If it wern't for Yoko's history, I'd wonder if this was more about stopping that terrible film from being associated with Lennon than any real copyright concern.
Just like providing DRM systems, there is the danger, when providing this capacity, for websites to begin to demand it, something they can't easily do now because there's no infrastructure to demand it.
Of course, this is a constant danger/possibility - some days I regret that Javascript was invented because a number of sites don't work at all unless I tell NoScript to allow JS on them. Cost of progress, I guess...
Because if there's one thing an encyclopedia must have, it's a list of all the television stations in the United States.. and every single episode of every single show, all with original reseach about each.. and show schedules...:)
No there are not. Only evolution has any significant degree of scientific consensus, and creationism isn't even a scientific theory. It is the job of the educational system to present the current consensus of the academic community to the masses, discussing any significant splits in that if necessary. That's not the case here.
The fact that you have to compare a "giant fingerprint of God or something" to digging up missing-link fossils should tell you something (although the "missing link" is drastically understated - given the rate of preservation of fossils, we should not expect every stage of speciation of every form to be available for our perusal.)
Don't get us-versus-them with me - I've been using Linux since SLS and it's my primary operating system. What's all this "us" stuff anymhow? We should be able to look at the faults honestly without getting so defensive though.
On Windows (and to a lesser extent OSX), you actually don't need to research before you buy, and with Linux fairly often you need to restrict yourself to a subset of slightly dated wireless adapters if you want things to work smoothly without (at least) exercising your compiler. Ndiswrapper is a partial solution if you don't mind system instability.
nvidia and ati graphics cards are most of the market, and if you use the open drivers, you don't get much in the way of 3d (what little you get has poor performance). The closed drivers are, as I said, difficult to configure properly.
Let's say you were to want to write a game - trying to figure out what permutation(s) of sound and graphics libraries to use is a major ordeal, and supporting all the varieties of system configurations people have as they pretend to be another (badly) is not a pretty thing to ask a development studio to do. DirectX is a lousy API, but at least it's a single API - if you want to do sound for linux, do you want to do ALSA? OSS? esound? pulse-audio? arts? nas? Which of these can you assume is configured and working properly on a given system? How about that 3d? Most linux users don't bother, even those interested in games.. it's not an easy platform to target. Note that I'm talking about linux as being more than just the kernel - it may not be the kernel's job to play video, nor (entirely) the kernel folks fault that linux is a poor platform for these things, but looking at the bigger picture, it's a problem.
Foxconn is an exceptionally bad example - it wasn't what I meant. On most systems, ACPI support is just "iffy" and you're wandering into an ugly area if you expect ACPI-dependent features to work (suspend/hibernate, throttling, etc). This is partly a matter of inadequate vendor support, although there needs to be a lot more care given to userland stuff too.
I do call it negligible. What portion of their catalogs can be loaded with linux? A handful of servers? Great. That's not significant yet.
I'm not a linux hater, I'm an honest unix old-timer. A lot of these issues are/were not there with traditional unix vendors because they controlled their hardware and had a very good team of engineers making things mostly "just work" out of the box. Any Irix install on SGI hardware has/had very few problems of these sort. Any OSX install on a Mac is the same. Windows isn't quite as polished in these areas, but it's simple to bring a system to the state of having all the hardware running and everything working as smoothly as windows ever does (thanks to good vendor support). These platforms also are/were not so bad to write multimedia software for.
Linux is great for stuff on a fairly vanilla desktop if you don't need good sound or 3d acceleraton - these areas are not given much attention and it shows. If you want to run Linux on a laptop and fully use your hardware, you have a research project ahead of you.
Poor Flash is the one major barrier? Pah - there are a number of more pressing issues, like poor wireless support (on the driver level), poor opensource drivers and closed drivers being difficult to configure manually, poor multimedia support on the API level (using SDL helps a bit though), iffy ACPI support on a number of systems, negligible vendor preloads, and probably a number of other things.
That said, excellent flash support would certainly be nice.
I hold the notion of intellectual property to be legitimate. In practice, I don't "pirate" games anymore, for a handful of reasons (very few games coming out recently that I'd want to play being a big one), but I don't think there's anything wrong with doing so.
Hmm? Then seurity guards at a concert, the secret service, and... well, basically most other uses of police power apart from actually arresting people is tyranny?
Although I tend to go with them at work, I've been happy with Penguin Computing, and their prices are reasonable enough that they'd be good for home use too.
Fortunately, most of the issues of discontent are tied to mandatory interface changes - as they've been good enough to split the interface from the basic IM functionality (pidgin versus libpurple), what might happen instead is that we'll see purple in the spotlight and a large number of IM clients using it. Hopefully its interfaces are stable and documented enough for that at this point..
Enabling that doesn't restore the old interface - instead it means I have two icons flanking every name. The ability to even show them was only added after very serious threats of forking last time.
I realise these changes don't bug everyone, and that it didn't bug you in particular. It bugged me though, and it clearly bugged a lot of other people.
This wouldn't be the first time the pidgeon folk have decided to change the interface and refused to let people keep things the way they liked. Forks have been threatened before over their decision to hide protocol icons as well. I'm glad they separated the gui from the rest of the program - both this and the protocol icon decision really bug me.
No worries about possible disjointedness - this is usenet.. I mean slashdot:P
Useful illusions are part of how people think - even pretending that people are simply unitary entities with a clear will is an illusion (or perhaps a useful abstraction). Particular to this example is the notion that people or groups don't always have a coherent will on all topics. I don't see that as a problem though. I don't see society as being completely alien to the interests of individuals, but they do relate in a not-always-simple way. In any case, I think thinking in terms of interests and privileges is more productive than thinking in terms of rights. We are both groups and individuals, and can hopefully better serve the public good by being open to arguments on both.
I'm not actually utilitarian though, just closer to it than bring entirely structuralist. Taking individualism too far is something I see as harmful, like its opposite.
Low frequency of need doesn't make something not a need - if someone has asthma, that they don't need to go to a doctor three times a day (or however often people eat) doesn't mean they don't need to see a doctor. There is also no "mere existence" in a society - we're all bound together into an entity that has a phonomenal amount of resources available to it as a whole, and it's meaningful when some people would have us spend those resources on their yacht, hiring servants, or a giant house while others are starving. It's great when people give to charity, but I'd rather keep reforming the system so that our society spends more on the public good and less on the individual good.
Autonomy is not completely unimportant, but fiscal autonomy of individuals is not something I see as a particularly high priority, especially compared to health care and education. I don't believe in "right" in the sense that you do, just different choices that have different characteristics for human happiness. Autonomy makes people happy, good health care makes people happy, etc, and it's a question of engineering a system that navigates all the things we consider good and comes to a reasonable mix.
Fascism is a particular popularist political ideology tied to glorification of power, the mythos of ethnic traditions, and a return to a glorious past. It has only the most superficial of ties to use of tax money for the public good - that it is not generally considered libertine in tax policy (although fascist politicians generally did not talk much about these matters). Politics are more complex than that:)
Slashdot Mirror
I would bet that if you move any sensitive data onto USB keys on your keychain, nobody will give them a second glance.
If it wern't for Yoko's history, I'd wonder if this was more about stopping that terrible film from being associated with Lennon than any real copyright concern.
Just like providing DRM systems, there is the danger, when providing this capacity, for websites to begin to demand it, something they can't easily do now because there's no infrastructure to demand it.
Of course, this is a constant danger/possibility - some days I regret that Javascript was invented because a number of sites don't work at all unless I tell NoScript to allow JS on them. Cost of progress, I guess...
This seems like a good time to consider revoking Orbit Communications' corporate charter.
For those of us who have both sysadmin and systems programmer things on our resumé, we often face an analogous problem - we sometimes have problems being hired as a sysadmin because we get classified as a programmer, and sometimes have problems being hired as a programmer because we get classified as a sysadmin. Maybe it's like how actors can easily be typecast...
man xmodmap
Because if there's one thing an encyclopedia must have, it's a list of all the television stations in the United States.. and every single episode of every single show, all with original reseach about each.. and show schedules... :)
And some of us used both... :)
No there are not. Only evolution has any significant degree of scientific consensus, and creationism isn't even a scientific theory. It is the job of the educational system to present the current consensus of the academic community to the masses, discussing any significant splits in that if necessary. That's not the case here.
The fact that you have to compare a "giant fingerprint of God or something" to digging up missing-link fossils should tell you something (although the "missing link" is drastically understated - given the rate of preservation of fossils, we should not expect every stage of speciation of every form to be available for our perusal.)
Don't get us-versus-them with me - I've been using Linux since SLS and it's my primary operating system. What's all this "us" stuff anymhow? We should be able to look at the faults honestly without getting so defensive though.
On Windows (and to a lesser extent OSX), you actually don't need to research before you buy, and with Linux fairly often you need to restrict yourself to a subset of slightly dated wireless adapters if you want things to work smoothly without (at least) exercising your compiler. Ndiswrapper is a partial solution if you don't mind system instability.
nvidia and ati graphics cards are most of the market, and if you use the open drivers, you don't get much in the way of 3d (what little you get has poor performance). The closed drivers are, as I said, difficult to configure properly.
Let's say you were to want to write a game - trying to figure out what permutation(s) of sound and graphics libraries to use is a major ordeal, and supporting all the varieties of system configurations people have as they pretend to be another (badly) is not a pretty thing to ask a development studio to do. DirectX is a lousy API, but at least it's a single API - if you want to do sound for linux, do you want to do ALSA? OSS? esound? pulse-audio? arts? nas? Which of these can you assume is configured and working properly on a given system? How about that 3d? Most linux users don't bother, even those interested in games.. it's not an easy platform to target. Note that I'm talking about linux as being more than just the kernel - it may not be the kernel's job to play video, nor (entirely) the kernel folks fault that linux is a poor platform for these things, but looking at the bigger picture, it's a problem.
Foxconn is an exceptionally bad example - it wasn't what I meant. On most systems, ACPI support is just "iffy" and you're wandering into an ugly area if you expect ACPI-dependent features to work (suspend/hibernate, throttling, etc). This is partly a matter of inadequate vendor support, although there needs to be a lot more care given to userland stuff too.
I do call it negligible. What portion of their catalogs can be loaded with linux? A handful of servers? Great. That's not significant yet.
I'm not a linux hater, I'm an honest unix old-timer. A lot of these issues are/were not there with traditional unix vendors because they controlled their hardware and had a very good team of engineers making things mostly "just work" out of the box. Any Irix install on SGI hardware has/had very few problems of these sort. Any OSX install on a Mac is the same. Windows isn't quite as polished in these areas, but it's simple to bring a system to the state of having all the hardware running and everything working as smoothly as windows ever does (thanks to good vendor support). These platforms also are/were not so bad to write multimedia software for.
Linux is great for stuff on a fairly vanilla desktop if you don't need good sound or 3d acceleraton - these areas are not given much attention and it shows. If you want to run Linux on a laptop and fully use your hardware, you have a research project ahead of you.
Poor Flash is the one major barrier? Pah - there are a number of more pressing issues, like poor wireless support (on the driver level), poor opensource drivers and closed drivers being difficult to configure manually, poor multimedia support on the API level (using SDL helps a bit though), iffy ACPI support on a number of systems, negligible vendor preloads, and probably a number of other things.
That said, excellent flash support would certainly be nice.
Err... I mean I don't hold. Oy.
I hold the notion of intellectual property to be legitimate. In practice, I don't "pirate" games anymore, for a handful of reasons (very few games coming out recently that I'd want to play being a big one), but I don't think there's anything wrong with doing so.
Look on the slightly broader scale - if murder were to become routine (prosecuted or not), it would in fact have an influence on your life.
Hmm? Then seurity guards at a concert, the secret service, and ... well, basically most other uses of police power apart from actually arresting people is tyranny?
So you suggest lying to clients to satisfy "gut feelings" without any good reasons behind them?
Although I tend to go with them at work, I've been happy with Penguin Computing, and their prices are reasonable enough that they'd be good for home use too.
Fortunately, most of the issues of discontent are tied to mandatory interface changes - as they've been good enough to split the interface from the basic IM functionality (pidgin versus libpurple), what might happen instead is that we'll see purple in the spotlight and a large number of IM clients using it. Hopefully its interfaces are stable and documented enough for that at this point..
Enabling that doesn't restore the old interface - instead it means I have two icons flanking every name. The ability to even show them was only added after very serious threats of forking last time.
I realise these changes don't bug everyone, and that it didn't bug you in particular. It bugged me though, and it clearly bugged a lot of other people.
This wouldn't be the first time the pidgeon folk have decided to change the interface and refused to let people keep things the way they liked. Forks have been threatened before over their decision to hide protocol icons as well. I'm glad they separated the gui from the rest of the program - both this and the protocol icon decision really bug me.
Mmm... Pi day celebrations...
No worries about possible disjointedness - this is usenet .. I mean slashdot :P
Useful illusions are part of how people think - even pretending that people are simply unitary entities with a clear will is an illusion (or perhaps a useful abstraction). Particular to this example is the notion that people or groups don't always have a coherent will on all topics. I don't see that as a problem though. I don't see society as being completely alien to the interests of individuals, but they do relate in a not-always-simple way. In any case, I think thinking in terms of interests and privileges is more productive than thinking in terms of rights. We are both groups and individuals, and can hopefully better serve the public good by being open to arguments on both.
I'm not actually utilitarian though, just closer to it than bring entirely structuralist. Taking individualism too far is something I see as harmful, like its opposite.
Low frequency of need doesn't make something not a need - if someone has asthma, that they don't need to go to a doctor three times a day (or however often people eat) doesn't mean they don't need to see a doctor. There is also no "mere existence" in a society - we're all bound together into an entity that has a phonomenal amount of resources available to it as a whole, and it's meaningful when some people would have us spend those resources on their yacht, hiring servants, or a giant house while others are starving. It's great when people give to charity, but I'd rather keep reforming the system so that our society spends more on the public good and less on the individual good.
:)
Autonomy is not completely unimportant, but fiscal autonomy of individuals is not something I see as a particularly high priority, especially compared to health care and education. I don't believe in "right" in the sense that you do, just different choices that have different characteristics for human happiness. Autonomy makes people happy, good health care makes people happy, etc, and it's a question of engineering a system that navigates all the things we consider good and comes to a reasonable mix.
Fascism is a particular popularist political ideology tied to glorification of power, the mythos of ethnic traditions, and a return to a glorious past. It has only the most superficial of ties to use of tax money for the public good - that it is not generally considered libertine in tax policy (although fascist politicians generally did not talk much about these matters). Politics are more complex than that
Is this news or just fyoder's take on the situation?
Do you think Google Calendar (and the rest of Google Office) have a shot at being a replacement anytime soon?