So then... Say Slashdot user A posts name/address/SSN/photo/etc of some poor schmuck on Slashdot, including a false accusation that that person is a child molestor and calls on the Slashdot audience to visit retribution on his head. This is pointed out to the editors. By your reasoning, it would be WRONG of them to delete the post.
There is no difference between this hypothetical situation and the one discussed in the article. One party has posted false accusations and a call for retribution on an information medium owned by another party. The second party has decided to delete this content. This saves them money by not tying up their call center (the costs of which would have to be passed to customers) and prevents emotional stress and consternation of their customer base.
Censorship is still censorship. I don't support the KKK, but I respect their right to say what they want openly without being told what they can and cannot say.
Ahh but there is where you become lost, grasshopper. For the only 'right' regarding speech is freedom from Government censorship. A corporation is entirely within its rights to control what is broadcast over its own satellite. Much as a sysadmin can delete forum posts he or she does not want to host.
Repeat the mantra again, young one... "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech."
Yeah, that "bug" is generally referred to as a 'Wife'. Keeps happening to more and more people, strangely enough... Nothing a sledgehammer and a pit full of lye won't fix.
My old roommate worked in an air force communications center in Asia. They had similar 'base-overrun' practices. It consisted of opening a safe and each person taking a pack of cards. Each card had step-by-step instructions they would follow.
I'll leave the definition of 'BFH' up to you. My roomie actually got to use the BFH once when they found that a classified menu screen had been burned into one of their monitors because it hadn't been turned off in a couple of years... Other than that, they would do dry-runs of the destruction procedures: Doing everything but smashing the actual components.
Of course the funny/scary part is the security officers had base overrun procedures, too. The last step of which was to shoot everyone in the Comm Center. It wasn't common knowledge and they never got to do practice runs.:P
The bright side is in a vacuum you can't hear them screaming. Plus they won't be there to bug me while I'm pushing the detonator's plunger, since they won't have rockets to get to the moon.
I can't wait until people are upset that we're screwing up Mars by terraforming it.
As someone else pointed out, shipping ores to the Moon isn't all that dangerous. Heck, most every big Interplanetary probe you've heard of in the past forty years has had moderate amounts of plutonium on board. The Moon *will* have Uranium in similar abundances as the Earth, and it also has vast amounts of He-3 that is an excellent fuel for fusion reactors. I really don't think it would be all that mind-bogglingly expensive to mine and process the stuff. Strip-mining the Moon won't be nearly as unpopular as doing so here on Earth. ^_-
Except that their competitors make such bonehead choices when it comes to hardware. Witness: The horrifying N64-on-steroids PS2, the chopped down PC that limits you to coding in DirectX X-Box... er, well, don't have anything bad to say about the Dreamcast other than too-little, too-early...
Look at the released specs on the next X-Box, it's essentially GameCube V1.5 hardware wise... While Sony is off creating some new Real Ultimate Power CPU that you'll probably have to program in Sanskrit...
Erm actually the storyline fits very well... At the end of A Link to the Past/Link's Awakening Link has left Hyrule to travel the sea... where he settled down on an Island and eventually raised a family... Of which Link in Wind Waker is a descendant... And who is also the ancestor of the Link in the original Legend of Zelda (who comes to a destroyed Hyrule from a far away Island). So it ties in actually kind of nicely. But yeah, enemies in general just weren't that tough... But then again, it wasn't a Miyamoto game for the most part.
I never claimed any different. The FSF doesn't care if you can see the code, they only care about the license that code is under. Look at their disapproval of XFree and Apache, for example. OSS zealots aren't the ones upset about Sun for the most part, it's Free Software zealots that are.;) Though as someone else pointed out, there's already work on the Free Software front to implement a GPL-compatible Java, so I doubt that many are really peeved at Sun.
Do you honestly think RMS would write something better than ESR on this matter? ESR just pointed out Java would get wide acceptance as an open source standard much like NFS where other Sun innovations have failed for being closed and proprietary. RMS would just point out how evil and wicked Sun is for distributing binaries without the source and not GPL'ing all their code. I can't read Mr. Phipps' response currently, but I think he's the one out of touch on this issue after reading the well written and argued (along with politely worded) letter from ESR.
Of course the UN never has problems with beaurocracy or political expediancy overriding logic or good sense or even ethics and morals when deciding what to do. They never have problems respondingly quickly and adequately to problems that pop up. The UN always acts in the best interest of humanity. And, as we all know, pigs can fly. So armed with these facts, your idea will be the greatest boon to space exploration our planet has ever seen....
Competition is what drove the space industry to great heights. Lack of competition is what's caused it to stagnate. In every case that there's been an attempt at cooperation, it's been lackluster or outright failed. And the idea that you'd want to put a bunch of people that decided it would be neat for Libya to head the Human Rights Commission to be in charge of space exploration makes me question how in touch with reality you are.
7.) They actually use numbered-lists, complete with entire paragraphs, to outlay their points. This is an assurance they will never get laid!
C'mon mods, it's a joke, mod it funny... Nice joke/troll btw. Good way of playing on stereotypes. Most of what you say rings slightly true in one way or another... Just enough to get people riled up until they read the last line. *clap*clap*
Sitting at a coworker's PC trying to figure out what was wrong with it for her, had an installer popup out of nowhere when no web browser was open offering to install a Spyware removal tool for me. One Ad-Aware update and scan later and her system was behaving fine. Don't remember the name of the program... May of been SpyBan... Funnily enough as this article popped up I was on the phone w/ another coworker who had installed SpyHunter on a suggestion from an office mate... Problem was it started giving weird errors and she claims it kept reinstalling itself when she's remove it from Add/Remove Programs. She deleted the folder it belonged in and that seems to have eliminated it finally, but I had to clear a registry entry on her PC for her that was trying to start it... Funny thing was whatever genius wrote the software didn't enclose the path to the program in quotes, so it was trying to run C:\Program... That's really the kinda programmer I want mucking about deleting 'Spyware' off my PC. Thank God for Lavasoft...
Actually the SNES's CPU had an emulation mode that let it run like a 6502 (the old NES CPU)... There were adapters for the SNES to let you play NES games as well as adapters for every Nintendo console since the SNES to let you play Gameboy games. The GBA is also backwards compatible. The point was with console systems, Nintendo always wanted a low launch price (witness the Gamecube's sub $200 launch) and putting in hardware to play the old system's games was a really unnecessary expense. Only the advent of non-cartridge based games made it feasible (Since a DVD-ROM system could easily read CD-ROM titles) but it still costs extra. Nintendo just lucked out on finding a way to make the Gameboy cartridge pinout last a long time. Plus the Z80 and monochrome sprite hardware is pretty easy to emulate. PC based emulators still have trouble with some of the odder NES/SNES hardware bits...
If a business is open to the general public, then, by definition, it exists to serve the community.
By who's definition!? We can keep going in circles here forever: A business exists to make money. If they choose to serve the public in their pursuit of money, that's their choice. NO private company by law exists to serve the community. The Government exists to serve the community. No matter how hard you try, your belief does not make true the idea that businesses owe you something.
Take Walmart for example.
But you kept fussing at others for using Big Businesses as an example and telling them to look at Mom & Pops... Make up your mind... Even Wal Mart can have problems. Look at K-Mart, they used to be the largest retailer in the US and now they're struggling out of bankruptcy. Yes Wal Mart will not miss a few individual customers, but if customers begin migrating to what they feel is a better store they can fall like a house of cards as well.
They probably do, but they have no corporate responsibility to do so: they don't have to answer to shareholders, trustees, or a board of directors. They can do it just for fun if they please.
But even in the case of 'doing it for fun', there is no implied debt to the community. A business is there to do whatever they want (within the law), not serve the community. Businesses live or die based on their patronage, so it is in their best interest to please their customers. A Government, however, takes its revenues by force and therefore is required by law to act to the benefit of its community, since they'll get our money whether or not we're pleased with them.
If you're discriminated against at a business, the easier option is to go elsewhere. It takes the right kind of person to fight back.
That *IS* fighting back. Taking your money elsewhere helps their competition and hurts them. That's the most effective way to fight a business you disagree with: vote with your dollars. This is the truth whether it's a Mom & Pop shop or a Multinational Corporation. Neither survives without customers, and if anything the Mom & Pop is harder hit by customers going elsewhere.
I don't know where you get your ideas that a business owes you something due to its very existance but the thought that someone like you may be in a position of power to affect my own business someday in the future is scary.
My business owes the community nothing. They should be happy that I pay my taxes.
I've had just about the exact opposite experience... Well, except for Dell. Their laptops are just awful for the price. We had one die recently and it took about two days of us trying to repair it followed by two tech visits and mailing it back to the manufacturer for it to start working again. Meanwhile we loaned the guy who it belonged to one of our presentation Thinkpads... He's repeatedly begged to keep the Thinkpad instead of his Latitude. In our case, we can't kill the Thinkpads in service with us. They're solid sturdy functional little machines. They're also fast, as well. Toshiba I probably haven't given a fair shake, as the police department got a bunch of refurb Toshibas and they were some of the worst trash I've ever dealt with. I saw in another post you said the Thinkpads you had problems with were used mainly by professors... What sort of problems did you experience? I begin to wonder if it was PEBKAC...
While the 300m to 300 conversion was obviously an editor error... What about the first article claiming that since the galaxies were 10.8 million light years away we were seeing them as they were 10.8 billion years ago.
That's like saying "since you moved 100 metres in the last hour we'll conclude you're moving at the rate of 100 kilometers an hour". Is this an editing snafu on their part or am I missing something?
The problem here is that ICANN has no real authority either. People only listen to them because it's more convenient to listen to them and agree on a standard than it is to go with some other system. IANA still controls IP addresses, and they only did that at the whim of the RIRs, so your argument is invalid.
Abiding by decisions made by ICANN (Or IETF or IEEE for that matter) is completely voluntary. But then again, so is being connected to the Internet in the first place. The Internet has always worked on the system of "We'll all get together and agree on a standard. If you don't like the standard, convince others that your idea is better. If you don't agree, we don't have to route your packets." And it should remain that way. Does that mean people in the nations that worked on making the Internet what it is today get more say than nations being hooked up currently do? Of course! But then again, with nigh on forty years of experience in making this thing work, they should!
Except that chunks of the Internet are owned by both bitter rivals and by public organizations (Government, Universities, etc). I don't see UU.NET merging with MIT for instance. Or ALTER.NET with DARPA, for that matter.
But ICANN doesn't have control of handing out IP addresses and anyone can decide to use a competing DNS system other than ICANN's root servers if they find ICANN intolerable. IANA controls the IP addresses and they only do that via the good graces of the RIRs trusting them, and the RIRs only work because ISPs voluntarily listen to their allocation rules, etc... People voluntarily listen to ICANN (and ICANN's the first to admit they can't really enforce anything) because listening to them is only slightly less annoying than convincing everyone to switch to the new system. Should ICANN step completely out of line, they will be ignored as the Internet continues on without them.
Slashdot Mirror
So then... Say Slashdot user A posts name/address/SSN/photo/etc of some poor schmuck on Slashdot, including a false accusation that that person is a child molestor and calls on the Slashdot audience to visit retribution on his head. This is pointed out to the editors. By your reasoning, it would be WRONG of them to delete the post.
There is no difference between this hypothetical situation and the one discussed in the article. One party has posted false accusations and a call for retribution on an information medium owned by another party. The second party has decided to delete this content. This saves them money by not tying up their call center (the costs of which would have to be passed to customers) and prevents emotional stress and consternation of their customer base.
Censorship is still censorship. I don't support the KKK, but I respect their right to say what they want openly without being told what they can and cannot say.
Ahh but there is where you become lost, grasshopper. For the only 'right' regarding speech is freedom from Government censorship. A corporation is entirely within its rights to control what is broadcast over its own satellite. Much as a sysadmin can delete forum posts he or she does not want to host.
Repeat the mantra again, young one...
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech."
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech."
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech."
QVC and shopping type channels
Yeah, that "bug" is generally referred to as a 'Wife'. Keeps happening to more and more people, strangely enough... Nothing a sledgehammer and a pit full of lye won't fix.
Arrrgghhh my karma is burning!
My old roommate worked in an air force communications center in Asia. They had similar 'base-overrun' practices. It consisted of opening a safe and each person taking a pack of cards. Each card had step-by-step instructions they would follow.
:P
1. Open Panel C-2
2. Pull circuit board 4
3. Acquire BFH
4. Smash board.
I'll leave the definition of 'BFH' up to you. My roomie actually got to use the BFH once when they found that a classified menu screen had been burned into one of their monitors because it hadn't been turned off in a couple of years... Other than that, they would do dry-runs of the destruction procedures: Doing everything but smashing the actual components.
Of course the funny/scary part is the security officers had base overrun procedures, too. The last step of which was to shoot everyone in the Comm Center. It wasn't common knowledge and they never got to do practice runs.
The bright side is in a vacuum you can't hear them screaming. Plus they won't be there to bug me while I'm pushing the detonator's plunger, since they won't have rockets to get to the moon.
I can't wait until people are upset that we're screwing up Mars by terraforming it.
As someone else pointed out, shipping ores to the Moon isn't all that dangerous. Heck, most every big Interplanetary probe you've heard of in the past forty years has had moderate amounts of plutonium on board. The Moon *will* have Uranium in similar abundances as the Earth, and it also has vast amounts of He-3 that is an excellent fuel for fusion reactors.
I really don't think it would be all that mind-bogglingly expensive to mine and process the stuff. Strip-mining the Moon won't be nearly as unpopular as doing so here on Earth. ^_-
Except that their competitors make such bonehead choices when it comes to hardware. Witness: The horrifying N64-on-steroids PS2, the chopped down PC that limits you to coding in DirectX X-Box... er, well, don't have anything bad to say about the Dreamcast other than too-little, too-early...
Look at the released specs on the next X-Box, it's essentially GameCube V1.5 hardware wise... While Sony is off creating some new Real Ultimate Power CPU that you'll probably have to program in Sanskrit...
Erm actually the storyline fits very well... At the end of A Link to the Past/Link's Awakening Link has left Hyrule to travel the sea... where he settled down on an Island and eventually raised a family... Of which Link in Wind Waker is a descendant... And who is also the ancestor of the Link in the original Legend of Zelda (who comes to a destroyed Hyrule from a far away Island). So it ties in actually kind of nicely.
But yeah, enemies in general just weren't that tough... But then again, it wasn't a Miyamoto game for the most part.
I love how every time I talk about RMS I get a Flamebait ranking. :)
I never claimed any different. The FSF doesn't care if you can see the code, they only care about the license that code is under. Look at their disapproval of XFree and Apache, for example. OSS zealots aren't the ones upset about Sun for the most part, it's Free Software zealots that are. ;) Though as someone else pointed out, there's already work on the Free Software front to implement a GPL-compatible Java, so I doubt that many are really peeved at Sun.
Of course the funny thing is that years ago when I complained about Sun's compiler on Slashdot I got told I was an idiot. :P
Do you honestly think RMS would write something better than ESR on this matter? ESR just pointed out Java would get wide acceptance as an open source standard much like NFS where other Sun innovations have failed for being closed and proprietary. RMS would just point out how evil and wicked Sun is for distributing binaries without the source and not GPL'ing all their code.
I can't read Mr. Phipps' response currently, but I think he's the one out of touch on this issue after reading the well written and argued (along with politely worded) letter from ESR.
Bottom line: The Free Software community hates Sun like it hates all other developers who keep their code closed. So if you're expecting a Sun Love-In from RMS, you'll be waiting a long time.
Of course the UN never has problems with beaurocracy or political expediancy overriding logic or good sense or even ethics and morals when deciding what to do. They never have problems respondingly quickly and adequately to problems that pop up. The UN always acts in the best interest of humanity. And, as we all know, pigs can fly. So armed with these facts, your idea will be the greatest boon to space exploration our planet has ever seen. ...
Competition is what drove the space industry to great heights. Lack of competition is what's caused it to stagnate. In every case that there's been an attempt at cooperation, it's been lackluster or outright failed. And the idea that you'd want to put a bunch of people that decided it would be neat for Libya to head the Human Rights Commission to be in charge of space exploration makes me question how in touch with reality you are.
7.) They actually use numbered-lists, complete with entire paragraphs, to outlay their points. This is an assurance they will never get laid!
C'mon mods, it's a joke, mod it funny... Nice joke/troll btw. Good way of playing on stereotypes. Most of what you say rings slightly true in one way or another... Just enough to get people riled up until they read the last line. *clap*clap*
Sitting at a coworker's PC trying to figure out what was wrong with it for her, had an installer popup out of nowhere when no web browser was open offering to install a Spyware removal tool for me. One Ad-Aware update and scan later and her system was behaving fine. Don't remember the name of the program... May of been SpyBan...
Funnily enough as this article popped up I was on the phone w/ another coworker who had installed SpyHunter on a suggestion from an office mate... Problem was it started giving weird errors and she claims it kept reinstalling itself when she's remove it from Add/Remove Programs. She deleted the folder it belonged in and that seems to have eliminated it finally, but I had to clear a registry entry on her PC for her that was trying to start it...
Funny thing was whatever genius wrote the software didn't enclose the path to the program in quotes, so it was trying to run C:\Program... That's really the kinda programmer I want mucking about deleting 'Spyware' off my PC.
Thank God for Lavasoft...
No, that's generally a Nintendo marketing deal.
Actually the SNES's CPU had an emulation mode that let it run like a 6502 (the old NES CPU)... There were adapters for the SNES to let you play NES games as well as adapters for every Nintendo console since the SNES to let you play Gameboy games. The GBA is also backwards compatible. The point was with console systems, Nintendo always wanted a low launch price (witness the Gamecube's sub $200 launch) and putting in hardware to play the old system's games was a really unnecessary expense. Only the advent of non-cartridge based games made it feasible (Since a DVD-ROM system could easily read CD-ROM titles) but it still costs extra.
Nintendo just lucked out on finding a way to make the Gameboy cartridge pinout last a long time. Plus the Z80 and monochrome sprite hardware is pretty easy to emulate. PC based emulators still have trouble with some of the odder NES/SNES hardware bits...
K-mart died because people took their money elsewhere. The reason it was taken elsewhere is inconsequential.
If a business is open to the general public, then, by definition, it exists to serve the community.
By who's definition!? We can keep going in circles here forever: A business exists to make money. If they choose to serve the public in their pursuit of money, that's their choice. NO private company by law exists to serve the community. The Government exists to serve the community. No matter how hard you try, your belief does not make true the idea that businesses owe you something.
Take Walmart for example.
But you kept fussing at others for using Big Businesses as an example and telling them to look at Mom & Pops... Make up your mind... Even Wal Mart can have problems. Look at K-Mart, they used to be the largest retailer in the US and now they're struggling out of bankruptcy. Yes Wal Mart will not miss a few individual customers, but if customers begin migrating to what they feel is a better store they can fall like a house of cards as well.
They probably do, but they have no corporate responsibility to do so: they don't have to answer to shareholders, trustees, or a board of directors. They can do it just for fun if they please.
But even in the case of 'doing it for fun', there is no implied debt to the community. A business is there to do whatever they want (within the law), not serve the community. Businesses live or die based on their patronage, so it is in their best interest to please their customers. A Government, however, takes its revenues by force and therefore is required by law to act to the benefit of its community, since they'll get our money whether or not we're pleased with them.
If you're discriminated against at a business, the easier option is to go elsewhere. It takes the right kind of person to fight back.
That *IS* fighting back. Taking your money elsewhere helps their competition and hurts them. That's the most effective way to fight a business you disagree with: vote with your dollars. This is the truth whether it's a Mom & Pop shop or a Multinational Corporation. Neither survives without customers, and if anything the Mom & Pop is harder hit by customers going elsewhere.
I don't know where you get your ideas that a business owes you something due to its very existance but the thought that someone like you may be in a position of power to affect my own business someday in the future is scary.
My business owes the community nothing. They should be happy that I pay my taxes.
Well you know, if you really don't want the book, there's plenty of us poor college student programmers who'd be happy to take it off your hands...
I've had just about the exact opposite experience... Well, except for Dell. Their laptops are just awful for the price. We had one die recently and it took about two days of us trying to repair it followed by two tech visits and mailing it back to the manufacturer for it to start working again. Meanwhile we loaned the guy who it belonged to one of our presentation Thinkpads... He's repeatedly begged to keep the Thinkpad instead of his Latitude.
In our case, we can't kill the Thinkpads in service with us. They're solid sturdy functional little machines. They're also fast, as well.
Toshiba I probably haven't given a fair shake, as the police department got a bunch of refurb Toshibas and they were some of the worst trash I've ever dealt with. I saw in another post you said the Thinkpads you had problems with were used mainly by professors... What sort of problems did you experience? I begin to wonder if it was PEBKAC...
While the 300m to 300 conversion was obviously an editor error... What about the first article claiming that since the galaxies were 10.8 million light years away we were seeing them as they were 10.8 billion years ago.
That's like saying "since you moved 100 metres in the last hour we'll conclude you're moving at the rate of 100 kilometers an hour". Is this an editing snafu on their part or am I missing something?
The problem here is that ICANN has no real authority either. People only listen to them because it's more convenient to listen to them and agree on a standard than it is to go with some other system. IANA still controls IP addresses, and they only did that at the whim of the RIRs, so your argument is invalid.
Abiding by decisions made by ICANN (Or IETF or IEEE for that matter) is completely voluntary. But then again, so is being connected to the Internet in the first place. The Internet has always worked on the system of "We'll all get together and agree on a standard. If you don't like the standard, convince others that your idea is better. If you don't agree, we don't have to route your packets." And it should remain that way. Does that mean people in the nations that worked on making the Internet what it is today get more say than nations being hooked up currently do? Of course! But then again, with nigh on forty years of experience in making this thing work, they should!
Except that chunks of the Internet are owned by both bitter rivals and by public organizations (Government, Universities, etc). I don't see UU.NET merging with MIT for instance. Or ALTER.NET with DARPA, for that matter.
But ICANN doesn't have control of handing out IP addresses and anyone can decide to use a competing DNS system other than ICANN's root servers if they find ICANN intolerable. IANA controls the IP addresses and they only do that via the good graces of the RIRs trusting them, and the RIRs only work because ISPs voluntarily listen to their allocation rules, etc... People voluntarily listen to ICANN (and ICANN's the first to admit they can't really enforce anything) because listening to them is only slightly less annoying than convincing everyone to switch to the new system. Should ICANN step completely out of line, they will be ignored as the Internet continues on without them.