meaning you won't be able to watch movies like The Hunger Games and World War Z through the service anymore
Well, this would have been a big loss indeed. If I had been able to watch those movies through Netflix to begin with, not being in US.
It's absolutely mindblowing how much distributor-to-distributor backstabbing goes on in US and it just doesn't matter here because they never got around to get their stuff here in the first place. Obligatory XKCD.
Is there still any prospect at all? I left 5 years ago because they stopped improving anything for a decade.
Emacs still has plenty of awesome projects going on, just that they're bloody haphazardly organised. You need to really go look for them and sometimes some minor assembly is required.
For example, the single most awesome Emacs package right now is Org-Mode, which especially speaks to me as a writer (a lot of writers swear by Scrivener, but screw it, we have a better open source alternative in Org). You'll note that it's developed outside of Emacs proper with its own release schedule. You'll note that if you want the newer versions (which aren't always required, the ones shipped with Emacs itself are usually pretty decent) you need to get the git version or use the one from Emacs ELPA package manager, which in itself is still kind of in early stages and not many projects make themselves available through it (translation: I use a whole bunch of emacs extensions, but none of them are available through ELPA). If you want nifty extensions for Org, you really need to hunt random files all around the interwebs and pray they actually work in current version of Org.
This sort of disorganisation is actually just what Emacs has been all about for decades. The core Emacs devs don't innovate that much (well, at least they do add cool new features in major releases, which is a good thing), and just package the outside contributions whenever they can. There's all sorts of cool shit going on, but you just wouldn't always know where to find them.
(That said, if you want to develop Java or C++, NetBeans just blows Emacs off the water.)
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
To me, this sounds like a pretty open and shut case of "Hey, I've heard that these 'NoSQL' database thingies are trendy these days. Let's use one of those!"
There's a difference between using fun, exciting new technologies and learning something new while doing that... and doing a project which stays in schedule and budget, is based on technology you already know thoroughly, and on which people's lives can depend (well, indirectly).
It looks like someone took a paper "written" using SciGen and submitted it to them. Because they didn't read the paper at all, they didn't notice it was absolute bullshit courtesy of finest context-free grammars people could code.
Brilliant work - not only is SciGen great for busting less than reputable scientific publications that don't exactly value this "peer review" thing, but now it has busted security magazines too.
On a broader level, one of most baffling things to me has been how little people are willing to invest in their own futures. They'll spend $1,500 on an HDTV, but spend $125 for an ISBN -- when publishing their novel is presumably one of their lifelong dreams -- hell no! I can't afford it! It's so much money!
Yog's Law: The money flows toward the writer. If it doesn't, then you're pretty obviously doing it wrong. Just how many people in other lines of work are paying to do their work? Silly me, I thought that people are usually paid to do their job.
The publishing industry has existed for a long time and has found a way to enable people to pay the authors, without any of the parties along the way screwing themselves over. The reason why publishers pay for ISBNs is that they're the risk-takers, and this arrangement works for all parties involved in normal publishing.
It's silly to assume that this arrangement would be most benefical for all parties in self-publishing scenario. It's silly to assume that ISBN authorities would be somehow entitled to do this same thing with self-publishing authors. And it's silly to assume that authors should be taking the exact same risks as commercial publishers do right now. The right solution would be to offer new mutually benefical arrangements and new approaches. In short, if publishing something requires an ISBN and self-publishers need it for minimal or no cost, offer them at that price. Otherwise, it's just an artificial barrier and it's plain as day that someone's screwing over someone.
Okay. Voting machines with a miscalibrated screen, coupled with a dumb user interface that causes wrong choices to be made and doesn't allow the voters to be certain what they voted for.
Scroll to comments.
That’s why the Marxist-in-Chief will be re-selected.
*facepalm*
OF COURSE it's a frigging Obama conspiracy! I mean, Obama did Hurricane Sandy, messing with a few voting machines is easy in comparison, right? Duh.
Seriously, though, this is kind of like an inverse of the common-sense conclusion. Normally, one flaw is a glitch, two is a conspiracy. In voting machines, one election with screwy results is enough to suggest a conspiracy, but when all elections that use voting machines have more or less screwy results, maybe that suggests that the technology just isn't there yet.
I wonder what sea water flooding implies for the financial district.
1. A brisk day of trading in derivatives based on underwater mortgages.
2. A vindication of the Saltwater school of economics.
3. People who thought studying Economics is nothing but underwater basket-weaving thought "damn, I wish I had actually studied underwater basket-weaving instead".
It is still alive in Norway (and I guess a lot of countries) as well.
In what form? According to Wikipedia analogue TV was turned off in Norway in 2009.
The DVB standard, which is used in digital broadcasting almost everywhere except North America, still supports teletext. It's just that some of the most commonly used features, like subtitles, have made their way into separate features.
The only way you'll make me unhappy is if you charge others for the font itself. That is all.
...in other words, it's simultaneously just an Attribution license, with a tacked-on Non-Commercial clause aside of the common CC licence.
It's not a standard licence, which adds another layer of complications. And because it has a commercial distribution prohibition, it's definitely not an "open source" project.
If you use Creative Commons licenses, go with the strictest license that describes your project to avoid unnecessary confusion. If you have a non-commercial clause, use the NC variants of licenses! Because nothing infuriates people more than seeing "it's under CC licence with no NC clause, cool" and then discovering that the actual license does prohibit commercial use to some extent.
Github is crowd funding now? Why did you tards mod this up to +5?
It's for the cover-up project! You need a Ruby on Rails software project to get donations these days....or maybe not RoR these days. Node.js, then. Gotta be trendy. Just make sure you add enough obscure dependencies that no one can be bothered to actually install and run your project. Then watch the money roll in!
Because I really couldn't care less about all of the "power" features? All of the "power user" tools worth their salt are CLI tools, anyway.
X11 is a system that lets you display applications in windows. Gnome just happens to do that, reasonably conveniently, and doesn't look half bad. Gnome 3 shell is perhaps a bit dumbed down and not particularly powerful, but it gets its job done. The reason I'm not using a lighter desktop environment is that Gnome 3 is also a reasonably modern choice, so I won't be having headaches about applications being dumbfounded by WindowMaker's peculiarities (or the other way around).
X11 is also a system that lets you show a ton of xterms at once. Gnome just calls those Gnome Terminals. Simple enough.
All I usually really need to do to get through my day are Firefox/Iceweasel, Emacs, and some graphics/video apps (MyPaint/GIMP/Inkscape/Blender/Synfig/Kdenlive). And then there's mpd for playing music in nicely Unixy way.
Oh, so "Bottomfeeder" is still a respectful term? As I understand it, lawyers are no longer allowed to call other people "scumbags", because that technical and accurate term is no longer considered politically correct. "Bottomfeeder" is still okay, though?
My first thought was "Gee, they're using 'democrat' and 'republican' keywords - I wonder if they're making use of Conservapedia's Best New Conservative Words? Andy Schlafly has already charted this linguistic ocean, and obviously every scientist should follow his superior conservative insights!...and they probably should only use conservative terms, because 'republican' terms may include RINO terms."
tapping the GPU mining potential of gamers, more specifically gamers of free-to-play games
So people buy gaming hardware, and then play F2P games that... don't actually utilise the hardware to run games, but for other purposes?
Consider the alternative: firing up a Bitcoin miner on background and running some other game that doesn't require a sophisticated GPU. The gamer can keep the profit all to themselves. The only upside is that the mining company can give the gamers different games. But the fundamental problem is that people think they're buying gaming hardware, you're saying they have gaming hardware... while downplaying the fact that they're not actually using the gaming hardware for gaming at all.
Ye gods, it's like 1999 again, people get venture capital for only slightly retarded business plans
I bet Jack Tramel's death won't get the kind of coverage that Steve Jobs got.
Funny. I opened up a prominent Finnish technology news site that seems to worship the ground upon which modern-time gadget makers walk on - sure enough, no mention of Tramiel yet.
I was only half-heartedly hoping Tramiel's death would be reported in national news, but I was not surprised that they actually did that. Commodore computers were pretty damn popular here back in the day.
I have a G+ profile, but I don't post that much there.
If they'd just let me stick the RSS feeds from my blogs there, the profile just might be a little bit more useful, you know? Simple and effective. (Perhaps even integrate to Google Reader somehow. Let people see what I post. Let people see what I liked.)
Wait, such a brilliantly obvious idea is not patentable and Facebook already bought FriendFeed. *sigh*
Yeah, I thought the same. XBL purchases come out of your MSPoints wallet, which is (logically enough) stored in XBL, not the console - you can purchase stuff through the xbox.com website too, and stuff gets downloaded when you turn the console on again. Credit card info is stored on XBL too, as far as I can boundlessly speculate. Wouldn't make much sense to store it on the console, especially since the XBL account is not tied to a specific console.
However, as far as I can tell you can have multiple 360s logged in at the same time, and the console stores authorisation cookies, not passwords; you can change the Windows Live account password and the console will still happily log you on. You can change your privacy settings to only allow your One Holy Console(tm) in without passwords. Still, theoretically, you could (somehow) let your hard drive slip to someone else, thus allowing them to log in as you, and have someone charging stuff for your credit card, but all those points would go to your account anyway. All the more reason to set the password asking on.
harsh personal treatment of individuals [...] Christ treated them with compassion -- as long as they confessed that their sin was a sin.
Oh, so that clears that up, then. He's not.
Yeah, all he says is that as long as gay people accept that God created them as abominations, they can continue to exist in the abominable state and not be totally nuked off the face of the planet collectively. Totally not homophobia.
Everywhere else, Google Play will be the new home for Android apps.
And I don't have an Android device.
Way to go! Get us excited about an awesome new service that does everything we've ever wanted, then tell me that basically it does nothing. Just because you live in a country the big media people forgot. And not some third-world country either - a perfectly normal and highly technological European country. Birthplace of the Android kernel, by the way. This is how they repay us?
I usually have nothing but good things to say about Google, and I know that for many parts this stuff is not really their fault, but god damn this stuff is always depressing.
If some special interest group wanted to influence law this way, the bigger question would be how they would keep a lid on it once they start bribing people. Remember, this is a country with very little political corruption, or at least that's the public perception - the last time we had to start asking questions about unclear sources of campaign fundings, it really hit the fan in the media.
So I believe someone would notice if random citizens were handed money for supporting an initiative. Since this is (as far as I can tell) a publicly documented process, it'd be even harder. And, besides, what would these special interest groups do if a counter-proposal sprung up, and people were supporting it without monetary incentives?
The concept of unalienable rights is a product of the 18th century and inextricably linked to religious belief: rights are inalienable because they are endowed by a Creator. Since modern societies find it increasingly unlikely that there is a Creator, that religious basis is no longer tenable and most of the West (with rising nations like China) now follows some variant of utilitarianism where rights are a convenient and mutable legal fiction to ensure general quality of life.
That's funny. The only place I can think of that specifies that inalienable rights are endowed by a Creator is the US Declaration of Independece. Here's a free hint: not every country in the world uses this as a basis.
Here's what our Constitution says: "Section 11 - Freedom of religion and conscience. Everyone has the freedom of religion and conscience. Freedom of religion and conscience entails the right to profess and practice a religion, the right to express one's convictions and the right to be a member of or decline to be a member of a religious community. No one is under the obligation, against his or her conscience, to participate in the practice of a religion."
Note the wording: "Everyone has the freedom of religion and conscience". It's just stated as a matter of fact. It doesn't need to come from any source. The law regards that as an irrelevant detail that is of no consequence. This is because the law is no place to explore some mysterious rationales for things.
It doesn't matter where good ideas come from, as long as those good ideas are actually upheld. The western society has, as a conclusion to watching strange things happen over centuries, come to the conclusion that freedom of religion and conscience - ability to freely accept and reject religious and moral ideas on personal level - is a good idea, and there's no problem keeping things that way.
Democracy depends on "mutable legal fiction". Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to correct the mistakes that legislators made in the past. Some laws may seem like good idea at time, but sometimes they unfortunately become outdated. And as it happens, basic human rights are good ideas that everyone still agrees are good ideas. Because we've seen what the alternatives are, and they just aren't pretty. Just look at the article.
We all know LaTeX allows you to focus on the content and magically comes up with beautiful layouts. I mean the single best page layouts are always in the looks-the-same LaTeX format! And it's so intuitive to use!
Also, funnily enough (and relevant to the article), one of the groups who is trying to improve (La)TeX's suitability for modern font technologies and supporting obscure languages is SIL, a group that does, among other things, Bible translations. (The end result is XeTeX, one of the best TeX versions out there right now if you want good PDF output and TrueType/OpenType support out of the box.)
Linux is difficult to use because of the command line problem, yes, but more so the problem is that Linux is a hodge podge of software that need not work well together.
No, Linux is difficult to use because it is a hodge-podge of software that works well together. Newbies take annoyance on the fact that sometimes you need to use a completely different software to finish your job, and that's just bad. They think that the software isn't good enough if it can't do everything they need it to do. They want completely integrated solutions to everything.
Of course, the pros know that it's better to just have separate tools that by themselves work much better than whatever hacked-together crap you will integrate in the software. And, incidentally, that is also true for other operating systems, on all fields of work. You don't just pick a piece of software to do your job; you do your job by picking the right pieces of software for the tasks at hand. A subtle but crucial difference.
It's just that it takes some user conditioning ("No, you may need to use separate app for that part of the job, and since I do that every day without a hitch, it's not as painful as you think, trust me"), and user education ("There are several apps that can do that part of the job, like X, Y and Z, but you can search for more options using website W and package manager P.")
Mythbusters can make a vehicle remote operated for a weekly TV show.
Except that a discerning viewer might notice they don't produce all of the material for a single episode a week. It's fairly obvious that they can spend a longer time testing a single myth than a week, if the need arises. They seem to sort of buffer their stuff on the background and have multiple bits of stuff going on at once.
So this is what they might say:
"We need a remote-controlled fire truck. How much time do you need?"
"Two weeks."
"...oh, and unlike your normal stuff, it absolutely has to work, because you can't randomly explodinate a fire truck in a residential area - which, by the way, is quite irradiated too."
"Maybe three or four weeks? We're not experts on building this stuff if it absolutely has to work under those conditions, but we can call the experts if needed."
"Let's just skip the middle man. We're calling in the experts, because we don't have that much time anyway."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this would have been a big loss indeed. If I had been able to watch those movies through Netflix to begin with, not being in US.
It's absolutely mindblowing how much distributor-to-distributor backstabbing goes on in US and it just doesn't matter here because they never got around to get their stuff here in the first place. Obligatory XKCD.
Emacs still has plenty of awesome projects going on, just that they're bloody haphazardly organised. You need to really go look for them and sometimes some minor assembly is required.
For example, the single most awesome Emacs package right now is Org-Mode, which especially speaks to me as a writer (a lot of writers swear by Scrivener, but screw it, we have a better open source alternative in Org). You'll note that it's developed outside of Emacs proper with its own release schedule. You'll note that if you want the newer versions (which aren't always required, the ones shipped with Emacs itself are usually pretty decent) you need to get the git version or use the one from Emacs ELPA package manager, which in itself is still kind of in early stages and not many projects make themselves available through it (translation: I use a whole bunch of emacs extensions, but none of them are available through ELPA). If you want nifty extensions for Org, you really need to hunt random files all around the interwebs and pray they actually work in current version of Org.
This sort of disorganisation is actually just what Emacs has been all about for decades. The core Emacs devs don't innovate that much (well, at least they do add cool new features in major releases, which is a good thing), and just package the outside contributions whenever they can. There's all sorts of cool shit going on, but you just wouldn't always know where to find them.
(That said, if you want to develop Java or C++, NetBeans just blows Emacs off the water.)
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
To me, this sounds like a pretty open and shut case of "Hey, I've heard that these 'NoSQL' database thingies are trendy these days. Let's use one of those!"
There's a difference between using fun, exciting new technologies and learning something new while doing that... and doing a project which stays in schedule and budget, is based on technology you already know thoroughly, and on which people's lives can depend (well, indirectly).
Hakin9 is a magazine that's not exactly too reputable.
It looks like someone took a paper "written" using SciGen and submitted it to them. Because they didn't read the paper at all, they didn't notice it was absolute bullshit courtesy of finest context-free grammars people could code.
Brilliant work - not only is SciGen great for busting less than reputable scientific publications that don't exactly value this "peer review" thing, but now it has busted security magazines too.
Why am I reminded of Star Wreck 4½? Can't remember the exact quote, but...
"Alert the enemies, that we're about to warm up the twinkler banks... soon."
"Alert the enemies, that we're about to warm up the twinkler banks... now."
(Several hours later)
"All right, if you want it. So be it. We will not make any more warnings. All light balls and twinkler banks... feuer."
(The ensuing fight consists mostly of dodging maneuvers of "turn right very slowly" variety)
On a broader level, one of most baffling things to me has been how little people are willing to invest in their own futures. They'll spend $1,500 on an HDTV, but spend $125 for an ISBN -- when publishing their novel is presumably one of their lifelong dreams -- hell no! I can't afford it! It's so much money!
Yog's Law: The money flows toward the writer. If it doesn't, then you're pretty obviously doing it wrong. Just how many people in other lines of work are paying to do their work? Silly me, I thought that people are usually paid to do their job.
The publishing industry has existed for a long time and has found a way to enable people to pay the authors, without any of the parties along the way screwing themselves over. The reason why publishers pay for ISBNs is that they're the risk-takers, and this arrangement works for all parties involved in normal publishing.
It's silly to assume that this arrangement would be most benefical for all parties in self-publishing scenario. It's silly to assume that ISBN authorities would be somehow entitled to do this same thing with self-publishing authors. And it's silly to assume that authors should be taking the exact same risks as commercial publishers do right now. The right solution would be to offer new mutually benefical arrangements and new approaches. In short, if publishing something requires an ISBN and self-publishers need it for minimal or no cost, offer them at that price. Otherwise, it's just an artificial barrier and it's plain as day that someone's screwing over someone.
Okay. Voting machines with a miscalibrated screen, coupled with a dumb user interface that causes wrong choices to be made and doesn't allow the voters to be certain what they voted for.
Scroll to comments.
That’s why the Marxist-in-Chief will be re-selected.
*facepalm*
OF COURSE it's a frigging Obama conspiracy! I mean, Obama did Hurricane Sandy, messing with a few voting machines is easy in comparison, right? Duh.
Seriously, though, this is kind of like an inverse of the common-sense conclusion. Normally, one flaw is a glitch, two is a conspiracy. In voting machines, one election with screwy results is enough to suggest a conspiracy, but when all elections that use voting machines have more or less screwy results, maybe that suggests that the technology just isn't there yet.
I wonder what sea water flooding implies for the financial district.
1. A brisk day of trading in derivatives based on underwater mortgages.
2. A vindication of the Saltwater school of economics.
3. People who thought studying Economics is nothing but underwater basket-weaving thought "damn, I wish I had actually studied underwater basket-weaving instead".
It is still alive in Norway (and I guess a lot of countries) as well.
In what form? According to Wikipedia analogue TV was turned off in Norway in 2009.
The DVB standard, which is used in digital broadcasting almost everywhere except North America, still supports teletext. It's just that some of the most commonly used features, like subtitles, have made their way into separate features.
So the font itself is under Creative Commons Attribution. Not bad. But then:
The only way you'll make me unhappy is if you charge others for the font itself. That is all.
...in other words, it's simultaneously just an Attribution license, with a tacked-on Non-Commercial clause aside of the common CC licence.
It's not a standard licence, which adds another layer of complications. And because it has a commercial distribution prohibition, it's definitely not an "open source" project.
If you use Creative Commons licenses, go with the strictest license that describes your project to avoid unnecessary confusion. If you have a non-commercial clause, use the NC variants of licenses! Because nothing infuriates people more than seeing "it's under CC licence with no NC clause, cool" and then discovering that the actual license does prohibit commercial use to some extent.
Github is crowd funding now? Why did you tards mod this up to +5?
It's for the cover-up project! You need a Ruby on Rails software project to get donations these days. ...or maybe not RoR these days. Node.js, then. Gotta be trendy. Just make sure you add enough obscure dependencies that no one can be bothered to actually install and run your project. Then watch the money roll in!
Because I really couldn't care less about all of the "power" features? All of the "power user" tools worth their salt are CLI tools, anyway.
X11 is a system that lets you display applications in windows. Gnome just happens to do that, reasonably conveniently, and doesn't look half bad. Gnome 3 shell is perhaps a bit dumbed down and not particularly powerful, but it gets its job done. The reason I'm not using a lighter desktop environment is that Gnome 3 is also a reasonably modern choice, so I won't be having headaches about applications being dumbfounded by WindowMaker's peculiarities (or the other way around).
X11 is also a system that lets you show a ton of xterms at once. Gnome just calls those Gnome Terminals. Simple enough.
All I usually really need to do to get through my day are Firefox/Iceweasel, Emacs, and some graphics/video apps (MyPaint/GIMP/Inkscape/Blender/Synfig/Kdenlive). And then there's mpd for playing music in nicely Unixy way.
Respectfully,
Candice Leonard Schwager
Zzzzzzz... huh? Oh, it ended already? Okay, that wasn't so bad. Oh wait, the entry has tags...
... Michael-Zhang-libels-Atty4kids-lies-libel-Bottomfeeder, ...
Oh, so "Bottomfeeder" is still a respectful term? As I understand it, lawyers are no longer allowed to call other people "scumbags", because that technical and accurate term is no longer considered politically correct. "Bottomfeeder" is still okay, though?
My first thought was "Gee, they're using 'democrat' and 'republican' keywords - I wonder if they're making use of Conservapedia's Best New Conservative Words? Andy Schlafly has already charted this linguistic ocean, and obviously every scientist should follow his superior conservative insights! ...and they probably should only use conservative terms, because 'republican' terms may include RINO terms."
tapping the GPU mining potential of gamers, more specifically gamers of free-to-play games
So people buy gaming hardware, and then play F2P games that... don't actually utilise the hardware to run games, but for other purposes?
Consider the alternative: firing up a Bitcoin miner on background and running some other game that doesn't require a sophisticated GPU. The gamer can keep the profit all to themselves. The only upside is that the mining company can give the gamers different games. But the fundamental problem is that people think they're buying gaming hardware, you're saying they have gaming hardware... while downplaying the fact that they're not actually using the gaming hardware for gaming at all.
Ye gods, it's like 1999 again, people get venture capital for only slightly retarded business plans
I bet Jack Tramel's death won't get the kind of coverage that Steve Jobs got.
Funny. I opened up a prominent Finnish technology news site that seems to worship the ground upon which modern-time gadget makers walk on - sure enough, no mention of Tramiel yet.
Open up the news from the national broadcasting company? Boom. That's in the foreign news section, so that's fairly prominent. Dennis M. Ritchie's death was relegated to the "science and technology" section. Oh boo hoo.
(Yes, they covered Steve Jobs too. Who didn't?)
I was only half-heartedly hoping Tramiel's death would be reported in national news, but I was not surprised that they actually did that. Commodore computers were pretty damn popular here back in the day.
I have a G+ profile, but I don't post that much there.
If they'd just let me stick the RSS feeds from my blogs there, the profile just might be a little bit more useful, you know? Simple and effective. (Perhaps even integrate to Google Reader somehow. Let people see what I post. Let people see what I liked.)
Wait, such a brilliantly obvious idea is not patentable and Facebook already bought FriendFeed. *sigh*
Yeah, I thought the same. XBL purchases come out of your MSPoints wallet, which is (logically enough) stored in XBL, not the console - you can purchase stuff through the xbox.com website too, and stuff gets downloaded when you turn the console on again. Credit card info is stored on XBL too, as far as I can boundlessly speculate. Wouldn't make much sense to store it on the console, especially since the XBL account is not tied to a specific console.
However, as far as I can tell you can have multiple 360s logged in at the same time, and the console stores authorisation cookies, not passwords; you can change the Windows Live account password and the console will still happily log you on. You can change your privacy settings to only allow your One Holy Console(tm) in without passwords. Still, theoretically, you could (somehow) let your hard drive slip to someone else, thus allowing them to log in as you, and have someone charging stuff for your credit card, but all those points would go to your account anyway. All the more reason to set the password asking on.
harsh personal treatment of individuals [...] Christ treated them with compassion -- as long as they confessed that their sin was a sin.
Oh, so that clears that up, then. He's not.
Yeah, all he says is that as long as gay people accept that God created them as abominations, they can continue to exist in the abominable state and not be totally nuked off the face of the planet collectively. Totally not homophobia.
Everywhere else, Google Play will be the new home for Android apps.
And I don't have an Android device.
Way to go! Get us excited about an awesome new service that does everything we've ever wanted, then tell me that basically it does nothing. Just because you live in a country the big media people forgot. And not some third-world country either - a perfectly normal and highly technological European country. Birthplace of the Android kernel, by the way. This is how they repay us?
I usually have nothing but good things to say about Google, and I know that for many parts this stuff is not really their fault, but god damn this stuff is always depressing.
</bitterness>
If some special interest group wanted to influence law this way, the bigger question would be how they would keep a lid on it once they start bribing people. Remember, this is a country with very little political corruption, or at least that's the public perception - the last time we had to start asking questions about unclear sources of campaign fundings, it really hit the fan in the media.
So I believe someone would notice if random citizens were handed money for supporting an initiative. Since this is (as far as I can tell) a publicly documented process, it'd be even harder. And, besides, what would these special interest groups do if a counter-proposal sprung up, and people were supporting it without monetary incentives?
The concept of unalienable rights is a product of the 18th century and inextricably linked to religious belief: rights are inalienable because they are endowed by a Creator. Since modern societies find it increasingly unlikely that there is a Creator, that religious basis is no longer tenable and most of the West (with rising nations like China) now follows some variant of utilitarianism where rights are a convenient and mutable legal fiction to ensure general quality of life.
That's funny. The only place I can think of that specifies that inalienable rights are endowed by a Creator is the US Declaration of Independece. Here's a free hint: not every country in the world uses this as a basis.
Here's what our Constitution says: "Section 11 - Freedom of religion and conscience. Everyone has the freedom of religion and conscience. Freedom of religion and conscience entails the right to profess and practice a religion, the right to express one's convictions and the right to be a member of or decline to be a member of a religious community. No one is under the obligation, against his or her conscience, to participate in the practice of a religion."
Note the wording: "Everyone has the freedom of religion and conscience". It's just stated as a matter of fact. It doesn't need to come from any source. The law regards that as an irrelevant detail that is of no consequence. This is because the law is no place to explore some mysterious rationales for things.
It doesn't matter where good ideas come from, as long as those good ideas are actually upheld. The western society has, as a conclusion to watching strange things happen over centuries, come to the conclusion that freedom of religion and conscience - ability to freely accept and reject religious and moral ideas on personal level - is a good idea, and there's no problem keeping things that way.
Democracy depends on "mutable legal fiction". Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to correct the mistakes that legislators made in the past. Some laws may seem like good idea at time, but sometimes they unfortunately become outdated. And as it happens, basic human rights are good ideas that everyone still agrees are good ideas. Because we've seen what the alternatives are, and they just aren't pretty. Just look at the article.
We all know LaTeX allows you to focus on the content and magically comes up with beautiful layouts. I mean the single best page layouts are always in the looks-the-same LaTeX format! And it's so intuitive to use!
Looks-the-same format? Wha...? =)
Also, funnily enough (and relevant to the article), one of the groups who is trying to improve (La)TeX's suitability for modern font technologies and supporting obscure languages is SIL, a group that does, among other things, Bible translations. (The end result is XeTeX, one of the best TeX versions out there right now if you want good PDF output and TrueType/OpenType support out of the box.)
Linux is difficult to use because of the command line problem, yes, but more so the problem is that Linux is a hodge podge of software that need not work well together.
No, Linux is difficult to use because it is a hodge-podge of software that works well together. Newbies take annoyance on the fact that sometimes you need to use a completely different software to finish your job, and that's just bad. They think that the software isn't good enough if it can't do everything they need it to do. They want completely integrated solutions to everything.
Of course, the pros know that it's better to just have separate tools that by themselves work much better than whatever hacked-together crap you will integrate in the software. And, incidentally, that is also true for other operating systems, on all fields of work. You don't just pick a piece of software to do your job; you do your job by picking the right pieces of software for the tasks at hand. A subtle but crucial difference.
It's just that it takes some user conditioning ("No, you may need to use separate app for that part of the job, and since I do that every day without a hitch, it's not as painful as you think, trust me"), and user education ("There are several apps that can do that part of the job, like X, Y and Z, but you can search for more options using website W and package manager P.")
Mythbusters can make a vehicle remote operated for a weekly TV show.
Except that a discerning viewer might notice they don't produce all of the material for a single episode a week. It's fairly obvious that they can spend a longer time testing a single myth than a week, if the need arises. They seem to sort of buffer their stuff on the background and have multiple bits of stuff going on at once.
So this is what they might say:
"We need a remote-controlled fire truck. How much time do you need?"
"Two weeks."
"...oh, and unlike your normal stuff, it absolutely has to work, because you can't randomly explodinate a fire truck in a residential area - which, by the way, is quite irradiated too."
"Maybe three or four weeks? We're not experts on building this stuff if it absolutely has to work under those conditions, but we can call the experts if needed."
"Let's just skip the middle man. We're calling in the experts, because we don't have that much time anyway."