I haven't used Chrome on any platform yet, so I cannot speak for it.
Firefox has usually been around 100 Mb for me on XP, which I consider bloated, but I'm aware that resource efficiency isn't important to many of the rest of you, these days. It seems to average at about half that on FreeBSD, but is still the most memory-intensive application I use on a daily basis. Still, for GUI web browsing, I can't complain, so I'm not.
I'm not passionately in love with Firefox, but I don't hate it either; it serves its' purpose and I am content with it. It does what I need, doesn't crash unless there's a problem with a page, and does its' job in a relatively efficient manner. I suspect that my lack of feeling toward it either way is actually due to its' transparency; it stays out of the way to the point where I barely notice it at all, and lets me focus on web content instead, so people would probably tell me that that is a good reason to actively love it.
I would not, however, like to go back to using Firefox without Vimperator at this point. I have heard even one Vim enthusiast express dislike for Vimperator, but I actually consider it probably the single most meaningful user interface upgrade that I have found since Ratpoison; the two complement each other exceptionally well.
Of course Microsoft are going to do everything they can, to sink Linux in every potential niche they can.
There are a couple of ways in which the Linux community is its' own worst enemy, however.
1) You think "the desktop," is the primary issue of importance. Maybe in 1999 it was; it isn't now. First Web 2.0, and then the cloud craze both mean that the local client desktop is nowhere near as important as it used to be. Firefox is cross-platform, and if you're using Google, that is all you need. A person can thus do what they want just as well on either system, so the OS they're using ceases to be important.
2) Overuse of promotion. This might initially sound insane, but to get ahead of Microsoft, Linux's distribution actually needs to be as quiet as possible. Spread it one person at a time, via word of mouth. When you have PR releases and bang the drum and have huge crowds of people waving flags, that's when Microsoft are able to come in and step on you with FUD. The Linux community needs to learn to start doing things under Microsoft's radar.
3) Insisting that people still care about "free." (As in Stallman) Nobody neurotypical does, nobody neurotypical ever has, and nobody neurotypical wants to. You can lament and bitch and moan and drum your heels and hold your breath about that as much as you want. It won't make any difference.
The stack is both closed and open source. Normal people use what works, whether it is FOSS or proprietary, and as long as it does what they need, they don't give a shit either way. The only people who care about the ideology are the autistic. Neurotypicals don't, and if you try and tell them that they should, they will simply call you a freak, (or think you're one, if they don't actually say it) and walk away from you.
Other than that, the only purpose it served was to give children a false impression of war, and how god-forsaken horrible it is. Usually that wouldn't matter in a video game, but it certainly does matter when that video game is really a recruitment tool for the US Army. -Reed
Yep. My generation has spent its' adolescence with Doom, Quake, and Half-Life. Teenagers have learned very basic things from those games like the use of cover, and the necessity of ammo conservation, maybe, and on the basis of that, sometimes decided to do something like Columbine, if they didn't end up in Iraq.
They find out that outside a game, it's a little different.;)
but a lot of the stupid posts attached to this article had 5 points, so down-modding them by 1 wouldn't have made much difference.
Also, it continues to become more and more painfully obvious that the new crop of Anonymous Cowards are WoW forum refugees; the least intelligent, educated, or mature community on the Internet, by a mile. The trademark WoWisms in their text are all there.
Vast library of mp3s, directly from the labels, and DRM free so that I can back them up, thus allowing my purchase to survive hardware failure? (And yes, requiring backup is of course valid; I'm not asking for this in order to facilitate piracy)
Sign me up, Universal, quite seriously. This is a better deal than what someone could hypothetically get on IRC for free, simply because it removes the electronic legwork they would have to do if they want particularly old/rare/obscure files. Pirates generally only trade what's popular; being able to drink straight from the labels' tap means I can get whatever I want, whether it is popular or not, I don't have to waste time looking for it, I can potentially get it at top sound quality, AND I don't have to worry about being prosecuted or sued.
I don't know about the rest of you, but in my mind, piracy is motivated purely by pragmatism; free mp3s are considered a better deal than per-cost CDs. However, give me a service where I can have just about everything since when Cocky was an egg, catalogued, and with a 384 khz bitrate, even better, and I'll be there with bells on, and will be quite happy to pay.
I'm not paying for the actual files themselves here, necessarily. What I'm paying for is a) file quality, b) guaranteed availability and convenience, (due to the source) and c) legal protection.
A flat monthly fee would be preferable to me, but we could talk about just about anything up to around $50 AUD a month. Get 100,000 people to sign up for that, and you've got a $5 million pilot program. I could be wrong, but something tells me that upwards of $10-$20 million a month is something the RIAA could potentially be interested in.;)
Here's another idea for giving us both some security without the DRM bogeyman, as well. Give me a digital receipt with a unique key every time I download some paid-for files from you, and I'll keep it in the same directory the files are in, and back it up with them as well. That way, if there's ever a question asked, if you keep that key on file, we can both know said mp3s have come from you, and that I haven't pirated them.
The RIAA knows that it would be very stupid to lose a case of symbolic value. They obviously perceive that their case is strong. After all, they won the case the first time.
The only way the RIAA ever accomplish anything is by intimidating people. They don't have the technical means to stop piracy, and they know it, but they can massively reduce it by scaring people sufficiently that the majority no longer pirate.
eMule is a good example. While it hasn't died completely, it is a pale shadow of its' former self. Technically, the RIAA weren't able to sink the entire network, but by making a very public bust of the biggest node, Razorback, and flooding the rest of the network with malware, they've succeeded in deterring probably more than 90% of its' previous population from using it.
They don't need to win every case they try and prosecute, or even most of them. All they need to do is create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty within the Internet using population, and to some extent, they've already done that now. The thinking goes that, while they might not get a conviction in every case, and while they might not find every single person who pirates, they might find you, and your case might be one where the judge rules in their favour, and you're forced to pay them a lot more than you can afford.
They don't need concrete legal victories every time. All they need is fear and paranoia.
If the guy who asked for your help in setting up makeshift networks in Iran, is also able to read your replies, then it automatically follows that the government could, too.
That means, that while to some extent you might be helping the OP, it also means you're potentially providing the government with very critical pieces of information:-
a) What any would-be revolutionaries are possibly specifically doing, as far as setting up network infrastructure is concerned, and
b) By extension, how to snoop/counter it.
c) Potentially information (even if only email addresses) about the Iranian individuals who want to deploy the technology, and then use it for subversive purposes.
The other thing to consider is, whether or not getting rid of a new dictatorship there is worth it, even if you could. The most revolutions ever do is buy time, (yes, including the American one) and in the end, all you're really doing is making the world safe for corporations, since in any scenario where government doesn't hold power, they invariably do instead...and generally they do even where you have a national government.
The majority never end up permanently retaining power, for the simple reason that they don't want it. As long as said dictator doesn't start randomly killing people, and is also able to do a sufficiently competent administrative job, leave him where he is. Fewer people will probably end up dying, and in a part of the world like the Middle East, having a firmer than usual hand at the wheel isn't a bad thing anywayz.
Sadaam might have been a monster in a lot of ways, but he held Iraq together, and as someone else said, managed to keep Iran in check as well. The Arab states aren't places where behaving like a member of Amnesty International is good for either keeping a country together, or retaining office.
They would have made sure they had a vaccine ready before they released the virus.
1. Create virus. 2. Create vaccine. 3. Release virus, and then generate as much fear and hysteria about said virus as possible, using organisations like the WHO to beat the drum for you, despite the fact that the mortality rate of said virus amounts to statistical line noise. 4. Some months after the release of the virus, when a few people have died, and the "health authorities," have managed to stir public hysteria up to a fever pitch, announce that you have a vaccine for the virus, and enjoy being hailed as heroes and public saviours. 5. Mass produce the vaccine, and sell it to anyone who wants it. 6. Profit.
Any success in developing resource-efficient software is to be celebrated, IMHO. There is far too much of a trend these days of writing bloated, horribly inefficient crap, simply because in hardware terms we can get away with it.
The Windows refugees desperately need to stop being listened to. All they care about is superficial usability. They don't care about design quality, code quality, robustness, security, or resource (RAM/cpu/power) efficiency. The only important thing is that whatever they want to do is, "easy," and also, preferably, that it includes pretty lights.
We need software that is resource efficient, and well designed. We need it because we're not always in scenarios where we've got access to a 4 Ghz processor, 32 odd GB of ram, and a terrabyte hard drive. Such machines tend to be expensive, and also to require a lot of power.
If the world underwent some sort of disaster next week which included a loss of mains power, the 4 Ghz desktops with KDE wouldn't be what people would be running, if they were using a computer at all; because they wouldn't have the electricity to be able to waste it on such hardware. It'd be iPods or other power-efficient ARM-based machines running NetBSD or minimalist Linux configurations, with something like Blackbox as a window manager.
There's a reason why I have Ratpoison as a window manager for daily use, despite having a gigabyte of ram at my disposal. It's because I've used a C64 with a tape drive, and a portable IBM XT with a 2400 baud modem, and I'm thus able to recognise a graphical user interface for exactly what it really is.
A convenience. Not a necessity. There's a very big difference.
I'm getting very tired of hearing the usual cry of, "If you're not with us, you're against us!" where FOSS is concerned, coming from the usual suspects. I think a certain quote about only a Sith dealing in absolutes, is appropriate here.
The paranoia possibly wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't so completely baseless. People still using proprietary stuff from Microsoft or whoever hasn't killed open source up to this point, and it isn't going to kill it in the future.
There are a lot of genuinely terrible things being done by corporations at the present time; I would agree with anyone who suggests that. However, the death of Free Software is not, nor is it going to be, one of them.
People keep seeing an endless array of supposedly lethal threats; binary device drivers, DRM, even apparently the use of non-GPL FOSS licenses. Yet all of these things exist, and continue to exist, and FOSS itself co-exists with them just fine.
So for those of you who continue to insist on being hysterically terrified of how the evil corporations are going to kill FOSS entirely, please, I'm begging you, get over yourselves.
Also, stop listening to Stallman. He is wrong, he has been wrong, and he continues to be wrong, over and over and over again; and I know that he is the main source, ultimately, of most of your fear and paranoia. I've gone over the countless ways in which he is catastrophically misguided many times before, but if you feel like replying and asking for citations, I'm more than happy to do it again, in the hope of potentially educating someone.
Try it; purely as an experiment. For a single month, stop listening to the FSF's (and its' fanboys) paranoid ranting and foaming at the mouth about the corporate wolves at the gate, and see if, at the end of said month, FOSS as a whole is still here. I suspect the outcome will cause you to be very surprised; although it won't surprise me much at all.
Myopic, paranoid, condescending, dismissive, ad hominem laced, pro-FSF reply incoming, I'm sure. Also, once again, for those of you with mod points who don't have the brains or capacity for independent thought to refute me logically, please feel free to down-mod this post into oblivion; my karma on this site is sufficiently good that it can withstand a significant amount of your cowardice.
And guess what? The websites made money, and people payed more money to the ISPs for access, and all the corporations rejoiced. Thus died the golden age of the internet which we now just call 'interactive cable'.
Take a hike. I'm sick of this sort of apocalyptic, hysterically alarmist crap. It's the same bullshit that Stallman's been shovelling for years, and it's been garbage for as long as he's been doing it, too.
Usenet still exists. You can still download mp3s or pirated books on IRC as much as you want. Bit torrent might be throttled somewhat and watched a bit more these days, but that's a long way from saying you can't use it at all. A cam for Terminator Salvation came out very quickly. eMule only died (and it still hasn't completely) because of the cartels scaring people away from it, but not because they were able to physically shut it down; they couldn't.
If Usenet exists to a lesser extent than it used to, it's purely because people started realising that web-based forums were simply a better idea. Moderation abilities mean you don't have to put up with the sort of gibbering, barking, locked-in-their-basement headcases that Usenet has always suffered from.
Anyone who complains about piracy becoming more difficult on YouTube can also cry me a fucking river. Self-host your own bit torrent tracker; problem solved.
Piracy is still very much alive and kicking, and the idea that the Internet is or ever will become purely a home shopping network has been bullshit from the first moment it was dreamed up.
Richard Stallman is *not* a genius...and neither are you.
Splitting apart a water molecule requires energy. The amount of energy isn't important for the example, so we'll refer to it as X.
From the analysis of his device that I read, what he specifically claimed was that he'd found a way to replicate hydrogen atoms.
He may well have been a lunatic, a fraud, or both. It's just odd (and a little coincidental) that he winds up dying only a few years after he's also claimed that he was offered $10 billion to sit on his work and not do anything further with it, don't you think?
Assuming hypothetically that someone did kill him, if he was simply a loony, why would they bother? Wouldn't that just make him look more credible in the eyes of impressionable people like me?
There's the whole rest of the Internet, if this blog doesn't suit you.
a) This site isn't a blog. This site existed quite a long time before blogs, and if you weren't one of the very 14 year olds I was talking about yourself, you might know that.
b) Grammatical abuse, such as misuse of the word, "fail," doesn't make the people who do it look intelligent, mature, or cool. It makes them appear exactly what they are; jaded, emo adolescents with anger management issues, who if they got out of Mummy and Daddy's basement and went into the real world for a few minutes, might discover that while there actually are valid things to feel pain in response to, contrary to what they think, they've never actually experienced any of them.
Apparently the WoW forum losers are starting to show up on Slashdot. Calling something "full of fail," is a classic WoWism.
Please find somewhere else to interact with your fellow illiterate, pre-pubescent sociopaths. Slashdot has, despite certainly not being perfect, customarily been vastly more elevated and intelligent than the cesspool that is the WoW forums. I for one would like to keep it that way.
I was with you, right up until I clicked that link. Seeing as how you're apparently a proponent of perpetual motion, I hereby demand that you surrender all rights to comment on future science-based discussions.
LOL.
Oxyhydrogen generation isn't perpetual motion. I haven't heard of anyone using it who claims that it is limitless. Water is limited, carbon steel is limited, current is certainly limited, and you need all of those.
Hydrogen can, however, make a fairly powerful bang when channeled in the right way. Then again, however, given that you're so much more scientifically oriented than me, you'd know that.;)
During Bush's administration, I would have taken that as sarcasm. But after Obama's gutting the space budget, honoring Bush's scientific enlightenment is starting to sound like a good idea.
The problem with a space program is that, in practical terms, it just isn't really very useful, at least not at this point in time. Truthfully we're not really anywhere near technologically ready for one, anywayz. As I've written before, the contemporary space shuttle(s) are around the spacefaring equivalent of travelling on water, by putting one leg on either side of a hollow log. On water in a terrestrial environment, that's ok, (as long as you're in calm sea, which also doesn't contain sharks) but in space it doesn't work quite so well.
We need to develop better propulsion technology first, (or at least stop murdering scientists who try) and we also need to realise that terraforming our own planet is going to need to come first, before we think about giving it a shot on Mars. Given the current corporate attitude, even if we had the technology, industry would start creating pollution there even while the terraforming process was underway.
Because anyone with half a brain isn't running Linux purely for Firefox or Open Office. They're doing it for other advantages over Windows at the OS level.
- Robustness. (Assuming you're not running Ubuntu; also, if robustness is truly a priority, use BSD)
- Security.
- Much more diverse hardware support.
- Flexibility. You can customise just about anything.
- Efficient software. You can use a 400 Mhz CPU to power a firewall or CLI media centre.
- Openness. If something breaks, you can delve into the source and fix it yourself, and if you can't, you can hire someone to do it.
This is claimed at least once a week, but has yet to be true. Fact is, there's nothing on the market that can compete with WoW.
I fairly regularly see trolls making this statement as well, but then never offering anything more specific to back it up. Allow me to offer you a clue.
a) The levelling game is dead. D-E-A-D. Blizzard reduced the xp requirement between 20-60 by 20%. Then you've got Recruit-A-Friend, and the +10% xp heirloom bonus on top of that. They're killing the ability of new users to really acclimatise, learn the game, or experience what was genuinely good content, all for the sake of letting the established crowd race to the cap.
b) Once a person powerlevels their way to the cap in two days, they will very swiftly discover that there is less than no point to being there. Heroics? Boring. Naxx? Boring. Sarth? Boring. Ulduar might be marginally less boring, but I doubt it. WoTLK has the worst instances, as stated previously, that this game has ever seen. They are a total sleepwalk; no strategy required at all. Just get DKs and AoE lol.
c) The battlegrounds, which used to be my main reason for playing the game, are also dead. Blizzard killed twinking a couple of patches back, which caused a lot of people to leave, and the Death Knight and Paladin are also, as stated, now the only two classes in the game that are worth playing. Everything else has been nerfed into the ground.
d) Chilton had to kill world PvP too, because if that had remained viable at all, people might not have wanted to play the Arena...so now that is dead, also.
That leaves the Arena, which is literally the only thing left to do in the game at this point; and I don't know about you, but if I'm going to bother playing an FPS at all, I'm going to play a real one, not a half-assed joke.
Ah, the Anonymous Cowards. I'm starting to think it might be time for Slashdot to retire the ability to make anonymous comments, to be honest; I've noticed ACs becoming even more obnoxious and/or annoying than usual, recently.
Although Ubuntu's numbers on DistroWatch, as well as the amount of forum traffic they get, prove that you're wrong. Plenty of people care about it.
I was looking at Warcraftrealms.com overnight; WoW's population is about to drop like a rock. It's already begun, in fact.
Character classes have been nerfed into the ground, with the Paladin or DK now being the only two worth playing. Any originality is gone. WotLK had the worst instances the game has ever had, and the only thing the developers now focus on is the Arena.
I can see it in my own behaviour; I'd be lucky to log into WoW once a week, now, and even just this last night, while I got up planning on playing WoW, it never happened, even though I spent practically the entire night idling on IRC, bored.
When I'd rather spend a night vegetating on Freenode than playing World of Warcraft, (which I used to genuinely love, incidentally) I know that the game has truly died in the ass...and it has.
I'm starting to think Guild Wars might be worth a look. WoW sure isn't getting much of my time these days, that's for sure.
That number of bugs rather scares me. I depend on Windows for playing WoW at home and writing documents at work. Will this kill it?
There is no need for that. I run WoW in Wine on FreeBSD, and it runs much faster and more smoothly there than it does natively in Windows.
Granted, customising FreeBSD is perhaps a little above the bullet-dodging capabilities of the average FOSS user, but Ubuntu will still run WoW very agreeably. I'd recommend Kubuntu; I'm a KDE man in terms of the "big two," desktop environments, myself.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't used Chrome on any platform yet, so I cannot speak for it.
Firefox has usually been around 100 Mb for me on XP, which I consider bloated, but I'm aware that resource efficiency isn't important to many of the rest of you, these days. It seems to average at about half that on FreeBSD, but is still the most memory-intensive application I use on a daily basis. Still, for GUI web browsing, I can't complain, so I'm not.
I'm not passionately in love with Firefox, but I don't hate it either; it serves its' purpose and I am content with it. It does what I need, doesn't crash unless there's a problem with a page, and does its' job in a relatively efficient manner. I suspect that my lack of feeling toward it either way is actually due to its' transparency; it stays out of the way to the point where I barely notice it at all, and lets me focus on web content instead, so people would probably tell me that that is a good reason to actively love it.
I would not, however, like to go back to using Firefox without Vimperator at this point. I have heard even one Vim enthusiast express dislike for Vimperator, but I actually consider it probably the single most meaningful user interface upgrade that I have found since Ratpoison; the two complement each other exceptionally well.
"No shit, Sherlock."
Of course Microsoft are going to do everything they can, to sink Linux in every potential niche they can.
There are a couple of ways in which the Linux community is its' own worst enemy, however.
1) You think "the desktop," is the primary issue of importance. Maybe in 1999 it was; it isn't now. First Web 2.0, and then the cloud craze both mean that the local client desktop is nowhere near as important as it used to be. Firefox is cross-platform, and if you're using Google, that is all you need. A person can thus do what they want just as well on either system, so the OS they're using ceases to be important.
2) Overuse of promotion. This might initially sound insane, but to get ahead of Microsoft, Linux's distribution actually needs to be as quiet as possible. Spread it one person at a time, via word of mouth. When you have PR releases and bang the drum and have huge crowds of people waving flags, that's when Microsoft are able to come in and step on you with FUD. The Linux community needs to learn to start doing things under Microsoft's radar.
3) Insisting that people still care about "free." (As in Stallman) Nobody neurotypical does, nobody neurotypical ever has, and nobody neurotypical wants to. You can lament and bitch and moan and drum your heels and hold your breath about that as much as you want. It won't make any difference.
The stack is both closed and open source. Normal people use what works, whether it is FOSS or proprietary, and as long as it does what they need, they don't give a shit either way. The only people who care about the ideology are the autistic. Neurotypicals don't, and if you try and tell them that they should, they will simply call you a freak, (or think you're one, if they don't actually say it) and walk away from you.
Other than that, the only purpose it served was to give children a false impression of war, and how god-forsaken horrible it is. Usually that wouldn't matter in a video game, but it certainly does matter when that video game is really a recruitment tool for the US Army. -Reed
Yep. My generation has spent its' adolescence with Doom, Quake, and Half-Life. Teenagers have learned very basic things from those games like the use of cover, and the necessity of ammo conservation, maybe, and on the basis of that, sometimes decided to do something like Columbine, if they didn't end up in Iraq.
They find out that outside a game, it's a little different. ;)
...of one of the 14 year olds who uses this, as she runs the script.
"Dodge this." ;)
but a lot of the stupid posts attached to this article had 5 points, so down-modding them by 1 wouldn't have made much difference.
Also, it continues to become more and more painfully obvious that the new crop of Anonymous Cowards are WoW forum refugees; the least intelligent, educated, or mature community on the Internet, by a mile. The trademark WoWisms in their text are all there.
This article's title gave me the mental image of a decomposing zombie clawing its' way up out of the ground.
Hopefully as the article suggests, the sale will be forestalled, and some judge will finally put a stake in this monster once and for all. ;)
Vast library of mp3s, directly from the labels, and DRM free so that I can back them up, thus allowing my purchase to survive hardware failure? (And yes, requiring backup is of course valid; I'm not asking for this in order to facilitate piracy)
Sign me up, Universal, quite seriously. This is a better deal than what someone could hypothetically get on IRC for free, simply because it removes the electronic legwork they would have to do if they want particularly old/rare/obscure files. Pirates generally only trade what's popular; being able to drink straight from the labels' tap means I can get whatever I want, whether it is popular or not, I don't have to waste time looking for it, I can potentially get it at top sound quality, AND I don't have to worry about being prosecuted or sued.
I don't know about the rest of you, but in my mind, piracy is motivated purely by pragmatism; free mp3s are considered a better deal than per-cost CDs. However, give me a service where I can have just about everything since when Cocky was an egg, catalogued, and with a 384 khz bitrate, even better, and I'll be there with bells on, and will be quite happy to pay.
I'm not paying for the actual files themselves here, necessarily. What I'm paying for is a) file quality, b) guaranteed availability and convenience, (due to the source) and c) legal protection.
A flat monthly fee would be preferable to me, but we could talk about just about anything up to around $50 AUD a month. Get 100,000 people to sign up for that, and you've got a $5 million pilot program. I could be wrong, but something tells me that upwards of $10-$20 million a month is something the RIAA could potentially be interested in. ;)
Here's another idea for giving us both some security without the DRM bogeyman, as well. Give me a digital receipt with a unique key every time I download some paid-for files from you, and I'll keep it in the same directory the files are in, and back it up with them as well. That way, if there's ever a question asked, if you keep that key on file, we can both know said mp3s have come from you, and that I haven't pirated them.
It could work brilliantly.
When did Michaelangelo start reading Slashdot? Beware if so, fellow Slashdotters; nobody's pizza will be safe!
The RIAA knows that it would be very stupid to lose a case of symbolic
value. They obviously perceive that their case is strong. After all, they won
the case the first time.
The only way the RIAA ever accomplish anything is by intimidating people.
They don't have the technical means to stop piracy, and they know it, but they
can massively reduce it by scaring people sufficiently that the
majority no longer pirate.
eMule is a good example. While it hasn't died completely, it is a pale shadow
of its' former self. Technically, the RIAA weren't able to sink the entire
network, but by making a very public bust of the biggest node, Razorback, and
flooding the rest of the network with malware, they've succeeded in deterring
probably more than 90% of its' previous population from using it.
They don't need to win every case they try and prosecute, or even most of
them. All they need to do is create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty
within the Internet using population, and to some extent, they've already done
that now. The thinking goes that, while they might not get a conviction in
every case, and while they might not find every single person who pirates,
they might find you, and your case might be one where the judge
rules in their favour, and you're forced to pay them a lot more than you can
afford.
They don't need concrete legal victories every time. All they need is fear
and paranoia.
If the guy who asked for your help in setting up makeshift networks in Iran, is also able to read your replies, then it automatically follows that the government could, too.
That means, that while to some extent you might be helping the OP, it also means you're potentially providing the government with very critical pieces of information:-
a) What any would-be revolutionaries are possibly specifically doing, as far as setting up network infrastructure is concerned, and
b) By extension, how to snoop/counter it.
c) Potentially information (even if only email addresses) about the Iranian individuals who want to deploy the technology, and then use it for subversive purposes.
The other thing to consider is, whether or not getting rid of a new dictatorship there is worth it, even if you could. The most revolutions ever do is buy time, (yes, including the American one) and in the end, all you're really doing is making the world safe for corporations, since in any scenario where government doesn't hold power, they invariably do instead...and generally they do even where you have a national government.
The majority never end up permanently retaining power, for the simple reason that they don't want it. As long as said dictator doesn't start randomly killing people, and is also able to do a sufficiently competent administrative job, leave him where he is. Fewer people will probably end up dying, and in a part of the world like the Middle East, having a firmer than usual hand at the wheel isn't a bad thing anywayz.
Sadaam might have been a monster in a lot of ways, but he held Iraq together, and as someone else said, managed to keep Iran in check as well. The Arab states aren't places where behaving like a member of Amnesty International is good for either keeping a country together, or retaining office.
I can understand why some of my recent posts have been modded Troll, but this one?
Come on, guys...cut me a little slack, here.
They would have made sure they had a vaccine ready before they released the virus.
1. Create virus.
2. Create vaccine.
3. Release virus, and then generate as much fear and hysteria about said virus as possible, using organisations like the WHO to beat the drum for you, despite the fact that the mortality rate of said virus amounts to statistical line noise.
4. Some months after the release of the virus, when a few people have died, and the "health authorities," have managed to stir public hysteria up to a fever pitch, announce that you have a vaccine for the virus, and enjoy being hailed as heroes and public saviours.
5. Mass produce the vaccine, and sell it to anyone who wants it.
6. Profit.
Any success in developing resource-efficient software is to be celebrated, IMHO. There is far too much of a trend these days of writing bloated, horribly inefficient crap, simply because in hardware terms we can get away with it.
The Windows refugees desperately need to stop being listened to. All they care about is superficial usability. They don't care about design quality, code quality, robustness, security, or resource (RAM/cpu/power) efficiency. The only important thing is that whatever they want to do is, "easy," and also, preferably, that it includes pretty lights.
We need software that is resource efficient, and well designed. We need it because we're not always in scenarios where we've got access to a 4 Ghz processor, 32 odd GB of ram, and a terrabyte hard drive. Such machines tend to be expensive, and also to require a lot of power.
If the world underwent some sort of disaster next week which included a loss of mains power, the 4 Ghz desktops with KDE wouldn't be what people would be running, if they were using a computer at all; because they wouldn't have the electricity to be able to waste it on such hardware. It'd be iPods or other power-efficient ARM-based machines running NetBSD or minimalist Linux configurations, with something like Blackbox as a window manager.
There's a reason why I have Ratpoison as a window manager for daily use, despite having a gigabyte of ram at my disposal. It's because I've used a C64 with a tape drive, and a portable IBM XT with a 2400 baud modem, and I'm thus able to recognise a graphical user interface for exactly what it really is.
A convenience. Not a necessity. There's a very big difference.
I'm getting very tired of hearing the usual cry of, "If you're not with us, you're against us!" where FOSS is concerned, coming from the usual suspects. I think a certain quote about only a Sith dealing in absolutes, is appropriate here.
The paranoia possibly wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't so completely baseless. People still using proprietary stuff from Microsoft or whoever hasn't killed open source up to this point, and it isn't going to kill it in the future.
There are a lot of genuinely terrible things being done by corporations at the present time; I would agree with anyone who suggests that. However, the death of Free Software is not, nor is it going to be, one of them.
People keep seeing an endless array of supposedly lethal threats; binary device drivers, DRM, even apparently the use of non-GPL FOSS licenses. Yet all of these things exist, and continue to exist, and FOSS itself co-exists with them just fine.
So for those of you who continue to insist on being hysterically terrified of how the evil corporations are going to kill FOSS entirely, please, I'm begging you, get over yourselves.
Also, stop listening to Stallman. He is wrong, he has been wrong, and he continues to be wrong, over and over and over again; and I know that he is the main source, ultimately, of most of your fear and paranoia. I've gone over the countless ways in which he is catastrophically misguided many times before, but if you feel like replying and asking for citations, I'm more than happy to do it again, in the hope of potentially educating someone.
Try it; purely as an experiment. For a single month, stop listening to the FSF's (and its' fanboys) paranoid ranting and foaming at the mouth about the corporate wolves at the gate, and see if, at the end of said month, FOSS as a whole is still here. I suspect the outcome will cause you to be very surprised; although it won't surprise me much at all.
Myopic, paranoid, condescending, dismissive, ad hominem laced, pro-FSF reply incoming, I'm sure. Also, once again, for those of you with mod points who don't have the brains or capacity for independent thought to refute me logically, please feel free to down-mod this post into oblivion; my karma on this site is sufficiently good that it can withstand a significant amount of your cowardice.
And guess what? The websites made money, and people payed more money to the ISPs for access, and all the corporations rejoiced. Thus died the golden age of the internet which we now just call 'interactive cable'.
Take a hike. I'm sick of this sort of apocalyptic, hysterically alarmist crap. It's the same bullshit that Stallman's been shovelling for years, and it's been garbage for as long as he's been doing it, too.
Usenet still exists. You can still download mp3s or pirated books on IRC as much as you want. Bit torrent might be throttled somewhat and watched a bit more these days, but that's a long way from saying you can't use it at all. A cam for Terminator Salvation came out very quickly. eMule only died (and it still hasn't completely) because of the cartels scaring people away from it, but not because they were able to physically shut it down; they couldn't.
If Usenet exists to a lesser extent than it used to, it's purely because people started realising that web-based forums were simply a better idea. Moderation abilities mean you don't have to put up with the sort of gibbering, barking, locked-in-their-basement headcases that Usenet has always suffered from.
Anyone who complains about piracy becoming more difficult on YouTube can also cry me a fucking river. Self-host your own bit torrent tracker; problem solved.
Piracy is still very much alive and kicking, and the idea that the Internet is or ever will become purely a home shopping network has been bullshit from the first moment it was dreamed up.
Richard Stallman is *not* a genius...and neither are you.
Splitting apart a water molecule requires energy. The amount of energy isn't important for the example, so we'll refer to it as X.
From the analysis of his device that I read, what he specifically claimed was that he'd found a way to replicate hydrogen atoms.
He may well have been a lunatic, a fraud, or both. It's just odd (and a little coincidental) that he winds up dying only a few years after he's also claimed that he was offered $10 billion to sit on his work and not do anything further with it, don't you think?
Assuming hypothetically that someone did kill him, if he was simply a loony, why would they bother? Wouldn't that just make him look more credible in the eyes of impressionable people like me?
There's the whole rest of the Internet, if this blog doesn't suit you.
a) This site isn't a blog. This site existed quite a long time before blogs, and if you weren't one of the very 14 year olds I was talking about yourself, you might know that.
b) Grammatical abuse, such as misuse of the word, "fail," doesn't make the people who do it look intelligent, mature, or cool. It makes them appear exactly what they are; jaded, emo adolescents with anger management issues, who if they got out of Mummy and Daddy's basement and went into the real world for a few minutes, might discover that while there actually are valid things to feel pain in response to, contrary to what they think, they've never actually experienced any of them.
Interesting.
Apparently the WoW forum losers are starting to show up on Slashdot. Calling something "full of fail," is a classic WoWism.
Please find somewhere else to interact with your fellow illiterate, pre-pubescent sociopaths. Slashdot has, despite certainly not being perfect, customarily been vastly more elevated and intelligent than the cesspool that is the WoW forums. I for one would like to keep it that way.
I was with you, right up until I clicked that link. Seeing as how you're apparently a proponent of perpetual motion, I hereby demand that you surrender all rights to comment on future science-based discussions.
LOL.
Oxyhydrogen generation isn't perpetual motion. I haven't heard of anyone using it who claims that it is limitless. Water is limited, carbon steel is limited, current is certainly limited, and you need all of those.
Hydrogen can, however, make a fairly powerful bang when channeled in the right way. Then again, however, given that you're so much more scientifically oriented than me, you'd know that. ;)
During Bush's administration, I would have taken that as sarcasm. But after Obama's gutting the space budget, honoring Bush's scientific enlightenment is starting to sound like a good idea.
The problem with a space program is that, in practical terms, it just isn't really very useful, at least not at this point in time. Truthfully we're not really anywhere near technologically ready for one, anywayz. As I've written before, the contemporary space shuttle(s) are around the spacefaring equivalent of travelling on water, by putting one leg on either side of a hollow log. On water in a terrestrial environment, that's ok, (as long as you're in calm sea, which also doesn't contain sharks) but in space it doesn't work quite so well.
We need to develop better propulsion technology first, (or at least stop murdering scientists who try) and we also need to realise that terraforming our own planet is going to need to come first, before we think about giving it a shot on Mars. Given the current corporate attitude, even if we had the technology, industry would start creating pollution there even while the terraforming process was underway.
And why shouldn't they?
Because anyone with half a brain isn't running Linux purely for Firefox or
Open Office. They're doing it for other advantages over Windows at the OS
level.
- Robustness. (Assuming you're not running Ubuntu; also, if robustness is
truly a priority, use BSD)
- Security.
- Much more diverse hardware support.
- Flexibility. You can customise just about anything.
- Efficient software. You can use a 400 Mhz CPU to power a firewall or CLI
media centre.
- Openness. If something breaks, you can delve into the
source and fix it yourself, and if you can't, you can hire someone to do it.
This is claimed at least once a week, but has yet to be true. Fact is, there's nothing on the market that can compete with WoW.
I fairly regularly see trolls making this statement as well, but then never offering anything more specific to back it up. Allow me to offer you a clue.
a) The levelling game is dead. D-E-A-D. Blizzard reduced the xp requirement between 20-60 by 20%. Then you've got Recruit-A-Friend, and the +10% xp heirloom bonus on top of that. They're killing the ability of new users to really acclimatise, learn the game, or experience what was genuinely good content, all for the sake of letting the established crowd race to the cap.
b) Once a person powerlevels their way to the cap in two days, they will very swiftly discover that there is less than no point to being there. Heroics? Boring. Naxx? Boring. Sarth? Boring. Ulduar might be marginally less boring, but I doubt it. WoTLK has the worst instances, as stated previously, that this game has ever seen. They are a total sleepwalk; no strategy required at all. Just get DKs and AoE lol.
c) The battlegrounds, which used to be my main reason for playing the game, are also dead. Blizzard killed twinking a couple of patches back, which caused a lot of people to leave, and the Death Knight and Paladin are also, as stated, now the only two classes in the game that are worth playing. Everything else has been nerfed into the ground.
d) Chilton had to kill world PvP too, because if that had remained viable at all, people might not have wanted to play the Arena...so now that is dead, also.
That leaves the Arena, which is literally the only thing left to do in the game at this point; and I don't know about you, but if I'm going to bother playing an FPS at all, I'm going to play a real one, not a half-assed joke.
Nobody gives a shit.
Ah, the Anonymous Cowards. I'm starting to think it might be time for Slashdot to retire the ability to make anonymous comments, to be honest; I've noticed ACs becoming even more obnoxious and/or annoying than usual, recently.
Although Ubuntu's numbers on DistroWatch, as well as the amount of forum traffic they get, prove that you're wrong. Plenty of people care about it.
I was looking at Warcraftrealms.com overnight; WoW's population is about to drop like a rock. It's already begun, in fact.
Character classes have been nerfed into the ground, with the Paladin or DK now being the only two worth playing. Any originality is gone. WotLK had the worst instances the game has ever had, and the only thing the developers now focus on is the Arena.
I can see it in my own behaviour; I'd be lucky to log into WoW once a week, now, and even just this last night, while I got up planning on playing WoW, it never happened, even though I spent practically the entire night idling on IRC, bored.
When I'd rather spend a night vegetating on Freenode than playing World of Warcraft, (which I used to genuinely love, incidentally) I know that the game has truly died in the ass...and it has.
I'm starting to think Guild Wars might be worth a look. WoW sure isn't getting much of my time these days, that's for sure.
That number of bugs rather scares me. I depend on Windows for playing WoW at home and writing documents at work. Will this kill it?
There is no need for that. I run WoW in Wine on FreeBSD, and it runs much faster and more smoothly there than it does natively in Windows.
Granted, customising FreeBSD is perhaps a little above the bullet-dodging capabilities of the average FOSS user, but Ubuntu will still run WoW very agreeably. I'd recommend Kubuntu; I'm a KDE man in terms of the "big two," desktop environments, myself.