Just listened on the phone to my mother upgrading to Service Pack 4 on some Windows box. She sounded worried. Apparently, every now and then an upgrade will mess up the system enough to require a reinstallation of everything. Now, I have been *asking* for that sort of behavior by using a free OS called Debian *Unstable*, obviously, but apart from minor niggles, it refuses to serve me with the adrenaline rush of unspeakable disaster I enjoyed in my Windows using days.
The time needed to record an album depends a lot on the style of music you make. It takes me an hour to make ten seconds of electronic music. (If you must, search for Rene Kita on Archive.org.)
Time spent by Derek Bailey, the great master of free improvisation, in recording a one hour record: One hour and one minute, if you count setting up and turning the recorder on and off.
Faithful.doc import/export is the main thing I need as a translator. I get Word files and replace their contents with Finnish, English or German text. Happily, MS Word has been known to mangle documents, too, so I haven't yet been penalized for not paying the Microsoft tax: In the occasional cases when a document has its formatting messed up, the customers apparently just sigh and readjust, thinking that the translator doesn't know how to use Word properly.
You see, that's the great thing about most Microsoft's users: They have built in fault tolerance.
"It's purely defensive, to shoot down enemy spy satellites or the hypothetical "star wars" satellites Reagan was so fond of pushing. Personally, I think we should be investing more into weapons of this sort. Perhaps a laser like this could be used against ICBMs."
Um, excuse me, but that is exactly what the Star Wars program was and still is about: shooting down ICBM's in flight. Unfortunately, those things are faster than bullets and not all that much bigger, so the attempt to hit them with anything has proved an extremely embarrassing boondoggle, which American taxpayers will continue to sink billions into to avoid admitting defeat.
Personally, I don't mind, as long as they don't try to hit any frantactical frukes that might be flying in for a vacation.
I grew up in the 70s. I remember it as an exceptionally grey and clouded time. Cars stank, chimneys stank, trees were dying. Since then, environmental regulations have cleared the skies and stopped the sulphur emissions from coal fired plants that were killing the trees. So now there are people like you claiming it was a hoax because things changed too gradually for you to notice.
It's analogous to the Y2K crisis. Thousands of people worked their asses off to patch millions of computers to prevent it. They are probably pretty miffed that now everyone's laughing at them for wasting their time on a non-existant problem. Well, the problem was non-existant because they made it go away. Mind, all those who hoarded food, fuel and bullets and ran in circles screaming did not help at all. It's a matter of knowing what to do, as well.
Oh, and developing and deploying low emission technology does not destroy economies. It creates jobs, saves fuel costs and gives those countries that do it an edge in technological know-how - which just might explain why Toyota will soon be the world's biggest car manufacturer while Ford is facing bankruptcy. Investment in R&D pays off. The US is turning into the Commodore Computers of the world, resting on its laurels - or rather building spliffs with them.
Your argument would carry a bit more weight, if there was a global warming controversy in Europe as well. Over here, it's just a question of how much and how soon. Apparently ExxonMobil forgot to lob some dollars at Europeans as well. So far, every global warming doubter I have seen has been American. Do correct me if I'm wrong.
As for granting corporations the right to express themselves, remember how ClearChannel with its 80% share of US radio stations campaigned for the invasion of Iraq, labeling dissenting voices as traitors? Look where it got you. When those with the most money get to speak the loudest, reason and facts get silenced.
You are far more likely to get laid and thus preserve your gene stock, if you don't fart constantly, like lactose intolerants do in cattle raising societies.
No, I would call the police. There are reasons why southern Italy has been an economic disaster area for most of the post-war years, and the fact that most businesses pay protection money to the Mafia, who in turn pay off or threaten the police and courts is a major one. Corruption is not good for business.
Mind, I live in Finland. We have the world's lowest corruption rate, low crime rates and the second highest productivity after the USA, while only working two thirds of the hours US employees put in, so perhaps I don't live in the 'real' world. Not that I mind...
"There is nothing irresponsible about taking out insurance against one of the biggest business risks corporations face today."
Would you also condone paying al-Qaida for not bombing your business? Where exactly would you draw the line? You don't give in to terrorists and you trust that the authorities deal with them. The same way you don't give in to the software patent mob and trust that IBM's nazguls will deal with them, since IBM is betting their business on GNU/Linux. Any IP doubts about GPL software are bad for IBM's business, since there is no settlement option for patents in GPL software. You either remove the patented parts or negotiate a universally free license to use the patent in free software. There is no middle ground, no way of paying licenses.
It's ironic, in a way: IBM makes a lot of money from patents, but the only way to make GNU/Linux truly viable is by eradicating software patents.
I moved from DOS to Windows 3.0 back in the day. Couldn't afford a Mac and the Amiga didn't have a word processor that would have produced files my customers would accept, so I had nothing to compare it to.
Windows 3.0 taught me two things: Save every couple of minutes and never run more than one application at a time. Took me a decade and a move to GNU/Linux to get over the latter habit. Still, it was a lot prettier than DOS and had AmiPro, the nicest word processor I've ever used (Lotus and IBM murdered that one in subsequent versions).
In other words, back in the day, we had shit and were pathetically grateful for it. No wonder Microsoft thinks producing shit is a business model.
I'm already trying to cut down on my Slashdot consumption, since I write for a living and all the bad prose here is killing my ear for English. Meeza kustermerz no gonna peh me iffa meeza deteriorizah furtha. My grounding in science, OTOH, is firmly based on school text books I glanced at in the 70s and lots of science fiction. It really should not be possible to get past my glazed eyes with a scientific howler, right?
Carbon production!!! Out of coal? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Hint: Elsewhere in the publishing world, the word 'editor' does not mean story chooser. A really good editor fixes typos, grammar, story structure/rhythm and verifies facts.
Hm...Okay, they are extinct these days. I have now found the word combination "equally as" in a Dan Simmons novel (Olympos) and in a musicology text published by an American university press. Forget I said anything.
Steal a thousand dollars, it's your problem. Steal a million dollars and it's the bank's problem.
With massive financial crime, the victims are usually so faceless that even judges have trouble seeing the pain it causes. When you defraud just one grandmother out of her life savings, they have no such problems, although it's basically the same thing.
Its proper abbreviation is USAPATRIOT act. It has nothing to do with patriotism since it erodes American values and the international standing of the USA abroad. A better way of pronouncing it would be
U SAP AT RIOT act.
Or maybe that's just sour grapes, since I'm one of those pesky foreigners who get spied on by the NSA and may at any time be whisked away to a secret detention camp by the CIA, if my opinions displease them.
Polluters are equated to terrorists now? Brilliant! So we won't need any Erin Brockovitches to get some justice to these bastards - we can just ship them off to Guantanamo when a bluegill dies. About time, too.
I wish people would at least hint at how many books on the subject they've read. Nobody is as fanatically convinced of his version of the truth as the person who has read exactly one book on the subject. No doubts can creep in since all you know has been taught to you by exactly one voice.
Mind, your post sounded very reasonable to me, but all I know on the subject comes from various newspaper and web articles, so I'm not an expert.
You took the hard way out. When I resigned, back in the late 80s, I just walked into the citizens' registry office, the Väestörekisterikeskus, and said that I was moving my files over to them. They gave me a form to fill out - name, time and place of birth, current address - and I walked out again.
I seem to recall that I resigned because of my pacifist convictions after hearing on the radio that the state church knew such a thing as an acceptable war. Jesus didn't...
As far as I know, learning Braille is an essential part of the education/rehabilitation of visually impaired people in Europe. What do they teach in America, if a "majority of visually impaired people do not read" it?
Was I talking about French comics culture? No. Heavy Metal was and is the English language offshoot of the French Metal Hurlante magazine and thus liberally ignored the Comics Code - as did the underground comix of the late 60s. Exceptions with more limited distribution that prove the rule.
Sounds remarkably like what Hollywood did in the 1930s or so and what American comics publishers did in the 1950s in the form of the Comics Code: In order to avoid being censored by government legislation, they decided to censor themselves.
Movies abided by rules such as: No prolonged kissing - never show even a married couple in the same bed - no revenge plots (the hero just happened to kill his enemies in self defence while pursuing nobler goals) etc. ad nauseam. The excision of politics was just an unwritten rule, but followed particularly religiously until the 60s.
The Comics Code was even more rigorous. It killed comics as a form of entertainment for adults up until the 1990s. Horror comics, erotic comics, realistic violence etc. ceased to exist. Nothing but spandex pap was left in its wake. And if you say now that you're a grown-up who reads Marvel comics, tell me: Just how grown-up do you feel while you're doing it? I feel about 12 years old when I dive into X-Men.
"The Linux Community" is a globally distributed, internally disconnected agglomeration of people who happen to use the same kernels for nearly anything computing hardware can be used for. Why should these people all agree to amputate 90% of this diversity to please one bland PC box shifter?
This diversity is what makes GNU/Linux strong. We could have all standardized on Red Hat 4 eight years ago, but then we wouldn't have slick new approaches to distribution like Ubuntu, for instance. We'd have one big Red Hat Corporation being slowly crushed by Microsoft, since it would not be nimble enough to evade the FUD or interesting enough to motivate the volunteers who are GNU/Linux's lifeblood.
Dell speaks about what's good for Dell, which is monoculture. For him, even better than a single distribution would be no Linux at all. Saves time and money, which is all Dell stands for.
...that the planet (and our species) has survived far more drastic climate change in the past...
I believe our species survived the ice age by moving south by half a continent. It might be just a bit costly to move billions of people away from coastal cities and encroaching deserts, no?
Mind, Katrina cleared New Orleans fairly painlessly (compared to the recent earthquake in Pakistan or the tsunami in 2004) and it cost less than the invasion of Iraq.
And you won't mind buying your bread from Canada, once the Midwest turns into desert, right? Details like that don't mean anything with regard to the survival of the species, but they can feel rather inconvenient to the billions of individuals involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Just listened on the phone to my mother upgrading to Service Pack 4 on some Windows box. She sounded worried. Apparently, every now and then an upgrade will mess up the system enough to require a reinstallation of everything. Now, I have been *asking* for that sort of behavior by using a free OS called Debian *Unstable*, obviously, but apart from minor niggles, it refuses to serve me with the adrenaline rush of unspeakable disaster I enjoyed in my Windows using days.
Still, can't complain, since I don't pay for it.
The time needed to record an album depends a lot on the style of music you make. It takes me an hour to make ten seconds of electronic music. (If you must, search for Rene Kita on Archive.org.)
Time spent by Derek Bailey, the great master of free improvisation, in recording a one hour record:
One hour and one minute, if you count setting up and turning the recorder on and off.
Faithful .doc import/export is the main thing I need as a translator. I get Word files and replace their contents with Finnish, English or German text. Happily, MS Word has been known to mangle documents, too, so I haven't yet been penalized for not paying the Microsoft tax: In the occasional cases when a document has its formatting messed up, the customers apparently just sigh and readjust, thinking that the translator doesn't know how to use Word properly.
You see, that's the great thing about most Microsoft's users: They have built in fault tolerance.
"It's purely defensive, to shoot down enemy spy satellites or the hypothetical "star wars" satellites Reagan was so fond of pushing. Personally, I think we should be investing more into weapons of this sort. Perhaps a laser like this could be used against ICBMs."
Um, excuse me, but that is exactly what the Star Wars program was and still is about: shooting down ICBM's in flight. Unfortunately, those things are faster than bullets and not all that much bigger, so the attempt to hit them with anything has proved an extremely embarrassing boondoggle, which American taxpayers will continue to sink billions into to avoid admitting defeat.
Personally, I don't mind, as long as they don't try to hit any frantactical frukes that might be flying in for a vacation.
I grew up in the 70s. I remember it as an exceptionally grey and clouded time. Cars stank, chimneys stank, trees were dying. Since then, environmental regulations have cleared the skies and stopped the sulphur emissions from coal fired plants that were killing the trees. So now there are people like you claiming it was a hoax because things changed too gradually for you to notice.
It's analogous to the Y2K crisis. Thousands of people worked their asses off to patch millions of computers to prevent it. They are probably pretty miffed that now everyone's laughing at them for wasting their time on a non-existant problem. Well, the problem was non-existant because they made it go away. Mind, all those who hoarded food, fuel and bullets and ran in circles screaming did not help at all. It's a matter of knowing what to do, as well.
Oh, and developing and deploying low emission technology does not destroy economies. It creates jobs, saves fuel costs and gives those countries that do it an edge in technological know-how - which just might explain why Toyota will soon be the world's biggest car manufacturer while Ford is facing bankruptcy. Investment in R&D pays off. The US is turning into the Commodore Computers of the world, resting on its laurels - or rather building spliffs with them.
Your argument would carry a bit more weight, if there was a global warming controversy in Europe as well. Over here, it's just a question of how much and how soon. Apparently ExxonMobil forgot to lob some dollars at Europeans as well. So far, every global warming doubter I have seen has been American. Do correct me if I'm wrong.
As for granting corporations the right to express themselves, remember how ClearChannel with its 80% share of US radio stations campaigned for the invasion of Iraq, labeling dissenting voices as traitors? Look where it got you. When those with the most money get to speak the loudest, reason and facts get silenced.
You are far more likely to get laid and thus preserve your gene stock, if you don't fart constantly, like lactose intolerants do in cattle raising societies.
No, I would call the police. There are reasons why southern Italy has been an economic disaster area for most of the post-war years, and the fact that most businesses pay protection money to the Mafia, who in turn pay off or threaten the police and courts is a major one. Corruption is not good for business.
Mind, I live in Finland. We have the world's lowest corruption rate, low crime rates and the second highest productivity after the USA, while only working two thirds of the hours US employees put in, so perhaps I don't live in the 'real' world. Not that I mind...
"There is nothing irresponsible about taking out insurance against one of the biggest business risks corporations face today."
Would you also condone paying al-Qaida for not bombing your business? Where exactly would you draw the line? You don't give in to terrorists and you trust that the authorities deal with them. The same way you don't give in to the software patent mob and trust that IBM's nazguls will deal with them, since IBM is betting their business on GNU/Linux. Any IP doubts about GPL software are bad for IBM's business, since there is no settlement option for patents in GPL software. You either remove the patented parts or negotiate a universally free license to use the patent in free software. There is no middle ground, no way of paying licenses.
It's ironic, in a way: IBM makes a lot of money from patents, but the only way to make GNU/Linux truly viable is by eradicating software patents.
I moved from DOS to Windows 3.0 back in the day. Couldn't afford a Mac and the Amiga didn't have a word processor that would have produced files my customers would accept, so I had nothing to compare it to.
Windows 3.0 taught me two things: Save every couple of minutes and never run more than one application at a time. Took me a decade and a move to GNU/Linux to get over the latter habit. Still, it was a lot prettier than DOS and had AmiPro, the nicest word processor I've ever used (Lotus and IBM murdered that one in subsequent versions).
In other words, back in the day, we had shit and were pathetically grateful for it. No wonder Microsoft thinks producing shit is a business model.
I'm already trying to cut down on my Slashdot consumption, since I write for a living and all the bad prose here is killing my ear for English. Meeza kustermerz no gonna peh me iffa meeza deteriorizah furtha. My grounding in science, OTOH, is firmly based on school text books I glanced at in the 70s and lots of science fiction. It really should not be possible to get past my glazed eyes with a scientific howler, right?
Carbon production!!! Out of coal? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Hint: Elsewhere in the publishing world, the word 'editor' does not mean story chooser. A really good editor fixes typos, grammar, story structure/rhythm and verifies facts.
Hm...Okay, they are extinct these days. I have now found the word combination "equally as" in a Dan Simmons novel (Olympos) and in a musicology text published by an American university press. Forget I said anything.
'Dieb' means 'thief' in German, so could say that you're getting exactly what the name promises. Isn't that comforting?
Indeed. In 1999, I talked about GNU/Linux to a relative who managed four different operating systems at work. He said:
"Linux is a hobbyist OS. It will never measure up to an industrial strength UNIX like SCO."
Snicker.
AFAIK = As Far As I Know, FWIW, HTH.
Steal a thousand dollars, it's your problem.
Steal a million dollars and it's the bank's problem.
With massive financial crime, the victims are usually so faceless that even judges have trouble seeing the pain it causes. When you defraud just one grandmother out of her life savings, they have no such problems, although it's basically the same thing.
Its proper abbreviation is USAPATRIOT act. It has nothing to do with patriotism since it erodes American values and the international standing of the USA abroad. A better way of pronouncing it would be
U SAP AT RIOT act.
Or maybe that's just sour grapes, since I'm one of those pesky foreigners who get spied on by the NSA and may at any time be whisked away to a secret detention camp by the CIA, if my opinions displease them.
Polluters are equated to terrorists now? Brilliant! So we won't need any Erin Brockovitches to get some justice to these bastards - we can just ship them off to Guantanamo when a bluegill dies. About time, too.
"Check out that book, though, I recommend it."
I wish people would at least hint at how many books on the subject they've read. Nobody is as fanatically convinced of his version of the truth as the person who has read exactly one book on the subject. No doubts can creep in since all you know has been taught to you by exactly one voice.
Mind, your post sounded very reasonable to me, but all I know on the subject comes from various newspaper and web articles, so I'm not an expert.
Orion VII and VIII were the vessels Commander McLane flew in the 1966 German science fiction series Raumpatrouille.
http://www.orionspace.de/ww/de/pub/english.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumpatrouille
"Enlightenment had that years ago! That's so 20th century!"
I'm not being served here.
I seem to recall that I resigned because of my pacifist convictions after hearing on the radio that the state church knew such a thing as an acceptable war. Jesus didn't...
As far as I know, learning Braille is an essential part of the education/rehabilitation of visually impaired people in Europe. What do they teach in America, if a "majority of visually impaired people do not read" it?
Was I talking about French comics culture? No.
Heavy Metal was and is the English language offshoot of the French Metal Hurlante magazine and thus liberally ignored the Comics Code - as did the underground comix of the late 60s. Exceptions with more limited distribution that prove the rule.
Sounds remarkably like what Hollywood did in the 1930s or so and what American comics publishers did in the 1950s in the form of the Comics Code: In order to avoid being censored by government legislation, they decided to censor themselves.
Movies abided by rules such as: No prolonged kissing - never show even a married couple in the same bed - no revenge plots (the hero just happened to kill his enemies in self defence while pursuing nobler goals) etc. ad nauseam. The excision of politics was just an unwritten rule, but followed particularly religiously until the 60s.
The Comics Code was even more rigorous. It killed comics as a form of entertainment for adults up until the 1990s. Horror comics, erotic comics, realistic violence etc. ceased to exist. Nothing but spandex pap was left in its wake. And if you say now that you're a grown-up who reads Marvel comics, tell me: Just how grown-up do you feel while you're doing it? I feel about 12 years old when I dive into X-Men.
"The Linux Community" is a globally distributed, internally disconnected agglomeration of people who happen to use the same kernels for nearly anything computing hardware can be used for. Why should these people all agree to amputate 90% of this diversity to please one bland PC box shifter?
This diversity is what makes GNU/Linux strong. We could have all standardized on Red Hat 4 eight years ago, but then we wouldn't have slick new approaches to distribution like Ubuntu, for instance. We'd have one big Red Hat Corporation being slowly crushed by Microsoft, since it would not be nimble enough to evade the FUD or interesting enough to motivate the volunteers who are GNU/Linux's lifeblood.
Dell speaks about what's good for Dell, which is monoculture. For him, even better than a single distribution would be no Linux at all. Saves time and money, which is all Dell stands for.
I believe our species survived the ice age by moving south by half a continent. It might be just a bit costly to move billions of people away from coastal cities and encroaching deserts, no?
Mind, Katrina cleared New Orleans fairly painlessly (compared to the recent earthquake in Pakistan or the tsunami in 2004) and it cost less than the invasion of Iraq.
And you won't mind buying your bread from Canada, once the Midwest turns into desert, right? Details like that don't mean anything with regard to the survival of the species, but they can feel rather inconvenient to the billions of individuals involved.