Abortion, as exercised by places like the Chinese Government against its' own citizens, i.e., forced abortion, is far from a laughing matter,
Most abortions are not forced abortions. Your saying that you can't make jokes about topics that have dark sides to them. Say goodbye to any joke about sex, religion, politics, children, prison, animals, labour, animals, food, alcohol, art or pretty much any other human activity. If humans do it, someone will have found a way to corrupt or abuse it.
It appears Mr. Stallman may need to broaden his horizons to understand that not all people live in a free society.
I'm pretty sure he gets it, it's the entire point of the joke.
It's not a joke about abortion, it's a joke about freedom of speech.
Actually "Professionalism" is highly subjective, AND changes over time and varies from group to group and organization to organization, because it is a cultural concept.
I disagree. A professional is someone who gets paid to do something. Unfortunately it doesn't guarantee any level of quality, especially in the software-industry where there is very little accountability for failure nor a generally accepted standard for quality.
That's why the Germans claim Facebook uses extortion. Apparently it is so hard to leave / never join that it can not be expected from a reasonable person. Hence extortion; users are forced to join Facebook against there will. Not with a gun, but with social pressure.
The NSDAP was a union between left-wing socialists* and right-wing nationalists. Hitler belonged to the latter arm. The first thing Hitler did when he came to power in 1934 was to murder the socialist leaders. Look up The Knight of the Long Knives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
By the time WW2 started there was little left from the socialist part of the party. The nazi's the world got to know were mostly right-wing nationalists.
* socialists, not communists, they were anti-communist.
Stealing this material would have hurt and maybe killed thousands of people, but not by putting it into a bomb.
These isotopes are used in hospitals around the world for all kind of things like diagnosing and treating cancer. However there is only a very small number of places that can manufacture them. If memory serves there are only six of those laboratory's in the world and they are unable to fill the current demand anyway. If any of those can't produce for any reason the entire medical world immediately feels the consequences. Stealing a large supply of isotopes an possibly disturbing production or distribution for a long time would have deadly consequence. People would be unable to get diagnosed or treated and some of them will die. That part would be far more harmufll than any dirty bomb the terrorists could build.
[quote]
Some people just dont get that when you use your companies services (phone, email and what not) there is no expectation to privacy.
[/quote]
That may be true in the US but not in Europe. In Europe employee's do have a legally recognized expectation of privacy. You shouldn't expect as much privacy as in your own home but there is some privacy nevertheless.
There is always some expectation of privacy. I'm sure everybody expects privacy when visiting the loo, even at work. There are borders, it's just a matter of where you draw the line.
I expect privacy when I'm working in my office with the door closed and I expect my boss to knock before entering.
All reports miss an important part. Nobody went out to look at this guys private messages. During the course of an investigation into his performance at work some private messages were discovered. He argued that this alone was a violation of his privacy. The judge decided that the employer did the right thing. The employer was not intentionally looking for private messages and he did not read them when he discovered they were of a private nature.
I used to think along those lines untill I saw it in action, it quickly devolves towards slavery.
My municipality forces people on welfare to do community service. Unfortunately those "voluntary" positions replace actual paid jobs. A famous example was a street sweeper who was asked to supervise a number of "volunteers". After training them he was fired an replaced by those "volunteers" as his job was no longer necessary. He couldn't find a new job and had to apply for unemployment benefits. Upon registering he was told that he needed to community service to get more work experience. He was assigned to sweeping the streets and was forced to do his old job at no pay.
So your hypothetical home user has a single IP address and runs multiple web servers. And you feel that "Most home routers" should default to supporting that?
Probably not a classic webserver but appliances with a built in webserver for administration and monitoring are becoming more and more common. It's part of the domotica/internet of things wave. Right now these appliances need to use all kinds of workarounds because they are not directly adressable. For example they relay through a server owned by the manufacturer.
the dream of "millions more streaming online" is just a dream
It's reality, not a dream, and has been for a while.
It's hard to find numbers to put this into perspective but I found some info from IEM San Jose (december 2014) and DOTA2. IEM had 4 milion live viewers during a two day event. DOTA2 reached 2 million simultaneous viewers with a total of 20 million viewers. While NCAA is bigger than both events combined the numbers are not that far off either.
NCAA is an old organisation with a 50 year television history that has a lot of resources to promote it's events. As eSports have time and demography on their side I expect that eSport will continue to grow. Especially now television broadcasters are starting to pick it up.
The mass appeal of watching someone play video games is just not there.
That statement makes me wonder if you've actually watched eSport. In my mind it's no different than watching people play baseball or tennis.
Because KDE was one of the first free software projects to focus on involving more women. They KDE Women mailinglist archive goes back to 1998. Given the recent attention for that subject it seems like a good idea to ask KDE about their experience.
It is about freedom, just not the freedom of the programmer. It's about the users. Freedom is not an absolute condition, it's always a balance the rights of various stakeholders. The cliche is that my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. Most software licenses restrict the rights of the users in favour of the programmer. The BSD licenses are vary liberal but they only focus on programmers that want to use the code. As a user you don't know anything about your rights if code is based on BSD code. Usually its 'free', but there is no guarantee. The programmer has no obligation to the user. The GPL is about giving assurances to users. If software is based on GPL code the user knows for sure that he will be able to get the code and use it.
What people fail to grasp is that shrinkwrap software is only a small part of the entire software market. Most software is never sold. It's written to solve a specific problem within an organisation. Most companies are not software companies. They will write software when they have to, but they would prefer to focus on their primary activity. Cooperating with other companies is a way to save money. Someone might think that those companies wouldn't want to share the software because they would lose a competetive advantage but that's usually not the case. Those companies don't want to compete on software, it's not their strong suit.
There is a number of intermediaries that try to solve this problem.
If you want to buy a product you ask the intermediary to buy it for you. They will judge the seller and buy the product for you if they feel all is in order. When they receive the product they'll unpack it and send you a few pictures. Now you can decide if you want to buy it. If so they mail it to you, if not they will return it to the manufacturer and deal with the refundprocess.
Ofcourse you'll have to a pay a small fee for the service but the examples I've seen were very cheap.
I wouldn't call your examples cases of overregulation. More a case of the law being behind the technology curve, as it usually is.
Not that there is no overregulation, but I don't think your examples qualify.
Regarding safety. There is no such thing as absolute safety. The law specifies a number of features a car should have to make it safe. How else would 'they' determine if the car is safe? You'll need some kind of guideline.
Not just natural genes. No genes at all should be patentable. Otherwise they'll just change one atom somewhere and claim that anything that resembles that gene is infringement.
Yes, really great, compared to the rest of the USA.
Over here in the Netherlands I have 500/500 for €60, €50 after discounts. That's from a high end provider which also includes goodies such as a 4G subscription for my cellphone. There is about a dozen others that offer the same speed for less money. 1000/1000 for €40 is also available. My other connection is 180/18 over cable.
I don't think your perspective on this is right. There is no hard cut-off between fully depending on support an doing everything yourself. At the very least you will need someone to talk with support. You will always have someone who is acting as an administrator and who will solve problems. Sooner or later you are going to run into problems that can be fixed without support. If you don't want to keep fixing the same problem over and over you are better of sending the fix upstream. With or without the help of payed support.
No, Moore's law is still going strong. Moore never said that your computer would get any faster, just that you would get more transistors in the same space. Newer hardware is still getting more transistors but the application of all those transistors has been shifted in a different direction and games do not always benefit.
Modern processors are much better at running multiple processes at the same time. Most games however don't use that capability, single core performance is what counts in most games. Therefor games don't benefit as much from improvements in transistor count as the used to. Also, much of the heavy lifting is no longer done by the CPU. The GPU is doing most of the work. As the GPU is doing most of the graphics work the CPU has more time available for the rest of the game. Thirdly, most high-end games are now designed for multiple platforms. Thus they are limited to the performance of the lowest common denominator which often is a game console. Most game-engines are very flexible and will adjust to work with slower hardware by decreasing the quality of the graphics.
Slashdot Mirror
Abortion, as exercised by places like the Chinese Government against its' own citizens, i.e., forced abortion, is far from a laughing matter,
Most abortions are not forced abortions. Your saying that you can't make jokes about topics that have dark sides to them. Say goodbye to any joke about sex, religion, politics, children, prison, animals, labour, animals, food, alcohol, art or pretty much any other human activity. If humans do it, someone will have found a way to corrupt or abuse it.
It appears Mr. Stallman may need to broaden his horizons to understand that not all people live in a free society.
I'm pretty sure he gets it, it's the entire point of the joke. It's not a joke about abortion, it's a joke about freedom of speech.
Actually "Professionalism" is highly subjective, AND changes over time and varies from group to group and organization to organization, because it is a cultural concept.
I disagree. A professional is someone who gets paid to do something. Unfortunately it doesn't guarantee any level of quality, especially in the software-industry where there is very little accountability for failure nor a generally accepted standard for quality.
That's why the Germans claim Facebook uses extortion. Apparently it is so hard to leave / never join that it can not be expected from a reasonable person. Hence extortion; users are forced to join Facebook against there will. Not with a gun, but with social pressure.
How about game support? What games can I expect to work with VR on Linux right now?
I'll just start using 128 character passwords, randomly generated from the non-ascii part of Unicode.
The NSDAP was a union between left-wing socialists* and right-wing nationalists. Hitler belonged to the latter arm. The first thing Hitler did when he came to power in 1934 was to murder the socialist leaders. Look up The Knight of the Long Knives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... By the time WW2 started there was little left from the socialist part of the party. The nazi's the world got to know were mostly right-wing nationalists. * socialists, not communists, they were anti-communist.
Stealing this material would have hurt and maybe killed thousands of people, but not by putting it into a bomb. These isotopes are used in hospitals around the world for all kind of things like diagnosing and treating cancer. However there is only a very small number of places that can manufacture them. If memory serves there are only six of those laboratory's in the world and they are unable to fill the current demand anyway. If any of those can't produce for any reason the entire medical world immediately feels the consequences. Stealing a large supply of isotopes an possibly disturbing production or distribution for a long time would have deadly consequence. People would be unable to get diagnosed or treated and some of them will die. That part would be far more harmufll than any dirty bomb the terrorists could build.
[quote] Some people just dont get that when you use your companies services (phone, email and what not) there is no expectation to privacy. [/quote] That may be true in the US but not in Europe. In Europe employee's do have a legally recognized expectation of privacy. You shouldn't expect as much privacy as in your own home but there is some privacy nevertheless. There is always some expectation of privacy. I'm sure everybody expects privacy when visiting the loo, even at work. There are borders, it's just a matter of where you draw the line. I expect privacy when I'm working in my office with the door closed and I expect my boss to knock before entering.
All reports miss an important part.
Nobody went out to look at this guys private messages. During the course of an investigation into his performance at work some private messages were discovered. He argued that this alone was a violation of his privacy. The judge decided that the employer did the right thing. The employer was not intentionally looking for private messages and he did not read them when he discovered they were of a private nature.
This is not a cart-blanche to spy on employee's.
I used to think along those lines untill I saw it in action, it quickly devolves towards slavery. My municipality forces people on welfare to do community service. Unfortunately those "voluntary" positions replace actual paid jobs. A famous example was a street sweeper who was asked to supervise a number of "volunteers". After training them he was fired an replaced by those "volunteers" as his job was no longer necessary. He couldn't find a new job and had to apply for unemployment benefits. Upon registering he was told that he needed to community service to get more work experience. He was assigned to sweeping the streets and was forced to do his old job at no pay.
the dream of "millions more streaming online" is just a dream
It's reality, not a dream, and has been for a while. It's hard to find numbers to put this into perspective but I found some info from IEM San Jose (december 2014) and DOTA2. IEM had 4 milion live viewers during a two day event. DOTA2 reached 2 million simultaneous viewers with a total of 20 million viewers. While NCAA is bigger than both events combined the numbers are not that far off either. NCAA is an old organisation with a 50 year television history that has a lot of resources to promote it's events. As eSports have time and demography on their side I expect that eSport will continue to grow. Especially now television broadcasters are starting to pick it up.
The mass appeal of watching someone play video games is just not there.
That statement makes me wonder if you've actually watched eSport. In my mind it's no different than watching people play baseball or tennis.
v1.0 That's easy. v1.4 Just prefix every sentence with a version number. v2.4 Software has been doing this for ages. >= v1.7 How hard can it be?
That only works until the company that offered the open source solution starts a lawsuit. Suing over lost tenders is rather common.
Why ask about women?
Because KDE was one of the first free software projects to focus on involving more women. They KDE Women mailinglist archive goes back to 1998. Given the recent attention for that subject it seems like a good idea to ask KDE about their experience.
It is about freedom, just not the freedom of the programmer. It's about the users. Freedom is not an absolute condition, it's always a balance the rights of various stakeholders. The cliche is that my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. Most software licenses restrict the rights of the users in favour of the programmer. The BSD licenses are vary liberal but they only focus on programmers that want to use the code. As a user you don't know anything about your rights if code is based on BSD code. Usually its 'free', but there is no guarantee. The programmer has no obligation to the user. The GPL is about giving assurances to users. If software is based on GPL code the user knows for sure that he will be able to get the code and use it.
What people fail to grasp is that shrinkwrap software is only a small part of the entire software market. Most software is never sold. It's written to solve a specific problem within an organisation. Most companies are not software companies. They will write software when they have to, but they would prefer to focus on their primary activity. Cooperating with other companies is a way to save money. Someone might think that those companies wouldn't want to share the software because they would lose a competetive advantage but that's usually not the case. Those companies don't want to compete on software, it's not their strong suit.
There is a number of intermediaries that try to solve this problem. If you want to buy a product you ask the intermediary to buy it for you. They will judge the seller and buy the product for you if they feel all is in order. When they receive the product they'll unpack it and send you a few pictures. Now you can decide if you want to buy it. If so they mail it to you, if not they will return it to the manufacturer and deal with the refundprocess. Ofcourse you'll have to a pay a small fee for the service but the examples I've seen were very cheap.
I wouldn't call your examples cases of overregulation. More a case of the law being behind the technology curve, as it usually is. Not that there is no overregulation, but I don't think your examples qualify. Regarding safety. There is no such thing as absolute safety. The law specifies a number of features a car should have to make it safe. How else would 'they' determine if the car is safe? You'll need some kind of guideline.
Not just natural genes. No genes at all should be patentable. Otherwise they'll just change one atom somewhere and claim that anything that resembles that gene is infringement.
"The rest of us" boils down to the 1% that gives a shit. The other 99% will just pick the cheapest solution, no matter what the consequences might be.
You must love "dark fiber". In one of my current project every vendor seems to be use "dark fiber" to connect stuff.
Yes, really great, compared to the rest of the USA. Over here in the Netherlands I have 500/500 for €60, €50 after discounts. That's from a high end provider which also includes goodies such as a 4G subscription for my cellphone. There is about a dozen others that offer the same speed for less money. 1000/1000 for €40 is also available. My other connection is 180/18 over cable.
I don't think your perspective on this is right. There is no hard cut-off between fully depending on support an doing everything yourself. At the very least you will need someone to talk with support. You will always have someone who is acting as an administrator and who will solve problems. Sooner or later you are going to run into problems that can be fixed without support. If you don't want to keep fixing the same problem over and over you are better of sending the fix upstream. With or without the help of payed support.
No, Moore's law is still going strong. Moore never said that your computer would get any faster, just that you would get more transistors in the same space. Newer hardware is still getting more transistors but the application of all those transistors has been shifted in a different direction and games do not always benefit.
Modern processors are much better at running multiple processes at the same time. Most games however don't use that capability, single core performance is what counts in most games. Therefor games don't benefit as much from improvements in transistor count as the used to.
Also, much of the heavy lifting is no longer done by the CPU. The GPU is doing most of the work. As the GPU is doing most of the graphics work the CPU has more time available for the rest of the game.
Thirdly, most high-end games are now designed for multiple platforms. Thus they are limited to the performance of the lowest common denominator which often is a game console. Most game-engines are very flexible and will adjust to work with slower hardware by decreasing the quality of the graphics.