"Your honor, my client pleads guilty to murder, bank robbery, and to violating the DMCA by watching a Blu-ray movie on his Ubuntu computer. However, he asks that this picture of Mohammed having sex with a horse be taken into consideration."
"My goodness, that'll offend Muslims everywhere. What a prime example of controversial speech. Case dismissed!"
I don't know, but at the same time, if the message didn't go out to a large number of people in his address book, however it happened, I assume we'd not be reading it. So the story may have that detail ("the entire address book") wrong without being wrong, per-se, about the guy's innocence.
Not having a Blackberry, I can only assume you can easily set up groups of contacts. If girl friend's name is "Samantha", and group name is "Swim team", and they appear next to one another in the address book, then... maybe? Any BB owners here care to comment?
People at a cinema are also mostly getting along, because they want to watch a movie, and if any were actively anti-social it'd be a problem. I'd hardly call them a community.
...which doesn't reflect particularly well on Torvalds. Whether it reflects badly on "the community" really is another issue - given Torvald's approach on, say, the whole BitKeeper fiasco, I often wonder if there is a community there anyway, or just a bunch of people "mostly getting along" because they want Linux "fixed" (that is, supporting and doing whatever it needs to be doing right now right now, but isn't quite yet.)
Is Romney a moron? Absolutely not.
The plane window thing was obviously a joke, as Snopes has reported, and wouldn't even be that dumb if it hadn't been (look at the windows on your exit row next time - yes, technically they don't open, but they're built within hatches, and I'd find it believable and reasonable that someone talking off-the-cuff would talk about those windows "opening" - but, in any case, it was a joke about windows opening on planes.) Moreover, the man did a reasonable job as Governor of MA, he ran Bain Capital competently - his detractors are more upset about ethics issues than whether he made good business decisions.
Is he running a bad campaign? Yes. Has he made dumb comments during the campaign? Yes again. At the same time, is his position untenable? In my view, yes. He has to run a Tea Party campaign because he's a Republican and because he'd lose massive support if he didn't, and unfortunately for him the positions of the Tea Party include some outright batshit crazy crap. And most conservatives don't see that until something, like the "47%" comment, leaves the echo chamber and goes worldwide, facing the exposure it didn't when it was repeated by people who wanted it to mean what they wanted it to mean. Wait - you mean the 47% includes pensioners, and infantrymen, and students and people who are literally between jobs but have worked all their lives and probably will work until they retire? Oh! Somehow Michelle Malkin never mentioned that!
Mitt's major misjudgement was to run now, rather than let the extremists have their day and then run as a Unity candidate - as Obama did in 2008, in 2016. But a misjudgement or two does not make you a moron.
Actually I did. I said cheap, and I gave $5,000 as a ballpark figure. You know, I don't know what more I could have done to make it clear I was talking about a $5,000 vehicle you'd buy in addition to a regular car, rather than something $10,000 or more.
I want to know why the scientists keep making these giant supermassive super destructive black holes. Surely when there is starvation in the world there are more peaceful goals they could be striving for?!
OK, thoughts on the heating-a-car-with-a-battery thing:
Bear in mind the following:
1. Being stuck for hours in traffic during what's normally a 20 minute commute is a rare event. It may be common in DC, but to be honest, this is yet another case of Washington being out of touch with ordinary Americans;-)
2. You'd be in a sealed box that you've already warmed up (the car does contain a climate system, per my spec above, so it's safe to say that as you left work, your car's heater kicked in) and that already contains an independent, non-battery charged, heat source (you.) And I understand your point about not dressing to go to a football game, but you're still going to be wearing considerably more than you would in the office or home you're commuting to or from. So unless the car is extremely badly designed, it's highly improbably you're going to freeze to death, or even feel uncomfortable.
3. I'm thinking that it should be relatively inexpensive to build a lightweight battery powered vehicle that has a range of one hundred miles. Again, given typical commuting distances, which are usually under 25 miles, this vehicle should have a considerable amount of power to spare.
I'd be more than happy with a low cost electric vehicle with a range of around 50-100 miles as long as it's clearly priced and marketed as a supplementary vehicle (ie you'd be expected to buy one in addition to a regular car), is comfortable, and is climate controlled (I live in Florida, so an electric scooter isn't going to work for me.)
Most people's morning commute is less than 25 miles. If you could create a class of electric vehicle optimized for the morning commute, selling at, say, $5k, rather than insisting on trying to replace every $25k gasoline guzzler with a $35k green alternative, you ought to be able to make a mint.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the way the industry is working at the moment, in part because it's conservative and with good reason. It's scary producing new models of motor vehicle - Ford execs panic just at the risk that an overhaul of an existing line might be unpopular.
I don't think it's ever been a case of cost. I recall, for example, the issue with the Rasberry Pi wasn't that it'd cost more to produce domestically, it was that it would take longer to set up the manufacturing process.
Commodore was producing cost effective computers until the early-nineties where the vast majority of each product was assembled in the US from components largely made in the US. Did they have problem? Well, yeah, but that has more to do with stupid management refusing to sell newer designs than anything to do with its manufacuring process. It could have reduced the manufacturing costs of its computers by outsourcing, but that wouldn't have solved any actual problems.
People react to the culture in which they're brought up. And even in the Middle East, it's a small proportion of Muslims acting in the way rightists here want to depict all Muslims as.
As an atheist, I have no dog in this fight, except one: I want to live in a peaceful world. Six years ago I wrote this journal entry. I'm more fearful today than then that a new Hitler will arise, and no less convinced that the chances are equal that such a Hitler will come from the West as they are from the Middle East.
Thanks. Nice idea by the developers but it needs a little work - I can't download all my pictures for example (I just get an empty Zip file, and selecting each manually would take hours...)
You know, none of this would be necessary if Android had proper Bluetooth file transfer support...
I'm an ex-Brit. I remember being a little shocked on my first time voting in Britain, in the late eighties or early nineties.
My name was looked up on a register. Then a ballot form, with a serial number was selected from a stack. The serial number was recorded by my name, ostensibly to ensure it was known I voted and that if someone came in afterwards and claimed to be me, something can be done about it, and then the ballot was handed to me.
No idea if that's still the case, but it was obvious there that in one of the countries considered a co-birthplace of Western Democracy and a high profile advocate for Democracy at a time when we were at war to protect the very concept, I was not being given a secret ballot.
My mother (who now counts as a grandmother) has Internet access largely because of the ease and cost of setting up a prepaid wireless broadband connection. If she were limited to DSL and Cable, she'd probably not have it set up given her particular circumstances.
Are you reading the same Slashdot I am? Because the only comments I'm reading that aren't scorning the idea are those from people who want to devote their comments to Unity and how much that sucks instead.
And speaking for myself... I have no objection to Ubuntu shipping with an Amazon store of some kind, but ads is another thing. I'll use 12.04 for as long as necessary, and switch to Mint in the long term, if that happens.
I've stuck with Ubuntu for a while. I'm ambivalent about Unity, largely because I respect what they're trying to do but feel the UI just isn't there yet, and because, in terms of my own workflow, I actually get a better desktop because of their work (GNOME 3 with Unity's menu system and some other widgets actually works well for me.)
I want to upgrade, because there are issues in 12.04. The system doesn't fully support MTP for example, meaning I need to install hacky, barely working, packages just to transfer files from my Galaxy Nexus. I was looking forward to an upgrade, albeit with some concern that the GNOME+Unity mixture might finally break with this release.
Ads? No, that's the last straw. I'm happy with all kinds of revenue streams, even the infamous "swapping in Canonical's affiliate id into Banshee" incident. But I'm tired of every two bit marketer out there refusing to accept that at some point they have to ask for money, and insisting - INSISTING - that ads be foisted upon their users instead, especially in an era where advertisers are either clueless, or sociopathic, and think nothing of transmitting a highbandwidth presentation with audio without warning to their hapless victims.
Now, I should add this: yes, I understand Canonical is grasping around at the moment trying to find something that works. The cloud storage thing was probably looking good until Google and Apple jumped into that realm. The music store, well, maybe not so much as Amazon's been there from the start with a superb MP3 store. But you have to at least work from the premise of being rewarded for adding value. When your chosen revenue generator removes value, users go elsewhere. And especially in an open source environment, you're fooling yourself if you think you can remove value and get away with it. Mint exists because many Ubuntu users perceived Canonical as removing value from Ubuntu by moving away from GNOME 2. If Mint didn't already exist, putting ads in Ubuntu would result in its creation tomorrow morning.
I remember CIX being announced, with it being made clear in Personal Computer World et al that CIXs inspiration was Byte's BIX network. (Read on before responding it couldn't be because BIX was from 1985, and CIX 1983. CIX did NOT exist in 1983. I'll explain.)
Some sources put CIX at two years older than BIX making the above look... odd. However, those sources kinda confuse the history. CIX was a replacement for an existing FidoNet BBS. The FidoNet BBS that CIX replaced dated to 1983. The replacement, with complete rebranding, occured in 1987. From a "corporate" point of view, it was the same thing, users were migrated, data was, etc. From a technical point of view, it was a completely new system seeded with an existing database.
I can block Flash by not installing the plug-in, or temporarily disabling it.
For some reason, every idiot web browser developer out there thinks that if a video is in HTML5, you want to download and watch it as soon as the page loads. And that nobody, nobody, could possibly want anything different.
I never thought I'd say this but... fuck HTML5. I don't want it. Give me back my Flash video.
Hold on, according to StatCounter, Safari has nearly 128% of the market though, over 6,000 times more users than Internet Explorer and Firefox combined!
Moreover, the silliness of the proposal becomes obvious if reworded as "Switch to Bing if you want to prevent Google tracking you as it does when you visit any sites funded via Google advertising, or when you visit YouTube, GMail, Google Maps, Google Plus, Google News, Google..."
(And yeah, I'm aware Bing has its own mapping product. But to the best of my knowledge, only corporate websites that need embedded maps use it for much the same reason that iPhone users are getting very upset about the removal of Google Maps in the latest version of iOS)
1. Did we have competition before Obamacare? If so, why was healthcare so expensive compared to the rest of the world. If not, how did "Obamacare" miss this?
2. Competition between what and what exactly? Insurance companies? Still exists. Hospitals and doctors and stuff? That still exists too. (Before chipping in with the regular "But insurance means I get to pick the most expensive... blah blah", no it doesn't, because your insurer doesn't offer you all the doctors at the same prices. That's why you have to pick a doctor out of a catalog when you pick a new insurer, and why your insurance has different rates for "in-network" and "out of network" doctors. Likewise every insurance plan I've seen has at least three different rates for drugs.)
3. Regardless of whether competition "existed" before Obamacare or not, competition between different healthcare entities within their fields is obviously higher in the US than it is in countries like the UK, where private entities have to compete with "free" and thus have to target relatively small markets. Again, why does the US spend a much higher proportion per-capita on healthcare, and why does it fail to cover such a substantial proportion of the population despite spending being so many times more?
I'm not defending Obamacare here, but I am attacking the idea that "competition" is the issue. It isn't. The situation hasn't changed pre- or post- Obamacare, largely because Obamacare really didn't change much, which is the major reason it's a piece of shit. Healthcare is expensive in the US because it's inefficient. It's inefficient largely because of competition, not despite it. It's inefficient in part because it's biased towards the needs of the relatively well off rather than aimed at providing a basic, necessary, standard of care for everyone. The most efficient, best bang per buck, parts of the healthcare system in the US today are Medicare (minus Medicare Plus and Part B, for obvious reasons), and the VA Hospital system. There's a reason for that.
Slashdot Mirror
That'd set an entertaining precedent.
"Your honor, my client pleads guilty to murder, bank robbery, and to violating the DMCA by watching a Blu-ray movie on his Ubuntu computer. However, he asks that this picture of Mohammed having sex with a horse be taken into consideration."
"My goodness, that'll offend Muslims everywhere. What a prime example of controversial speech. Case dismissed!"
I don't know, but at the same time, if the message didn't go out to a large number of people in his address book, however it happened, I assume we'd not be reading it. So the story may have that detail ("the entire address book") wrong without being wrong, per-se, about the guy's innocence.
Not having a Blackberry, I can only assume you can easily set up groups of contacts. If girl friend's name is "Samantha", and group name is "Swim team", and they appear next to one another in the address book, then... maybe? Any BB owners here care to comment?
People at a cinema are also mostly getting along, because they want to watch a movie, and if any were actively anti-social it'd be a problem. I'd hardly call them a community.
Is Romney a moron? Absolutely not.
The plane window thing was obviously a joke, as Snopes has reported, and wouldn't even be that dumb if it hadn't been (look at the windows on your exit row next time - yes, technically they don't open, but they're built within hatches, and I'd find it believable and reasonable that someone talking off-the-cuff would talk about those windows "opening" - but, in any case, it was a joke about windows opening on planes.) Moreover, the man did a reasonable job as Governor of MA, he ran Bain Capital competently - his detractors are more upset about ethics issues than whether he made good business decisions.
Is he running a bad campaign? Yes. Has he made dumb comments during the campaign? Yes again. At the same time, is his position untenable? In my view, yes. He has to run a Tea Party campaign because he's a Republican and because he'd lose massive support if he didn't, and unfortunately for him the positions of the Tea Party include some outright batshit crazy crap. And most conservatives don't see that until something, like the "47%" comment, leaves the echo chamber and goes worldwide, facing the exposure it didn't when it was repeated by people who wanted it to mean what they wanted it to mean. Wait - you mean the 47% includes pensioners, and infantrymen, and students and people who are literally between jobs but have worked all their lives and probably will work until they retire? Oh! Somehow Michelle Malkin never mentioned that!
Mitt's major misjudgement was to run now, rather than let the extremists have their day and then run as a Unity candidate - as Obama did in 2008, in 2016. But a misjudgement or two does not make you a moron.
Actually I did. I said cheap, and I gave $5,000 as a ballpark figure. You know, I don't know what more I could have done to make it clear I was talking about a $5,000 vehicle you'd buy in addition to a regular car, rather than something $10,000 or more.
Just wait to you use the new GNOMEphone!
I want to know why the scientists keep making these giant supermassive super destructive black holes. Surely when there is starvation in the world there are more peaceful goals they could be striving for?!
No, I'd buy a $5,000 vehicle, like I said. That'd pay for itself in just over two years.
Close. Lacks climate control, and I don't see anything about range on there.
OK, thoughts on the heating-a-car-with-a-battery thing:
Bear in mind the following:
1. Being stuck for hours in traffic during what's normally a 20 minute commute is a rare event. It may be common in DC, but to be honest, this is yet another case of Washington being out of touch with ordinary Americans ;-)
2. You'd be in a sealed box that you've already warmed up (the car does contain a climate system, per my spec above, so it's safe to say that as you left work, your car's heater kicked in) and that already contains an independent, non-battery charged, heat source (you.) And I understand your point about not dressing to go to a football game, but you're still going to be wearing considerably more than you would in the office or home you're commuting to or from. So unless the car is extremely badly designed, it's highly improbably you're going to freeze to death, or even feel uncomfortable.
3. I'm thinking that it should be relatively inexpensive to build a lightweight battery powered vehicle that has a range of one hundred miles. Again, given typical commuting distances, which are usually under 25 miles, this vehicle should have a considerable amount of power to spare.
4. There is no four.
Parking is a real problem in New York City. For that reason alone, I don't know anyone who'd buy a car there.
I'd be more than happy with a low cost electric vehicle with a range of around 50-100 miles as long as it's clearly priced and marketed as a supplementary vehicle (ie you'd be expected to buy one in addition to a regular car), is comfortable, and is climate controlled (I live in Florida, so an electric scooter isn't going to work for me.)
Most people's morning commute is less than 25 miles. If you could create a class of electric vehicle optimized for the morning commute, selling at, say, $5k, rather than insisting on trying to replace every $25k gasoline guzzler with a $35k green alternative, you ought to be able to make a mint.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the way the industry is working at the moment, in part because it's conservative and with good reason. It's scary producing new models of motor vehicle - Ford execs panic just at the risk that an overhaul of an existing line might be unpopular.
I don't think it's ever been a case of cost. I recall, for example, the issue with the Rasberry Pi wasn't that it'd cost more to produce domestically, it was that it would take longer to set up the manufacturing process.
Commodore was producing cost effective computers until the early-nineties where the vast majority of each product was assembled in the US from components largely made in the US. Did they have problem? Well, yeah, but that has more to do with stupid management refusing to sell newer designs than anything to do with its manufacuring process. It could have reduced the manufacturing costs of its computers by outsourcing, but that wouldn't have solved any actual problems.
This poll seems timely: http://www.gallup.com/poll/148763/muslim-americans-no-justification-violence.aspx
People react to the culture in which they're brought up. And even in the Middle East, it's a small proportion of Muslims acting in the way rightists here want to depict all Muslims as.
As an atheist, I have no dog in this fight, except one: I want to live in a peaceful world. Six years ago I wrote this journal entry. I'm more fearful today than then that a new Hitler will arise, and no less convinced that the chances are equal that such a Hitler will come from the West as they are from the Middle East.
Thanks. Nice idea by the developers but it needs a little work - I can't download all my pictures for example (I just get an empty Zip file, and selecting each manually would take hours...)
You know, none of this would be necessary if Android had proper Bluetooth file transfer support...
I'm an ex-Brit. I remember being a little shocked on my first time voting in Britain, in the late eighties or early nineties.
My name was looked up on a register. Then a ballot form, with a serial number was selected from a stack. The serial number was recorded by my name, ostensibly to ensure it was known I voted and that if someone came in afterwards and claimed to be me, something can be done about it, and then the ballot was handed to me.
No idea if that's still the case, but it was obvious there that in one of the countries considered a co-birthplace of Western Democracy and a high profile advocate for Democracy at a time when we were at war to protect the very concept, I was not being given a secret ballot.
I see what you did there...
She will if she has to pay for them.
My mother (who now counts as a grandmother) has Internet access largely because of the ease and cost of setting up a prepaid wireless broadband connection. If she were limited to DSL and Cable, she'd probably not have it set up given her particular circumstances.
Are you reading the same Slashdot I am? Because the only comments I'm reading that aren't scorning the idea are those from people who want to devote their comments to Unity and how much that sucks instead.
And speaking for myself... I have no objection to Ubuntu shipping with an Amazon store of some kind, but ads is another thing. I'll use 12.04 for as long as necessary, and switch to Mint in the long term, if that happens.
I've stuck with Ubuntu for a while. I'm ambivalent about Unity, largely because I respect what they're trying to do but feel the UI just isn't there yet, and because, in terms of my own workflow, I actually get a better desktop because of their work (GNOME 3 with Unity's menu system and some other widgets actually works well for me.)
I want to upgrade, because there are issues in 12.04. The system doesn't fully support MTP for example, meaning I need to install hacky, barely working, packages just to transfer files from my Galaxy Nexus. I was looking forward to an upgrade, albeit with some concern that the GNOME+Unity mixture might finally break with this release.
Ads? No, that's the last straw. I'm happy with all kinds of revenue streams, even the infamous "swapping in Canonical's affiliate id into Banshee" incident. But I'm tired of every two bit marketer out there refusing to accept that at some point they have to ask for money, and insisting - INSISTING - that ads be foisted upon their users instead, especially in an era where advertisers are either clueless, or sociopathic, and think nothing of transmitting a highbandwidth presentation with audio without warning to their hapless victims.
Now, I should add this: yes, I understand Canonical is grasping around at the moment trying to find something that works. The cloud storage thing was probably looking good until Google and Apple jumped into that realm. The music store, well, maybe not so much as Amazon's been there from the start with a superb MP3 store. But you have to at least work from the premise of being rewarded for adding value. When your chosen revenue generator removes value, users go elsewhere. And especially in an open source environment, you're fooling yourself if you think you can remove value and get away with it. Mint exists because many Ubuntu users perceived Canonical as removing value from Ubuntu by moving away from GNOME 2. If Mint didn't already exist, putting ads in Ubuntu would result in its creation tomorrow morning.
I remember CIX being announced, with it being made clear in Personal Computer World et al that CIXs inspiration was Byte's BIX network. (Read on before responding it couldn't be because BIX was from 1985, and CIX 1983. CIX did NOT exist in 1983. I'll explain.)
Some sources put CIX at two years older than BIX making the above look... odd. However, those sources kinda confuse the history. CIX was a replacement for an existing FidoNet BBS. The FidoNet BBS that CIX replaced dated to 1983. The replacement, with complete rebranding, occured in 1987. From a "corporate" point of view, it was the same thing, users were migrated, data was, etc. From a technical point of view, it was a completely new system seeded with an existing database.
No way dude.
I can block Flash by not installing the plug-in, or temporarily disabling it.
For some reason, every idiot web browser developer out there thinks that if a video is in HTML5, you want to download and watch it as soon as the page loads. And that nobody, nobody, could possibly want anything different.
I never thought I'd say this but... fuck HTML5. I don't want it. Give me back my Flash video.
Hold on, according to StatCounter, Safari has nearly 128% of the market though, over 6,000 times more users than Internet Explorer and Firefox combined!
How the F*!? do you lose 16 BILLION DOLLARS with a search engine?
What the blazes are they spending the money on?
Moreover, the silliness of the proposal becomes obvious if reworded as "Switch to Bing if you want to prevent Google tracking you as it does when you visit any sites funded via Google advertising, or when you visit YouTube, GMail, Google Maps, Google Plus, Google News, Google..."
(And yeah, I'm aware Bing has its own mapping product. But to the best of my knowledge, only corporate websites that need embedded maps use it for much the same reason that iPhone users are getting very upset about the removal of Google Maps in the latest version of iOS)
Does not compute.
1. Did we have competition before Obamacare? If so, why was healthcare so expensive compared to the rest of the world. If not, how did "Obamacare" miss this?
2. Competition between what and what exactly? Insurance companies? Still exists. Hospitals and doctors and stuff? That still exists too. (Before chipping in with the regular "But insurance means I get to pick the most expensive... blah blah", no it doesn't, because your insurer doesn't offer you all the doctors at the same prices. That's why you have to pick a doctor out of a catalog when you pick a new insurer, and why your insurance has different rates for "in-network" and "out of network" doctors. Likewise every insurance plan I've seen has at least three different rates for drugs.)
3. Regardless of whether competition "existed" before Obamacare or not, competition between different healthcare entities within their fields is obviously higher in the US than it is in countries like the UK, where private entities have to compete with "free" and thus have to target relatively small markets. Again, why does the US spend a much higher proportion per-capita on healthcare, and why does it fail to cover such a substantial proportion of the population despite spending being so many times more?
I'm not defending Obamacare here, but I am attacking the idea that "competition" is the issue. It isn't. The situation hasn't changed pre- or post- Obamacare, largely because Obamacare really didn't change much, which is the major reason it's a piece of shit. Healthcare is expensive in the US because it's inefficient. It's inefficient largely because of competition, not despite it. It's inefficient in part because it's biased towards the needs of the relatively well off rather than aimed at providing a basic, necessary, standard of care for everyone. The most efficient, best bang per buck, parts of the healthcare system in the US today are Medicare (minus Medicare Plus and Part B, for obvious reasons), and the VA Hospital system. There's a reason for that.