They'll also be implementing a double-vision tax for people with more than one eye, who could potentially view internet content up to double the amount of times and still only get taxed for it once.
That argument holds no water and you know it. Who determines what's worth hiding? Against what criteria will the information be weighed? How is the validity of such information assured? Should I be denied a job because of a few late check to pay down my washing machine in my college years? Must I wait seven years for my declared bankruptcy to wash off my record before I can hold down another job?
Instead of the question being "do I have the right to refuse," the question should be "do they have the right to expect it." Unless the company is going to give you a credit card or help you renegotiate your mortgage, it's really NONE OF THEIR FSCKING BUSINESS.
History of employment? Sure. Reference check? Makes sense to me. Qualifies for 0% down on a 2003 Chevy? WHAT THE FUCK?
"Unless you have nothing to hide", my heinder. The real issue is whether or not the information in relevent. And in my opinion, it ain't.
Okay, so maybe that's a smart idea for the office-
on
Dell Dropping The Floppy
·
· Score: 1, Funny
But to people who *don't* always use the same computer, dropping the floppy is like condemning them to death.
Outside of my office, right now, some 80 students are banging away at the public access machines. They're doing research, writing papers, (probably surfing porn), and doing other tasks that they need to preserve the results of.
These machines are not assigned to them - it's pick-as-you-please. The students do not have network accounts, so there's no server for them to upload to.
They *need* floppies.
"Why not just make them purchase CD-RWs? They're just as cheap!" -- do all students have CD-RW's at home? Do they all know how to use burning software? Do I *really* want to have to train them in it? All 3000+ of them on campus? Do I have to explain the virtues of ISO9600 over Joliet over UDF over... You have to KNOW that shit to burn a CD that will work the way to expect it to.
Ditto with USB pen drives, zip drives, holo-cubes and direct brain-plugs.
Floppies are a standard everyone can agree on. Take the floppies away and they're left with a hodge-podge menagerie of devices in which the support staff must support *all* of them, or tell the student "too bad you didn't buy the $200 porto-wafer storage solution that we recommend" when they panic because they can't bring up the final project they finished 5 minutes ago and are about to lose.
Everyone knows floppies. Floppies are nice. Floppies are available everywhere. Floppies don't need updated drivers, and you don't have to plug a floppy in and hope that USB doesn't crash. Unless you buy a USB floppy drive, in which case, you get what you deserve.
When it's just your office machine and your home machine, it's easy to keep the two connected. When it's your home machine (if you have one) and whatever machine is free at the moment, you need to keep it simple.
Paramount opened the movie smack-dab in the middle of two major, highly anticipated openings and one major "event" release
That points to the problem right there. Trek is no longer a majorly anticipated release -- in other words, fewer people care about it, or the same amount of people care less.
Berman does need to be replaced. He's drunk at the wheel.
"I, for one, do not think that the problem was that the band was down tonight. I think the problem may have been that we had a monument of Stonehenge on stage in danger of being trampled BY A DWARF."
Seriously - the Trek franchise has been hashed into regurgitated crap since the halcyon days of Next Gen, and some people would argue even further back than that. They can't seem to get away from the same old tired dynamics.
The progression of reactions goes something like this: During the series: "Yippie! Picard and Data!" Generations: "Oh hey, Picard and Data." First Contact: "Ah. Picard and Data." Nemesis: "FUCK! Picard and Data!" Next movie: "Please kill Picard."
And no amount of resynthesizing Picard and Data into other characters in other shows will get away from all that Picard and Data floating around.
With his gripe about custome interfaces. Xine is a desktop nightmare. Ditto with most of the other multimedia players I've encountered. They sacrifice high-tech intuitive controls for some made-up high-tech LOOK.
I'd rather just be able to find the play button and get the damn thing out of the way.
When I set up a theme on my desktop, I expect it to be constant, even if it's just the default. I understand this means making an app work with KDE or Gnome or whatever, but it seems to me that that's less work that scraping a graphic interface together from scratch. Skins are for the desktop manager, not the apps themselves, IMHO.
Then there's the issue of the half-completed custom interface that jars from one look to another. For instance - why does the XMMS "browse/open" window look so awful? The rest of the app looks very nice, or is at least non-intrusive to my eyeballs. It's small, it's tight, and it looks like other players I'm familiar with. But when I try to open an MP3, I get this horrific, generic, huge freaking window to browse around in. Yuck. XMMS is the #1 recommended playing app, too, but it doesn't seem to fit in with any window manager beyond generic X.
If someone can recommend an MP3 player that just fits my desktop, I'd be ever so grateful. GMFTatsujin
You two: We've had our eye on you for some time. We gave you special versions of these documents with coded keyword sequences which enable us to trace their sources.
Thank you for your previous effors on our behalf. Please have your desks cleaned out by the close of the business day.
This case is more like a troublemaker walking into a bar, shouting at everyone in the room at the top of his lungs, and demanding his right to pee on their shoes as a speech action. I don't have any problem with bouncers (in the employ of the guy who pays the rent on the building) showing guys like this the door.
This guy wasn't walking down a public street. He was abusing a privately controlled, open space. He was repeatedly making a disturbance that violated the agreement as to his conduct he made when he walked in the door. He was warned, bounced, but kept coming back. Effectively, he was tresspassing, and thus, legal action can and should be taken.
Open forum on the Internet !== non-regulated open space. GMFTatsujin
"It sounds in part that this [lawsuit] highlights the lack of public spaces on the Internet," Seltzer said. "I would be more comfortable saying they could kick off whoever they wanted if there was someplace else they could tell him to go."
He doesn't get out much, does he?
When you open your site up to anyone, and make the process of getting an account public and easily accessable, you've just created a public space. The vast majority of web-based message boards are this way. No identity verification, no scrutinized application process, no requirements (except possibly vowing that you're over 18). The act of getting an account on these boards is almost totally geared toward providing a constant on-line identity in the forums, but it has nothing to do with who you are in meatspace.
That being said, I'm fine with this lawsuit. It takes money and resources to create such a forum, even if it's free to use. I'm posting on Slashdot's dime right now, in fact.
There are plenty of places for boneheads to go. Selzer's particular place has been targetted for asshole bombardment, and that sucks.
Maybe he should implement a Karma scheme?:) GMFTatsujin
I'm fairly new to Linux, so pardon me if I sounds like a dork.:)
I recently downloaded Gentoo (NICE!) and in reading the emerge docs, it states that you can set a flag in the source compilation process to include KDE and Gnome functionality into the build scripts for apps that support them.
This leads me to believe that I can run a Gnome app in KDE and still have all the Gnome-y goodness within that application. Ditto for running KDE apps in Gnome.
Is this true? If so, why worry about using one desktop or the other exclusively? Is this something the only Gentoo does, or does it just handle it more gracefully? What are the disadvantages of mixing like this?
What about those millions of criminal Californians who download and actually *use* the software??? Seems to me that's a high enough percentage that you could just pick anyubody off the street and have a good chance of nabbing one.
Australia: Um... I'm sorry, guys, I don't know what's gotten into us lately.
You could download the itsy-bitsy Palm PDB version and read it wherever you go without having to lug around a microforest!
That's freakin' genius, you ask me. In the Beginning was a good read too, and I think it's because I could read it on my Visor that I've enjoyed reading it over and over whenever the mood strikes me. On the bus, waiting in the line at the bank, over dinner... I love it.
Columbus wasn't a true American, dumbass. Nor was he seeking freedom, except perhaps the freedom to quickly sail to Asia and make lots of money on a new trade route.
America was settled by slave owners who wanted to be free. - George Carlin
If *you're* a US citizen, I suggest you take a high school civics course.
Yes, freedoms are granted by the government. Your own argument confirms it - the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are there specifically to give them to the citizenry. The Constitution describes the structure of the government and the abilities of each branch. The Bill of Rights grants citizens rights under the law. Surprise. surprise.
Unless you're talking about that whole "inalienable human rights" thing, but that's philosophy, not politics. Even then, the closest that the Constitution comes to expressing that notion is Amendment 10. But it is still granted by the document -- it *has* to be. You can't just assume you have a right to something and expect to be able to back it up without legal documentation.
And they *can* be taken away by the government. That's why the Bill of Rights is composed of amendments, not articles. It would be political suicide (one hopes) to try to amend the Bill of Rights down to, say, a more managable 4, but it can legally be done. This is because, even up to the signing, the framers of the Constitution weren't *really* sure that the rights they had in mind were universally beneficial, or best codified in the language they'd chosen.
And just a stupid quibbling footnote
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
String Theory doesn't touch Ether with a ten-foot pole.
String Theory, in part, seeks to explain the structure of the universe in such a way as to accomodate both gravitation and quantum effects. It does this by shifting the understanding of particles from a family of points that all have different properties (protons, electrons, quarks, what have you) toward a *truly* fundamental form of matter - a string - that displays different properties depending on its orientation and motion in space. One (and ONLY one) type of string, many configurations, all leading up to families of particles.
It's elegant, unproven, pretty damn keen, and possibly wrong, but worth a look. The math involved makes *predictions* about the fundamental properties of matter, rather than being built off of measurements of those properties (as quantum theory and relativity are). That's an important step that cannot be underscored enough.
String Theory doesn't posit that there's a universal medium that everything travels through, as Ether theory does. Instead, it describes a configuration of space that strings wiggle around in to produce the world that we're used to looking at.
String Theory rocks. I hope it's right. GMFTatsujin
Re:can someone explain to me
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Lordy... You don't ask much, do you?
The speed of light is constant in all possible frames of reference, according to Einstein. Basically what he's saying is that for any two objects at rest relative to each other (regardless of their motion to the rest of the universe, they appear not to be moving to *each other*), time and space behave in the same way. The beauty of his theory is that no one object can be said to be at universal rest to everything else -- there is no universal frame to measure against. Therefore, every frame of reference is valid and will behave the same way. This kills Ether theory dead, since Ether theory depends on a universal frame of reference. If it didn't have a universal frame of reference, then space and time would start behaving oddly within your *own* frame of reference depending on your motion. This is not the case - the light on Pluto behaves the same way as the light on Earth, even though the two are moving in different frames.
It's only when you introduce out-of-frame references (I'm standing still, the train is moving at 60mph away from me) that relativity kicks in and the laws start to behave weirdly.
Not inconsistantly, just weirdly. It's all in shifting your viewpoint.
The trick with light is to realize that although it travels at the same speed in every frame of reference, the *wavelength* is what changes between frame. This is what that whole red-shifting/Doppler effect is about. The speed of light is constant; the color, however, changes depnding on your frame of reference. If you shoot a blue light at me while we're both standing still relative to each other, it looks blue to me. If I run away *really fast*, it will still be blue to you, but it will appear red to me because the wavelength alters even though it still travels toward me at a constant rate. Ditto if *you* run away from me - the light is blue to you, but again, it appears red to me, even though it travels at the same speed.
Light does not behave in the Newtonian way - acceleration does not effect its speed, only its wavelength. That's where the question of why light is constant to everything, even moving objects, is answered.
Weird, huh?
For a far, far, better explanation (and a fantastic grounding on String Theory in terms for non-physicists) check out The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. If I could, I'd give this book a Pulitzer every year until the day I died.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the "anti-competitive practices" part of the complaint is that most times, that situation can't be helped...
They'll also be implementing a double-vision tax for people with more than one eye, who could potentially view internet content up to double the amount of times and still only get taxed for it once.
GMFTaxsujin
unless you're hiding something...
That argument holds no water and you know it. Who determines what's worth hiding? Against what criteria will the information be weighed? How is the validity of such information assured? Should I be denied a job because of a few late check to pay down my washing machine in my college years? Must I wait seven years for my declared bankruptcy to wash off my record before I can hold down another job?
Instead of the question being "do I have the right to refuse," the question should be "do they have the right to expect it." Unless the company is going to give you a credit card or help you renegotiate your mortgage, it's really NONE OF THEIR FSCKING BUSINESS.
History of employment? Sure. Reference check? Makes sense to me. Qualifies for 0% down on a 2003 Chevy? WHAT THE FUCK?
"Unless you have nothing to hide", my heinder. The real issue is whether or not the information in relevent. And in my opinion, it ain't.
But to people who *don't* always use the same computer, dropping the floppy is like condemning them to death.
Outside of my office, right now, some 80 students are banging away at the public access machines. They're doing research, writing papers, (probably surfing porn), and doing other tasks that they need to preserve the results of.
These machines are not assigned to them - it's pick-as-you-please. The students do not have network accounts, so there's no server for them to upload to.
They *need* floppies.
"Why not just make them purchase CD-RWs? They're just as cheap!" -- do all students have CD-RW's at home? Do they all know how to use burning software? Do I *really* want to have to train them in it? All 3000+ of them on campus? Do I have to explain the virtues of ISO9600 over Joliet over UDF over... You have to KNOW that shit to burn a CD that will work the way to expect it to.
Ditto with USB pen drives, zip drives, holo-cubes and direct brain-plugs.
Floppies are a standard everyone can agree on. Take the floppies away and they're left with a hodge-podge menagerie of devices in which the support staff must support *all* of them, or tell the student "too bad you didn't buy the $200 porto-wafer storage solution that we recommend" when they panic because they can't bring up the final project they finished 5 minutes ago and are about to lose.
Everyone knows floppies. Floppies are nice. Floppies are available everywhere. Floppies don't need updated drivers, and you don't have to plug a floppy in and hope that USB doesn't crash. Unless you buy a USB floppy drive, in which case, you get what you deserve.
When it's just your office machine and your home machine, it's easy to keep the two connected. When it's your home machine (if you have one) and whatever machine is free at the moment, you need to keep it simple.
Keep the floppy.
GMFTatsujin
Beautiful. Just beautful.
The parent to your response used a stupid example by analogy. You totally trumped him. Well done, friend.
Paramount opened the movie smack-dab in the middle of two major, highly anticipated openings and one major "event" release
That points to the problem right there. Trek is no longer a majorly anticipated release -- in other words, fewer people care about it, or the same amount of people care less.
Berman does need to be replaced. He's drunk at the wheel.
"I, for one, do not think that the problem was that the band was down tonight. I think the problem may have been that we had a monument of Stonehenge on stage in danger of being trampled BY A DWARF."
Seriously - the Trek franchise has been hashed into regurgitated crap since the halcyon days of Next Gen, and some people would argue even further back than that. They can't seem to get away from the same old tired dynamics.
The progression of reactions goes something like this:
During the series: "Yippie! Picard and Data!"
Generations: "Oh hey, Picard and Data."
First Contact: "Ah. Picard and Data."
Nemesis: "FUCK! Picard and Data!"
Next movie: "Please kill Picard."
And no amount of resynthesizing Picard and Data into other characters in other shows will get away from all that Picard and Data floating around.
GMFTatsujin
NO MORE.
Thank goodness. Give the franchise a nice tombstone and lay it to rest already.
I swear to God I have seen this exact same post, word for word before. I don't know where, I'm not griping, I'm just confused.
:)
It's tripping me out.
That being said, good example.
GMFTatsujin
I just looked at his web page www.jwz.com. With an index page like that, who the hell is he to gripe?
With his gripe about custome interfaces. Xine is a desktop nightmare. Ditto with most of the other multimedia players I've encountered. They sacrifice high-tech intuitive controls for some made-up high-tech LOOK.
I'd rather just be able to find the play button and get the damn thing out of the way.
When I set up a theme on my desktop, I expect it to be constant, even if it's just the default. I understand this means making an app work with KDE or Gnome or whatever, but it seems to me that that's less work that scraping a graphic interface together from scratch. Skins are for the desktop manager, not the apps themselves, IMHO.
Then there's the issue of the half-completed custom interface that jars from one look to another. For instance - why does the XMMS "browse/open" window look so awful? The rest of the app looks very nice, or is at least non-intrusive to my eyeballs. It's small, it's tight, and it looks like other players I'm familiar with. But when I try to open an MP3, I get this horrific, generic, huge freaking window to browse around in. Yuck. XMMS is the #1 recommended playing app, too, but it doesn't seem to fit in with any window manager beyond generic X.
If someone can recommend an MP3 player that just fits my desktop, I'd be ever so grateful.
GMFTatsujin
I, too, am a Lindows insider.
:)
You two: We've had our eye on you for some time. We gave you special versions of these documents with coded keyword sequences which enable us to trace their sources.
Thank you for your previous effors on our behalf. Please have your desks cleaned out by the close of the business day.
Just kidding.
GMFTatsujin
As so often happens, I was too busy making my point to make sure I was bringing the right facts into play.
:)
Thanks for the correction.
GMFTatsujin
In a truly public space, yes.
This case is more like a troublemaker walking into a bar, shouting at everyone in the room at the top of his lungs, and demanding his right to pee on their shoes as a speech action. I don't have any problem with bouncers (in the employ of the guy who pays the rent on the building) showing guys like this the door.
This guy wasn't walking down a public street. He was abusing a privately controlled, open space. He was repeatedly making a disturbance that violated the agreement as to his conduct he made when he walked in the door. He was warned, bounced, but kept coming back. Effectively, he was tresspassing, and thus, legal action can and should be taken.
Open forum on the Internet !== non-regulated open space.
GMFTatsujin
"It sounds in part that this [lawsuit] highlights the lack of public spaces on the Internet," Seltzer said. "I would be more comfortable saying they could kick off whoever they wanted if there was someplace else they could tell him to go."
:)
He doesn't get out much, does he?
When you open your site up to anyone, and make the process of getting an account public and easily accessable, you've just created a public space. The vast majority of web-based message boards are this way. No identity verification, no scrutinized application process, no requirements (except possibly vowing that you're over 18). The act of getting an account on these boards is almost totally geared toward providing a constant on-line identity in the forums, but it has nothing to do with who you are in meatspace.
That being said, I'm fine with this lawsuit. It takes money and resources to create such a forum, even if it's free to use. I'm posting on Slashdot's dime right now, in fact.
There are plenty of places for boneheads to go. Selzer's particular place has been targetted for asshole bombardment, and that sucks.
Maybe he should implement a Karma scheme?
GMFTatsujin
I'm fairly new to Linux, so pardon me if I sounds like a dork. :)
I recently downloaded Gentoo (NICE!) and in reading the emerge docs, it states that you can set a flag in the source compilation process to include KDE and Gnome functionality into the build scripts for apps that support them.
This leads me to believe that I can run a Gnome app in KDE and still have all the Gnome-y goodness within that application. Ditto for running KDE apps in Gnome.
Is this true? If so, why worry about using one desktop or the other exclusively? Is this something the only Gentoo does, or does it just handle it more gracefully? What are the disadvantages of mixing like this?
Just a little confused. Thanks!
GMFTatsujin
What about those millions of criminal Californians who download and actually *use* the software??? Seems to me that's a high enough percentage that you could just pick anyubody off the street and have a good chance of nabbing one.
Australia: Um... I'm sorry, guys, I don't know what's gotten into us lately.
You could download the itsy-bitsy Palm PDB version and read it wherever you go without having to lug around a microforest!
That's freakin' genius, you ask me. In the Beginning was a good read too, and I think it's because I could read it on my Visor that I've enjoyed reading it over and over whenever the mood strikes me. On the bus, waiting in the line at the bank, over dinner... I love it.
Actually, I value chocotacos.
Columbus wasn't a true American, dumbass. Nor was he seeking freedom, except perhaps the freedom to quickly sail to Asia and make lots of money on a new trade route.
America was settled by slave owners who wanted to be free. - George Carlin
If *you're* a US citizen, I suggest you take a high school civics course.
Yes, freedoms are granted by the government. Your own argument confirms it - the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are there specifically to give them to the citizenry. The Constitution describes the structure of the government and the abilities of each branch. The Bill of Rights grants citizens rights under the law. Surprise. surprise.
Unless you're talking about that whole "inalienable human rights" thing, but that's philosophy, not politics. Even then, the closest that the Constitution comes to expressing that notion is Amendment 10. But it is still granted by the document -- it *has* to be. You can't just assume you have a right to something and expect to be able to back it up without legal documentation.
And they *can* be taken away by the government. That's why the Bill of Rights is composed of amendments, not articles. It would be political suicide (one hopes) to try to amend the Bill of Rights down to, say, a more managable 4, but it can legally be done. This is because, even up to the signing, the framers of the Constitution weren't *really* sure that the rights they had in mind were universally beneficial, or best codified in the language they'd chosen.
I'm with you on the chilling effects argument.
... for fun and refreshing home-made sci-fi. First MST3K, now this. Excellent work, guys!
Keep circulating the tapes.
GMFTatsujin
Lean to the left!
String Theory doesn't touch Ether with a ten-foot pole.
String Theory, in part, seeks to explain the structure of the universe in such a way as to accomodate both gravitation and quantum effects. It does this by shifting the understanding of particles from a family of points that all have different properties (protons, electrons, quarks, what have you) toward a *truly* fundamental form of matter - a string - that displays different properties depending on its orientation and motion in space. One (and ONLY one) type of string, many configurations, all leading up to families of particles.
It's elegant, unproven, pretty damn keen, and possibly wrong, but worth a look. The math involved makes *predictions* about the fundamental properties of matter, rather than being built off of measurements of those properties (as quantum theory and relativity are). That's an important step that cannot be underscored enough.
String Theory doesn't posit that there's a universal medium that everything travels through, as Ether theory does. Instead, it describes a configuration of space that strings wiggle around in to produce the world that we're used to looking at.
String Theory rocks. I hope it's right.
GMFTatsujin
Lordy... You don't ask much, do you?
The speed of light is constant in all possible frames of reference, according to Einstein. Basically what he's saying is that for any two objects at rest relative to each other (regardless of their motion to the rest of the universe, they appear not to be moving to *each other*), time and space behave in the same way. The beauty of his theory is that no one object can be said to be at universal rest to everything else -- there is no universal frame to measure against. Therefore, every frame of reference is valid and will behave the same way. This kills Ether theory dead, since Ether theory depends on a universal frame of reference. If it didn't have a universal frame of reference, then space and time would start behaving oddly within your *own* frame of reference depending on your motion. This is not the case - the light on Pluto behaves the same way as the light on Earth, even though the two are moving in different frames.
It's only when you introduce out-of-frame references (I'm standing still, the train is moving at 60mph away from me) that relativity kicks in and the laws start to behave weirdly.
Not inconsistantly, just weirdly. It's all in shifting your viewpoint.
The trick with light is to realize that although it travels at the same speed in every frame of reference, the *wavelength* is what changes between frame. This is what that whole red-shifting/Doppler effect is about. The speed of light is constant; the color, however, changes depnding on your frame of reference. If you shoot a blue light at me while we're both standing still relative to each other, it looks blue to me. If I run away *really fast*, it will still be blue to you, but it will appear red to me because the wavelength alters even though it still travels toward me at a constant rate. Ditto if *you* run away from me - the light is blue to you, but again, it appears red to me, even though it travels at the same speed.
Light does not behave in the Newtonian way - acceleration does not effect its speed, only its wavelength. That's where the question of why light is constant to everything, even moving objects, is answered.
Weird, huh?
For a far, far, better explanation (and a fantastic grounding on String Theory in terms for non-physicists) check out The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. If I could, I'd give this book a Pulitzer every year until the day I died.
Yet another fine example of why the world so desperatly needs a website like GodFuckingDamnit.com.