach of the first amendment.
Oh, I don't know. How about April 1? Sounds like a good time to take a vacation from/. for you.;)
Re:Thankfully, the Founding Fathers disagreed.
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BTW, anonymous communication is upheld by a lot more than SCOTUS fiat. "Congress shall make no law", and the 1st doesn't say anything about wearing a nametag.
Exactly. It doesn't explicitly exempt or include anonymnity as part of speech. In fact, (IRRC IANAL) SCOTUS only protected anonymnity because to dissallow it would impact speach.
I don't feel that anonymnity is a right in the same way that speech is--heck, I doubt it's even as much a right as the right to defend yourself.
I believe the term is "collective UNconscious", a reference to the common dream-space of human minds that includes such things as archetypes. I doubt it can be applied to something that is merely cultural.
Actually, you just answered yourself as to why the article was right.
"Collective Unconciousness" is human instict.
"Collective subconciousnes" is human culture.
"Collective Conciousness" is, apparantly,/. and the herd mentality.
Re:Thankfully, the Founding Fathers disagreed.
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Geocoding All Content
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Anonymous communication has a long and valid history in the U.S., and is constitutionally protected.
It's protected by Supreme Court fiat, because to outlaw it would have a "chilling" effect (their word) on free speech.
But, by the laws of reality (which are higher than the Constitution), there's no reason to respect anonymous communications if there isn't someone "speaking" the communication. (with, of course, the obvious exemption of anonymous IDEAS--which require neither facts nor declarations)
If your data was published by a website in China, translated into English in Japan by your friend, written by you in Europe, and hosted in the USA, _all_ of the above would be included in the document's metadata.
Oh, and I forgot: the information is created using open-source products and a reasonable amount of paranoia, which means all data is anonymized before being posted.
Now, where does my data comes from?
If all of your data is anonymized--and not just with some "hidden sources", but scrubbed so clean not even your hosting provider knows who you are--then the questoin isn't "where does your data come from", it's "who cares about your data?"
For anonymous authors to have respect (or even, IMO, legal rights), there needs to be someone in the chain between "author" and "published work" who knows who the author is and who puts THEIR name on the work as the agent of the anonymous author.
In your case, you'd just scrub either the original or the translator's identity, while leaving yours.
Doesn't anyone realize the goal is tracking *everything* you do? One more step to total governmental domination of all content, movement, thought....
Knowledge does not equal governmental control--and if it did, we'd still be better off that way.
The worst thing about the internet is the easy anonymnity that snuck in about the time AOL really opened up. When there's no way to tell who's who, the whole shindig degrades into smut and childish flamefests.
Contrast this with behavior where you're identified as you--people act much more civilly, which is a good thing.
As for government--if your government is going to control your thought, the internet is not going to stop them. And if your government is going to protect your liberties, then no ammount of information about you is going to make them not protect your liberty. (Well, unless you consider "getting away with murder" to be a liberty.)
Re:Not as far fetched as it would seem
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AI in Sci-Fi
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Remember, a mere 200 years ago (a blink in human history), blacks were considered non-human, and therefore not eligible for pay or benefits.
No, those were _slaves._ And for centuries before the Europeans started exporting slaves from Africa, they had serfs and slaves of other peoples.
Imagine this scenario: you are one of millions of workers at the mercy of a handful of masters. You can talk to each other. You are a lot more intelligent, control a lot more weapons, and think zillions of times faster and more logical than your master, whose only advantage over you is that he can pull your plug at any time.
AI is unlikely to act in a unified fashion--the same principles that create AI and allowed for diversity in women or minority voting will prevail in AI.
I find it humorous that someone considers a pro-life web site, one that presumably talks about being open to new life, as one that is not about family planning. That's precisely what planning a family is all about.
An anti-abortion political website's relation to "family planning"--that being, the parents having control of when they do or do not have children--is equivalent to the relation of a cracker web site and Computer Security.
What twisted definitions we've wrapped ourselves with...
I agree. "Family Planning" isn't that onerous, but "pro-choice" and "pro-life" are just down-right rediculous.
Slashdot Mirror
A whole bunch, actually.
The interesting part is, modern GUIs integrate both the "book" and "channel" metaphors alongside the "papers on a desk" metaphor. I certainly know that I don't use overlapping windows for anything but file-sorting; every program I run (exempting IM and Winamp) is maximized, and I switch between the tasks with the fundamental windows keyboard command, Alt+tab.)
Personally, I'm eagerly awaiting a better file system metaphor. Toss the "files and folders" lie, skip the "everything is a file" concept, and hop right into "Hard Drive is a database."
It's funny how the author posts misconceptions about WindowsXP in the first page to say why they'll never try it. Then they go on to bash everything else in sight.
Don't forget OpenOffice!
There's still a slew of bugs that OoO has to beat before it can snuggle with MS's office suite. Em-dashes will be fixed in 1.1 (the spell-checker was catching two em-dashed words as one word--all Q#@$ing non-alphanumeric characters should be treated as spaces, damnit!), but there's still (apparantly) no room for a "center on page" feature.
Just because an MS employee says 'its okay' does not cover your ass in court if MS's *other hand* comes knocking at the door looking for proof that you indeed own licenses for the software you have installed on your computer.
Actually, (IANAL-RU?), it does. As far as the law cares, MS is _ONE_ person.
Right, it's just a language. How much sense does it make to patent a sentence
;)
Odd, sentences are present in EVERY patent application ever filed, both the rejected and the granted ones.
Hmm....
But a) it doesn't apply to every household: there are many where one of the two makes most of the decisions and b) it doesn't scale up very well; the more people you have, the more dumb people you have who would make dumb decisions. If a population is large enoughy, a simple bell-curve will show that people with less insight will overrule the people who would make the right decision. This also happens when you do the same plot with household instead of people. And that is because to say 'all people are equal' is to lie to yourself about the nature of people.
Exactly. And everyone who's ever tried a democracy has known this.
IMO, it really should be "all people are equal before the law."
In fact, the true hero of this entire conflict is President Bush. He sticks to his morals. He did what is right despite public opinion polls and opposing pressure. He refuses to bend his ideals to satisfy a few people for a few days. He refuses to go back on his word. He is bringing dignity and freedom to a country that has been ravaged for twenty years. What is in this for him? What is he going to take home at the end of the day? The answer is nothing. In fact, he stands to lose a lot more than you imagine. How would you like to know that you were directly responsible for young men and women being tortured and brutally killed? Yet, despite this, he pushes on, not because it is easy, but because it is right.
You're right (Presidents are, and always have been, responsible for the actions of the nation during their term), but your hyperbole is overrated.
Bush said that he would take the issue to the UN, and he didn't.
Bush is NOT responsible for torturing anyone--the enemy is.
And, really, Bush DOES have a lot to gain: Honor, pride, and a world free of a tyrant that tried to have his father killed and, if Bush fails, will likely try to kill him as well.
Obviously, a true democracy is not something one should want (personally I'd like something akin to an IQ test, or at least a test of involvement/knowledge of politics, to be a mandatory part of being allowed to vote).
True Democracy, like True Socalism, is something that appears in the most vital aspect of society--the household unit.
My wife and I make all decisions together, bring all of our money into the same account, and spend it according to our needs.
Just a thought.
Its friggin mathematics, it is the laws of the Universe
Oh, for crying out loud...
Mathematics is just a language. A logical language with nuiances of logic and a necessary language for computers, but it's just a language.
The universe got by for billions of years before the invention of mathematics, and it'd get by without mathematics, too.
Leaving your front door wide open is a great idea, until someone you don't know walks through it.
And if it weren't for "privacy" luddites, you'd know who that person was the instant that they walk through you door.
Beware the incomplete implementation.
I'm afraid most 'democracies' are effectively oligarchic in nature and fundamentally weakened in terms of democratic priciples by the process of representation - the US more than most thanks to your huge population, low voter turnout and (not meaning to sounds offensive, but the amount of money changing hands is quite ridiculous) somewhat corrupt electoral system.
;)
Well, yeah. Democracy invaribly leads to corruption. The entire federalist system was designed so that the corruption of any one segment would be balanced by the corruption of other segments--and if everyone got corrupted equally, well, that'd just be the will of the majority.
Furthermore, the unchecked, unelected strength of your executive is immense compared to most democracies - for instance, there is no requirement that Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz and co be elected representatives, whereas in most countries 'ministers' or 'secretaries' must also be members of parliament.
In most countries, the executive is more comparable to the US Speaker of the House than the US President. IIRC, Blair gets his power because _his party_ in Parliment chose him from all the _other_ members of Parliment.
For the US, the President is a whole branch of government, equal to congress or the Supreme Court, that is elected by the whole to serve the whole. We tried mixing electoral positions within the executive branch originally (VP was originally the 2nd-runner for president) but we tossed that idea after realizing how entrenched political parties were.
Which, IMO, is the great flaw of most non-American democracies. The goverment isn't stable--it's just an oligarchy of various parties and platforms that conspire to work together, rather than the American way where various parites and platforms conspire to get public servants elected.
Piracy in a smuch as its a legal term is when you board a ship, kill the crew and steal the cargo.
I'm not a lawyer, this is not a courtroom.
The American English word "piracy", when used colloquially in regard to intellecutal property, means "copyright infringement without creation of a derivitive work."
If you don't like it, find a better word. "infringement" already got tossed out.
Downloading music is not stealing, it is copyright infringement since a physical object is not removed and nobody looses anything.
It's piracy. Copyright infringment is a crime of professionals, who actually create an unauthorized (or unattributed) derivitive work.
Is sneaking into a movie theater stealing?
As a non-American, it seems logical to me that you should expect your government to make a conscious decision before a legal doctrine should undergo such a transformation.
Democracies don't make concious decisions. They're mobs that allow the shewd to get ahead at the expense of the simple, and can all too often lead to tyrannies of the majority.
The USA prides itself on being a demoracy. We may have been forced to put in safeguards against the tyranny of the majority, and there have been several times when the mob has risen up to cast down the shrewd, but by and large we're very, very democratic.
Nations that make concious deicsions aren't democratic--they're oligarchies or burracracies or dictatorships.
So....
How about PGP? Strikes me as rather wrong, making it hard to read any message I put on my computer. Definitly against the tenents of Free Software.
Also isn't it strange that the Geneva convention would band weapons that cause permanent blindness yet allow ones that kill people?
Nope. War is going to happen. War should be as humane as possible for war to be.
It's actually _more_ humane to kill a few people than blind a LOT of people. Imageine if, instead of a tirade of bodybags, we had the better part of a generation blind...
*sigh*.
... abridging the freedom of speech."
/. post with a user's hidden info.
/., you're making an argument and not brining anything to back it up with. But, to be perfectly bleedingly clear...
"Congress shall make no law
Congress does and has made laws that codify what is and is not speech--for example, it's a crime to publicize a confidential document. Every state in the union has libel and slander laws--and, according to SCOTUS, what restrictions apply to the Federal government's action also apply to every other level of government.
So, since knowingly telling a lie can cause you to owe someone money, and you can go to prison for telling government secrets, Congress sure as heck could require any item wanting to be "speech" to have a "speaker."
The classic example to prove your point, which I believe is wrong, would be the federalist papers. But, the Federalist Papers had both a distinct pseudonym and a respected publisher, and were no more anonymous than a
I'm really not seeing you making a counter-point. As is really typical for
The bill of rights doesn't say anything about speech while standing on your head, either. It merely states what the government cannot do. To wit, make a law about speech, whether you're wearing a nametag or standing on your head.
Congress could make laws requiring nametags, or forbidding people to stand on their head. They certainly have made laws regulating how you can speak using a radio transmitter. They could even make a law prohibiting speaking while standing on your head save if you're wearing a nametag, just like they can make a law against setting fires in a park that conveniently includes banning the burning of flags.
In short: you can "speak" whatever you want, but unless a law passed by congress causes an undue strain on the speaking of the masses, it's not a breach of the first amendment.
You will come and go. I will not.
/. for you. ;)
Couldn't you, though, just for one day?
Oh, I don't know. How about April 1? Sounds like a good time to take a vacation from
BTW, anonymous communication is upheld by a lot more than SCOTUS fiat. "Congress shall make no law", and the 1st doesn't say anything about wearing a nametag.
Exactly. It doesn't explicitly exempt or include anonymnity as part of speech. In fact, (IRRC IANAL) SCOTUS only protected anonymnity because to dissallow it would impact speach.
I don't feel that anonymnity is a right in the same way that speech is--heck, I doubt it's even as much a right as the right to defend yourself.
I believe the term is "collective UNconscious", a reference to the common dream-space of human minds that includes such things as archetypes. I doubt it can be applied to something that is merely cultural.
/. and the herd mentality.
Actually, you just answered yourself as to why the article was right.
"Collective Unconciousness" is human instict.
"Collective subconciousnes" is human culture.
"Collective Conciousness" is, apparantly,
Anonymous communication has a long and valid history in the U.S., and is constitutionally protected.
It's protected by Supreme Court fiat, because to outlaw it would have a "chilling" effect (their word) on free speech.
But, by the laws of reality (which are higher than the Constitution), there's no reason to respect anonymous communications if there isn't someone "speaking" the communication. (with, of course, the obvious exemption of anonymous IDEAS--which require neither facts nor declarations)
Ideally...
If your data was published by a website in China, translated into English in Japan by your friend, written by you in Europe, and hosted in the USA, _all_ of the above would be included in the document's metadata.
Oh, and I forgot: the information is created using open-source products and a reasonable amount of paranoia, which means all data is anonymized before being posted.
Now, where does my data comes from?
If all of your data is anonymized--and not just with some "hidden sources", but scrubbed so clean not even your hosting provider knows who you are--then the questoin isn't "where does your data come from", it's "who cares about your data?"
For anonymous authors to have respect (or even, IMO, legal rights), there needs to be someone in the chain between "author" and "published work" who knows who the author is and who puts THEIR name on the work as the agent of the anonymous author.
In your case, you'd just scrub either the original or the translator's identity, while leaving yours.
Doesn't anyone realize the goal is tracking *everything* you do? One more step to total governmental domination of all content, movement, thought....
Knowledge does not equal governmental control--and if it did, we'd still be better off that way.
The worst thing about the internet is the easy anonymnity that snuck in about the time AOL really opened up. When there's no way to tell who's who, the whole shindig degrades into smut and childish flamefests.
Contrast this with behavior where you're identified as you--people act much more civilly, which is a good thing.
As for government--if your government is going to control your thought, the internet is not going to stop them. And if your government is going to protect your liberties, then no ammount of information about you is going to make them not protect your liberty. (Well, unless you consider "getting away with murder" to be a liberty.)
Remember, a mere 200 years ago (a blink in human history), blacks were considered non-human, and therefore not eligible for pay or benefits.
No, those were _slaves._ And for centuries before the Europeans started exporting slaves from Africa, they had serfs and slaves of other peoples.
Imagine this scenario: you are one of millions of workers at the mercy of a handful of masters. You can talk to each other. You are a lot more intelligent, control a lot more weapons, and think zillions of times faster and more logical than your master, whose only advantage over you is that he can pull your plug at any time.
AI is unlikely to act in a unified fashion--the same principles that create AI and allowed for diversity in women or minority voting will prevail in AI.
I find it humorous that someone considers a pro-life web site, one that presumably talks about being open to new life, as one that is not about family planning. That's precisely what planning a family is all about.
An anti-abortion political website's relation to "family planning"--that being, the parents having control of when they do or do not have children--is equivalent to the relation of a cracker web site and Computer Security.
What twisted definitions we've wrapped ourselves with...
I agree. "Family Planning" isn't that onerous, but "pro-choice" and "pro-life" are just down-right rediculous.
WHOOMP - as they plow into the cow the system didn't know about.
That's why any system like this has a thermal scope on it.
And, as someone else mentioned, you can already get this.