The other is that it is yet another war on an abstract idea. (joining the war on terror and the war on poverty) Bad news, you can't win against an idea, only against a group of people (terrorists, pirates, the poor?).
I don't know any Republicans or Democrats who think a war on terrorism could ever be won completely (including Bush, unless you have quotes showing otherwise). If anyone claimed otherwise it is easy to show how terrorism can spring up pretty much anywhere that 'public trust' exists like a crowded place, no matter how hard you fight against it.
Semantics of 'War on Terror' aside, the fact that it is unwinnable (which would be eliminating terrorism forever), in no way makes it a more or less worthy cause.
For example, you can never absolutely squash organized crime, but that is no reason to stop fighting it. Calling it the 'War on Mafia' might be a dumb name, given that it is so obviously a good cause. But in the case of terrorism, some on the right would argue that there are people who morally allow terrorism for some means to an end, and so the war on terror may not be an 'obviously good cause' to them.
Sorry but you're wasting your time. Only musician-victim vs corporation-bully views are allowed here.
You have to remember, musicians are poor feeble minded creatures who are lured into dark corners by executives in suits to sign their filthy contracts. They shouldn't be expected to prove their talent up front and build up capital and resources like the rest of us, they're special.
Sure. When your local city pays the companies the billions they paid to built it, maybe it will happen.
Well in some cases the city did own it and then privatised the cabling etc. of the last mile. I am not sure it would be a good idea for local government to take back infrastructure from the existing companies, but ideally it should not have been privatised from the start.
... once they own the local access network, who pays the cost of transit and moving that traffic to other networks?
The user should pay for every byte should they not?
... Clinton need to appease some Republicans so he let them screw the internet over.
What a great president that lets the opposition screw things over as a favour.
Re:Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing.
on
Web 2.0, Meet .Net 3.0
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have largely avoided Microsoft products over the past 20 years because I couldn't easily figure out what is what. It seems like every six months or so Microsoft renames their technologies in an effort to make them sound new.
That used to piss me off, but now I just remind myself that the more complex the API is the better. Allow me to explain my reasoning:
Take the old Win32 API for example. It is very ugly and badly designed, I'm sure not many would disagree with that. Try making a reasonably bug free user interface with it, obeying general guidlines from offical software like iexplore & explorer. Toolbars, menu, maybe a list that looks like explorer's file list too.
You'll find that it takes even a seasoned programmer months to fiddle around with the bugs, incompatibilies, undocumented functionality *even when using the built in controls*! (toolbar, menu and listview controls). They are both badly designed and made, just like the API itself.
So why is this good? Because many rival companys or programmers will likely give up after a few weeks/months of wasting time with such a frustrating thing. Sure, many will and do continue to struggle through it, but think of the competition for me if it was a well laid out API that was perfectly understandable and worked as expected.
It relates to the problem of programmers becoming commoditized by easy newer and higher level languages such as vb, access. From the small glimpse I have seen of.net, it does look re-designed from the ground up and much more in the direction of a good API.
I realise there is more to programming than technical knowledge of an API. A non-programmer who knows an API well will still have bad general design ideas, for example. I don't disagree with that at all. But whenever trying to decide what a good new project would be, I would recommend that programmers look for software that is just too hard, or too boring to write. That is where the money is imo.
I do but it has not been used for some years and would need a few days of work to get it useable. I plan to restart the project in a year or so if I cannot come up with a better design.
I have tried about 3 different types of 2d layout for code (nearly always objects with pipes connecting them), and 1 for 3d. The 2d ones are better in just about every way except for one factor, lines crossing. 3d handles that really well, but then suffers for the same reason because it hides things behind other objects.
I know from searching around in the past that many people have tried a graphical or 3d language and failed, but I have a lot of faith that it's possible to really use it effectively if done properly. I don't think I'll personally ever contribute anything useful to it, but it's a very interesting subject still.
I often feel as if there is a really great way to display code just waiting to be found, be it fractal display or quake/descent style. There seem to be a lot of possibilities, and also some interesting real world usage in things like UML. But that in particular seemed quite complicated and inaccessable to average coders when I checked it out a few years ago. Lego Mindstorm looked good besides not being able to make real software with it, but I have only glanced at a couple of screenshots of it.
Heh, it sounds like the setup to a b-grade movie: Scientists try to take away Pluto's name because of their emotionally barren nature, town protests against the evil nerds, nerds lose face in embarrasing loss against town, pluto is found out to be even bigger than earth after careful observation...
But, speaking of ways of 3D navigation people are really accustomed with... WSAD anyone?
Back in the days, I once wrote a quick hack to visualise a 3D structure. Everyone had problems navigating around the view, until I changed it to something Descent-like (it was the only fully-3D game at the time, nothing else had 6 degrees of freedom).
I made something similar for browsing code, showing functions as spheres and function calls as pipes between them. It was not useful in the end, but I did spend a lot of time on the movement code (I used to love just flying around in Descent like a bird).
The movement code was finally bought to where I wanted it technically, but there were still problems with movement, design type problems. For example, if you are in a 3d world like I'm speaking of, try circling the mouse (either direction). It will spin your ship around z axis eventually, bit by bit (z axis spinning is like having a skewer from head to toe).
There are mathematical reasons for it, but it sucks to the user. It causes disorientation and you find yourself contstantly holding z-axis-spin-mode key and moving mouse left or right to re-orient. Note that simply having auto-leveling defeats too much of the reason you are using 3d.
There are a very elegant fix though for this inherent problem of 3d movement. Once it is implemented I can guarantee 3d interfaces will become much more useful and widespread. The fix is an input device with 3 good analog dimensions, instead of 2 like a mouse. The 3rd dimension can then be used for 'twisting' to counter the z-axis weirdness. In a game you would label the dimension something like 'z axis turn'.
All these things can be done without needing to flip the widget. You want the settings window to appear in a constent spot? Just force window positions in the OS. That is essentially what they are doing with some graphics added.
A bigger problem is the goal of having the same way to access settings etc. in a program. If the flipping technique is not possible with all application types, then it would be causing the user to learn two ways of accessing settings instead of one.
I don't mean to sound critical of the original flip idea because I also like to explore new interfaces. I just think this one in particular may not work for those reasons. I spent a few years trying to design a 3d programming interface, like I'm sure many others have, so I'm interested in new design ideas.
From the writeup: a school district in Libertyville, IL will be holding students accountable for illegal actions discussed in their MySpace blogs even if such actions in no way involved the school or another student.
Hence the law decides.
A valid argument, to me, is that the school should simply report it to the police and let them punish the kid via law. As far as my understanding of this goes, the schools want to be able to punish kids on that subset of cases where what they did was illegal (likely drugs & violence, boasting to younger students), but when the cops refuse to take on a case due to its insignificance.
It is for protection of the pupils at the school that they are not exposed to boasting about illegal acts by other students. The thing here is that there is an *enormous* difference between an impressionable child reading about this from a school mate, as compared to some random kid in some country.
I probably wouldn't want a hypothetical boaster like this in the same school as my children are sent to. And I believe that, because only purely illegal activities are involved here, the onus is on removing the blog kid, rather than parent removing their own kids because of fear.
Relating more to your point, I do believe that the school would have to first prove the wrong-doing was illegal in court, before taking action. Or have enough evidence to be confident with the threat of court.
It also makes sense to stop a pupil boasting about underage drinking etc. to his school mates, especially for the younger more impressionable kids.
Feel free to bring up 1984, but i see it as very narrow minded if you cannot look at this from the parents & teachers side (I realise they don't all support this). From their point of view, an older pupil is writing stories on the net about sex, drugs etc. at the school parties he went to. Their children are hearing about the url in the playground and of course every single kid the school ends up checking these things out.
You try to paint them as power-hungry authoritarian government masters, but most of them are only concerned about what their kids are reading, and how they are being impressioned, in matters like this one.
Downloading is a mass phenonemon. Nerds are the only people who mostly have a 100% unpirated system.
He knows it's a mass phenonemon! His point is that (a subset of) nerds are the only ones to do it then complain when the reverse happens (their software is pirated, their band's music is copied, their GPL product they worked on for 3 years is copied and secretly resold as a closed source product (perhaps technically unrealistic but you get my drift).
If it really is a case of libel or slander, they should report it to the police. Police enforce the laws; not school districts.
I fully agree in principle. But in practice sueing a kid is not only terrible publicity and a major timewasting headache, it also costs a lot more than simply getting rid of him.
RTFM The kid did not threaten the school, or blatantly accuse them of anything. He discussed HIS FEELINGS.
It was hard to read because they didn't show us a single word of his original comments which allegedly caused the whole problem.
He wrote, and I quote, "I feel threatened by you," to which the District replied, that the district will take action if it believes there is a safety issue.
Which in the same breath started rambling about ***COLUMBINE*** of all things. ***COLUMBINE*** (i need more stars).
I personally would not expel the guy, nor would i even suspend or detention him. I do feel, however, that they have a right to suspend or even expel him in this specific case.
If a student came to the office with a vague complaint of being threatened by a Teacher, with such a lame example, they'd be told to get over it. Why can the entire school system get by with being more "sensitive?"
So little Jonny walks in and says "Mr Smith was in a public forum making threats about me. The next day the teacher followed up with additional comments referencing a shooting incident where two teachers went crazy and shot up the school back in 1990 (hypothetical of course). Then Mr Smith went on to tell me to put that in my pipe & smoke it, all the time telling me that I am the one bullying him!"
Please tell me where I have stuffed up the analogy.
So you can't discuss intellectual property issues on Slashdot because you're automatically just providing moral cover to yourself and others and that makes your contribution worthless?
From my reading he never came close to implying such a thing. His grievance was that a large number of people here *very* often say things such as "I only download to test and buy the album/dvd later", whereas they would be serving themselves much better to be honest about the copyright debate.
Even I can be honest about it. I download stuff all the time. I also produce commercial software, I also wish copyright & patents never existed (100%).
Why are some slashdot topics full of insightful posts, with logical fallacies properly shot down etc.? Then suddenly political topics make some of us nerds forget what we often pride ourselves on, objectivity.
E.g. try typing this as a comment in any programming story:
void main(void) { }
... and watch the number of replies that flood in to correct you. Then try:
In all seriousness, Bush is nearly as bad as Hitler.
... and watch it get modded... up!
(replying with 'but he really is just as bad' is about as funny as a republican cracking a monica joke btw).
I realise there are always going to be a subset of kids on slashdot, but it's obvious when it's youth with no idea and when it is someone older who does or should understand logical fallicies better (at least intuitively).
Slashdot Mirror
The other is that it is yet another war on an abstract idea. (joining the war on terror and the war on poverty) Bad news, you can't win against an idea, only against a group of people (terrorists, pirates, the poor?).
I don't know any Republicans or Democrats who think a war on terrorism could ever be won completely (including Bush, unless you have quotes showing otherwise). If anyone claimed otherwise it is easy to show how terrorism can spring up pretty much anywhere that 'public trust' exists like a crowded place, no matter how hard you fight against it.
Semantics of 'War on Terror' aside, the fact that it is unwinnable (which would be eliminating terrorism forever), in no way makes it a more or less worthy cause.
For example, you can never absolutely squash organized crime, but that is no reason to stop fighting it. Calling it the 'War on Mafia' might be a dumb name, given that it is so obviously a good cause. But in the case of terrorism, some on the right would argue that there are people who morally allow terrorism for some means to an end, and so the war on terror may not be an 'obviously good cause' to them.
Carter is a shill paid by Exxon Mobil to fight global warming to keep public policy pro-oil.
My Ad-Hominem meter is really going through the roof for this article.
Sorry but you're wasting your time. Only musician-victim vs corporation-bully views are allowed here.
You have to remember, musicians are poor feeble minded creatures who are lured into dark corners by executives in suits to sign their filthy contracts. They shouldn't be expected to prove their talent up front and build up capital and resources like the rest of us, they're special.
If, as you say, a robot is self aware because it "knows" its position, then certainly a rock is self aware because it "knows" its position.
No because a rock doesn't store the position within itself.
Sure. When your local city pays the companies the billions they paid to built it, maybe it will happen.
... once they own the local access network, who pays the cost of transit and moving that traffic to other networks?
Well in some cases the city did own it and then privatised the cabling etc. of the last mile. I am not sure it would be a good idea for local government to take back infrastructure from the existing companies, but ideally it should not have been privatised from the start.
The user should pay for every byte should they not?
You dumb shit. Why must it be explained over and over again what a monopoly is? I haven't got the patience, go and look it up on google.
Do they have a monopoly on web browsing?
Do they have a monopoly on email?
Do they have a monopoly on IM?
Do they have a monopoly on P2P?
You dumb shit.
Even as a Libertarian I diverge from the party line and believe that the last mile natural monopoly should be municipally controlled.
I feel the same way, also a Libertarian. At least until something changes where it is no longer a natural monopoly.
... Clinton need to appease some Republicans so he let them screw the internet over.
What a great president that lets the opposition screw things over as a favour.
I have largely avoided Microsoft products over the past 20 years because I couldn't easily figure out what is what. It seems like every six months or so Microsoft renames their technologies in an effort to make them sound new.
.net, it does look re-designed from the ground up and much more in the direction of a good API.
That used to piss me off, but now I just remind myself that the more complex the API is the better. Allow me to explain my reasoning:
Take the old Win32 API for example. It is very ugly and badly designed, I'm sure not many would disagree with that. Try making a reasonably bug free user interface with it, obeying general guidlines from offical software like iexplore & explorer. Toolbars, menu, maybe a list that looks like explorer's file list too.
You'll find that it takes even a seasoned programmer months to fiddle around with the bugs, incompatibilies, undocumented functionality *even when using the built in controls*! (toolbar, menu and listview controls). They are both badly designed and made, just like the API itself.
So why is this good? Because many rival companys or programmers will likely give up after a few weeks/months of wasting time with such a frustrating thing. Sure, many will and do continue to struggle through it, but think of the competition for me if it was a well laid out API that was perfectly understandable and worked as expected.
It relates to the problem of programmers becoming commoditized by easy newer and higher level languages such as vb, access. From the small glimpse I have seen of
I realise there is more to programming than technical knowledge of an API. A non-programmer who knows an API well will still have bad general design ideas, for example. I don't disagree with that at all. But whenever trying to decide what a good new project would be, I would recommend that programmers look for software that is just too hard, or too boring to write. That is where the money is imo.
And it was a DX2-66.
Please do not being technical debates with 'Ummm' or 'Errr', thank you.
The Slashdot Community,
http://slashdot.org/
10 Jun 2006
Oh, they're pretty good at it in the Far West. The USA is one of the countries who carry out more executions in the world
Bit different when they've been tried first. Don't let a small technicality like that get in the way of your beliefs though!
I do but it has not been used for some years and would need a few days of work to get it useable. I plan to restart the project in a year or so if I cannot come up with a better design.
I have tried about 3 different types of 2d layout for code (nearly always objects with pipes connecting them), and 1 for 3d. The 2d ones are better in just about every way except for one factor, lines crossing. 3d handles that really well, but then suffers for the same reason because it hides things behind other objects.
I know from searching around in the past that many people have tried a graphical or 3d language and failed, but I have a lot of faith that it's possible to really use it effectively if done properly. I don't think I'll personally ever contribute anything useful to it, but it's a very interesting subject still.
I often feel as if there is a really great way to display code just waiting to be found, be it fractal display or quake/descent style. There seem to be a lot of possibilities, and also some interesting real world usage in things like UML. But that in particular seemed quite complicated and inaccessable to average coders when I checked it out a few years ago. Lego Mindstorm looked good besides not being able to make real software with it, but I have only glanced at a couple of screenshots of it.
Heh, it sounds like the setup to a b-grade movie: Scientists try to take away Pluto's name because of their emotionally barren nature, town protests against the evil nerds, nerds lose face in embarrasing loss against town, pluto is found out to be even bigger than earth after careful observation ...
But, speaking of ways of 3D navigation people are really accustomed with... WSAD anyone?
Back in the days, I once wrote a quick hack to visualise a 3D structure. Everyone had problems navigating around the view, until I changed it to something Descent-like (it was the only fully-3D game at the time, nothing else had 6 degrees of freedom).
I made something similar for browsing code, showing functions as spheres and function calls as pipes between them. It was not useful in the end, but I did spend a lot of time on the movement code (I used to love just flying around in Descent like a bird).
The movement code was finally bought to where I wanted it technically, but there were still problems with movement, design type problems. For example, if you are in a 3d world like I'm speaking of, try circling the mouse (either direction). It will spin your ship around z axis eventually, bit by bit (z axis spinning is like having a skewer from head to toe).
There are mathematical reasons for it, but it sucks to the user. It causes disorientation and you find yourself contstantly holding z-axis-spin-mode key and moving mouse left or right to re-orient. Note that simply having auto-leveling defeats too much of the reason you are using 3d.
There are a very elegant fix though for this inherent problem of 3d movement. Once it is implemented I can guarantee 3d interfaces will become much more useful and widespread. The fix is an input device with 3 good analog dimensions, instead of 2 like a mouse. The 3rd dimension can then be used for 'twisting' to counter the z-axis weirdness. In a game you would label the dimension something like 'z axis turn'.
All these things can be done without needing to flip the widget. You want the settings window to appear in a constent spot? Just force window positions in the OS. That is essentially what they are doing with some graphics added.
A bigger problem is the goal of having the same way to access settings etc. in a program. If the flipping technique is not possible with all application types, then it would be causing the user to learn two ways of accessing settings instead of one.
I don't mean to sound critical of the original flip idea because I also like to explore new interfaces. I just think this one in particular may not work for those reasons. I spent a few years trying to design a 3d programming interface, like I'm sure many others have, so I'm interested in new design ideas.
Humans: 0, Car analogies: 68294
I believe you're thinking of flock animals, like sheep or goats.
Might want to read one of the thousands of teenager studies that contradict you in their opening paragraphs.
And who gets to decide what's offensive? They do
From the writeup: a school district in Libertyville, IL will be holding students accountable for illegal actions discussed in their MySpace blogs even if such actions in no way involved the school or another student.
Hence the law decides.
A valid argument, to me, is that the school should simply report it to the police and let them punish the kid via law. As far as my understanding of this goes, the schools want to be able to punish kids on that subset of cases where what they did was illegal (likely drugs & violence, boasting to younger students), but when the cops refuse to take on a case due to its insignificance.
It is for protection of the pupils at the school that they are not exposed to boasting about illegal acts by other students. The thing here is that there is an *enormous* difference between an impressionable child reading about this from a school mate, as compared to some random kid in some country.
I probably wouldn't want a hypothetical boaster like this in the same school as my children are sent to. And I believe that, because only purely illegal activities are involved here, the onus is on removing the blog kid, rather than parent removing their own kids because of fear.
Relating more to your point, I do believe that the school would have to first prove the wrong-doing was illegal in court, before taking action. Or have enough evidence to be confident with the threat of court.
It also makes sense to stop a pupil boasting about underage drinking etc. to his school mates, especially for the younger more impressionable kids.
Feel free to bring up 1984, but i see it as very narrow minded if you cannot look at this from the parents & teachers side (I realise they don't all support this). From their point of view, an older pupil is writing stories on the net about sex, drugs etc. at the school parties he went to. Their children are hearing about the url in the playground and of course every single kid the school ends up checking these things out.
You try to paint them as power-hungry authoritarian government masters, but most of them are only concerned about what their kids are reading, and how they are being impressioned, in matters like this one.
Good point, good point. You must come the other half though and agree that the columbine reference was ill conceived though.
Downloading is a mass phenonemon. Nerds are the only people who mostly have a 100% unpirated system.
He knows it's a mass phenonemon! His point is that (a subset of) nerds are the only ones to do it then complain when the reverse happens (their software is pirated, their band's music is copied, their GPL product they worked on for 3 years is copied and secretly resold as a closed source product (perhaps technically unrealistic but you get my drift).
If it really is a case of libel or slander, they should report it to the police. Police enforce the laws; not school districts.
I fully agree in principle. But in practice sueing a kid is not only terrible publicity and a major timewasting headache, it also costs a lot more than simply getting rid of him.
RTFM The kid did not threaten the school, or blatantly accuse them of anything. He discussed HIS FEELINGS.
It was hard to read because they didn't show us a single word of his original comments which allegedly caused the whole problem.
He wrote, and I quote, "I feel threatened by you," to which the District replied, that the district will take action if it believes there is a safety issue.
Which in the same breath started rambling about ***COLUMBINE*** of all things. ***COLUMBINE*** (i need more stars).
I personally would not expel the guy, nor would i even suspend or detention him. I do feel, however, that they have a right to suspend or even expel him in this specific case.
If a student came to the office with a vague complaint of being threatened by a Teacher, with such a lame example, they'd be told to get over it. Why can the entire school system get by with being more "sensitive?"
So little Jonny walks in and says "Mr Smith was in a public forum making threats about me. The next day the teacher followed up with additional comments referencing a shooting incident where two teachers went crazy and shot up the school back in 1990 (hypothetical of course). Then Mr Smith went on to tell me to put that in my pipe & smoke it, all the time telling me that I am the one bullying him!"
Please tell me where I have stuffed up the analogy.
From my reading he never came close to implying such a thing. His grievance was that a large number of people here *very* often say things such as "I only download to test and buy the album/dvd later", whereas they would be serving themselves much better to be honest about the copyright debate.
Even I can be honest about it. I download stuff all the time. I also produce commercial software, I also wish copyright & patents never existed (100%).
Why are some slashdot topics full of insightful posts, with logical fallacies properly shot down etc.? Then suddenly political topics make some of us nerds forget what we often pride ourselves on, objectivity.
E.g. try typing this as a comment in any programming story:... and watch the number of replies that flood in to correct you. Then try:... and watch it get modded
(replying with 'but he really is just as bad' is about as funny as a republican cracking a monica joke btw).
I realise there are always going to be a subset of kids on slashdot, but it's obvious when it's youth with no idea and when it is someone older who does or should understand logical fallicies better (at least intuitively).