I won't pay for content because I don't want all the sites on the web to be pay sites. As long as people refuse to pay for content, there won't be any incentive for sites to go pay.
Personally, I'm somewhat boggled at the idea that anyone wouldn't consider code to be expressive. Think for a moment about how we express ideas in logic. We often say things like "if 'A' and 'B' are both true..." which is just a kind of logical shorthand. If you study logic formally, you will certainly see this kind of thing taken even further, with the use of logical symbols and so forth.
No one could argue that these things aren't expressive. Symbolic logic is expression at it's most basic and streamlined. It expresses the validity (or lack thereof) of certain propositions, which is indisputably communication.
And what is programming but symbolic logic which has been extended to involve the way certain machines work? As much as programming is functional (i.e. getting the machine to do what you want it to), it is also communicative (i.e., getting other humans to understand what you want the machine to do).
It seems to me that what we see in the MPAA version of things is a real bias towards a viewpoint of the world based in the humanities. The idea here is that "speech" (speech worthy of protection, anyway), is something that expresses "ideas", and "ideas" are something that are culturally or emotionally "meaningful" to people. Mere "how-to" sorts of instructions are less worthy in this scenario.
Of course, it doesn't take much to see where this idea falls apart. Our entire technological world is based on such "how-to" ideas. And even more! What if banks tried to ban aritmetic as an intrusion on their intellectual property? To anyone who has a solid grounding in math, science, or engineering, the idea that logic is a lesser form of expression is absurd.
Unfortunately, movie and record producers, as well as lawyers, judges and politicians tend to come from a humanities background. While they (especially lawyers) may pay lip service to logic, their actual method is in the interpretation of old laws and cases, and in emotional appeals to juries and the public, not in the creation of functioning logical systems.
I've been using RH 7.1 on my workstation for several days now. I haven't delved deeply into it, but it seems decent so far. Paired with Ximian Gnome 1.4, it's a very nice desktop. I'll have to explore it a little further before I decide whether or not to put it on my server, but for now, the prospects are looking good. A definite improvement over 7.0.
It seems to me that the real story of this election is the turnout. I had to wait in line for nearly two hours to vote, and there are similar stories from around the country. In my state (Georgia), voter turnout is expected to approach the all time record.
For years now, we've been told that American voters are apathetic. Turnouts have been approaching record lows, and the pundits have chalked this up to our being disenchanted with the process.
How then to explain what happened yesterday? If we're so disenchanted, why did we turn out in droves?
One might be tempted to credit the alternative candidated, Nader, Browne, Buchanan et. al. But in reality, these candidates weren't really a factor in the popular vote. Even Nader, despite a strong showing in some locations will probably not crack the 5 percent he was looking for. (Note: I'm not saying Nader wasn't a factor in the election - he probably had a pretty real effect on the electorial college numbers.)
The answer seems evident to me. What turns people off is not the process, or even lackluster candidates (and I don't think anyone but the most partisan would argue that Gush and Bore are two of the most lackluster candidates in recent memory), but a race that seems like a foregone conclusion.
After all, who can get enthused about voting if they've been told for weeks who's going to win? What drove the turnout in this election was the uncertainty.
In light of this, I think it would be a good thing, from a civic point of view, if the media stopped reporting poll numbers. I don't think this is ever going to happen, and I would be horrified at the thought of outlawing it or something, but it's obvious that lopsided poll results dampen voter turnout.
Why does/. keep perpetuating this lie that the Coumbine kids were these picked on geeks. Even a quick glance over any of the reporting that came out since the story broke, for example, this story at Salon shows that these were fucked up kids who were sick and wanted to be famous.
It doesn't really matter. What matters is that they were geeks in the perception of the people who run the schools (both the popular kids who "run" the schools, and the teachers and administrators), and that perception caused an even greater degree of ostricization and harassment because these people suddenly believed that, in addition to being weird and nerdy, geeks were dangerous.
No, the TCM weren't really picked on geeks, but they looked like geeks, and superficially anyway, they acted like geeks. They like FPS games, and long coats. They used the net. In a lot of minds, that's enough.
I was lucky. In my school, geeks were a large enough segment of the population that they didn't really get messed with. Still, there were rumors among the teachers and parents that D&D (fairly new and quite the rage at the time), was satanic, or evil or violent, or something. There was talk of banning it, but nothing along those lines ever happened.
It's easy enough for us to be discerning. For one thing, we're capable of it. For another, geeks are, by and large, interested in the facts. It's easy to forget that a fairly large segment of this society is neither.
According to the NIMH, about 15% of the general population suffers from depression or anxiety. If that's the case, then it seems like IT workers are above the curve.
Yeah, and this kind of annoys me. I've really liked the Corel WPO products - especially on my laptop. Now, I feel like I won't be able to trust future releases. Is this irrational? Maybe, but I switched to Linux for a reason. Well, several reasons, but getting away from MS products was one of them.
Any time you combine high stress levels with high income, you're going to find drug abuse. (Actually, the high income is incidental. It's just that we're only surprised when it's rich people doing the drugs.) Whether it's stimulants or just plain alcohol, people will medicate themselves to deal with the stress. This is not to say that everyone will do this, but at least some people will.
Sometimes the only way to make one's point is to make it very, very crystal clear. Whether that means calling Valenti a cocksucker or smashing some Starbucks' up, I leave it to you to decide.
I wouldn't buy a book like that strictly for practical reasons. I don't like having to sit at my computer to read a book.
I do like the idea, as a lot of publishers are doing now, of putting the entire text of a book on a cd as a searchable PDF. It really makes it helpful if you're looking for something specific.
I used to work in an academic library. It was the same sort of thing - no email, and fairly strict rules about what you were not supposed to be looking at.
The thing about email is understandable. A lot of the students would come in and work on their email for a long time. They're not supposed to do this because the library computers are supposed to be for research.
As for the other stuff (porn, etc.), they had to do this for legal reasons. In my state, it is illegal for state-owned computer networks to be used to transmit obscene materials. Of course, this is impossible to enforce, but all it takes is for one student to complain about what's on the next student's monitor, and there can be hell to pay.
No librarian I know wants to be on the internet porn patrol, but when Princess tells her daddy, the Taxpayer(tm), that someone was looking at dirty pictures on the computer, someone's going to get a phone call.
The irony of the whole thing is that most of the students at this school can hack around the defenses in about 30 seconds.
One thing I've been really disappointed with in GUI mailers is the lack of PGP/GPG support. Even Arrow, which seems to support it the best, only has an encrypt option, and not a sign option. Until someone manages better privacy support, I'm going to have to stick with Pine.
It seems to me, that the continual references throughout the patent to a "central computer" and "terminals" describes something vastly different from simple "hyperlinks". Unless they're prepared to try to enforce their patent on the entire idea of client/server architecture they're on pretty shaky ground here.
I've been using Word Perfect Suite for Linux for some time now. Aside from some of the problems with window managers (transient windows tend to submerge themselves under Gnome/Sawfish), there doesn't seem to be any reason to choose MSOffice over WP. Certainly, there are some file format issues, but not huge ones. Personally, I don't see any reason why your average user couldn't handle a Corel Linux/WPO setup. Not only that, with Samba and WPO for Windows, there shouldn't be any problems with people who want to stick with Windows, too. (I know the goal is an MS free office, but there are often people who want to stick with what they know). Get the Windows people to use a neutral-type mail client (i.e. Eudora), and everything is cool and froody.
Slashdot Mirror
Just another reason not to listen to the radio.
I won't pay for content because I don't want all the sites on the web to be pay sites. As long as people refuse to pay for content, there won't be any incentive for sites to go pay.
-J
Personally, I'm somewhat boggled at the idea that anyone wouldn't consider code to be expressive. Think for a moment about how we express ideas in logic. We often say things like "if 'A' and 'B' are both true..." which is just a kind of logical shorthand. If you study logic formally, you will certainly see this kind of thing taken even further, with the use of logical symbols and so forth.
No one could argue that these things aren't expressive. Symbolic logic is expression at it's most basic and streamlined. It expresses the validity (or lack thereof) of certain propositions, which is indisputably communication.
And what is programming but symbolic logic which has been extended to involve the way certain machines work? As much as programming is functional (i.e. getting the machine to do what you want it to), it is also communicative (i.e., getting other humans to understand what you want the machine to do).
It seems to me that what we see in the MPAA version of things is a real bias towards a viewpoint of the world based in the humanities. The idea here is that "speech" (speech worthy of protection, anyway), is something that expresses "ideas", and "ideas" are something that are culturally or emotionally "meaningful" to people. Mere "how-to" sorts of instructions are less worthy in this scenario.
Of course, it doesn't take much to see where this idea falls apart. Our entire technological world is based on such "how-to" ideas. And even more! What if banks tried to ban aritmetic as an intrusion on their intellectual property? To anyone who has a solid grounding in math, science, or engineering, the idea that logic is a lesser form of expression is absurd.
Unfortunately, movie and record producers, as well as lawyers, judges and politicians tend to come from a humanities background. While they (especially lawyers) may pay lip service to logic, their actual method is in the interpretation of old laws and cases, and in emotional appeals to juries and the public, not in the creation of functioning logical systems.
I've been using RH 7.1 on my workstation for several days now. I haven't delved deeply into it, but it seems decent so far. Paired with Ximian Gnome 1.4, it's a very nice desktop. I'll have to explore it a little further before I decide whether or not to put it on my server, but for now, the prospects are looking good. A definite improvement over 7.0.
It's a matter of context. You can say "I pricked my finger", but you can't say "I fingered my prick."
-J
Languages evolve. Languages are changed by the influence of other languages. So has it been, so shall it always be.
It seems to me that the real story of this election is the turnout. I had to wait in line for nearly two hours to vote, and there are similar stories from around the country. In my state (Georgia), voter turnout is expected to approach the all time record.
For years now, we've been told that American voters are apathetic. Turnouts have been approaching record lows, and the pundits have chalked this up to our being disenchanted with the process.
How then to explain what happened yesterday? If we're so disenchanted, why did we turn out in droves?
One might be tempted to credit the alternative candidated, Nader, Browne, Buchanan et. al. But in reality, these candidates weren't really a factor in the popular vote. Even Nader, despite a strong showing in some locations will probably not crack the 5 percent he was looking for. (Note: I'm not saying Nader wasn't a factor in the election - he probably had a pretty real effect on the electorial college numbers.)
The answer seems evident to me. What turns people off is not the process, or even lackluster candidates (and I don't think anyone but the most partisan would argue that Gush and Bore are two of the most lackluster candidates in recent memory), but a race that seems like a foregone conclusion.
After all, who can get enthused about voting if they've been told for weeks who's going to win? What drove the turnout in this election was the uncertainty.
In light of this, I think it would be a good thing, from a civic point of view, if the media stopped reporting poll numbers. I don't think this is ever going to happen, and I would be horrified at the thought of outlawing it or something, but it's obvious that lopsided poll results dampen voter turnout.
Anyway, my $0.02.
It doesn't really matter. What matters is that they were geeks in the perception of the people who run the schools (both the popular kids who "run" the schools, and the teachers and administrators), and that perception caused an even greater degree of ostricization and harassment because these people suddenly believed that, in addition to being weird and nerdy, geeks were dangerous.
No, the TCM weren't really picked on geeks, but they looked like geeks, and superficially anyway, they acted like geeks. They like FPS games, and long coats. They used the net. In a lot of minds, that's enough.
I was lucky. In my school, geeks were a large enough segment of the population that they didn't really get messed with. Still, there were rumors among the teachers and parents that D&D (fairly new and quite the rage at the time), was satanic, or evil or violent, or something. There was talk of banning it, but nothing along those lines ever happened.
It's easy enough for us to be discerning. For one thing, we're capable of it. For another, geeks are, by and large, interested in the facts. It's easy to forget that a fairly large segment of this society is neither.
According to the NIMH, about 15% of the general population suffers from depression or anxiety. If that's the case, then it seems like IT workers are above the curve.
I guess they ran out of Space Tinactin.
Yeah, and this kind of annoys me. I've really liked the Corel WPO products - especially on my laptop. Now, I feel like I won't be able to trust future releases. Is this irrational? Maybe, but I switched to Linux for a reason. Well, several reasons, but getting away from MS products was one of them.
So far, I haven't had any real problems with RH 7.0. I haven't put it on my server machine because I'm waiting for more info, but so far, so good.
You'd think they'd just want to get it over with instead of dragging out this period where they know everything they do is being scrutinized.
Any time you combine high stress levels with high income, you're going to find drug abuse. (Actually, the high income is incidental. It's just that we're only surprised when it's rich people doing the drugs.) Whether it's stimulants or just plain alcohol, people will medicate themselves to deal with the stress. This is not to say that everyone will do this, but at least some people will.
Okay. You first.
I wouldn't buy a book like that strictly for practical reasons. I don't like having to sit at my computer to read a book.
I do like the idea, as a lot of publishers are doing now, of putting the entire text of a book on a cd as a searchable PDF. It really makes it helpful if you're looking for something specific.
I used to work in an academic library. It was the same sort of thing - no email, and fairly strict rules about what you were not supposed to be looking at.
The thing about email is understandable. A lot of the students would come in and work on their email for a long time. They're not supposed to do this because the library computers are supposed to be for research.
As for the other stuff (porn, etc.), they had to do this for legal reasons. In my state, it is illegal for state-owned computer networks to be used to transmit obscene materials. Of course, this is impossible to enforce, but all it takes is for one student to complain about what's on the next student's monitor, and there can be hell to pay.
No librarian I know wants to be on the internet porn patrol, but when Princess tells her daddy, the Taxpayer(tm), that someone was looking at dirty pictures on the computer, someone's going to get a phone call.
The irony of the whole thing is that most of the students at this school can hack around the defenses in about 30 seconds.
Does this mean that there's a whole new spam opportunity emerging?
There are any number of folks out there who will be happy to burn you a CD of your favorite Linux distro upon request.
One thing I've been really disappointed with in GUI mailers is the lack of PGP/GPG support. Even Arrow, which seems to support it the best, only has an encrypt option, and not a sign option. Until someone manages better privacy support, I'm going to have to stick with Pine.
First came the churches, then came the schools,
then came the lawyers, then came the rules.
-J
A man after my own heart! Never pay for information you can suck off the web for free with a perl script.
-Joe
It seems to me, that the continual references throughout the patent to a "central computer" and "terminals" describes something vastly different from simple "hyperlinks". Unless they're prepared to try to enforce their patent on the entire idea of client/server architecture they're on pretty shaky ground here.
-J
I've been using Word Perfect Suite for Linux for some time now. Aside from some of the problems with window managers (transient windows tend to submerge themselves under Gnome/Sawfish), there doesn't seem to be any reason to choose MSOffice over WP. Certainly, there are some file format issues, but not huge ones. Personally, I don't see any reason why your average user couldn't handle a Corel Linux/WPO setup. Not only that, with Samba and WPO for Windows, there shouldn't be any problems with people who want to stick with Windows, too. (I know the goal is an MS free office, but there are often people who want to stick with what they know). Get the Windows people to use a neutral-type mail client (i.e. Eudora), and everything is cool and froody.
ipchains -A input -s doubleclick.com DENY