"tyranny of the majority," South Africa being the typical example.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that whites were by far the minority in South Africa, but they held the power for a long time. Perhaps a better counter-argument being the slave trade?
I've always held that "tyranny of the majority" is only dangerous when it impacts an individual's rights and freedoms. Slavery certainly does this. Copyright infringement? I don't see it. You're free to make music as much as you want, but I don't see it as a basic human right that you should profit from it, unless our society so agrees. What if everyone agreed to never listen to music again, save for a small minority? Are we infringing upon their freedom?
I spent several months looking into climate models and concluded that they're complete bunk. We can't predict the weather a week out, but people use the very same techniques to "predict" the climate a century out.
Common misconception. "Weather" is the local, day-to-day state of your environment. "Climate" is more of an averaging of many, many days' weather, over large areas.
Simple trick: try to predict the exact temperature, winds, precipitation for 3 weeks from now in the city where you live. Kinda hard, right?
Watch me predict, very accurately, the climate. Central Canada: snow in the winter, temperatures below freezing. Warm, dry summers with many sunny days. Sahara desert: hot and very low precipitation for the next 5 years. Brazilian rainforest: warm and rainy. We can even do some very accurate climate comparisons: California warmer than Alaska. Chicago windier than.. well anywhere:) I realize I'm using extreme examples, but I doubt that many Slashdotters would know where the heck Dryden, Ontario is, for example.
Anyway, long-term climate modelling is rather accurate, because for the most part, our climate doesn't change all that quickly in comparison to a human lifetime. The day-to-day weather? Good luck, you'd be better off predicting the stock market:)
These days, a standard linux distro like Redhat comes on several CDs
Did you know, if you just want an OS, window manager, some basic apps like a text editor, things like that... you just need a single CD?Sounds kinda like Windows, no? Just install the basics and you'll never be asked for CDs 2 and 3.
The other CDs are applications. All of the extra server software, office suites, games, extra window managers (although they took out windowmaker from 9, the bastards), etc. Stuff you DON'T get on a Windows install CD. Stuff that would come on ADDITIONAL CDs.
As for the slowness/bloat issue, I'm not really qualified to comment, as my RedHat box is a P2-266 with 64MB of ram. Runs just fine for me, although I have my doubts about XP on that system...:)
Opera (6, anyway) blocks any and all popups, regardless of how it's done. It's actually a bit of a pain when you're on a site that requires some stupid popup navigation form, but there aren't many of those worth going to. Click, and nothing happens. Thankfully the status bar generally shows javascript:window.open(somepage.html) or however the syntax is, so I usually clue in.
The worst any site has managed to do is attempt the popup/resize/hijack the browser thing. All they can do is un-maximize the current browser tab. I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, because I honesly couldn't care less - any site that tries this, why the hell would you even waste your time with them? The only reason I've even seen it was due to some "research" (it was a porn site;).
Go ahead. Do your worst. I'd love to see you get Opera to popup a window on me.
Imagine you're a cancer patient. You've been handed a death sentence from your doctor, effectively. Might be a few weeks, might be a few years, who knows. Now, once you get over the shock, and start living with the disease (and some people do for quite a long time), what are you going to do with yourself?
1. Wait to die, knowing there will never be a cure, because all of modern science has yet to mention even the possiblity of one.
2. Have some hope, because at least it's *possible* something might happen. It could be very unlikely, but hey, there are a hell of a lot of smart people working on it, so why not give it a shot?
I'm as against snake oil as anyone. Nothing sickens me more than people who stop taking known, working treatments because some quack claims he can "cure" you. But hope? For someone expecting to die in the near future there really isn't anything better.
Actually, I'd say that things like this do more for cancer patients than almost anything else. Certainly more for them than whiny posts to Slashdot.
Aren't patents supposed to be the ultimate evil on slashdot? Slashdot hardly differentiates between good and bad patents
I need you to do something for me. Look at your post. See that little "588387" next to your nick? That, my friend, is your Slashdot user ID (UID for short). It is a unique numeric identifier for your account. Now, I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. UIDs are issued sequentially. In case you've never heard this word before, what this means is that the first person to get a Slashdot account was assigned UID 1, the next UID 2, and so on.
You'll notice your UID is 588387. I'll help break it down by re-writing 588,387. That is over half a million. Pretty big number, no? Some people here are over 700,000. Here's a neat trick. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE UIDS INDICATES AN INDIVIDUAL USER. Clear? No? That means there are close to three quarters of a million people who have signed up for a Slashdot account, and could potentially post on a story. Those 700,000+ people, while I know it is difficult to believe, might just possibly have differing opinions. In theory, anyway.
What, did you think "Slashdot" was some automated script that just spewed out commentary on its own stories?
Drug companies (and a lot of other R&D shops) are some of the biggest financial entities out there, and some of the biggest campaign contributors (well, used to be, anyway). We see copyright extension after copyright extension, all with the argument of "no more Disney movies", yet the pharmaceutical industry hasn't managed to get a 50 year patent by arguing "no more drugs".
Don't get me wrong, this is a VERY GOOD THING. It's just kind of sad that we've let Hollywood push us around so much. I'm pretty sure bringing a new miracle drug to market costs a hell of a lot more than financing a movie or producing a TV show, yet they somehow manage to turn a profit with only 17 years.
As messed up as some of the patent system is, I gotta say, this is one place where IP law is at least a bit sane.
This is why I haven't bought any LCDs besides my laptop yet
I almost pity all the people who in a rush to beat the curve and be "cool" bought those 4 or 5 thousand dollar Plasma tvs when if they could've practiced a small degree of self discipline and waited another year and a half could've saved almost 4 grand
Hmm.. I wonder how much less your laptop would have cost you if you had waited a year and a half?:)
Buying a TV, or for that matter any sort of entertainment/toy/whatever_floats_your_boat isn't evil, and wanting one doesn't make you a bad person. Neither is not wanting/buying. Freedom is a wonderful thing.
Most of these people have extensive mp3 collections which look highly illegal...I've never talked to them
Devil's advocate, but please don't take the RIAA's route in assuming that mp3 == illegal. I personally have over 400 albums worth of mp3s on my computer, all 100% legally obtained by ripping my CD collection many moons ago.
Unfortunately for anyone who lives close enough, they're not shared over my wireless connection. Well, unless you can get onto non-shared drives on a computer that denies connection attempts:)
I see you have been modded as a troll since I started writing this
Man, and I thought my refreshing the main page every 15 minutes hoping for a new story was bad.
We now have a poster who refreshes the posts he's replying to, while he's replying to them, just to get that second-to-second info as to their moderation status:)
If more open source software projects would name themselves after their domain name, it would make it really easy for customers to know where to go for information. Imagine if Mozilla.org would do this.
Weird. Even my 65-year old father who takes 15 minutes just to find the Start button on his desktop knows to do this. Whenever he's looking for information on something, the FIRST thing he does is try something.com (and usually something.net and something.org).
This led to a rather funny Kodak moment once, when he decided to check out some government websites. Anyone not getting the joke, try this with the Whitehouse. Just make sure you're alone or with cool people when you do it:)
I've since taught him to Google for things first...
for assignments that are electronically submitted, I specifically say that MS Word format is not allowed
I wish I had more professors like yourself. Mine specifically say Word only, and if I hand in plain text they'll send it right back to me. I've tried using OpenOffice in the past, but depending on the Word version you open it up in, it can often look like complete crap. Again, they'll send it back for re-formatting.
We finally got some of them to allow PDF last year, after much reluctance. "Students can't afford PDF writing software!". Yeah, I laughed too. They consider Word "free" for us because it's installed on the University's computers. Oh yay, make me do my work on campus. What a thrill.
Of course, the funniest part about all this is that I'm in Computer Science. Our department sold its soul to Microsoft years ago, sadly, although we do have one professor who lobbied for, and got, a small Linux lab we can play with.
You sure about that? I know the MOVIE American Wedding was rated R, but the preview? Every preview I've ever seen actually has a little preamble "this preview is rated PG-13" or some such, to avoid precisely the controversy you describe. They basically show only the "kid-appropriate" (whatever that means) material in the preview. It's not like an R-rated movie is 90 minutes of solid sex scenes:)
Now, if your complaint is that you don't want PG-13 previews for R-rated movies on your PG-13 movies, that's a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Man, North America sucks. We only have the first 2 here so far. On the bright side, I can skip through the copyright warnings pretty easily:)
I've actually returned movies that won't let me skip to the movie itself. Sorry, folks, I ain't paying for propaganda and commercials. No-hassle return policies are a good thing sometimes.
Technically, music CD-Rs may have a special code that allows them to be used in stand-alone music recording devices. These stand-alone devices check for the code
Hey, anyone know if this "special code" can be burned onto a data CD first, and then have it look like an audio CD to these devices?
I realize, it's rather silly, but hey, anything to mess up the system is all good in my books.
Well I'd say common sense, but I'll elaborate instead. Do you really think Microsoft will keep their activation servers running forever, for each and every product they release, until the end of time?
I've been a mostly happy Shaw customer for over 5 years now. Still am, in fact, but it's fun to rant. I'll preface this by noting I was doing probably 45gb down and maybe 5gb up a month for a few months straight at this point. I don't want to hear any holier-than-thous here, because if you really want, I could come up with legit activity to account for that - and besides, the issue of legality never once came up. ISPs in Canada couldn't care less WHAT you do with their bandwidth, just HOW MUCH you use. Whoring for mod points by shouting "PIRATE! No way can someone use that bandwidth!" is just sad.
Last year I got a notice from them that I was exceeding "expected" usage on their cable service, and please contact us before further action is taken (ie: disconnect). So, I politely emailed them back and asked what they meant by "expected usage". I was told it was usage that didn't negatively impair their network, as outlined by their TOS. I think 4 or 5 exchanges later, they finally told me it was about exceeding their expected bandwidth limits. I had fun with the word "limits". Oh, did I have fun. I started pulling out press releases and other advertisements from their web site, plus pretty much any dead tree promotional material I could find, scanned it in, and sent them a really nice package of information, with the word "unlimited" circled all over the place. No asterisk, no fine print, just the word "unlimited".
Well! You'd think I just made a "yo mamma" joke. I got a several hundred word email back explaining to me that "unlimited" means they do not limit the hours I can connect, as opposed to dial-up ISPs. (Quick note of humor, this is 4 years after almost everyone I knew had broadband. I had unlimited dialup as far back as 1996. I haven't seen anyone use hour-limited internet access in so many years, I honestly didn't think they still existed outside of AOL). They went on and on telling me how their service was better than dial-up, because they didn't limit your hours, etc, etc, etc. So, after a thinly veiled false advertising threat, I asked them just what my bandwidth limits were. They replied that they had no official limits, but anything that "exceeded expected usage". Wee, we're chasing our tails!
Anyway, I managed eventually to get someone to admit that they flag anyone who goes over what one of their small business packages is limited to (6/2, iirc). If it goes on for a long time, you get warned. I promised to be a good little netizen and left it at that, informing them that perhaps they should rethink their misleading advertising campaign and TOS, neither of which ever mention limits of any sort.
I'm still with them, btw. I've slowed down my activity, and I use a lot more sneaker net than in the old days. But switching to the other high speed provider in town means about half the speed, and practically no usenet access.
Lesson: you can't fight the big guy. When the competition stinks even worse, life sucks.
Wow. Not reading the article, then not reading the article summary, now not even reading a post, then responding. It's a new Slashdot low.
For those like yourself that haven't been paying attention, let's elaborate:
Thanks to product activation, once Microsoft EOLs a product, you CAN'T activate it anymore. The only way to continue using your legally purchased, still-useful software, is to USE A CRACKED (read: illegal) COPY.
What the hell you were talking about, I have no idea.
Slashdot Mirror
"tyranny of the majority," South Africa being the typical example.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that whites were by far the minority in South Africa, but they held the power for a long time. Perhaps a better counter-argument being the slave trade?
I've always held that "tyranny of the majority" is only dangerous when it impacts an individual's rights and freedoms. Slavery certainly does this. Copyright infringement? I don't see it. You're free to make music as much as you want, but I don't see it as a basic human right that you should profit from it, unless our society so agrees. What if everyone agreed to never listen to music again, save for a small minority? Are we infringing upon their freedom?
I spent several months looking into climate models and concluded that they're complete bunk. We can't predict the weather a week out, but people use the very same techniques to "predict" the climate a century out.
.. well anywhere :) I realize I'm using extreme examples, but I doubt that many Slashdotters would know where the heck Dryden, Ontario is, for example.
:)
Common misconception. "Weather" is the local, day-to-day state of your environment. "Climate" is more of an averaging of many, many days' weather, over large areas.
Simple trick: try to predict the exact temperature, winds, precipitation for 3 weeks from now in the city where you live. Kinda hard, right?
Watch me predict, very accurately, the climate. Central Canada: snow in the winter, temperatures below freezing. Warm, dry summers with many sunny days. Sahara desert: hot and very low precipitation for the next 5 years. Brazilian rainforest: warm and rainy. We can even do some very accurate climate comparisons: California warmer than Alaska. Chicago windier than
Anyway, long-term climate modelling is rather accurate, because for the most part, our climate doesn't change all that quickly in comparison to a human lifetime. The day-to-day weather? Good luck, you'd be better off predicting the stock market
These days, a standard linux distro like Redhat comes on several CDs
:)
Did you know, if you just want an OS, window manager, some basic apps like a text editor, things like that... you just need a single CD?Sounds kinda like Windows, no? Just install the basics and you'll never be asked for CDs 2 and 3.
The other CDs are applications. All of the extra server software, office suites, games, extra window managers (although they took out windowmaker from 9, the bastards), etc. Stuff you DON'T get on a Windows install CD. Stuff that would come on ADDITIONAL CDs.
As for the slowness/bloat issue, I'm not really qualified to comment, as my RedHat box is a P2-266 with 64MB of ram. Runs just fine for me, although I have my doubts about XP on that system...
Opera (6, anyway) blocks any and all popups, regardless of how it's done. It's actually a bit of a pain when you're on a site that requires some stupid popup navigation form, but there aren't many of those worth going to. Click, and nothing happens. Thankfully the status bar generally shows javascript:window.open(somepage.html) or however the syntax is, so I usually clue in.
;).
The worst any site has managed to do is attempt the popup/resize/hijack the browser thing. All they can do is un-maximize the current browser tab. I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, because I honesly couldn't care less - any site that tries this, why the hell would you even waste your time with them? The only reason I've even seen it was due to some "research" (it was a porn site
Go ahead. Do your worst. I'd love to see you get Opera to popup a window on me.
I think I'll wait a while before applying it so other users can find all the new "features".
You don't have a whole lot of choice here, because it's just going to Beta as we speak. General release isn't targetted until spring/summer 2004.
Yup, my HP laptop came with its XP image already patched to sp1.
It's in a vendor's best interest to do this, I don't know why someone would think they'd do otherwise.
Imagine you're a cancer patient. You've been handed a death sentence from your doctor, effectively. Might be a few weeks, might be a few years, who knows. Now, once you get over the shock, and start living with the disease (and some people do for quite a long time), what are you going to do with yourself?
1. Wait to die, knowing there will never be a cure, because all of modern science has yet to mention even the possiblity of one.
2. Have some hope, because at least it's *possible* something might happen. It could be very unlikely, but hey, there are a hell of a lot of smart people working on it, so why not give it a shot?
I'm as against snake oil as anyone. Nothing sickens me more than people who stop taking known, working treatments because some quack claims he can "cure" you. But hope? For someone expecting to die in the near future there really isn't anything better.
Actually, I'd say that things like this do more for cancer patients than almost anything else. Certainly more for them than whiny posts to Slashdot.
Aren't patents supposed to be the ultimate evil on slashdot? Slashdot hardly differentiates between good and bad patents
I need you to do something for me. Look at your post. See that little "588387" next to your nick? That, my friend, is your Slashdot user ID (UID for short). It is a unique numeric identifier for your account. Now, I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. UIDs are issued sequentially. In case you've never heard this word before, what this means is that the first person to get a Slashdot account was assigned UID 1, the next UID 2, and so on.
You'll notice your UID is 588387. I'll help break it down by re-writing 588,387. That is over half a million. Pretty big number, no? Some people here are over 700,000. Here's a neat trick. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE UIDS INDICATES AN INDIVIDUAL USER. Clear? No? That means there are close to three quarters of a million people who have signed up for a Slashdot account, and could potentially post on a story. Those 700,000+ people, while I know it is difficult to believe, might just possibly have differing opinions. In theory, anyway.
What, did you think "Slashdot" was some automated script that just spewed out commentary on its own stories?
Patents expire after 17 years
This one blows me away. Completely.
Drug companies (and a lot of other R&D shops) are some of the biggest financial entities out there, and some of the biggest campaign contributors (well, used to be, anyway). We see copyright extension after copyright extension, all with the argument of "no more Disney movies", yet the pharmaceutical industry hasn't managed to get a 50 year patent by arguing "no more drugs".
Don't get me wrong, this is a VERY GOOD THING. It's just kind of sad that we've let Hollywood push us around so much. I'm pretty sure bringing a new miracle drug to market costs a hell of a lot more than financing a movie or producing a TV show, yet they somehow manage to turn a profit with only 17 years.
As messed up as some of the patent system is, I gotta say, this is one place where IP law is at least a bit sane.
Good deal. I'll just need to borrow her for a few nights while I do my "genetic extraction".
*cough*
Slashdot editors, can we please have a music section?
Isn't that what the little icon of a gramaphone stands for? The one right up top of the page there?
This is why I haven't bought any LCDs besides my laptop yet
:)
I almost pity all the people who in a rush to beat the curve and be "cool" bought those 4 or 5 thousand dollar Plasma tvs when if they could've practiced a small degree of self discipline and waited another year and a half could've saved almost 4 grand
Hmm.. I wonder how much less your laptop would have cost you if you had waited a year and a half?
You say that like it's a bad thing.
It is if you want the thing(s) in question.
Buying a TV, or for that matter any sort of entertainment/toy/whatever_floats_your_boat isn't evil, and wanting one doesn't make you a bad person. Neither is not wanting/buying. Freedom is a wonderful thing.
Most of these people have extensive mp3 collections which look highly illegal...I've never talked to them
:)
Devil's advocate, but please don't take the RIAA's route in assuming that mp3 == illegal. I personally have over 400 albums worth of mp3s on my computer, all 100% legally obtained by ripping my CD collection many moons ago.
Unfortunately for anyone who lives close enough, they're not shared over my wireless connection. Well, unless you can get onto non-shared drives on a computer that denies connection attempts
I see you have been modded as a troll since I started writing this
:)
Man, and I thought my refreshing the main page every 15 minutes hoping for a new story was bad.
We now have a poster who refreshes the posts he's replying to, while he's replying to them, just to get that second-to-second info as to their moderation status
You sir, are my new Slashdot idol!
Nah, if it was a typical Slashdot link it'd be a Yahoo or Amazon referrer. And the wonderful URL-de-obfuscation code would still fuck up Opera :)
If more open source software projects would name themselves after their domain name, it would make it really easy for customers to know where to go for information. Imagine if Mozilla.org would do this.
:)
Weird. Even my 65-year old father who takes 15 minutes just to find the Start button on his desktop knows to do this. Whenever he's looking for information on something, the FIRST thing he does is try something.com (and usually something.net and something.org).
This led to a rather funny Kodak moment once, when he decided to check out some government websites. Anyone not getting the joke, try this with the Whitehouse. Just make sure you're alone or with cool people when you do it
I've since taught him to Google for things first...
for assignments that are electronically submitted, I specifically say that MS Word format is not allowed
I wish I had more professors like yourself. Mine specifically say Word only, and if I hand in plain text they'll send it right back to me. I've tried using OpenOffice in the past, but depending on the Word version you open it up in, it can often look like complete crap. Again, they'll send it back for re-formatting.
We finally got some of them to allow PDF last year, after much reluctance. "Students can't afford PDF writing software!". Yeah, I laughed too. They consider Word "free" for us because it's installed on the University's computers. Oh yay, make me do my work on campus. What a thrill.
Of course, the funniest part about all this is that I'm in Computer Science. Our department sold its soul to Microsoft years ago, sadly, although we do have one professor who lobbied for, and got, a small Linux lab we can play with.
The forced to watch preview is R.
:)
You sure about that? I know the MOVIE American Wedding was rated R, but the preview? Every preview I've ever seen actually has a little preamble "this preview is rated PG-13" or some such, to avoid precisely the controversy you describe. They basically show only the "kid-appropriate" (whatever that means) material in the preview. It's not like an R-rated movie is 90 minutes of solid sex scenes
Now, if your complaint is that you don't want PG-13 previews for R-rated movies on your PG-13 movies, that's a whole 'nother ball of wax.
All 4 seasons? You have all 4 seasons???
:)
Man, North America sucks. We only have the first 2 here so far. On the bright side, I can skip through the copyright warnings pretty easily
I've actually returned movies that won't let me skip to the movie itself. Sorry, folks, I ain't paying for propaganda and commercials. No-hassle return policies are a good thing sometimes.
Technically, music CD-Rs may have a special code that allows them to be used in stand-alone music recording devices. These stand-alone devices check for the code
Hey, anyone know if this "special code" can be burned onto a data CD first, and then have it look like an audio CD to these devices?
I realize, it's rather silly, but hey, anything to mess up the system is all good in my books.
Well I'd say common sense, but I'll elaborate instead. Do you really think Microsoft will keep their activation servers running forever, for each and every product they release, until the end of time?
I've been a mostly happy Shaw customer for over 5 years now. Still am, in fact, but it's fun to rant. I'll preface this by noting I was doing probably 45gb down and maybe 5gb up a month for a few months straight at this point. I don't want to hear any holier-than-thous here, because if you really want, I could come up with legit activity to account for that - and besides, the issue of legality never once came up. ISPs in Canada couldn't care less WHAT you do with their bandwidth, just HOW MUCH you use. Whoring for mod points by shouting "PIRATE! No way can someone use that bandwidth!" is just sad.
Last year I got a notice from them that I was exceeding "expected" usage on their cable service, and please contact us before further action is taken (ie: disconnect). So, I politely emailed them back and asked what they meant by "expected usage". I was told it was usage that didn't negatively impair their network, as outlined by their TOS. I think 4 or 5 exchanges later, they finally told me it was about exceeding their expected bandwidth limits. I had fun with the word "limits". Oh, did I have fun. I started pulling out press releases and other advertisements from their web site, plus pretty much any dead tree promotional material I could find, scanned it in, and sent them a really nice package of information, with the word "unlimited" circled all over the place. No asterisk, no fine print, just the word "unlimited".
Well! You'd think I just made a "yo mamma" joke. I got a several hundred word email back explaining to me that "unlimited" means they do not limit the hours I can connect, as opposed to dial-up ISPs. (Quick note of humor, this is 4 years after almost everyone I knew had broadband. I had unlimited dialup as far back as 1996. I haven't seen anyone use hour-limited internet access in so many years, I honestly didn't think they still existed outside of AOL). They went on and on telling me how their service was better than dial-up, because they didn't limit your hours, etc, etc, etc. So, after a thinly veiled false advertising threat, I asked them just what my bandwidth limits were. They replied that they had no official limits, but anything that "exceeded expected usage". Wee, we're chasing our tails!
Anyway, I managed eventually to get someone to admit that they flag anyone who goes over what one of their small business packages is limited to (6/2, iirc). If it goes on for a long time, you get warned.
I promised to be a good little netizen and left it at that, informing them that perhaps they should rethink their misleading advertising campaign and TOS, neither of which ever mention limits of any sort.
I'm still with them, btw. I've slowed down my activity, and I use a lot more sneaker net than in the old days. But switching to the other high speed provider in town means about half the speed, and practically no usenet access.
Lesson: you can't fight the big guy. When the competition stinks even worse, life sucks.
Wow. Not reading the article, then not reading the article summary, now not even reading a post, then responding. It's a new Slashdot low.
For those like yourself that haven't been paying attention, let's elaborate:
Thanks to product activation, once Microsoft EOLs a product, you CAN'T activate it anymore. The only way to continue using your legally purchased, still-useful software, is to USE A CRACKED (read: illegal) COPY.
What the hell you were talking about, I have no idea.
Isn't it the essence of SCO's argument that this code is already in the public's hands?