Question: What is Black Friday?
Answer: Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Question: But why is it called "Black"?
Answer: For the calendar year, most retailers are in the "red" on their books, or losing money until this date. This is because the majority of purchasing occurs during the Holiday season. The kind of turnout and purchasing that occurs on Black Friday sets the trend for the Holiday Seasons. The retailers will know after looking at their books on this Friday if they will end up in the "black" for the year, or profitable, or in the "red", losing money.
- Thanks dealsdyker
"The author of this letter was pointing out that this same kind of mindless acceptance of a convienient scapegoat was the same stuff that the director (a German) saw first-hand growing up in Nazi Germany. To further hammer the point home, director Verhoeven peppered the film full of rediculous propaganda commericals."
Good thing that nothing like this would ever happen here in the USA.
"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which
generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques
and complex extra facilities.
The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or
reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards.
The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information
contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the
scheme would in turn encourage its increased use.
The passing of this threshold accelerated by allowing large existing
databases to be linked together and with new ones."
- Tim Berners-Lee
Information Management: A Proposal CERN 1989
How about if a terrorist is using the US MAIL to plan to nuke Los Angeles.
Are you going to be as happy when all of your personal mail shows up in your mail box opened?
Maybe, maybe not.
How about when it happens because somebody SAYS a terrorist is using the US Mail to plan to nuke Los Angeles?
Ehhh...
How about when somebody says YOU are the terrorist using the US Mail to plan to nuke Los Angeles?
Ah Ha.
Note: Look up "Warrantless".
Now sit and think for a moment about what an encryption backdoor is, and who'd be in charge of it.
What about when they finally outlaw porn because it might have steganographic content?
And I don't give a shit if you live in New Jersey, Virginia, or East Boofoo, Missouri, if you really feel that giving up things such as privacy and freedom of speech and freedom from illegal search and seizure are acceptable in exchange for the possibility of increased safety from terrorist attacks, I sure as hell don't want you voting for anyone who'll be elected to MY government. So if you'd be so kind as to pack up your shit and move to some country where the government provides secret police to handle all those things for you, that'd be great. If you're choosy, you might even be able to get one with a planned economy, as well. Amnesty International can probably help with the travel arrangements. We might even be able to arrange a swap, because sure as hell someone THERE is right now planning to risk their life getting HERE.
Ever notice how ships with containers full of Americans never mysteriously appear off the coast of China?
Wake up, people. The only thing this country has that ever seperated it from everywhere else, and ever made it worth a damn, is that if you live here, you can (at least in theory) think and say whatever you want and meet and converse with like-minded people without the government nosing around and having advise-and-consent authority over every bloody subject of conversation. Everything else that falls under the heading of "Freedom" or "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" follows from that. Period.
Guaranteeing that is a tall order, and it runs directly contrary to the tendency of power and those who wield it to consolidate and perpetuate. It must be (and has been in the past) fought for and defended. To give up freedom for safety is to capitulate, to surrender. It is to roll over and abdicate authority over and responsiblity for your own destiny in the belief that the government will have the wisdom to know what's best for you and always make the right choices to you through. No thanks. They can't even stop fucking interns.
On the news during the attacks someone said, and it's been repeated since then, "Risk is the price of an open society. If we decide to give up that society, then the terrorists will have won".
I'm probably providing a big ol' heap of Purina Troll Chow here, but you ARE aware of what happens if you fire a weapon in a pressurized cabin and your slug somehow misses its intended target, right?
Yes, it bothers me, and I'll tell you to do what I did.
Instead of (or in addition to) bitching about it here on/., write your elected officials. And do it soon. Let them know that you stand against terrorism but not at the expense of your civil liberties.
At this point, it's probably too late for the change to stick. Note the success of the hacker/cracker re-education effort.
The argument for the GNU/Linux nomenclature is perfectly valid. "Linux" is the kernel. And as such, it's really the kernel code. It's worthless until it's compiled. Right now, with every distro that I can think of, that's happening with gcc. So much for stripping your system of GNU tools. Ok, so suppose someone decides to make a Linux version that is completely GNU-free at every step of the process. Say, oh... SUN. They use their versions of everything, compile the kernels with cc, etc., and put out a version of Linux.
Does anybody think for a second they wouldn't call in SUN Linux?
It's up to the vendors of alternate streaming formats to make sure that their product is superior in contrast to Media Player's availibility. A 5 meg download is nothing today, on DSL and cablemodems. But if Real, Apple or other companies don't provide anything new or better to bring to the table, then yes, Media Player will win out. Now, is this a bad thing, or a good thing?
This is a wonderful sentiment, assuming a level playing field. Unfortunately there are likely to be no individual consortiums and very few consortiums who can stand up to the amount of sheer monetary power that Microsoft can throw at a given issue.
Remeber back in the days of yore, when if you wanted to surf the web, you had NCSA Mosaic or Lynx? Mosaic was "superior" in that it was a GUI browser. Then came Netscape, which was "superior" mostly because it took Mosaic and threw some money at it. Then the web starts becoming very popular, and Microsoft decides that they need a web broswer too. Because "embrace and extend" seems to mean "find out what's hot and spend a lot of money on it, Microsoft decided to put a lot into developing IE. I'll probably get flamed for this because I don't have a link to back up the statistics, but as is my understanding, Microsoft's inital R&D budget for MSIE was greater than the entire operating budget for Netscape, Inc. Additionally, they're not writing using a developers's kit. They've got the source code to the OS right there. How the hell do you compete with that?
I don't know what the answer necessarily is. But when you've got an OS that ships default on god knows what percentage of the PC's sold (I'll call it 90%, and I bet that's conservative), and the browser/media app/chat client/etc that is installed default on that OS, the normal rules of business competition don't apply.
And as a Linux user (surprise) it's one thing for Windows users if they want to use Media Player vs. Quicktime or who cares what. It's another thing when group apathy regarding standards and market forces means that I'm left sucking hind tit because of the choices I make regarding my desktop. Come on, people. The whole fucking point of HTTP and the Web was platform and browser independent access to information.
Do you really think it will be that way? You really think that the police will "swarm" you? You really think that they are going to rely SOLELY on this software and nothing else?
Ok so...
What if she's 21 years old?
What if you tell her where to buy a gun?
What if you tell her where to get some drugs?
What if she's 16 years old?
What if you tell her where to get an abortion?
Seems to me that free speech that depends on what you're saying or who you're saying it to isn't really free speech at all, is it?
And once the precedents get set by trotting out the tired "For the sake of our children" horse, "For the sake of our copyright" comes right in on the cart behind it.
Somehow Americans seem to have gotten in the habit of limiting thier own freedoms in exchange for being able to abdicate personal responsibility. The "there ought to be a law" mentality has gone too far.
For what it's worth, Star Wars has become modern mythology. Damn near everybody on this planet could identify 3 things: A coke bottle, a VW Beetle, and Darth Vader. Everyone in the US, and I'd bet in Europe too, could tell you the difference between the dark and light sides of the force, and how you get to the dark side, if you're not careful. This isn't unexpected (the Joseph Campbell connection is well-known), but likely unintentional and has the unintended consequence of raising everyone's expectations. Star Wars was great, for a good deal of reasons: Simple archetypal characters, stirring soundtrack, amazing special effects (however if you want to get blown away by a movie that predates SW by about 6 years, go rent "Silent Running"), etc..
Although I personally feel that Empire is the better film, I also feel that things start to fall apart about half way through. Darth Vader is Luke's father? Come on. "From a certain point of view" is the biggest cop-out in the history of cinema. By the time we get to Jedi, we've got those damn ewoks. The mythology has run out. I'm sure that "Beowulf II" or "Gilgamesh Takes Manhattan" would have similar problems.
When it comes to Episode I, a great many of us had grown up with the Star Wars mythos, and had developed inflated expectations, espeically after 20 years. But really, all it was, and maybe all we should have expected, was a passable good sci-fi flick, complete with cutesey alien ripe for his own Taco Bell cup. In brief defense of Jar-Jar, if you're going to do the FIRST fully CGI main character in a motion picture that's going to be a MAJOR release, it's going to go a hell of a lot easier on you if he's more of a characature than anything else.
And as an example of how ingrained Star Wars really is, how many of you, no matter what movie it is, when you hear the full 20th Century Fox fanfare, expect the first chord of the Star Wars them to immediately follow?
BTW in 1977, I was 9, and I thought that Close Encounters blew Star Wars away.
Desktop Environment Vs. Window Manager
on
KDE 2.2 Tagged
·
· Score: 1
The following is NOT flamebait, it really is an honest question:
I use FVWM, I always have (about 6 years now). I've toyed with KDE and KDE2 and Gnome (whatever Gnome came with RH 7.1, I hated it), and found the experience far too windowsey for my liking. When I try to convert my mom from Macintosh to Linux, I'm gonna show her KDE and explain that if she's gotta learn OSX, she can learn KDE and probably be very happy with Linux, so I'm not dead-set against desktop environments, by any means.
My question is: For myself, is there any good reason to switch to Gnome/KDE? I like that I can configure FVWM by getting in and hacking at the rc file. I don't have any use at all for a file manager. I like that I have one rc file instead of the whole ~/Desktop tree. I LOVE FvwmButtons. The list goes on.
I'm willing to postulate that I like what I have because I'm used to it, so I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing, or something beyond the initial "discomfort curve" that I will grow to appreciate as an indespensible feature later on. (Maybe this is a better question for Ask Slashdot, but it was this thread that made me think of it).
Yes, but he gave a talk and explained out it works in the US.. that is illegal (currently) in the US. I don't think it's right, but it's the law.. That's like saying that in some other country where it's legal to shoot somebody that they should be exempt when they come here and do the same thing. You follow the laws of the land that you're in, and he broke the law here, while he was here. The law is stupid, yes, but jurisdiction is not an issue in this case.
Actually, it's like saying that in some other country where it's legal to shoot somebody, that they're to be arrested if they come here and give a talk on ballistics.
I'm not a lawyer, I'm probably not even particularly clued in, but to me, it appears that this revolves solely around free speech. If the problem was the software he wrote in Russia, he could have/should have been stopped and arrested at the border. That was not the case. He was arrested and is being held without trial or bail for something he said.
I'm trying to think of something cogent to say here about how this is a slap in the face to the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the framers of the US Constitition, and every US Veteran who fought to protect our freedoms, but I can't make it not sound like a damn 4th of July speech.
The point is I guess, that as Americans we, on paper at least, hold the bar pretty high and as a nation have generally struggled to meet the ideals embodied in the charter documents of our government. And before I get flamed as ridculously naive, I'm well aware that as a nation, we've also had some spectacular failures in this regard. However, even on slashdot we speak of Free (as in speech not as in beer) Software. We all generally seem to agree that "Free Speech" is a Good Thing, a Right. This was not always the case, in the world. With an appropriate nod to Locke, Hume, et.al., it can be said that America was for all practical purposes, the first place where this belief was generally held strongly enough that an attempt was made to codify it into law and put it into practice. (Where else, in the middle of the 18th century, was it so?). Now, rather than being at the forefront, we are lagging behind, often at the behest of large corporations, in the interests of protecting their bottom line. I don't have a problem with copyright, nor with protection of intellectual property, per se. If I write something for sale, I damn well want to get paid for it. If I want to contribute to Open Source then I can do that too. But if new legislation has to be drafted to keep up with technology, I'd like to see a little more thought put into it. I'd sure as hell rather risk losing a little money to pirates, than have somebody thrown in jail simply for speaking their mind. Period.
The law isn't just stupid, it's wrong.
"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety,"
Benjamin Franklin.
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than
the animating contest of freedom...go home from us in peace. We ask not
your counsels nor arms. May your chains set lightly upon you and may
posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams; 1776
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the
people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by
violent and sudden usurpations."
James Madison
Similarly if you try to amalgamate several movies onto a DVD, or maybe make a DVD of your favorite movie scenes. Or suppose you want to make your own eBook with some of your favorite passages?
I saw that ad at adcritic.com, and got to do a little survey on it. I told them that I thought it was bullshit, but I guess they didn't listen, if they actually used it.
Soapbox mode on That speech in 1963 was a seminal moment in American History, and has become an iconic symbol for the entire Civil Rights movement in this country. Personally I felt that was offensive to have something so powerful cheapened by using it to sell wireless or whatever the hell it was.
Next we'll have the guy in front of the tank at Tienanmen Square waiting for a Pepsi, or Kim Phuc going naked for PETA.
IIRC, the worm is memory-resident-only and therefore can't survive a reboot. It's not picking up where it left off, it's starting over infecting the internet almost from scratch, so it should be the same thing as last time. Except that this time everyone's forewarned.
IIRC, everyone was forewarned (see here and here) last time!
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I need to do anything like that, I use Octave.
Question: What is Black Friday?
Answer: Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Question: But why is it called "Black"?
Answer: For the calendar year, most retailers are in the "red" on their books, or losing money until this date. This is because the majority of purchasing occurs during the Holiday season. The kind of turnout and purchasing that occurs on Black Friday sets the trend for the Holiday Seasons. The retailers will know after looking at their books on this Friday if they will end up in the "black" for the year, or profitable, or in the "red", losing money.
- Thanks dealsdyker
Isn't that patrick from spongebob squarepants?
Good thing that nothing like this would ever happen here in the USA.
It's probably the digital watermark ;)
There's an obvious reason for blank CD's outselling recorded ones:
The blank ones sound better than the recorded ones.
And the little dude with the hearts and arrows is "COO-pid"?
"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities. The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use. The passing of this threshold accelerated by allowing large existing databases to be linked together and with new ones."
- Tim Berners-Lee
Information Management: A Proposal CERN 1989
I agree. If a "circumvention device" is illegal, then "virus enabling software" should be too. :)
Maybe, maybe not.
How about when it happens because somebody SAYS a terrorist is using the US Mail to plan to nuke Los Angeles?
Ehhh...
How about when somebody says YOU are the terrorist using the US Mail to plan to nuke Los Angeles?
Ah Ha.
Note: Look up "Warrantless".
Now sit and think for a moment about what an encryption backdoor is, and who'd be in charge of it.
What about when they finally outlaw porn because it might have steganographic content?
And I don't give a shit if you live in New Jersey, Virginia, or East Boofoo, Missouri, if you really feel that giving up things such as privacy and freedom of speech and freedom from illegal search and seizure are acceptable in exchange for the possibility of increased safety from terrorist attacks, I sure as hell don't want you voting for anyone who'll be elected to MY government. So if you'd be so kind as to pack up your shit and move to some country where the government provides secret police to handle all those things for you, that'd be great. If you're choosy, you might even be able to get one with a planned economy, as well. Amnesty International can probably help with the travel arrangements. We might even be able to arrange a swap, because sure as hell someone THERE is right now planning to risk their life getting HERE.
Ever notice how ships with containers full of Americans never mysteriously appear off the coast of China?
Wake up, people. The only thing this country has that ever seperated it from everywhere else, and ever made it worth a damn, is that if you live here, you can (at least in theory) think and say whatever you want and meet and converse with like-minded people without the government nosing around and having advise-and-consent authority over every bloody subject of conversation. Everything else that falls under the heading of "Freedom" or "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" follows from that. Period.
Guaranteeing that is a tall order, and it runs directly contrary to the tendency of power and those who wield it to consolidate and perpetuate. It must be (and has been in the past) fought for and defended. To give up freedom for safety is to capitulate, to surrender. It is to roll over and abdicate authority over and responsiblity for your own destiny in the belief that the government will have the wisdom to know what's best for you and always make the right choices to you through. No thanks. They can't even stop fucking interns.
On the news during the attacks someone said, and it's been repeated since then, "Risk is the price of an open society. If we decide to give up that society, then the terrorists will have won".
This is why El-Al employs professionals in this capacity.
Instead of (or in addition to) bitching about it here on
The argument for the GNU/Linux nomenclature is perfectly valid. "Linux" is the kernel. And as such, it's really the kernel code. It's worthless until it's compiled. Right now, with every distro that I can think of, that's happening with gcc. So much for stripping your system of GNU tools. Ok, so suppose someone decides to make a Linux version that is completely GNU-free at every step of the process. Say, oh... SUN. They use their versions of everything, compile the kernels with cc, etc., and put out a version of Linux.
Does anybody think for a second they wouldn't call in SUN Linux?
How about IBM?
This is a wonderful sentiment, assuming a level playing field. Unfortunately there are likely to be no individual consortiums and very few consortiums who can stand up to the amount of sheer monetary power that Microsoft can throw at a given issue.
Remeber back in the days of yore, when if you wanted to surf the web, you had NCSA Mosaic or Lynx? Mosaic was "superior" in that it was a GUI browser. Then came Netscape, which was "superior" mostly because it took Mosaic and threw some money at it. Then the web starts becoming very popular, and Microsoft decides that they need a web broswer too. Because "embrace and extend" seems to mean "find out what's hot and spend a lot of money on it, Microsoft decided to put a lot into developing IE. I'll probably get flamed for this because I don't have a link to back up the statistics, but as is my understanding, Microsoft's inital R&D budget for MSIE was greater than the entire operating budget for Netscape, Inc. Additionally, they're not writing using a developers's kit. They've got the source code to the OS right there. How the hell do you compete with that?
I don't know what the answer necessarily is. But when you've got an OS that ships default on god knows what percentage of the PC's sold (I'll call it 90%, and I bet that's conservative), and the browser/media app/chat client/etc that is installed default on that OS, the normal rules of business competition don't apply.
And as a Linux user (surprise) it's one thing for Windows users if they want to use Media Player vs. Quicktime or who cares what. It's another thing when group apathy regarding standards and market forces means that I'm left sucking hind tit because of the choices I make regarding my desktop. Come on, people. The whole fucking point of HTTP and the Web was platform and browser independent access to information.
Shit, if the dude was black?
He'd probably be dead now.
Hell, maybe it's all a marketing ploy to make sure that it does!
Ok so...
What if she's 21 years old?
What if you tell her where to buy a gun?
What if you tell her where to get some drugs?
What if she's 16 years old?
What if you tell her where to get an abortion?
Seems to me that free speech that depends on what you're saying or who you're saying it to isn't really free speech at all, is it?
And once the precedents get set by trotting out the tired "For the sake of our children" horse, "For the sake of our copyright" comes right in on the cart behind it.
Somehow Americans seem to have gotten in the habit of limiting thier own freedoms in exchange for being able to abdicate personal responsibility. The "there ought to be a law" mentality has gone too far.
Although I personally feel that Empire is the better film, I also feel that things start to fall apart about half way through. Darth Vader is Luke's father? Come on. "From a certain point of view" is the biggest cop-out in the history of cinema. By the time we get to Jedi, we've got those damn ewoks. The mythology has run out. I'm sure that "Beowulf II" or "Gilgamesh Takes Manhattan" would have similar problems.
When it comes to Episode I, a great many of us had grown up with the Star Wars mythos, and had developed inflated expectations, espeically after 20 years. But really, all it was, and maybe all we should have expected, was a passable good sci-fi flick, complete with cutesey alien ripe for his own Taco Bell cup. In brief defense of Jar-Jar, if you're going to do the FIRST fully CGI main character in a motion picture that's going to be a MAJOR release, it's going to go a hell of a lot easier on you if he's more of a characature than anything else.
And as an example of how ingrained Star Wars really is, how many of you, no matter what movie it is, when you hear the full 20th Century Fox fanfare, expect the first chord of the Star Wars them to immediately follow?
BTW in 1977, I was 9, and I thought that Close Encounters blew Star Wars away.
I use FVWM, I always have (about 6 years now). I've toyed with KDE and KDE2 and Gnome (whatever Gnome came with RH 7.1, I hated it), and found the experience far too windowsey for my liking. When I try to convert my mom from Macintosh to Linux, I'm gonna show her KDE and explain that if she's gotta learn OSX, she can learn KDE and probably be very happy with Linux, so I'm not dead-set against desktop environments, by any means.
My question is: For myself, is there any good reason to switch to Gnome/KDE? I like that I can configure FVWM by getting in and hacking at the rc file. I don't have any use at all for a file manager. I like that I have one rc file instead of the whole ~/Desktop tree. I LOVE FvwmButtons. The list goes on.
I'm willing to postulate that I like what I have because I'm used to it, so I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing, or something beyond the initial "discomfort curve" that I will grow to appreciate as an indespensible feature later on. (Maybe this is a better question for Ask Slashdot, but it was this thread that made me think of it).
Actually, it's like saying that in some other country where it's legal to shoot somebody, that they're to be arrested if they come here and give a talk on ballistics.
I'm not a lawyer, I'm probably not even particularly clued in, but to me, it appears that this revolves solely around free speech. If the problem was the software he wrote in Russia, he could have/should have been stopped and arrested at the border. That was not the case. He was arrested and is being held without trial or bail for something he said.
I'm trying to think of something cogent to say here about how this is a slap in the face to the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the framers of the US Constitition, and every US Veteran who fought to protect our freedoms, but I can't make it not sound like a damn 4th of July speech.
The point is I guess, that as Americans we, on paper at least, hold the bar pretty high and as a nation have generally struggled to meet the ideals embodied in the charter documents of our government. And before I get flamed as ridculously naive, I'm well aware that as a nation, we've also had some spectacular failures in this regard. However, even on slashdot we speak of Free (as in speech not as in beer) Software. We all generally seem to agree that "Free Speech" is a Good Thing, a Right. This was not always the case, in the world. With an appropriate nod to Locke, Hume, et.al., it can be said that America was for all practical purposes, the first place where this belief was generally held strongly enough that an attempt was made to codify it into law and put it into practice. (Where else, in the middle of the 18th century, was it so?). Now, rather than being at the forefront, we are lagging behind, often at the behest of large corporations, in the interests of protecting their bottom line. I don't have a problem with copyright, nor with protection of intellectual property, per se. If I write something for sale, I damn well want to get paid for it. If I want to contribute to Open Source then I can do that too. But if new legislation has to be drafted to keep up with technology, I'd like to see a little more thought put into it. I'd sure as hell rather risk losing a little money to pirates, than have somebody thrown in jail simply for speaking their mind. Period.
The law isn't just stupid, it's wrong.
"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety,"
Benjamin Franklin.
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom...go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels nor arms. May your chains set lightly upon you and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams; 1776
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
James Madison
NOW let's see if it works:
"Rubber chickens and a good marketing strategy make you a hundred times wealther than you would be in a non-rubber-chicken system."
Yep.
Replace "Rubber Chicken" with "Chia Pet" or "Pokemon" and it may become more clear.
"Guaranteed Positive Shot"
Nobody said it had to stand for Global anything.
Oh, wait...
Soapbox mode on
That speech in 1963 was a seminal moment in American History, and has become an iconic symbol for the entire Civil Rights movement in this country. Personally I felt that was offensive to have something so powerful cheapened by using it to sell wireless or whatever the hell it was.
Next we'll have the guy in front of the tank at Tienanmen Square waiting for a Pepsi, or Kim Phuc going naked for PETA.
It just ain't right.
IIRC, everyone was forewarned (see here and here) last time!