If I had to stare at that many fricking cats just to use a website, I'd take my Web 2.0 business elsewhere.
Of course, this captcha theory is prone to lots of misses. The person has to know the word and what the animal looks like -- all versions of the animal -- and not get it confused with similar animals. Even the test phase requires that people testing the auth don't confuse a wombat with a squirrel. If most people can't tell the difference, but I can, I lose, because LCD determines whether I'm right or not.
The first thing I can't figure out is what possibly possessed you to entitle an anti-FSF, pro-DRM piece with the words "Free as in do what I say".
The irony, which I'm sure I don't have to point out to you, is that FSF has been supportive of the rights of computer users to have control over their computers and the software and data that is on them. Meanwhile, DRM specifically and purposefully exists in order to control what you can do with data.
So I must assume that you got confused in combining the words "do what I say" with the name of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Perhaps you got your TLAs confused and really meant to associate "do what I say" with the acronym "DRM". Because that would make sense.
I don't know why I'm bothering to write, because I'm sure you must know this -- DRM is about limitation, FSF is about no limitation -- and yet you managed to switch the seats and slur FSF as the seekers of restriction. By inferred converse, this must mean that DRM is simply a beacon of liberty for you.
I think the problem is that you don't seem to see free software as a good thing because it gives individuals control over their computers, but because it does good things to the market. The philosophical questions of whether people should be free in their computers is (ironically enough) apparently not important to the modern libertarian; rather the only thing that matters is what the market does.
But the flaw in your market argument betrays the idea that maybe you're not really pro-free software at all. You argue that iTunes DRM must be okay, and not a challenge to user liberty, because the end-user market is gobbling it up. Now, if market acceptance was your true yardstick of good/bad, you couldn't in the same article say that free software (i.e. "free as in the concept of liberty") was also good -- because the end-user market *isn't* gobbling it up; they still use IE and Office and AIM and so on.
So how can you possibly use market acceptance as a yardstick for DRM but then not for free software when you're trying to compare the two? Clearly there is something inconsistent here. Clearly market acceptance means little in terms of real value. Actually, I'd really like to see you argue that there is any at all correlation between market acceptance and personal liberty. People aren't really all that big on personal liberty these days, not if market acceptance (not just in software, but in everything from CPUs to media players to gasoline to presidents) is any indication.
iTunes doesn't succeed in the market because it champions personal liberty. It succeeds because it has a large catalog of popular music and has lots of accessories and cross-branding. Personal liberty doesn't have anything to do with it. Like I said, personal liberty is not really all that high on people's priorities -- not as long as they can find a few things they are free to do (e.g. download music at a buck a song flat that they can do less with than they can a CD at roughly the same per-song price).
Now in closing, and just in case they didn't require Intro to Logic at your J-school, here's how the FSF-DRM thing breaks down:
* FSF fundamentally supports end-users' ability to have complete freedom over their computers and devices including the bits and bytes on them. * Therefore, FSF fundamentally opposes restricting end-users' complete freedom over their computers and the data on them. * DRM fundamentally exists in order to restrict end-users' complete freedom over their computers and the data on them. * Therefore, FSF fundamentally opposes DRM.
It makes sense. That is, as long as your logic is consistent.
To summarize, yes, there are still interesting things you can do with ham, but you can't just fire up a radio set and start running anymore; you need to be prepared to dump gobs of money and time into esoteric antenna arrays (and you'd better be landed, get proper permits, not piss off the neighborhood assoc) that can send signals into orbital space or modulate into arcane digital transmission modes.
In other words, if you want to do anything *really* interesting with ham, don't plan to have time to do or buy anything else except (a little) work and food.
Another aspect of OSS developer elitism. If you're not running the experimental, non-released CVS code, you've no idea what's going on with the software. There's always new features, fixes, and enhancements in the CVS dump, or even the non-release beta, and there's always a gaggle of users who absolutely must run the latest bleeding-edge zero-day version in order to be truly elite.
Ignore the fact that no one using the software for any serious purpose would sanely run non-release-quality software. OSS isn't for people to seriously use, but solely for geek cred.
OSS developers are like sysadmins. They don't care what the users want, because the users are idiots. Only developers really know what makes good software. If the developers haven't though of it, it can't be useful. This is why repeatedly submitted bugs/ERs that help day-to-day usage can sit stale in open bug trackers forever while some left-field chic feature that was some developer's pet idea and which has staying power on the order of a few months will suddenly appear as a priority in the next release beta.
Sadly, this notion of "the users want it, so we need to release it" is something I dare say the commercial software business understands a lot better.
IHNMTS except it would be really nice if TMO's GPRS plan was just fast enough to do 24k streams.
Incidentally streaming is a feature in PTunes, the major Palm MP3 player, and yet streaming only works on faster networks like CNG's (or Sprint Vision) -- where it's forbidden.
Yeah, slow as it is, I won't want to migrate to a faster service if I can't use it for faster content.
Matter of fact... This sort of policy keeps the US in the wireless dark ages compared to S.E.A. or probably much of Europe too. Wireless TV is one of the major drivers of the wireless market in modernized Asia; as a medium it rivals cable and satellite in that part of the world. Why cripple US 3G with such crappy usage restrictions? No doubt the carriers realize they are so far behind with high speed wireless data services that once they turn them on, they will probably be overloaded overnight due to the pent up demand.
Landline in the US is slipping, will wireless slip too as it fails to catch up with technology? If so, what will bring mobile broadband to US?
What's incredibly ironic about people who try to explain complex and confusing physics stories is that they end up being no less complex and confusing; just annoyed at the original source and more patronizing than it. But not a lick more explanatory.
Unionization is almost certainly a requirement of free markets. If companies can associate to gain leverage, so should employees. To allow incorporation, consolidation, conglomeration, and trade associations, but not allow unionization, would *not* be a free market.
Everyone thinks that they're safe and that it's only worthless people that get laid off or wrongfully terminated and out of work. Until, of course, it happens to them. As time goes on, the bar over which "talentedness" is measured keeps going up. You can always just take the people that got screwed over and place them under the bar. And then it becomes (in your mind) their own fault.
Aside from not telling us the whole story about this end-user; who you apparently for whatever reason can't simply not answer their emails but yet can't simply tell them that you're short on time... it sounds like you need to worry about the rest of your life rather than your problematic end-user. Maybe you need to reprioritize and simplify. Or maybe you should just give yourself a vacation.
It really would be best if managers realized that they were in a business relationship with their employees, and nothing more.
Despite how impersonal and dysfunctional that would be, I would actually tolerate that amicably. The problem, of course, is that it tends to tip the hand in favor of the employee at inconvenient times, which employers don't want. Workers are expected to be infinitely local to their employers, while employers simply don't return that loyalty.
The tendency is not towards an equitable or balanced employer-employee relationship, which the phrase "business relationship" would tend to suggest. The tendency is towards top-down control and imbalance of that relationship. YMMV, and your company might not have gotten there -- yet, or maybe luckily never. But very few companies go from an anti-employee environment to an equitable one without some sort of revoltive event (unionizing, buyout, etc.)
I agree -- far, far too many companies have no interest or concern regarding employee morale. They either appeal to a very unconvincing "good of the company" mentality, or use fear of termination -- or sometimes neither, using absolutely nothing to encourage workers -- to maintain or aggravate the demoralized status quo.
Of course, what doesn't help is that employers and employees both know (or think) that employers can always get more obedient, cheaper labor, fairly easily; and both also know (or think) that generally, employees cannot get more accomodating, more lucrative employment without risk.
So the employer-employee relationship is simply not an amicable, equitable business relationship, but something much more silently adversarial, where employers fight for the cheapest, most productive labor, and employees struggle for the best benefits and pay.
Say what you will -- organization of labor is probably the only thing that can actually make that relationship at all like a business relationship.
No, the problem is that Web 2.0 does not equal DHTML, or even AJAX, which is really just DHTML with back-room data loading. The article admits shamelessly it's just about DHTML. The difference between DHTML and Ajax is the difference between Experts Exchange and Google Mail.
I guess "Web 2.0" will never be defined. Is Web 2.0 "thick client" browsing, or is it providing and soliciting community-enhanced content?
Hey, guess what, I already give money to Livejournal. Apparently they don't need my money anymore, though. So, screw em, I don't really *need* extra pictures and a crappy user search feature anyway.
I'm a bit of a Linux snob, rebuffing requests of my home time for GoToMeeting and Skype sessions, citing incompatibility.
Even for someone fairly technically adept, getting help is no easy task. The fact that I could have any arrangement of kernel, drivers, distro, X, WM, etc. is part of it, and simply finding people who have an answer for me is the other.
OSS community touts linux as having low TCO because there are all these wonderful communities of Linux users who can help you out. Except that's a bunch of bullshit. Most Linux users are busy with device drivers for poorly supported hardware and esoteric mesh networks or some other project to answer your problem with how to get apt-get unfucked so you can get needed packages or why you can't get GDM to work. Still others don't think they should give it away for free.
RTFM? That's rich, since there is plenty of poorly documented Linux and OSS apps, as well as plenty of *un*documented and arcanely documented materials. Most people nowadays whinging "RTFM" don't even know of an FM to R.
Most of the OSS community's desire for broader use of Linux is a selfish one; so that the greater consumer base will encourage vendors to support it. They don't actually want to *help* this happen in any way that would be effective.
Clearly, everyone in the world needs to know C, assembler, and understand caching and pipelining in order to use a computer. Then everyone would be capable of running Linux, and unfucking it themselves when it gets into a messy state.
Both companies have been demonstrable examples of using Linux under the hood, and have a certain ongoing dedication to it. Both companies' products have significant (auth/unauth/tacit) community development (i.e. hacks). Google wants to expand into video search and cataloging, TiVo wants to expand into providing access to online content.
And for added bonus, the logo colors are practically identical.
It just seems like such an obvious fit. If only they could see it.
Come on, you can't prove that. Don't you know that there are dozens of respected scientists who can show that the Chernobylian people had been successfully dodging cancer for 100 years? The massive upswing in cancer after the spewing of radioactive smoke over the countryside was just the result of the natural cancer cycle catching up to the statistics.
Clearly Peppers is a notable figure, whether for the peculiarities of his case or for the existence of a meme involving him. Cf. Ghyslain. If the meme involved the photo, the question of whether or not to include the photo in the article is debatable, but whether or not to have an article on the topic is less so.
Deliberately not including a topic that is in the public realm is anathema to the purpose of any encyclopedia. An NPOV treatment on the subject would almost certainly do more good than harm.
I've no idea where you got your definition of "censorship" from, but it's bollocks. Censorship is whenever information or content is prevented from being distributed because the content bothers or hurts someone. The word has nothing to do with government.
Whether or not Wikipedia has the right to perform censorship is another issue. Legally, it does -- though its power in that area is limited as the GFDL under which WP content is submitted and released precludes them from preventing others from distributing the information. (Jimbo's face-saving goals would be better served by CC-BY, actually, as it allows you to order reusers to remove your name from the content, which AFAIK GFDL does not.)
Slashdot Mirror
Mind you, that's a standard British wall socket.
/ jade-intergration.jpg
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z/nw/illo/story-graphics
http://www.tradekey.com/product_view/id/59861.htm
If I had to stare at that many fricking cats just to use a website, I'd take my Web 2.0 business elsewhere.
Of course, this captcha theory is prone to lots of misses. The person has to know the word and what the animal looks like -- all versions of the animal -- and not get it confused with similar animals. Even the test phase requires that people testing the auth don't confuse a wombat with a squirrel. If most people can't tell the difference, but I can, I lose, because LCD determines whether I'm right or not.
The first thing I can't figure out is what possibly possessed you to entitle an anti-FSF, pro-DRM piece with the words "Free as in do what I say".
The irony, which I'm sure I don't have to point out to you, is that FSF has been supportive of the rights of computer users to have control over their computers and the software and data that is on them. Meanwhile, DRM specifically and purposefully exists in order to control what you can do with data.
So I must assume that you got confused in combining the words "do what I say" with the name of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Perhaps you got your TLAs confused and really meant to associate "do what I say" with the acronym "DRM". Because that would make sense.
I don't know why I'm bothering to write, because I'm sure you must know this -- DRM is about limitation, FSF is about no limitation -- and yet you managed to switch the seats and slur FSF as the seekers of restriction. By inferred converse, this must mean that DRM is simply a beacon of liberty for you.
I think the problem is that you don't seem to see free software as a good thing because it gives individuals control over their computers, but because it does good things to the market. The philosophical questions of whether people should be free in their computers is (ironically enough) apparently not important to the modern libertarian; rather the only thing that matters is what the market does.
But the flaw in your market argument betrays the idea that maybe you're not really pro-free software at all. You argue that iTunes DRM must be okay, and not a challenge to user liberty, because the end-user market is gobbling it up. Now, if market acceptance was your true yardstick of good/bad, you couldn't in the same article say that free software (i.e. "free as in the concept of liberty") was also good -- because the end-user market *isn't* gobbling it up; they still use IE and Office and AIM and so on.
So how can you possibly use market acceptance as a yardstick for DRM but then not for free software when you're trying to compare the two? Clearly there is something inconsistent here. Clearly market acceptance means little in terms of real value. Actually, I'd really like to see you argue that there is any at all correlation between market acceptance and personal liberty. People aren't really all that big on personal liberty these days, not if market acceptance (not just in software, but in everything from CPUs to media players to gasoline to presidents) is any indication.
iTunes doesn't succeed in the market because it champions personal liberty. It succeeds because it has a large catalog of popular music and has lots of accessories and cross-branding. Personal liberty doesn't have anything to do with it. Like I said, personal liberty is not really all that high on people's priorities -- not as long as they can find a few things they are free to do (e.g. download music at a buck a song flat that they can do less with than they can a CD at roughly the same per-song price).
Now in closing, and just in case they didn't require Intro to Logic at your J-school, here's how the FSF-DRM thing breaks down:
* FSF fundamentally supports end-users' ability to have complete freedom over their computers and devices including the bits and bytes on them.
* Therefore, FSF fundamentally opposes restricting end-users' complete freedom over their computers and the data on them.
* DRM fundamentally exists in order to restrict end-users' complete freedom over their computers and the data on them.
* Therefore, FSF fundamentally opposes DRM.
It makes sense. That is, as long as your logic is consistent.
To summarize, yes, there are still interesting things you can do with ham, but you can't just fire up a radio set and start running anymore; you need to be prepared to dump gobs of money and time into esoteric antenna arrays (and you'd better be landed, get proper permits, not piss off the neighborhood assoc) that can send signals into orbital space or modulate into arcane digital transmission modes.
In other words, if you want to do anything *really* interesting with ham, don't plan to have time to do or buy anything else except (a little) work and food.
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/romulus/papers/mywr/re port.htm
Another aspect of OSS developer elitism. If you're not running the experimental, non-released CVS code, you've no idea what's going on with the software. There's always new features, fixes, and enhancements in the CVS dump, or even the non-release beta, and there's always a gaggle of users who absolutely must run the latest bleeding-edge zero-day version in order to be truly elite.
Ignore the fact that no one using the software for any serious purpose would sanely run non-release-quality software. OSS isn't for people to seriously use, but solely for geek cred.
OSS developers are like sysadmins. They don't care what the users want, because the users are idiots. Only developers really know what makes good software. If the developers haven't though of it, it can't be useful. This is why repeatedly submitted bugs/ERs that help day-to-day usage can sit stale in open bug trackers forever while some left-field chic feature that was some developer's pet idea and which has staying power on the order of a few months will suddenly appear as a priority in the next release beta.
Sadly, this notion of "the users want it, so we need to release it" is something I dare say the commercial software business understands a lot better.
IHNMTS except it would be really nice if TMO's GPRS plan was just fast enough to do 24k streams.
Incidentally streaming is a feature in PTunes, the major Palm MP3 player, and yet streaming only works on faster networks like CNG's (or Sprint Vision) -- where it's forbidden.
Yeah, slow as it is, I won't want to migrate to a faster service if I can't use it for faster content.
Matter of fact... This sort of policy keeps the US in the wireless dark ages compared to S.E.A. or probably much of Europe too. Wireless TV is one of the major drivers of the wireless market in modernized Asia; as a medium it rivals cable and satellite in that part of the world. Why cripple US 3G with such crappy usage restrictions? No doubt the carriers realize they are so far behind with high speed wireless data services that once they turn them on, they will probably be overloaded overnight due to the pent up demand.
Landline in the US is slipping, will wireless slip too as it fails to catch up with technology? If so, what will bring mobile broadband to US?
Become a ... doctor, whatever
- 13-1443_1824893,00.htmlm ote_rob.htmls tance+doctor~R~(usage+of+robotics).html?refid=SEO
Umm, no.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4946229/
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2
http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2006/04/very_re
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1:143341452/Long-di
etc.
What's incredibly ironic about people who try to explain complex and confusing physics stories is that they end up being no less complex and confusing; just annoyed at the original source and more patronizing than it. But not a lick more explanatory.
Oh, I see, when they said it was a "CSS contest", they meant "not *just* CSS; in fact, we only mean 'CSS' the way tech support customers mean 'CPU'".
Unionization is almost certainly a requirement of free markets. If companies can associate to gain leverage, so should employees. To allow incorporation, consolidation, conglomeration, and trade associations, but not allow unionization, would *not* be a free market.
Everyone thinks that they're safe and that it's only worthless people that get laid off or wrongfully terminated and out of work. Until, of course, it happens to them. As time goes on, the bar over which "talentedness" is measured keeps going up. You can always just take the people that got screwed over and place them under the bar. And then it becomes (in your mind) their own fault.
Aside from not telling us the whole story about this end-user; who you apparently for whatever reason can't simply not answer their emails but yet can't simply tell them that you're short on time... it sounds like you need to worry about the rest of your life rather than your problematic end-user. Maybe you need to reprioritize and simplify. Or maybe you should just give yourself a vacation.
What exactly are the ways in which Openoffice:
* is less accessible than MS Word
* is less accessible than any other software
* is incompatible with available screen readers
And:
* Why not focus development to an open-source screen reader that is compatible with both leading proprietary and leading open-source software?
It really would be best if managers realized that they were in a business relationship with their employees, and nothing more.
Despite how impersonal and dysfunctional that would be, I would actually tolerate that amicably. The problem, of course, is that it tends to tip the hand in favor of the employee at inconvenient times, which employers don't want. Workers are expected to be infinitely local to their employers, while employers simply don't return that loyalty.
The tendency is not towards an equitable or balanced employer-employee relationship, which the phrase "business relationship" would tend to suggest. The tendency is towards top-down control and imbalance of that relationship. YMMV, and your company might not have gotten there -- yet, or maybe luckily never. But very few companies go from an anti-employee environment to an equitable one without some sort of revoltive event (unionizing, buyout, etc.)
I agree -- far, far too many companies have no interest or concern regarding employee morale. They either appeal to a very unconvincing "good of the company" mentality, or use fear of termination -- or sometimes neither, using absolutely nothing to encourage workers -- to maintain or aggravate the demoralized status quo.
Of course, what doesn't help is that employers and employees both know (or think) that employers can always get more obedient, cheaper labor, fairly easily; and both also know (or think) that generally, employees cannot get more accomodating, more lucrative employment without risk.
So the employer-employee relationship is simply not an amicable, equitable business relationship, but something much more silently adversarial, where employers fight for the cheapest, most productive labor, and employees struggle for the best benefits and pay.
Say what you will -- organization of labor is probably the only thing that can actually make that relationship at all like a business relationship.
No, the problem is that Web 2.0 does not equal DHTML, or even AJAX, which is really just DHTML with back-room data loading. The article admits shamelessly it's just about DHTML. The difference between DHTML and Ajax is the difference between Experts Exchange and Google Mail.
I guess "Web 2.0" will never be defined. Is Web 2.0 "thick client" browsing, or is it providing and soliciting community-enhanced content?
change the minimum age from 14 to 18 with an age verification system
Tom, wouldn't it be easier just to put them out of business?
One of the biggies was, correlation isn't causation.
A good one. One I'd like to use on the cellphone-driving-ban pushers.
OOC, what are the other two?
Hey, guess what, I already give money to Livejournal. Apparently they don't need my money anymore, though. So, screw em, I don't really *need* extra pictures and a crappy user search feature anyway.
I'm a bit of a Linux snob, rebuffing requests of my home time for GoToMeeting and Skype sessions, citing incompatibility.
Even for someone fairly technically adept, getting help is no easy task. The fact that I could have any arrangement of kernel, drivers, distro, X, WM, etc. is part of it, and simply finding people who have an answer for me is the other.
OSS community touts linux as having low TCO because there are all these wonderful communities of Linux users who can help you out. Except that's a bunch of bullshit. Most Linux users are busy with device drivers for poorly supported hardware and esoteric mesh networks or some other project to answer your problem with how to get apt-get unfucked so you can get needed packages or why you can't get GDM to work. Still others don't think they should give it away for free.
RTFM? That's rich, since there is plenty of poorly documented Linux and OSS apps, as well as plenty of *un*documented and arcanely documented materials. Most people nowadays whinging "RTFM" don't even know of an FM to R.
Most of the OSS community's desire for broader use of Linux is a selfish one; so that the greater consumer base will encourage vendors to support it. They don't actually want to *help* this happen in any way that would be effective.
Clearly, everyone in the world needs to know C, assembler, and understand caching and pipelining in order to use a computer. Then everyone would be capable of running Linux, and unfucking it themselves when it gets into a messy state.
Both companies have been demonstrable examples of using Linux under the hood, and have a certain ongoing dedication to it. Both companies' products have significant (auth/unauth/tacit) community development (i.e. hacks). Google wants to expand into video search and cataloging, TiVo wants to expand into providing access to online content.
And for added bonus, the logo colors are practically identical.
It just seems like such an obvious fit. If only they could see it.
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/even t-status/event/2006/
Come on, you can't prove that. Don't you know that there are dozens of respected scientists who can show that the Chernobylian people had been successfully dodging cancer for 100 years? The massive upswing in cancer after the spewing of radioactive smoke over the countryside was just the result of the natural cancer cycle catching up to the statistics.
</sarcasm>
Clearly Peppers is a notable figure, whether for the peculiarities of his case or for the existence of a meme involving him. Cf. Ghyslain. If the meme involved the photo, the question of whether or not to include the photo in the article is debatable, but whether or not to have an article on the topic is less so.
Deliberately not including a topic that is in the public realm is anathema to the purpose of any encyclopedia. An NPOV treatment on the subject would almost certainly do more good than harm.
I've no idea where you got your definition of "censorship" from, but it's bollocks. Censorship is whenever information or content is prevented from being distributed because the content bothers or hurts someone. The word has nothing to do with government.
Whether or not Wikipedia has the right to perform censorship is another issue. Legally, it does -- though its power in that area is limited as the GFDL under which WP content is submitted and released precludes them from preventing others from distributing the information. (Jimbo's face-saving goals would be better served by CC-BY, actually, as it allows you to order reusers to remove your name from the content, which AFAIK GFDL does not.)
http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22wireless%20toke n%20ring%22