"only ~380Mb"!!! Heh, that makes it only 270 times bigger than my window manager, EvilWM. After 9 hours of running, with some 50 open windows (Firefox, Audacious, xterms etc.) on 8 virtual desktops, EvilWM's resident size is 1424 kilobytes. Top claims it uses 0.0 % of my CPU. How low can you go...
Strange. From what I have read of Xiph's attitudes (avoid patented methods at all costs and code around any you bump into), I can only see an SCO-like court case ahead. And if that happens, Xiph will get donations from me. Because I am an artist creating public domain works with free tools. So I dislike people who try to outlaw my tools. And obviously, publishing free art is simply impossible with the specter of licensing costs hanging above it. Yes, there is that "non-commercial" loophole. For now. Do I want my creativity to be at the mercy of a consortium?
The bodycount in those expendable countries (someone really should come and waterboard you every day for those words) will never be clear, since cause and effect are difficult to establish. 1.5 million Cambodians, as US policies in Vietnam allowed Pol Pot into power (the CIA actually funded and protected Pol Pot after his fall)? Decades of civil war in Angola using weapons supplied by the US and USSR? 200,000 communists massacred in Indonesia as CIA sponsored dictator takes over? Bloody repression in dozens of US client dictatorships all over the world? We could be talking about millions of dead. And there are still some hundred thousand American landmines in Angolan soil, so it's not over yet.
She shouts a warning to turn around, they don't heed it (maybe they don't speak English, doesn't matter why).
So the US army has been in Iraq for seven years now and still sees no need to learn addressing the locals in their native language? That is utterly barbarian (and stupid) in itself. Your grandfathers invading Germany, Italy and Japan did not just have fluent speakers in every troop, but nearly all of them came back with a smattering of the local language (which is how words like pajamas and honcho entered your language). Now, for some reason those invasions worked out a lot better than the ones in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, didn't they?
You might want to read up on the Algerian war of independence. The French army fought the insurgency with all the brutality needed to win. And they did win. The insurgency was crushed. But by that time their methods had antagonized the whole population of Algeria to such an extent that they rose up and drove every single Frenchman out of the country. Every time any American in Iraq does something that is patently wrong and unjust, he creates another enemy. Those children in the van had relatives who are right now unlikely to piss on any American if he's on fire. Can you win a war against an exponentially growing enemy? American leaders keep talking about hearts and minds, but they are not walking the walk. Until they do, this will be drag on and cause ever more deaths on all sides. Which, BTW, I'm not happy about. I rather like most Americans. Because you're funny.
I have a few game addicts in my friend list. Who try every bleeding game they come across. Still, today, after hitting literally hundreds of ignore buttons, my news feed is usually fluff free. Boy, do I feel stupid for not using the greasemonkey script to spare me all that work...
I wish someone would finally notice that the Flash player is a closed, commercial product, so the fact that its Linux version sucks hardly reflects on the quality of free software or its development model. Strangely enough, the only piece of software on my computer that truly sucks dump trucks through a straw is that Flash plug-in. It also happens to be the only bit of non-free software here...
Mind, by that logic the porn industry would be entitled to a much bigger share. I buy a hundred CDs a year, underground music, though, and I do not download non-free music. I would be pretty pissed off at a RIAA tax on my net connection - especially as none of the independent musicians I listen to would get a dime of that.
The NSA tapping American phones? I would feel really bad about that, if I did not just recall that I'm European and that the NSA requires no warrant or reason to invade my privacy. It was expressly created for that. Do not expect me to feel sympathy when a Chinese agency snoops on your communications. You never gave it a thought whether indiscriminate spying on 'them danged furriners', i.e. me, was ethically justified.
Unfortunately that is the first criterion by which I must judge an office suite. I see the occasional customer accidentally saving files as DOCX, but nobody has ever asked me whether I do OASIS documents, as well. So any word processor I use must first scale that mountainous mess of MS file formats to be at all useful to me.
Quite a few Fortune 15 companies have not been doing well recently and many of the decisions that have led them there have appeared deranged in hindsight, be it derivatives trading or persisting with the production of monstrous SUVs in times of skyrocketing oil prices. Thank you for the insight into how that might have come about.
The worst director's cut I have seen is Monty Python's Meaning of Life. It simply ruins much of the film. Avoid at all costs or you'll be left wondering why people are raving about the genius of the thing.
Spoiler: Crime #1: They've cut out the Crimson Insurance intro. Which makes the later attack of the pirates look about as meaningful and funny as a giant mechanical spider in a western movie...
A generation taught to read online will be very rarely exposed to the kind of polished prose that can teach you both style and clear thinking. Almost any book ever published has been first rewritten by its author once or a dozen times and then vetted by an editor for spelling, grammar, style, structure and contents. Just about everything on the net is first draft - this present post included. So it is not just the atrocious apostrophes, the equally asses, the complementary compliments and their brethren that will haunt them, but a flabby race-to-the-first-post argumentative style that has no patience for intellectual rigour. Mind, that goes for us old farts, too. Lately, I have been forcing myself off the computer and into the library to refresh my ear for language with past and present masters of the craft. Reading good literature - as opposed to paperback fantasy and such dross - is a revelation. You can see the time the author has lavished on the crafting of his/her sentences to make them both beautiful and persuasive carriers of argument. I wish there was a way of transferring this to the internet, but, although many blogging sites allow authors to tinker with their posts, it would be futile to go through several drafts, as there are no readers to dig into bygone articles to see how they are shaping up after five months of revisions...
I'm a Finnish translator. The differing approaches to sex denomination can cause quite a bit of pain when translating passages of stories with protagonists called just 'he' and 'she'. Usually, we end up using their names, if available, or clumsy constructions like "the woman says", "the man went". It is entirely possible to write whole novels in Finnish without giving away the protagonist's gender. It's been done, too. Yes, we have a few gender specific job descriptions, like the speaker of the parliament is the 'puhemies' - the 'speaker man' - which got somewhat awkward as soon as the first woman got the job and had to be referred to as Madam Speaker Man... So, no, sex is not automatically conveyed with anything in Finnish. And we do not address people by name in every other sentence, like Americans, either. Determining the sex of an online Finn can be tricky.:)
...this system should give pause to any suicidal leader who is willing to trade the annihilation of his country for the chance to wipe out at least one American city.
Ah, yes, the legendary suicidal leader who has power enough to prod his whole nation into annihilation without getting deposed. I really wish Americans wouldn't base foreign policy decisions on second rate fantasy novels. Mind, I grant you that dehumanizing the enemy/all foreigners has always been a standard war propaganda method among all human nations in history. You know, crap like Sting's
"I hope the Russians love their children, too."
Yes, the Soviet Russians loved their children and in turn told them horror stories about inhuman capitalists who were plotting to wipe out life on Earth...
Tss. You know, the thing people have about Godwining threads is that comparing Nazi institutions to modern ones trivialises a system that caused a world war and directly killed 6 million Jews, 250,000 Romany people, thousands of homosexuals, mental patients, mentally handicapped persons and opposition figures. While certain innovations of the Bush administration make its propaganda abroad about human rights and freedom look silly (various dictators have taken to quoting Bush phrases when justifying atrocities), comparing these is obscene. Yes, it does feel more comfortable to laugh at the Nazis, but our refusal to take this universal taint of the human character seriously has already led to unchecked massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, to name but a few. Oh, and the various aspects of Jim Crow caused a lot more death and suffering in America than any present measures. Israel exists today, because in 1945, the world's Jews had reason to believe that there was no nation on Earth where they could feel safe. Read some history and gain some perspective, okay?
The peculiar thing about this story is that you are talking about CryptoAG in present tense. Yet again we learn that having one's integrity utterly compromised means nothing in the business world! Why would anybody buy a cryptographic product that does not encrypt properly? "We did it because they had shiny brochures." "We bought CryptoAG because the Americans promised us that only they and the Germans would be reading our communications." Insane.
Oh well, I still use clear e-mail for all business. In a world where nobody trusts anybody nobody gets anything done.
Funny thing is that Islam has an even stronger moral code against killing innocents than Christianity, yet they are the ones which have the least problem with targeting purely civilian populations.
There are a billion Muslims on Earth. If even a significant portion of these had no problem targeting civilian populations, the planet would be drowning in blood. This century, a lot more civilians have died as collateral damage from the actions of NATO troops than from bombings by minority extremists who claim to be Muslims. Most of those NATO troops and their commanders profess the Christian faith, but somehow nobody blames your contemporary Christian leaders...
People like you were one reason I lost faith in Christianity: There is very little Christ in Christianity. You know, "love your neighbor", "turn the other cheek" and all those other beautiful ideas I associate with Jesus.
Someone probably felt that Chelyabinsk could use some positive publicity for a change, as they have so far only been known as the "Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet":
http://www.logtv.com/films/chelyabinsk/ ...which is why I'm graciously refraining from posting that link...now why do I suddenly get Boy George singing Karma Chameleon in my poor skull?
6. Apparently, the only Godzilla movie available on bluray is the unspeakable American version of 1998. In other words, all of the real movie buffs who look for classic, rare, offbeat, weird and vintage movies will stick with DVD for the foreseeable. I might own a bluray player ten years from now, which is what it'll take for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's works to come out on it. The latest Superspiderbat III is not a reasonable replacement.
Let me ask you this, how many CGI sequences did you notice in the Lord of the Rings?
Don't ask me. I'm watching Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla, in which men in rubber suits trample toy tanks and cardboard cities. Why? Well, the story is a lot funnier and I don't need to fill time waiting for something to happen by looking for CGI artefacts. I know, I know. Lord of the Rings was so much more believable because it had great CGI...
Dude, the reason you will actually understand the manual I'm translating is that Google just taught me the basics of chimney and roofing installation. The reason translated manuals used to be even worse gobbledigook than today is that very few companies had the resources to have a translator meet two specialized engineers, one for each language, and hammer out a vocabulary and its meanings. Net searches that are fast and both reasonably close and sufficiently fuzzy to bring me what I didn't know are rather better than dictionaries and wild guesses, which is what we used to work with.
Now, if Google or Cuil could actually link to the Archive.org page that has my music for free download instead of fake sites that just give its track names and advertising, I'd be a happy man...
On what grounds, exactly, do you purport to forbid users from choosing what software runs in their kernel? Last I checked, the concept of free choice was generally agnostic about the source of the software, only the user's desire to run it.
Car analogy time! On what grounds, exactly, do you purport to forbid users from choosing what fuel runs in their tanks? If a person wants to pump apple cider into his SUV's tank, it's his prerogative, right?
It sets a bad example and leads to degradation of software stability. To draw an over the top analogy, in most free societies, citizens are not allowed to sign away their personal freedom and become the slave of another person. That is not a law that merely safeguards the individual citizen. It preserves the general ambiance of freedom and keeps us off slippery slopes.
Yes, there is an argument to be made that people have a right to harm themselves, which is why our societies permit people to get addicted to substances that shorten their lifespans by decades and ruin their productivity. But each society's sense of self-preservation makes them shy away from making this an absolute value and allowing crack cocaine to be sold in grocery stores.
Proprietary software has been known to encourage malware writers, which clogs up my email account (gmail's spam filter produces false positives, so it's not a hands off operation) and the world's data connections. One might ask at what point the runing of unverifiable, closed source software becomes too much of a burden on your fellow netizens.
Slashdot Mirror
"only ~380Mb"!!!
Heh, that makes it only 270 times bigger than my window manager, EvilWM. After 9 hours of running, with some 50 open windows (Firefox, Audacious, xterms etc.) on 8 virtual desktops, EvilWM's resident size is 1424 kilobytes. Top claims it uses 0.0 % of my CPU.
How low can you go...
Strange. From what I have read of Xiph's attitudes (avoid patented methods at all costs and code around any you bump into), I can only see an SCO-like court case ahead. And if that happens, Xiph will get donations from me. Because I am an artist creating public domain works with free tools. So I dislike people who try to outlaw my tools. And obviously, publishing free art is simply impossible with the specter of licensing costs hanging above it. Yes, there is that "non-commercial" loophole. For now. Do I want my creativity to be at the mercy of a consortium?
The bodycount in those expendable countries (someone really should come and waterboard you every day for those words) will never be clear, since cause and effect are difficult to establish. 1.5 million Cambodians, as US policies in Vietnam allowed Pol Pot into power (the CIA actually funded and protected Pol Pot after his fall)? Decades of civil war in Angola using weapons supplied by the US and USSR? 200,000 communists massacred in Indonesia as CIA sponsored dictator takes over? Bloody repression in dozens of US client dictatorships all over the world? We could be talking about millions of dead. And there are still some hundred thousand American landmines in Angolan soil, so it's not over yet.
She shouts a warning to turn around, they don't heed it (maybe they don't speak English, doesn't matter why).
So the US army has been in Iraq for seven years now and still sees no need to learn addressing the locals in their native language? That is utterly barbarian (and stupid) in itself. Your grandfathers invading Germany, Italy and Japan did not just have fluent speakers in every troop, but nearly all of them came back with a smattering of the local language (which is how words like pajamas and honcho entered your language). Now, for some reason those invasions worked out a lot better than the ones in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, didn't they?
You might want to read up on the Algerian war of independence. The French army fought the insurgency with all the brutality needed to win. And they did win. The insurgency was crushed. But by that time their methods had antagonized the whole population of Algeria to such an extent that they rose up and drove every single Frenchman out of the country.
Every time any American in Iraq does something that is patently wrong and unjust, he creates another enemy. Those children in the van had relatives who are right now unlikely to piss on any American if he's on fire. Can you win a war against an exponentially growing enemy?
American leaders keep talking about hearts and minds, but they are not walking the walk. Until they do, this will be drag on and cause ever more deaths on all sides. Which, BTW, I'm not happy about. I rather like most Americans. Because you're funny.
I have a few game addicts in my friend list. Who try every bleeding game they come across. Still, today, after hitting literally hundreds of ignore buttons, my news feed is usually fluff free. Boy, do I feel stupid for not using the greasemonkey script to spare me all that work...
I wish someone would finally notice that the Flash player is a closed, commercial product, so the fact that its Linux version sucks hardly reflects on the quality of free software or its development model. Strangely enough, the only piece of software on my computer that truly sucks dump trucks through a straw is that Flash plug-in. It also happens to be the only bit of non-free software here...
Mind, by that logic the porn industry would be entitled to a much bigger share. I buy a hundred CDs a year, underground music, though, and I do not download non-free music. I would be pretty pissed off at a RIAA tax on my net connection - especially as none of the independent musicians I listen to would get a dime of that.
The NSA tapping American phones? I would feel really bad about that, if I did not just recall that I'm European and that the NSA requires no warrant or reason to invade my privacy. It was expressly created for that. Do not expect me to feel sympathy when a Chinese agency snoops on your communications. You never gave it a thought whether indiscriminate spying on 'them danged furriners', i.e. me, was ethically justified.
I would like to point out that I'm male.
And thanks for the mention. First time anyone has considered me an authoritative source for anything.
Yours truly,
Rene "random ranting blogger" Kita
Unfortunately that is the first criterion by which I must judge an office suite. I see the occasional customer accidentally saving files as DOCX, but nobody has ever asked me whether I do OASIS documents, as well. So any word processor I use must first scale that mountainous mess of MS file formats to be at all useful to me.
Quite a few Fortune 15 companies have not been doing well recently and many of the decisions that have led them there have appeared deranged in hindsight, be it derivatives trading or persisting with the production of monstrous SUVs in times of skyrocketing oil prices. Thank you for the insight into how that might have come about.
The worst director's cut I have seen is Monty Python's Meaning of Life. It simply ruins much of the film. Avoid at all costs or you'll be left wondering why people are raving about the genius of the thing.
Spoiler:
Crime #1: They've cut out the Crimson Insurance intro. Which makes the later attack of the pirates look about as meaningful and funny as a giant mechanical spider in a western movie...
A generation taught to read online will be very rarely exposed to the kind of polished prose that can teach you both style and clear thinking. Almost any book ever published has been first rewritten by its author once or a dozen times and then vetted by an editor for spelling, grammar, style, structure and contents. Just about everything on the net is first draft - this present post included.
So it is not just the atrocious apostrophes, the equally asses, the complementary compliments and their brethren that will haunt them, but a flabby race-to-the-first-post argumentative style that has no patience for intellectual rigour.
Mind, that goes for us old farts, too. Lately, I have been forcing myself off the computer and into the library to refresh my ear for language with past and present masters of the craft. Reading good literature - as opposed to paperback fantasy and such dross - is a revelation. You can see the time the author has lavished on the crafting of his/her sentences to make them both beautiful and persuasive carriers of argument.
I wish there was a way of transferring this to the internet, but, although many blogging sites allow authors to tinker with their posts, it would be futile to go through several drafts, as there are no readers to dig into bygone articles to see how they are shaping up after five months of revisions...
I'm a Finnish translator. The differing approaches to sex denomination can cause quite a bit of pain when translating passages of stories with protagonists called just 'he' and 'she'. Usually, we end up using their names, if available, or clumsy constructions like "the woman says", "the man went". It is entirely possible to write whole novels in Finnish without giving away the protagonist's gender. It's been done, too. Yes, we have a few gender specific job descriptions, like the speaker of the parliament is the 'puhemies' - the 'speaker man' - which got somewhat awkward as soon as the first woman got the job and had to be referred to as Madam Speaker Man... :)
So, no, sex is not automatically conveyed with anything in Finnish. And we do not address people by name in every other sentence, like Americans, either. Determining the sex of an online Finn can be tricky.
Ah, yes, the legendary suicidal leader who has power enough to prod his whole nation into annihilation without getting deposed. I really wish Americans wouldn't base foreign policy decisions on second rate fantasy novels. Mind, I grant you that dehumanizing the enemy/all foreigners has always been a standard war propaganda method among all human nations in history. You know, crap like Sting's
"I hope the Russians love their children, too."
Yes, the Soviet Russians loved their children and in turn told them horror stories about inhuman capitalists who were plotting to wipe out life on Earth...
Tss. You know, the thing people have about Godwining threads is that comparing Nazi institutions to modern ones trivialises a system that caused a world war and directly killed 6 million Jews, 250,000 Romany people, thousands of homosexuals, mental patients, mentally handicapped persons and opposition figures. While certain innovations of the Bush administration make its propaganda abroad about human rights and freedom look silly (various dictators have taken to quoting Bush phrases when justifying atrocities), comparing these is obscene.
Yes, it does feel more comfortable to laugh at the Nazis, but our refusal to take this universal taint of the human character seriously has already led to unchecked massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, to name but a few.
Oh, and the various aspects of Jim Crow caused a lot more death and suffering in America than any present measures. Israel exists today, because in 1945, the world's Jews had reason to believe that there was no nation on Earth where they could feel safe.
Read some history and gain some perspective, okay?
The peculiar thing about this story is that you are talking about CryptoAG in present tense. Yet again we learn that having one's integrity utterly compromised means nothing in the business world! Why would anybody buy a cryptographic product that does not encrypt properly? "We did it because they had shiny brochures." "We bought CryptoAG because the Americans promised us that only they and the Germans would be reading our communications." Insane.
Oh well, I still use clear e-mail for all business. In a world where nobody trusts anybody nobody gets anything done.
'Religious freak' said:
Funny thing is that Islam has an even stronger moral code against killing innocents than Christianity, yet they are the ones which have the least problem with targeting purely civilian populations.
There are a billion Muslims on Earth. If even a significant portion of these had no problem targeting civilian populations, the planet would be drowning in blood. This century, a lot more civilians have died as collateral damage from the actions of NATO troops than from bombings by minority extremists who claim to be Muslims. Most of those NATO troops and their commanders profess the Christian faith, but somehow nobody blames your contemporary Christian leaders...
People like you were one reason I lost faith in Christianity: There is very little Christ in Christianity. You know, "love your neighbor", "turn the other cheek" and all those other beautiful ideas I associate with Jesus.
Someone probably felt that Chelyabinsk could use some positive publicity for a change, as they have so far only been known as the "Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet": http://www.logtv.com/films/chelyabinsk/
...which is why I'm graciously refraining from posting that link...now why do I suddenly get Boy George singing Karma Chameleon in my poor skull?
You forgot
6. Apparently, the only Godzilla movie available on bluray is the unspeakable American version of 1998. In other words, all of the real movie buffs who look for classic, rare, offbeat, weird and vintage movies will stick with DVD for the foreseeable. I might own a bluray player ten years from now, which is what it'll take for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's works to come out on it. The latest Superspiderbat III is not a reasonable replacement.
Let me ask you this, how many CGI sequences did you notice in the Lord of the Rings?
Don't ask me. I'm watching Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla, in which men in rubber suits trample toy tanks and cardboard cities.
Why? Well, the story is a lot funnier and I don't need to fill time waiting for something to happen by looking for CGI artefacts.
I know, I know. Lord of the Rings was so much more believable because it had great CGI...
Apparently it takes quite a bit of time and effort to create a flash app that doesn't crash on Linux, since I haven't seen one yet...
Dude, the reason you will actually understand the manual I'm translating is that Google just taught me the basics of chimney and roofing installation. The reason translated manuals used to be even worse gobbledigook than today is that very few companies had the resources to have a translator meet two specialized engineers, one for each language, and hammer out a vocabulary and its meanings. Net searches that are fast and both reasonably close and sufficiently fuzzy to bring me what I didn't know are rather better than dictionaries and wild guesses, which is what we used to work with.
Now, if Google or Cuil could actually link to the Archive.org page that has my music for free download instead of fake sites that just give its track names and advertising, I'd be a happy man...
On what grounds, exactly, do you purport to forbid users from choosing what software runs in their kernel? Last I checked, the concept of free choice was generally agnostic about the source of the software, only the user's desire to run it.
Car analogy time! On what grounds, exactly, do you purport to forbid users from choosing what fuel runs in their tanks? If a person wants to pump apple cider into his SUV's tank, it's his prerogative, right?
It sets a bad example and leads to degradation of software stability. To draw an over the top analogy, in most free societies, citizens are not allowed to sign away their personal freedom and become the slave of another person. That is not a law that merely safeguards the individual citizen. It preserves the general ambiance of freedom and keeps us off slippery slopes.
Yes, there is an argument to be made that people have a right to harm themselves, which is why our societies permit people to get addicted to substances that shorten their lifespans by decades and ruin their productivity. But each society's sense of self-preservation makes them shy away from making this an absolute value and allowing crack cocaine to be sold in grocery stores.
Proprietary software has been known to encourage malware writers, which clogs up my email account (gmail's spam filter produces false positives, so it's not a hands off operation) and the world's data connections. One might ask at what point the runing of unverifiable, closed source software becomes too much of a burden on your fellow netizens.