That is why GUIs in Linux are horrible. Not just bad, but horrible. The rare GUI that is easy to use is a pleasant surprise.
What exactly are you talking about?
If you want to talk about appearance, [...]
What he's talking about is usability of the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in the applications written for Linux, not appearance of the desktop environment.
I'm not expressing an opinion on what he said, but you appear to be missing the topic of his post by a rather large margin.
Further Frodo isn't Elendil Reborn, Pippin doesn't speak to wolves, and Merry doesn't have extraordinary luck. Orthanc has an old, corrupted wizard in it rather than a boatload of powerful, ageless women. Nazgul are a few, corrupted Kings of Men, and are much harder to kill than Myrdraal.
The differences are vast, only someone who's only shallowly read one or both would think they compare significantly.
If you haven't read "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge, you should, if you manage to get any spare time. There's a lot of good ideas in there for sensing and localization, including various kinds of augmented reality (AR). Might not be achievable in the short- to medium-term, but it seems like it would provide a good initial vector.
it is not your product. You do not own the product, the IP, anything at all to do with the product. You have a "right to use," and that's it. You couldn't take it and reverse-engineer it, replicating it in your own Chinese factories. There are a *lot* of things you know you cannot legally do to it.
You're greatly mistaken. When you buy something tangible like hardware, you DO own that product and can legally do lots of things with it, including things the manufacturer wouldn't like.
"The Law and Economics of Reverse Engineering", by Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer, published in the Yale Law Journal (Vol. 111, p.1528), has this to say:
The legal right to reverse-engineer a trade secret is so well-established that courts and commentators have rarely perceived a need to explain the rationale for this doctrine. A rare exception is the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Bonito Boats, Inc. v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc., which characterized reverse engineering as "an essential part of innovation," likely to yield variations on the product that "may lead to significant advances in the field." Moreover, "the competitive reality of reverse engineering may act as a spur to the inventor" to develop patentable ideas. Even when reverse engineering does not lead to additional innovation, the Bonito Boats decision suggests it may still promote consumer welfare by providing consumers with a competing product at a lower price.
That's not to say that the manufacturer cannot build things into the product, or in services that it uses, that try to block this. Apple is within its rights to refuse service to jailbroken iPhones, for instance, but it's not illegal to jailbreak them.
The conductivity of hair is very low. I know this because I have inadvertently applied 600 V between 3/4" of hair and my (thankfully dry and unsweaty) skull, yet I live to type about it. The possibility of a hair solar cell is, in my oh-so-humble opinion, exceedingly unlikely.
Don't conventional solar cells use semiconductors, which also have low conductivity?
My German's equally rusty. The (idiomatic?) phrase "zu Hause" means approximately the same as "at home" in English. This ended up evolving into "zuhause", both as adverb and noun. I think I learned "Heim" at school, but the usage apparently depends on the dialect.
Slashdot is peer-moderated, which implies that the moderator may not be an expert (or even well-informed!) about the topic of a comment they choose to mod "informative" or "insightful". Duh.
For a software engineer typing speed matters about as much as car/bicycle aerodynamics for a mailman.
Oh, please. First of all, it's not an engineering discipline, but let's set that aside for the moment. If you're a code monkey, you're MORE likely to be able to hunt-and-peck and get away with it, given the symbol-happy nature of most languages code monkeys like to use.
A software engineer, however, is generally expected (in my experience) to be able to be able to write actual written text in emails, documentation, and lots of things that aren't specifically code. In a small team, you can probably get away with most of that by discussing in person. In either case, for me the vast amount of real typing I do has NOTHING to do with actual coding, and since I've done both hunt-and-peck and touch-typing, I find I'm much more effective when doing the latter.
It's really easy to be able to say you don't need something when you've learned to get along without it, but speaking with the voice of experience from both sides of an issue seems to me to lend more weight to one's argument.
Back in October 1998, Microsoft fixed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 4 where a dotless IP address (represented as a single, unsigned 32-bit integer, which was legal in IPv4) would be treated as being on the local network rather than on the Internet at large. Basically, their programmers took a shortcut and assumed "no dots = local". (MS98-016)
This was re-introduced in IE 5 three years later and had to be fixed AGAIN. (MS01-051)
I've been waiting to see if they end up re-introducing this one, or if they learned their lesson well enough the last time.
As Joel Spolsky points out, this is exactly what happens when you rewrite software. The old software had lots of bug fixes. If your development shop made a particular mistake once, it's likely to do it again when you reimplement. It's unclear whether this was the case for IE 5 (no idea if that area of the code was rewritten), but it seems like this may have bitten Microsoft with the teardrop vulnerability.
Our kids in elementary school go to a charter school that focuses on progressive educational methods. The curriculum is emergent. The children end up collectively or individually choosing the topics, and the teachers guide the students through the process, assigning relevant tasks (sometimes individual work, sometimes group work) that teach them the same subjects they would study in a traditional school setting. Since the curriculum is based on the interests of the students, and they're empowered to control what they're doing, they're very involved in the coursework and always look forward to going to school. The school doesn't do tests, except those mandated by the government, and they always come out higher than the average for the state as well for their local, affiliated school district, despite having a higher than average number of special-needs children.
EVERY signaling system uses multiple frequencies at the same time.
Perhaps you meant "nearly every". Amplitude Modulation (AM) encoded signals use a single-frequency carrier wave and doesn't vary the frequency to carry the signal.
If they were the same government promising more openness would not be ramming near trillion dollar bills through Congress without a chance for public discussion, let alone reading of by the voting parties.
If Congress isn't doing it's job, then it's the fault of Congress, not the one that has to implement the laws they pass.
You mean archiving postings by the White House to third-party websites, and any replies to those postings by users of those websites, in the White House itself rather than relying them being archived by those third-party websites? Since we've already seen third-party content providers totally lose all their data, and since the White House is required by law to document its communications and what it does, this seems like a highly sensible project.
Agreed. You need no intelligence to use a mac. Whether that's a good thing, or a bad thing, I don't know. I do know that I'd prefer to be Patrick Warburton over Justin Long any day.
Don't you mean John Hodgman?
I suddenly had a vision of Kronk from The Emperor's New Groove saying, "You know, in my defense, all your buttons look alike."
Correct on all fronts. So why would you suggest that the FTC would limit its authority to fall within a scope not [yet] proscribed by the Court?
The FTC doesn't limit it's authority, Congress authorizes regulations through legislation. The FTC and other regulatory bodies issue rules to implement those laws.
The fact that the Court hasn't ruled on some point doesn't in itself make that point a "legal sinkhole."
But in this case, we have that pesky First Amendment that specifically prohibits Congress from limiting speech. The Supreme Court has previously established that in the specific case of commercial speech, there are narrow constraints under which it may be limited.
I again cite a long and unchallenged history of allowing that parties may be prevented from making unwanted telephone calls to people WITHOUT REGARD TO CONTENT.
I think by "cite" you mean "allude", as you haven't actually cited anything. The fact remains that our Constitution's First Amendment specifically says that Congress can't limit free speech. The Supreme Court has clarified that, in the case of commercial speech, they can if they follow a particular set of rules. Orthogonal to this is the prohibition against harassment, which also limits some speech. I invite you to provide citations that support your view.
Your [repeated] citation of the Court's willingness to allow limitations on commercial speech is [strangely] irrelevant here.
It's one of the only things moderating the First Amendment in US court precedent. Also, you'll note that the FTC is implementing a "no commercial robocalling" rule, and I was drawing a line directly from one to the other. That's pretty much the opposite of "irrelevent".
Can you cite a SCOTUS ruling that indicates that free speech rights entitle you to make calls into people's homes? I am not aware of such, and I think it would be a stretch. Rights to privacy, though inferred, offer a competing balance and are well-supported by the Court.
That's not how things work.
Laws specifically prohibit or restrict things, they don't enumerate what's allowed.
The First Amendment of the US Constitution specifically prohibits the government from infringing on free speech rights.
The SCOTUS rules on cases as they apply to laws and their Constitutionality as they come across the court.
As such, the ruling you seek likely doesn't exist.
However, it has ruled (Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission of New York, 447 U.S. 557 (1980)) that under certain conditions, the government can restrict commercial speech. It's not similarly ruled for non-commercial speech and don't to my knowledge have a desire to do so, so laws are generally crafted to avoid that legal sinkhole.
The allowance of political calls (under the guise of free speech) simply reflects legislative selfishness...a willingness to enforce just behavior upon all but themselves. It reflects the self-serving, less-than-high ethics that characterizes all but the fewest of politicians.
Actually, they might be trying to work within the framework of previous SCOTUS rulings regarding the regulation of commercial free speech as opposed to non-commercial free speech.
Follow the lead of the TCPA and allow EVERYONE to take spammers to court, instead of this corrupt law that only permits ISPs to do so, and spam would stop in short order.
But 47 USC 227 hasn't stopped junk faxing. Everywhere I've ever worked, the business faxes still get occasional junk faxes.
I suspect this is because companies are more willing to just ignore the low level of fax spam than to actually bring someone to court. The cost-shifting of the junk faxes doesn't rise to a level that justifies paying a legal team to track down and sue the senders, so they do nothing and the law becomes ineffective below some threshold of fax spam.
I haven't seen a convincing argument that this level of apathy would change sufficiently, particularly since receiving junk email doesn't eat up ink and paper costs and hard drive space is relatively inexpensive. Without a horde of people suing to recover damages due to the spamming, the law won't have an appreciable effect.
Slashdot Mirror
That is why GUIs in Linux are horrible. Not just bad, but horrible. The rare GUI that is easy to use is a pleasant surprise.
What exactly are you talking about?
If you want to talk about appearance, [...]
What he's talking about is usability of the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in the applications written for Linux, not appearance of the desktop environment.
I'm not expressing an opinion on what he said, but you appear to be missing the topic of his post by a rather large margin.
Pass good samaratin [sic] laws that allow researchers to nuke botnets.
Oh yeah, that will end well.
Sounds a little like Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age. I'll check it out.
Ah, that explains the stunning similarities between Baerlon and Bree, Bela and Bill the pony, etc.
Further Frodo isn't Elendil Reborn, Pippin doesn't speak to wolves, and Merry doesn't have extraordinary luck. Orthanc has an old, corrupted wizard in it rather than a boatload of powerful, ageless women. Nazgul are a few, corrupted Kings of Men, and are much harder to kill than Myrdraal.
The differences are vast, only someone who's only shallowly read one or both would think they compare significantly.
If you haven't read "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge, you should, if you manage to get any spare time. There's a lot of good ideas in there for sensing and localization, including various kinds of augmented reality (AR). Might not be achievable in the short- to medium-term, but it seems like it would provide a good initial vector.
it is not your product. You do not own the product, the IP, anything at all to do with the product. You have a "right to use," and that's it. You couldn't take it and reverse-engineer it, replicating it in your own Chinese factories. There are a *lot* of things you know you cannot legally do to it.
You're greatly mistaken. When you buy something tangible like hardware, you DO own that product and can legally do lots of things with it, including things the manufacturer wouldn't like.
"The Law and Economics of Reverse Engineering", by Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer, published in the Yale Law Journal (Vol. 111, p.1528), has this to say:
The legal right to reverse-engineer a trade secret is so well-established that courts and commentators have rarely perceived a need to explain the rationale for this doctrine. A rare exception is the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Bonito Boats, Inc. v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc., which characterized reverse engineering as "an essential part of innovation," likely to yield variations on the product that "may lead to significant advances in the field." Moreover, "the competitive reality of reverse engineering may act as a spur to the inventor" to develop patentable ideas. Even when reverse engineering does not lead to additional innovation, the Bonito Boats decision suggests it may still promote consumer welfare by providing consumers with a competing product at a lower price.
http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/111-7/SamuelsonFINAL.pdf
That's not to say that the manufacturer cannot build things into the product, or in services that it uses, that try to block this. Apple is within its rights to refuse service to jailbroken iPhones, for instance, but it's not illegal to jailbreak them.
The conductivity of hair is very low. I know this because I have inadvertently applied 600 V between 3/4" of hair and my (thankfully dry and unsweaty) skull, yet I live to type about it. The possibility of a hair solar cell is, in my oh-so-humble opinion, exceedingly unlikely.
Don't conventional solar cells use semiconductors, which also have low conductivity?
My German's equally rusty. The (idiomatic?) phrase "zu Hause" means approximately the same as "at home" in English. This ended up evolving into "zuhause", both as adverb and noun. I think I learned "Heim" at school, but the usage apparently depends on the dialect.
I don't know how this got modded insightful.
Slashdot is peer-moderated, which implies that the moderator may not be an expert (or even well-informed!) about the topic of a comment they choose to mod "informative" or "insightful". Duh.
For a software engineer typing speed matters about as much as car/bicycle aerodynamics for a mailman.
Oh, please. First of all, it's not an engineering discipline, but let's set that aside for the moment. If you're a code monkey, you're MORE likely to be able to hunt-and-peck and get away with it, given the symbol-happy nature of most languages code monkeys like to use.
A software engineer, however, is generally expected (in my experience) to be able to be able to write actual written text in emails, documentation, and lots of things that aren't specifically code. In a small team, you can probably get away with most of that by discussing in person. In either case, for me the vast amount of real typing I do has NOTHING to do with actual coding, and since I've done both hunt-and-peck and touch-typing, I find I'm much more effective when doing the latter.
It's really easy to be able to say you don't need something when you've learned to get along without it, but speaking with the voice of experience from both sides of an issue seems to me to lend more weight to one's argument.
Back in October 1998, Microsoft fixed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 4 where a dotless IP address (represented as a single, unsigned 32-bit integer, which was legal in IPv4) would be treated as being on the local network rather than on the Internet at large. Basically, their programmers took a shortcut and assumed "no dots = local". (MS98-016)
This was re-introduced in IE 5 three years later and had to be fixed AGAIN. (MS01-051)
I've been waiting to see if they end up re-introducing this one, or if they learned their lesson well enough the last time.
As Joel Spolsky points out, this is exactly what happens when you rewrite software. The old software had lots of bug fixes. If your development shop made a particular mistake once, it's likely to do it again when you reimplement. It's unclear whether this was the case for IE 5 (no idea if that area of the code was rewritten), but it seems like this may have bitten Microsoft with the teardrop vulnerability.
Our kids in elementary school go to a charter school that focuses on progressive educational methods. The curriculum is emergent. The children end up collectively or individually choosing the topics, and the teachers guide the students through the process, assigning relevant tasks (sometimes individual work, sometimes group work) that teach them the same subjects they would study in a traditional school setting. Since the curriculum is based on the interests of the students, and they're empowered to control what they're doing, they're very involved in the coursework and always look forward to going to school. The school doesn't do tests, except those mandated by the government, and they always come out higher than the average for the state as well for their local, affiliated school district, despite having a higher than average number of special-needs children.
It's hard to argue with results like that.
Must remember not to reply after a long day with a lot of metaphorical fires to fight. Apparently the metaphorical smoke got to me. =/
And "organic chemistry" (chemistry of compounds based on carbon) was in use long before "organic farming" (farming free from application of extraneous chemicals).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_chemistry
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=organic
That said, most people can figure these things out from context. Some apparently cannot, or choose not to.
EVERY signaling system uses multiple frequencies at the same time.
Perhaps you meant "nearly every". Amplitude Modulation (AM) encoded signals use a single-frequency carrier wave and doesn't vary the frequency to carry the signal.
If they were the same government promising more openness would not be ramming near trillion dollar bills through Congress without a chance for public discussion, let alone reading of by the voting parties.
If Congress isn't doing it's job, then it's the fault of Congress, not the one that has to implement the laws they pass.
then again, change might mean soliciting bids for a system to systematically scrape all non-hidden data on popular sites like facebook and myspace
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=eec856940efb75b2b1c11e2b1d5660a4&tab=core&_cview=0&cck=1&au=&ck=
You mean archiving postings by the White House to third-party websites, and any replies to those postings by users of those websites, in the White House itself rather than relying them being archived by those third-party websites? Since we've already seen third-party content providers totally lose all their data, and since the White House is required by law to document its communications and what it does, this seems like a highly sensible project.
Why make it sound sinister?
How many bits does it take to kill a human?
Only 1, the evil bit.
Agreed. You need no intelligence to use a mac. Whether that's a good thing, or a bad thing, I don't know. I do know that I'd prefer to be Patrick Warburton over Justin Long any day.
Don't you mean John Hodgman?
I suddenly had a vision of Kronk from The Emperor's New Groove saying, "You know, in my defense, all your buttons look alike."
Correct on all fronts. So why would you suggest that the FTC would limit its authority to fall within a scope not [yet] proscribed by the Court?
The FTC doesn't limit it's authority, Congress authorizes regulations through legislation. The FTC and other regulatory bodies issue rules to implement those laws.
The fact that the Court hasn't ruled on some point doesn't in itself make that point a "legal sinkhole."
But in this case, we have that pesky First Amendment that specifically prohibits Congress from limiting speech. The Supreme Court has previously established that in the specific case of commercial speech, there are narrow constraints under which it may be limited.
I again cite a long and unchallenged history of allowing that parties may be prevented from making unwanted telephone calls to people WITHOUT REGARD TO CONTENT.
I think by "cite" you mean "allude", as you haven't actually cited anything. The fact remains that our Constitution's First Amendment specifically says that Congress can't limit free speech. The Supreme Court has clarified that, in the case of commercial speech, they can if they follow a particular set of rules. Orthogonal to this is the prohibition against harassment, which also limits some speech. I invite you to provide citations that support your view.
Your [repeated] citation of the Court's willingness to allow limitations on commercial speech is [strangely] irrelevant here.
It's one of the only things moderating the First Amendment in US court precedent. Also, you'll note that the FTC is implementing a "no commercial robocalling" rule, and I was drawing a line directly from one to the other. That's pretty much the opposite of "irrelevent".
Can you cite a SCOTUS ruling that indicates that free speech rights entitle you to make calls into people's homes? I am not aware of such, and I think it would be a stretch. Rights to privacy, though inferred, offer a competing balance and are well-supported by the Court.
That's not how things work.
As such, the ruling you seek likely doesn't exist.
However, it has ruled (Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission of New York, 447 U.S. 557 (1980)) that under certain conditions, the government can restrict commercial speech. It's not similarly ruled for non-commercial speech and don't to my knowledge have a desire to do so, so laws are generally crafted to avoid that legal sinkhole.
The allowance of political calls (under the guise of free speech) simply reflects legislative selfishness...a willingness to enforce just behavior upon all but themselves. It reflects the self-serving, less-than-high ethics that characterizes all but the fewest of politicians.
Actually, they might be trying to work within the framework of previous SCOTUS rulings regarding the regulation of commercial free speech as opposed to non-commercial free speech.
Follow the lead of the TCPA and allow EVERYONE to take spammers to court, instead of this corrupt law that only permits ISPs to do so, and spam would stop in short order.
But 47 USC 227 hasn't stopped junk faxing. Everywhere I've ever worked, the business faxes still get occasional junk faxes.
I suspect this is because companies are more willing to just ignore the low level of fax spam than to actually bring someone to court. The cost-shifting of the junk faxes doesn't rise to a level that justifies paying a legal team to track down and sue the senders, so they do nothing and the law becomes ineffective below some threshold of fax spam.
I haven't seen a convincing argument that this level of apathy would change sufficiently, particularly since receiving junk email doesn't eat up ink and paper costs and hard drive space is relatively inexpensive. Without a horde of people suing to recover damages due to the spamming, the law won't have an appreciable effect.
Yes. Any living being pollutes its environment, by converting substances it needs to live into wastes which it cannot use. It's unavoidable.
Humanity:
Bears:
Damn bears...
...an old fashioned monkey trial will assist in exposing the roach [wikipedia.org] nest [wikipedia.org] to the harsh light of public scrutiny.
I briefly got my Slashdot discussions confused and though you were calling Wikipedia a roach nest...