We had some fairly good posts on this in the 'Egypt pornography ban' story earlier today. The general consensus (I think) is that it is a threat to the kind of compulsory, loveless marriages that are common accomplices to conservative values. It's not anyone's fault; merely an unfortunate equilibrium that built up over time. Personally, I'm still waiting for the complementary ban on Harlequin Romance novels.
...and sarcastically: escapism is clearly an unacceptable coping mechanism for a bad relationship that you're duty-bound to maintain by a bundle of two-thousand-year-old fairy tales and comic books.
Conversely, have you seen some of the absurdities they get up to in hardcore porn these days? Catering to private fantasies is one thing, but the amount of violence contaminating the general pool of smut at this point is pretty unsettling. It's enough to make me think that a concerted effort to reduce violence in the media might help clean up how sexuality is perceived by the people currently trying to oppress it.
Huh. Love has been hyped up far more than it is in reality. There's a vast gulf between marriages were the couple aren't romantically set on fire by each other (but which work very well nonetheless) and abusive and destructive relationships. It takes all kinds to make this world apparently. I think both rigidly orthodox, conservative societies (which tend to produce insecure, reactionary people as this House member being discussed) and amoral libertarians represent two extremes of the spectrum, and a middle-ground of a healthy society exemplified by "all for one and one for all" is the ideal we should aim for.
Like every other Internet user, having been exposed to all kinds of pornography, I'm now heartily sick of it and realise one ounce of a real relationship (no matter how imperfect it may be, as long as mutual respect is present) is worth tons of worthless fantasy. "Make love, not war" is excellent, but it's sad how it has been slowly transformed into "Make sex, not love."
Yes this is indeed the need of the hour! Save Earth from asteroids! How about we stop this paranoia and focus on matters closer to home, or what will be left in a few short decades will not only not be worth saving, it would well deserve obliteration by an asteroid or two!
Me too, but the 64-bit version of Chrome for Linux is not bundled with Flash. Instead it uses the system-wide Flash plugin that's installed, which now that Adobe will not be supporting, will get increasingly outdated. The 32-bit version however comes bundled with Google's own version of Flash.
I've been running Linux exclusively since 2004, but decided to give Windows 7 a try recently, and I've to say the overall experience was not good. For some reason Windows versions after XP (and particularly after 98) seem to love flogging the HDD. Windows 7 really excelled in this, and this continued even after I made sure to turn off the Indexing Service. It'd constantly decide to write/read from the disk, even when I had only an empty desktop idling by, without any applications open. The worst pain though was Update, which took literally hours and hours to install patches which were a few hundred kilobytes (as displayed by Update itself), preventing me from shutting down my system, as well as gobbling up disk space by the Gb. After updates had eaten away around 4Gb of my disk space, and Windows had roasted the HDD for a few days, I'd had enough, and wiped it clean, and went back to Linux, for the sake of my disk lifetime, if nothing else.
When the AC said "all English in India is this bad", I don't know what it is, if not a stereotype. All of India doesn't speak any single language, and though English was bestowed the status of an official language in the hope that it would serve as a 'link' language across the country, that hope was stillborn. I think fluent speakers of English aren't more uncommon here than in any other country where it is not a native language, official statuses notwithstanding.
Well, considering that English is not a native language, I'd say we aren't doing too bad on the whole, though there's always room for improvement.
It may not be a "native" language, but it is an official language of the country and it's been part of Indian society for nigh on 200 years. You'd think business people, at least, would be fluent -- and I say "business people" because TFA is obviously an advertisement for this obscure Indian company's contest, rather than anything of interest to the/. audience at large. (Damn, am I flaming Indians, Techgoss, or Slashdot? I can't even tell anymore!)
Part of a miniscule fraction of India's population, till just a couple of decades back. Like most other large countries, what the government does officially has little relevance to the reality across the country. Even now, the vast majority of those who know English are the first generation learners in their families, and thus lack much scope for practice. Outside the major cities and towns, schools in English medium are either rare or the quality of the teachers (with regards to English) are abysmal, since anyone who's had a good enough education to learn good English doesn't want to sacrifice his career in poorly paid rural jobs.
Only those few business people who need to interact heavily with a wide group of people, or those who'd studied at good English medium schools, are likely to be fluent in English. The adage that quality is drowned in quantity is as true here as elsewhere.
Well, considering that English is not a native language, I'd say we aren't doing too bad on the whole, though there's always room for improvement. I wonder how many Americans know a second language at all, never mind whether they're good or bad in it. Seriously, many of us can speak and write pretty good English. You might try easing off on the stereotyping.
Me too. Loved the GNOME desktop that came with Linux Mandrake sometime around 2001 or 02. Those were the days. Desktops were lean, clean and got out of your way. These days logging into either of the big two (KDE, GNOME) desktops is like walking into a fair; lots of noise and eye-candy, making you gawp and try to find your way around...
It's the same sort of thing that nerds feel about Flash (Flash==bad).
HTML==open==good.
I'm not giving a argument for that feeling here, merely noting it.
Here's a list of other Slashdot prejudices:
Java bad
Oracle bad
Google good
Apple good(?)
Android good (depending on your perspective)
C good
C++ bad
Unity/Gnome3 bad
M$ bad
WIndows bad/Linux good
JavaScript bad (unnecessary use of)
Flash bad
Facebook bad
For Facebook replace bad with Evil and for M$ replace bad with Devil, and you've summed-up perfectly...
Fortunately I believe people (and even most governments, perhaps not the US one though) won't accepted the dumbing down of the PC to an appliance. I certainly hope so. Besides being taken to court (which will definitely happen if Windows is imposed), the system is also certain to be cracked in time. IOW, we're heading for a mess at best, a protracted battle at worst. The fact that people haven't accepted lockdown even on smartphones and consoles gives me hope that this will turn out to be only yet another temporary roadblock towards universal and open computing.
Either the PC manufacturer has to provide an easy and standardized mechanism for the user to add his own signing keys, OR, provide an easy and standardized mechanism to disable 'secure' booting. If not, the PC will be no more than a glorified MS version of iPad, and I'll be boycotting any such manufacturer. So will a LOT of people I'm sure, and public and legal pressure will certainly be brought to bear on them.
You can only afford to nest virtual machines up to a point, after which the drag on performance becomes unaffordable, even on the fastest machines. A JavaScript x86 emulator is really cool, and it might be interesting to those who want to run (or serve) system code over the net, or push the limits of JS and it's implementation, but that's about the extent of it's potential as far as I can see.
"Sure, Java supports more platforms, but it's resource and memory hog, insecure (there's tons of Java exploits out there but none for.NET!)..."
Since installing Windows 7 (about a week back) I've had to apply more than 8-10 patches for.NET "security vulnerabilities" and "exploits" already.
Ironically medical care is becoming increasingly unaffordable to us here, at least those not blessed enough to be among the financial cream. $5000 is slightly more than an year's worth of earning for the middle-class, i.e., prohibitively expensive, though of course it'd almost certainly be substantially overpriced for non-citizens.
Hmm. Race has always been defined by physical appearance, and in this respect, this is a very diverse place. Physically, culturally, and linguistically (the main 'determinants' of 'race'), it's heterogeneous enough to overwhelm even an Indian like me. There are practical problems too, as a journey of about a 100 miles in any direction here more or less results in you not being able to communicate anymore, except through English, which not many speak outside metros. Diversity is it's greatest strength as well as it's greatest weakness (just like the world).
The south of India is dominated by non-Indo-European languages.
'Race' is one of those concepts which is apparently irresistibly powerful, but which even the slightest logical scrutiny shows to have been purely a delusion and devoid of any substantial meaning.
This is not an ideal analogy. Computing hardware simply gives you the potential to perform computations and leaves you the choice of software to run it (general purpose systems anyway.) This choice would be eroded by this Trusted booting scheme apparently.
To use your own analogy, imagine a car manufacturer who sells you a car which can only be driven by one certified person and no one else (and thats not even you the buyer)... This comes much closer to what trusted booting might mean for any buyer of that hardware. I'm sure I don't want any such hardware unless I'm provided the key(s) needed to any software of my choosing on it.
The Slashdot FAQ does claim that the vast majority of Slashdot users are from the USA. Though I'm one of the recent exceptions, I personally don't find it all that US centric, with some exceptions like articles on creationism.
As for software eating up the world, the only thing eating up the world is entropy, and it's inexorable.
Slashdot Mirror
We had some fairly good posts on this in the 'Egypt pornography ban' story earlier today. The general consensus (I think) is that it is a threat to the kind of compulsory, loveless marriages that are common accomplices to conservative values. It's not anyone's fault; merely an unfortunate equilibrium that built up over time. Personally, I'm still waiting for the complementary ban on Harlequin Romance novels.
...and sarcastically: escapism is clearly an unacceptable coping mechanism for a bad relationship that you're duty-bound to maintain by a bundle of two-thousand-year-old fairy tales and comic books.
Conversely, have you seen some of the absurdities they get up to in hardcore porn these days? Catering to private fantasies is one thing, but the amount of violence contaminating the general pool of smut at this point is pretty unsettling. It's enough to make me think that a concerted effort to reduce violence in the media might help clean up how sexuality is perceived by the people currently trying to oppress it.
Huh. Love has been hyped up far more than it is in reality. There's a vast gulf between marriages were the couple aren't romantically set on fire by each other (but which work very well nonetheless) and abusive and destructive relationships. It takes all kinds to make this world apparently. I think both rigidly orthodox, conservative societies (which tend to produce insecure, reactionary people as this House member being discussed) and amoral libertarians represent two extremes of the spectrum, and a middle-ground of a healthy society exemplified by "all for one and one for all" is the ideal we should aim for.
Like every other Internet user, having been exposed to all kinds of pornography, I'm now heartily sick of it and realise one ounce of a real relationship (no matter how imperfect it may be, as long as mutual respect is present) is worth tons of worthless fantasy. "Make love, not war" is excellent, but it's sad how it has been slowly transformed into "Make sex, not love."
Yes this is indeed the need of the hour! Save Earth from asteroids! How about we stop this paranoia and focus on matters closer to home, or what will be left in a few short decades will not only not be worth saving, it would well deserve obliteration by an asteroid or two!
Me too, but the 64-bit version of Chrome for Linux is not bundled with Flash. Instead it uses the system-wide Flash plugin that's installed, which now that Adobe will not be supporting, will get increasingly outdated. The 32-bit version however comes bundled with Google's own version of Flash.
I've been running Linux exclusively since 2004, but decided to give Windows 7 a try recently, and I've to say the overall experience was not good. For some reason Windows versions after XP (and particularly after 98) seem to love flogging the HDD. Windows 7 really excelled in this, and this continued even after I made sure to turn off the Indexing Service. It'd constantly decide to write/read from the disk, even when I had only an empty desktop idling by, without any applications open. The worst pain though was Update, which took literally hours and hours to install patches which were a few hundred kilobytes (as displayed by Update itself), preventing me from shutting down my system, as well as gobbling up disk space by the Gb. After updates had eaten away around 4Gb of my disk space, and Windows had roasted the HDD for a few days, I'd had enough, and wiped it clean, and went back to Linux, for the sake of my disk lifetime, if nothing else.
Mod this up please.
Haha. I'm sure you didn't mean what you just wrote! Ironic...
When the AC said "all English in India is this bad", I don't know what it is, if not a stereotype. All of India doesn't speak any single language, and though English was bestowed the status of an official language in the hope that it would serve as a 'link' language across the country, that hope was stillborn. I think fluent speakers of English aren't more uncommon here than in any other country where it is not a native language, official statuses notwithstanding.
Well, considering that English is not a native language, I'd say we aren't doing too bad on the whole, though there's always room for improvement.
It may not be a "native" language, but it is an official language of the country and it's been part of Indian society for nigh on 200 years. You'd think business people, at least, would be fluent -- and I say "business people" because TFA is obviously an advertisement for this obscure Indian company's contest, rather than anything of interest to the /. audience at large. (Damn, am I flaming Indians, Techgoss, or Slashdot? I can't even tell anymore!)
Part of a miniscule fraction of India's population, till just a couple of decades back. Like most other large countries, what the government does officially has little relevance to the reality across the country. Even now, the vast majority of those who know English are the first generation learners in their families, and thus lack much scope for practice. Outside the major cities and towns, schools in English medium are either rare or the quality of the teachers (with regards to English) are abysmal, since anyone who's had a good enough education to learn good English doesn't want to sacrifice his career in poorly paid rural jobs. Only those few business people who need to interact heavily with a wide group of people, or those who'd studied at good English medium schools, are likely to be fluent in English. The adage that quality is drowned in quantity is as true here as elsewhere.
Well, considering that English is not a native language, I'd say we aren't doing too bad on the whole, though there's always room for improvement. I wonder how many Americans know a second language at all, never mind whether they're good or bad in it. Seriously, many of us can speak and write pretty good English. You might try easing off on the stereotyping.
Me too. Loved the GNOME desktop that came with Linux Mandrake sometime around 2001 or 02. Those were the days. Desktops were lean, clean and got out of your way. These days logging into either of the big two (KDE, GNOME) desktops is like walking into a fair; lots of noise and eye-candy, making you gawp and try to find your way around...
From a general nerd perspective, JavaScript==bad.
It's the same sort of thing that nerds feel about Flash (Flash==bad).
HTML==open==good.
I'm not giving a argument for that feeling here, merely noting it.
Here's a list of other Slashdot prejudices: Java bad Oracle bad Google good Apple good(?) Android good (depending on your perspective) C good C++ bad Unity/Gnome3 bad M$ bad WIndows bad/Linux good JavaScript bad (unnecessary use of) Flash bad Facebook bad
For Facebook replace bad with Evil and for M$ replace bad with Devil, and you've summed-up perfectly...
Fortunately I believe people (and even most governments, perhaps not the US one though) won't accepted the dumbing down of the PC to an appliance. I certainly hope so. Besides being taken to court (which will definitely happen if Windows is imposed), the system is also certain to be cracked in time. IOW, we're heading for a mess at best, a protracted battle at worst. The fact that people haven't accepted lockdown even on smartphones and consoles gives me hope that this will turn out to be only yet another temporary roadblock towards universal and open computing.
Either the PC manufacturer has to provide an easy and standardized mechanism for the user to add his own signing keys, OR, provide an easy and standardized mechanism to disable 'secure' booting. If not, the PC will be no more than a glorified MS version of iPad, and I'll be boycotting any such manufacturer. So will a LOT of people I'm sure, and public and legal pressure will certainly be brought to bear on them.
"(NEIBS, the new buzzword coming to you in a near future!)" Awful... I much prefer NaCl...
You can only afford to nest virtual machines up to a point, after which the drag on performance becomes unaffordable, even on the fastest machines. A JavaScript x86 emulator is really cool, and it might be interesting to those who want to run (or serve) system code over the net, or push the limits of JS and it's implementation, but that's about the extent of it's potential as far as I can see.
"Sure, Java supports more platforms, but it's resource and memory hog, insecure (there's tons of Java exploits out there but none for .NET!)..."
Since installing Windows 7 (about a week back) I've had to apply more than 8-10 patches for .NET "security vulnerabilities" and "exploits" already.
Ironically medical care is becoming increasingly unaffordable to us here, at least those not blessed enough to be among the financial cream. $5000 is slightly more than an year's worth of earning for the middle-class, i.e., prohibitively expensive, though of course it'd almost certainly be substantially overpriced for non-citizens.
Hmm. Race has always been defined by physical appearance, and in this respect, this is a very diverse place. Physically, culturally, and linguistically (the main 'determinants' of 'race'), it's heterogeneous enough to overwhelm even an Indian like me. There are practical problems too, as a journey of about a 100 miles in any direction here more or less results in you not being able to communicate anymore, except through English, which not many speak outside metros. Diversity is it's greatest strength as well as it's greatest weakness (just like the world). The south of India is dominated by non-Indo-European languages. 'Race' is one of those concepts which is apparently irresistibly powerful, but which even the slightest logical scrutiny shows to have been purely a delusion and devoid of any substantial meaning.
This is not an ideal analogy. Computing hardware simply gives you the potential to perform computations and leaves you the choice of software to run it (general purpose systems anyway.) This choice would be eroded by this Trusted booting scheme apparently. To use your own analogy, imagine a car manufacturer who sells you a car which can only be driven by one certified person and no one else (and thats not even you the buyer)... This comes much closer to what trusted booting might mean for any buyer of that hardware. I'm sure I don't want any such hardware unless I'm provided the key(s) needed to any software of my choosing on it.
The Slashdot FAQ does claim that the vast majority of Slashdot users are from the USA. Though I'm one of the recent exceptions, I personally don't find it all that US centric, with some exceptions like articles on creationism. As for software eating up the world, the only thing eating up the world is entropy, and it's inexorable.