Suggestion to Google on how to comply with these laws: add the ability for trademark owners to disable targetted advertising to their trademark, as the law requires. However, do it by completely removing that trademark from the search index. Anyone searching for that trademark should get a blank page. We'll see how many companies really make use of this feature. If you don't want to play fair, you should take your toys and go home, I say.
- police can react to violent crime and stop the crime from occurring, a CCTV camera cannot intevene in a fight to break it up
This is backwards. CCTV cameras allow the police to more efficiently know when a violent crime is occurring, at which point real policemen can be dispatched to the area. Without CCTV cameras, you have to rely on the chance that a policeman might just happen to be in the area and being able to shout loud enough to attract their attention. Furthermore, CCTV cameras allow more efficient monitoring that can better identify suspicious activities that may indicate a crime is about to take place.
Incidentally, there is some level of privacy in a public place: privacy of the thoughts in my mind, privacy of where I'm going from and to (random people in public can't tell unless they stalk you), privacy of a conversation with a friend.
Well, I don't think that they've developed the ability to read your thoughts remotely yet:-) The other examples you give are both possible without CCTV cameras. You can never know that there isn't someone following you, or that if you are having a conversation in public, there isn't someone listening.
The conversation example I find particularly interesting. It's like the difference between telnet and ssh: if you don't mind other people hearing, by all means use the insecure option (telnet/talking in public). If it's really that important that what you are saying is secret, you should use the secure option (ssh/talking in private). You shouldn't be relying on lack of CCTV cameras for privacy.
For one thing, the police wouldn't be standing around, filming you for 15 minutes, as you got beat/stabbed to death in the street...
But CCTV cameras allow more efficient monitoring of larger areas. If you were being beaten or stabbed to death, CCTV cameras make it more likely that the police would notice and be able to do something about it. In such a scenario, how likely is it that a policeman would just happen to be walking down the street, notice what was happening and be able to intervene?
For another, human beings don't remember every detail, of everything going on, every second of every day... So actual police aren't going to send out tickets for every trivial little infraction, like jaywalking in the middle of the night... Police aren't going to remember exactly who you were associating with, on every single day, for years.
Firstly, how are police going to send out tickets to some random person that they see on a CCTV camera? Doing so would require sending a real policeman to apprehend the person committing the crime, so if, as you say, actual police won't bother doing this, then there is no difference.
Secondly, your argument is basically, "CCTV is bad because it takes away my right to break the law!". Stop and think for a minute how absurd this is.
I think the point is that use of CCTV cameras in public places isn't an invasion of privacy, because there is no privacy in a public place anyway. What if you got rid of all of the CCTV cameras and doubled the number of police patrolling the streets instead? How would it be different? Either way, the public are being monitored by an authority. When there is news about the number of police patrols being increased, everyone expresses support, but as soon as cameras start getting put up (effectively, making the process more efficient), people start freaking out and making 1984 comparisons.
Nobody that I've talked to on this issue has been able to answer this question yet, so I'll ask it plain and simple: How is monitoring of public places an invasion of privacy?
This actually reminds me of the Commander Keen story, where the Vorticons are hellbent on destroying earth after the Viking space probe landed on and killed their leader.
I'd pay careful attention to the author of this article. He claims to be an important Free Software author, but he's actually nothing of the sort. His major project was Shadow Conflict, a vaporware Open Source game that he used to try to scam funding from LinuxFund so he could buy a new computer.
Another one of his scams was "Make Patrick McFarland Rich", a website that now seems to be down. He claimed that this was either a parody, psychology experiment, or that he was going to use the money to do "something awesome". It's not clear which.
I seriously ask people to ignore this idiot. He isn't a big or important Open Source contributor. If anything he's a self-important con artist. He doesn't know what he's talking about.
Open Source licenses must not discriminate based on "field of endeavor". The license discriminates against people whose field of endeavor is to hack the OS to run on non-Apple hardware, therefore it is not Open Source.
People are missing an important fact here: Darwin is no longer Open Source under the Open Source Definition:
3. Derived Works
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
It's a good start. They really need to start searching Subversion/CVS repositories as well. One of the most obvious things that they seem to have missed is to index all the Sourceforge downloads.
So, Ruby is a totally useless toy language unsuitable for any professional use whatsoever because it uses "do..end" instead of "{...}"? Nice troll:-)
Actually, one of the things I like about Ruby (and Python) *is* the fact that I don't have to waste time fighting the syntax. The most obvious example of this is the lack of ';' separators between statements. There's also the fact that there is no silly separation of variables depending on their type like there is in Perl ($var, @var, %val are all different variables in Perl).
Well, yes, but if you run a 64-bit operating system, it means normal ints are 64 bits.
Actually, it depends on your compiler. On gcc on AMD64 ints are 32-bit values, just like on normal x86.
I still run my Athlon 64 in 32-bit mode, however, just because there is currently no reason to run a 64-bit OS. More things are available and work properly in 32-bit mode, so that's what I use.
Spreadsheets are basically a form of visual programming language, so it is unsurprising that bugs occur. They are basically designed so that ordinary people can use them, which means that they lose some of the strictness that is enforcable in a normal programming language. More worringly, I'd say that some of the properties of spreadsheets naturally encourage bugs. For example, when programming, code duplication is considered bad, and shared common code good, because it encourages simplicity and when bugs are found, they can be fixed in a single location. Conversely, in spreadsheets, the user is actually encouraged to duplicate code, with tools that let you "drag down" equations into neighbouring cells. Perhaps we should be wondering if it would be a good idea to create some kind of "next-generation" spreadsheet system that addresses these problems. Whereas programming languages have evolved constantly over the years, spreadsheets remain unchanged.
I see it the other way round. I don't know why anyone would choose to run Debian over Ubuntu. I see several advantages of Ubuntu over Debian. One of these is that it provides a polished GUI out of the box, but that isn't the only reason.
One of the other major reasons that I see is that the project is sanely managed. A new version of Ubuntu is released once every six months; compare that to Debian which struggles to get one out every two years. Another is that Debian provides only a sparse collection of packages out of the box, while Ubuntu gives you a sensible collection of useful software as a default. Also, the popularity of Ubuntu means that there is strong community support for the project.
Finally, for Sun there is the attraction of a distribution backed by a real company.
More fundamentally, when are they going to start providing _useful_ sets of screenshots for Operating Systems? It seems like every time a new OS comes out, osdir.com has a set of screenshots documenting every single step of the install process and every single menu of every single program that comes with the system. Come on, who actually needs to see this much detail? I'd much rather see a concise set of screenshots showing the interesting and unique features of the OS rather than this.
Fine, you don't like it, you're entitled to your opinion, I personally think they went a little overboard as well, but calling someone sexist is a very sharp comment. You're baseing your opinion solely on the fact that they were making fun of a stereotype, not the people that follow it, not the female gender, just the basic patterns and ideals that make up this common stereotype. This never has, and never did, and never will have anything to do with insulting the the female gender.
our audience is strangely disproportionately skewed towards males. Like, 98.3% males to be precise. To correct this oversight, we have decided to subtly tweak Slashdot's design and content to widen our appeal to these less active demographics.
He says that they are too "skewed towards males", so it is implied that they are trying to appeal more to females. Not teenage girls, just females in general.
I understand that there is a stereotype of girls like this, but that doesn't make it any better. The use of stereotypes can be sexist as well, just like stereotypes can be racist.
By the way: to clarify for all the confused people who replied to my previous post: I am a man, that's why I was asking for the opinions of any women who may be reading:-)
Our marketing department has done extensive research over the last 3 quarters and discovered that our audience is strangely disproportionately skewed towards males. Like, 98.3% males to be precise. To correct this oversight, we have decided to subtly tweak Slashdot's design and content to widen our appeal to these less active demographics.
"These less active demographics" implies he means women.
Regardless of whether it's intended as a joke or not, it is sexist, and I don't find it funny.
My issue is less with the colour scheme and more with news posts like this one. This is basically implying all women are stupid. If your teenage sister writes like this post, then slashdot is basically implying that all women have the mentality of a teenage girl.
Sexist jokes are the number one way to drive women out of any group, and they are more common than many people realize. I have more than once heard a man say that he doesn't make that kind of joke, and then hours or minutes later, hear the same person make a joke about pregnant women or PMS. Sometime he just doesn't realize that he made a sexist joke, for example, "blonde jokes" are actually "dumb women" jokes. Sometimes he tells me that it's okay to make a sexist joke if it's true, or it's funny (funny to whom?). What some people fail to realize is that jokes about gender of any sort almost always make fun of women, and will make most women angry, regardless of the context. It doesn't help to first make a sexist joke about men and then one about women.
Taco says that 98.3% of slashdot readers are men. Assuming that's a real statistic, I bet by tomorrow that figure will be even higher. I'd like to see read what some real female slashdot users actually think of this year's april fools joke.
Slashdot Mirror
Suggestion to Google on how to comply with these laws: add the ability for trademark owners to disable targetted advertising to their trademark, as the law requires. However, do it by completely removing that trademark from the search index. Anyone searching for that trademark should get a blank page. We'll see how many companies really make use of this feature. If you don't want to play fair, you should take your toys and go home, I say.
The conversation example I find particularly interesting. It's like the difference between telnet and ssh: if you don't mind other people hearing, by all means use the insecure option (telnet/talking in public). If it's really that important that what you are saying is secret, you should use the secure option (ssh/talking in private). You shouldn't be relying on lack of CCTV cameras for privacy.
Nobody that I've talked to on this issue has been able to answer this question yet, so I'll ask it plain and simple: How is monitoring of public places an invasion of privacy?
The Apple store, apparently :-)
This actually reminds me of the Commander Keen story, where the Vorticons are hellbent on destroying earth after the Viking space probe landed on and killed their leader.
Another one of his scams was "Make Patrick McFarland Rich", a website that now seems to be down. He claimed that this was either a parody, psychology experiment, or that he was going to use the money to do "something awesome". It's not clear which.
I seriously ask people to ignore this idiot. He isn't a big or important Open Source contributor. If anything he's a self-important con artist. He doesn't know what he's talking about.
Open Source licenses must not discriminate based on "field of endeavor". The license discriminates against people whose field of endeavor is to hack the OS to run on non-Apple hardware, therefore it is not Open Source.
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
HO!!!!!
Yeah, well, at least it's not Perl. Or C.
It's a good start. They really need to start searching Subversion/CVS repositories as well. One of the most obvious things that they seem to have missed is to index all the Sourceforge downloads.
And the bonnet, and the windscreen...
Kind of like this ?
Actually, one of the things I like about Ruby (and Python) *is* the fact that I don't have to waste time fighting the syntax. The most obvious example of this is the lack of ';' separators between statements. There's also the fact that there is no silly separation of variables depending on their type like there is in Perl ($var, @var, %val are all different variables in Perl).
I still run my Athlon 64 in 32-bit mode, however, just because there is currently no reason to run a 64-bit OS. More things are available and work properly in 32-bit mode, so that's what I use.
Spreadsheets are basically a form of visual programming language, so it is unsurprising that bugs occur. They are basically designed so that ordinary people can use them, which means that they lose some of the strictness that is enforcable in a normal programming language. More worringly, I'd say that some of the properties of spreadsheets naturally encourage bugs. For example, when programming, code duplication is considered bad, and shared common code good, because it encourages simplicity and when bugs are found, they can be fixed in a single location. Conversely, in spreadsheets, the user is actually encouraged to duplicate code, with tools that let you "drag down" equations into neighbouring cells. Perhaps we should be wondering if it would be a good idea to create some kind of "next-generation" spreadsheet system that addresses these problems. Whereas programming languages have evolved constantly over the years, spreadsheets remain unchanged.
One of the other major reasons that I see is that the project is sanely managed. A new version of Ubuntu is released once every six months; compare that to Debian which struggles to get one out every two years. Another is that Debian provides only a sparse collection of packages out of the box, while Ubuntu gives you a sensible collection of useful software as a default. Also, the popularity of Ubuntu means that there is strong community support for the project.
Finally, for Sun there is the attraction of a distribution backed by a real company.
More fundamentally, when are they going to start providing _useful_ sets of screenshots for Operating Systems? It seems like every time a new OS comes out, osdir.com has a set of screenshots documenting every single step of the install process and every single menu of every single program that comes with the system. Come on, who actually needs to see this much detail? I'd much rather see a concise set of screenshots showing the interesting and unique features of the OS rather than this.
I noticed that Microsoft's attitude toward Google appears to have changed. Now, they're going to fucking advertise Google!
By the way: to clarify for all the confused people who replied to my previous post: I am a man, that's why I was asking for the opinions of any women who may be reading :-)
I'm a man.
My issue is less with the colour scheme and more with news posts like this one. This is basically implying all women are stupid. If your teenage sister writes like this post, then slashdot is basically implying that all women have the mentality of a teenage girl.
I think this extract from "How to encourage more women in Linux" explains it better than I can:
Taco says that 98.3% of slashdot readers are men. Assuming that's a real statistic, I bet by tomorrow that figure will be even higher. I'd like to see read what some real female slashdot users actually think of this year's april fools joke.