Idiot. Symantec is not the government. What it censors, right or wrong, is NOT a CIVIL liberties issue. That's the reason the ACLU will never get involved in this.
How many times are you going to repeat this?
Did you read any of the responses patiently explaining that the use of Symantec product in a public library is a civil liberties issue, your 47 denials notwithstanding.
Maybe next time you feel the urge to repeat the same claim over and over again, you should first read a couple of replies to your claim. Respond to those instead.
Ironic. Companies like Disney, which make their money by deriviting copyrighted material from out of copyright works, want to retain their own copyright for even longer.
ironic
[...]
2: characterized by often poignant difference or incongruity
between what is expected and what actually is
I'm afraid that Disney's behavior is not ironic. It is horrible, hypocritical, selfish and, sadly, all too easily expected. I'd be much more surprised if Disney proclaimed that, since they have benefited from the public domain so much in the past, they support their own work reverting to public domain after a reasonable time."reasonabl"reasonabe" has the unusual meaning of
So the speed of light is an unsurmounatble constant, hmm? "Electric signals can be transmitted at least four times faster than the speed of light using only basic equipment that would be found in virtually any college science department."
Read your own references.
Signals also get weaker and more distorted the faster they go, so in theory no useful information can get transmitted at faster-than-light speeds, though Robertson hopes his students and others can now rigorously and cheaply test those ideas.
You offer pure speculation (maybe tomorrow we'll have a brand new idea that breaks all of the limits imposed by scientific theory) and pseudohistorical references. If you can find a real reference in the 19 century analogue to peer-reviewed publications giving a scientific argument that one can't travel faster than 20mph, I'd like to see it. At present, I suppose that such arguments were an anomoly at best and possibly non-existent.
Finally, your comment "Secondly, assuming they have found a way to travel fatser than light, doesn't it make sense they would have also found a way to communicate fatser than light to keep in contact with those ships" is, well, interesting. Of course, if I assume that aliens travel faster than light, I assume they can send messages faster than light. But what makes you think I believe aliens travel faster than light?
Faster than light travel is a useful, almost necessary, plot device in sci-fi. At present, a very well-tested scientific theory (our best physical theory to date) says that normal matter will not pass the speed of light (I understand that tachyons are consistent with the theory, but we're not made of tachyons, so that doesn't particularly help us).
Right now, all you've got is blind optimism that a little elbow grease will break that barrier, we just gotta work at it.
While it is true that we tend to communicate at rates faster than we physically travel, that's just the way that we know the world to be.
The best tested scientific theories put the speed of light as an insurmountable limit, Star Trek notwithstanding (sci-fi would be a bit dull if they didn't have faster-than-light travel). Given that, it is not merely a coincidence that we are used to communicating faster than we can travel.
I would, however, agree that it is somewhat ludicrous to expect that any or all life outside of our planet did, does, or will communicate through radio signals.
Again, what could be better for communication than a signal that travels as fast as anything in the universe can travel? (Why radio waves instead of some other frequency of light waves? I'll let someone correct me on this, but I assume that radio waves have the least problems with interference as they travel through space.)
Seems to me that you're simply speculating that some other intelligence somewhere is not bound by the physical laws of the universe, or that tomorrow we'll discover we were just wrong about the derivation of and confirmation of the physical laws. Yes, it's possible that tomorrow we revise our theories, although it's also very doubtful.
I wouldn't say that the expectation that other life forms are bound by the physical laws as we know them is "ludicrous".
Bill never said the 640K Quote, and I'm willing to bet he never said the 4GB one, either.
Read the stinking article. I'm not debating the 640K quote, but the 4GB quote is excerpted from the article (omitting an explicit exception mentioned by Gates).
"But apart from Photoshop, I can't think of desktop applications where you would need more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory, which is what you have to have in order to benefit from this technology. Right now, it is costly."
(To be pedantically fair, it's not clear whether Gates is talking about existing applications or possible desktop applications.)
It's fine to be skeptical, but reading the sources of that which you want to debunk is, well, bloody helpful. Unless Gates claims the interviewer misquoted him, there's no controversy here.
I know everytime this quote is used, someone has to debunk it, but there's no reason to perpetuate a false quote by one of the geniuses of our time.
Too easy. Must resist temptation. Must resist temptation. Must resist....
Back in the old old old Edison days, there wasn't product placement. In films characters held bottles labeled 'Beer' and ate from boxes labeled 'Cereal.' Things like that just wouldn't cut it today.
Why the heck not? Even assuming that white cans with black lettering is too distracting for one with attention problems, one can easily create a fake packaging that looks good enough.
But, in any case, what have the products that a character uses to do with realism? Was Minority Report a much more believable movie because Tom Cruise bought a coat in a Gap store (with big names everywhere)? Would the plot have suffered irreparably if he had instead stopped at a non-descript clothing store?
Did you find ET eminently more reasonable because an alien would like a national brand candy like Reese's pieces, and not some no-name snack?
Hell, use real products if you wish, but stop shoving them in my face when I'm trying to watch the movie.
I don't know about Castaway, but the blatant and annoying ad placements in Minority Report caused me to revise my opinion of the film considerably. Without the ads, it might have been a mediocre attempt at sci fi action. With the constant ads (did the faux ironic comments about too many ads in the future world fool anyone into thinking that these product placements were artistic illustrations?), I decided it was an unwatchable piece of shit.
I would've regretted purchasing the DVD if I had paid more than $2 for a Chinese bootleg.
I have to agree with the MPAA on the claim that screeners lead to piracy. Back in June, I picked up a nice quality Two Towers DVD in China (for about $2). The only flaws were:
(1) The English subtitles had nothing at all to do with the Two Towers or any other movie, I think. Though, they did repeat the words "sword" and "princess" regularly, they were utterly incoherent.
(2) The navigation menu is from Lord of the Rings. The chapter titles and pictures give no clue where on the DVD the link takes you (which is never the beginning of a scene).
(3) Every so often, you see a subtitle that this is a release for Oscar judges only and not intended for public viewing.
This is considerably less annoying than that other DVD I have, which helpfully runs a subtitle every so often reading:
"Sale or rental of this disc is ILLEGAL. If you have rented or purchased this disc, please call the MPAA at 1-800-NO-COPYS."
Very effective, that. I'm sure I would've called, too, but 1-800 numbers don't work from the Netherlands.
That is the *biggest* crock of shit ever, but I hear it time and time again on Slashdot./home is the most valuable part of the system!
I suppose that losing/home is important, but I also suppose that it takes little effort to back up home to some other partition each evening. If my/home directory is trashed by some process with user privileges, then I still can restore it, since that process can't hose my backup.
The NY Times article had a surprisingly insightful closing quote.
Indeed, because Linux code is published publicly, it is easier to track what I.B.M. contributed to the operating system. But the issue, of course, is whether SCO's Unix license covered any of the code I.B.M. put into Linux.
Should the SCO suit turn up any offending code, the open nature of Linux â" and the many programmers working on it â" will ensure a quick solution, according to open- source software experts.
Now, that should be old news for/. readers, but it's refreshing when a mainstream article makes this point explicit. Slowly, perhaps, the general (non-geek) public will understand open source software and the issues surrounding it.
Once again, the News Hour shows that they can present television news like no one else. Consistently, this program provides in-depth analysis of issues that get, at best, a 30 second report with useless graphics and video on other televised sources. Of course, for this, Jim Lehrer and Co. are rewarded with terminally low ratings. Thankfully, PBS accepts these low ratings as the payoff for integrity and thoroughness.
It is ironic that, in order to get a thorough and relatively unbiased presentation of the day's stories, one turns to a program partially funded by the US govt. Say what you will about whether there ought to be public television or not, a point which is obviously controversial. Whatever one's philosophical analysis says, at least PBS (and NPR, too) provide a valuable service in presenting news in greater depth (and with less dumbing-down) than can be found in any commercial enterprise.
No, it's a very good idea. The overabundance of choices scares the shit out of newbies. They have no clue where to start.
I haven't figured out why I should care so much about new users. Now, if Joe Blow wants to write a distro just for new users, and wants to limit their choices so the transition is easier for them, then that's fine by me. But, too often, people want to limit the availability of options in Linux/X/etc. for the same reason.
I have never cared more about new users than I care about me. I want an OS with lots of choices, because I may want different features than other users. I don't want someone else to decide what features I get.
Choice is good, but not at the expense of possible users.
Like hell. Possible users are good, but not at the expense of existing users.
I use Linux because I like Linux. It's good if it becomes popular, but I care more about my own experiences with Linux than with the total number of users.
I don't think that this is a good example for your case (namely, that Linux clusters are being selected over MS clusters, presumably because of their inherent superiority).
In this case, the corporation had previously used Unix, and so moving to Linux is much less painful than moving to MS. Even if MS was somewhat easier to cluster or gave better performance, one might prefer to move to Linux since porting the existing software would be so much simpler.
So, is Linux better or more popular for clustering? I don't know, but this particular article doesn't give much evidence that it's better.
(I tend to suppose that Linux is superior for clustering, just because of my personal biases. I would personally rather lick razor blades than use Windows, so perhaps I'm not the most impartial observer.)
is a subset of the natural numbers, and the natural numbers are well-ordered, there is a least element of this set. In fact, you indicated that the least such n is 1.
And people laughed at me for studying logic and philosophy in order to do computer science. Who's laughing now?
No, I reckon not. Let's read closely some of the key translated passages.
Some of these people would also benefit greatly from being able to see the source to their programming tools--how they actually work--rather than reading unnavigable gigabytes of manpages, RTFMs, STFWs and HOWTOs documentation to find info on how to work around some obscure bug or "feature" in their tools.
Now, a Linux user can "see the source to [his] programming tools," and so is not obliged to rely on included documentation. Moreover, as you point out, there are many sources of documentation for those tools, from HOWTOs to manpages to info pages (of course, with lots of redundant information and not every bit of software is well-documented). The Windows programmer has to rely on whatever documentation MS provides -- because no one else can see the bloody source.
Oh, wait. I forgot. There's that magnanimous shared source feature. A few others can see the source, but they can't share what they've learned.
Finally, note that the post you're replying to is not advocating Linux, but open source. So is the featured article. In other words, you're reacting to an argument (everyone should use Linux) that hasn't been made -- at least not here.
I like both the dark vision of Batman and the campy 1960s version.
The former sets a good comic tone, and the latter is funny.
Maybe the humor of the camp version would have fit better with an overly earnest hero, like Superman, but from what I've seen of 1960s era Batman comics, this dark interpretation largely came later.
Someone that knows comics better than I do might correct me about the 60s Batman comics.
In Europe just about any DVD-player you can buy is region-free, and it doesn't appear that this will change any time soon.
This is not my recent experience. When I was shopping for a DVD player in the Netherlands, there were a few region free models available, but most were not region free.
In the end, I ordered my player online, because none of the region free players in the stores here support both PAL and NTSC. Curiously, there was a PAL/NTSC compatible player that supported region encoding.
That sort of leads me to an interesting thought: It could likely proove Constitutionally impossible to use DRM technology with broadcast media. By using the public air waves it's likely that your content must be equally public.
If this reasoning worked, then one should conclude that it is illegal to use encryption on your home wireless network. Or do wireless networks use "private" airwaves?
As well, I don't see anything relevant to the constitution here, but I know little about law (I was arrested once or twice, that's about it).
On the other hand, some of us have this thing called A LIFE. I've done more than my share of changing config files, and like the lounge singer said, "the thrill is gone, baby".
"Is there some law that makes you a criminal if you miseducate the public about laws?"
Yes, there is such a law. House Bill 602P mandates that those who misinform the public about legal statutes may be fined up to 5c per email or incarcerated for no less than 90 days and no more than six weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
Idiot. Symantec is not the government. What it censors, right or wrong, is NOT a CIVIL liberties issue. That's the reason the ACLU will never get involved in this.
How many times are you going to repeat this?
Did you read any of the responses patiently explaining that the use of Symantec product in a public library is a civil liberties issue, your 47 denials notwithstanding.
Maybe next time you feel the urge to repeat the same claim over and over again, you should first read a couple of replies to your claim. Respond to those instead.
Ironic. Companies like Disney, which make their money by deriviting copyrighted material from out of copyright works, want to retain their own copyright for even longer.
ironic
[...]
2: characterized by often poignant difference or incongruity
between what is expected and what actually is
I'm afraid that Disney's behavior is not ironic. It is horrible, hypocritical, selfish and, sadly, all too easily expected. I'd be much more surprised if Disney proclaimed that, since they have benefited from the public domain so much in the past, they support their own work reverting to public domain after a reasonable time."reasonabl"reasonabe" has the unusual meaning of
So the speed of light is an unsurmounatble constant, hmm? "Electric signals can be transmitted at least four times faster than the speed of light using only basic equipment that would be found in virtually any college science department."
Read your own references.
Signals also get weaker and more distorted the faster they go, so in theory no useful information can get transmitted at faster-than-light speeds, though Robertson hopes his students and others can now rigorously and cheaply test those ideas.
You offer pure speculation (maybe tomorrow we'll have a brand new idea that breaks all of the limits imposed by scientific theory) and pseudohistorical references. If you can find a real reference in the 19 century analogue to peer-reviewed publications giving a scientific argument that one can't travel faster than 20mph, I'd like to see it. At present, I suppose that such arguments were an anomoly at best and possibly non-existent.
Finally, your comment "Secondly, assuming they have found a way to travel fatser than light, doesn't it make sense they would have also found a way to communicate fatser than light to keep in contact with those ships" is, well, interesting. Of course, if I assume that aliens travel faster than light, I assume they can send messages faster than light. But what makes you think I believe aliens travel faster than light?
Faster than light travel is a useful, almost necessary, plot device in sci-fi. At present, a very well-tested scientific theory (our best physical theory to date) says that normal matter will not pass the speed of light (I understand that tachyons are consistent with the theory, but we're not made of tachyons, so that doesn't particularly help us).
Right now, all you've got is blind optimism that a little elbow grease will break that barrier, we just gotta work at it.
While it is true that we tend to communicate at rates faster than we physically travel, that's just the way that we know the world to be.
The best tested scientific theories put the speed of light as an insurmountable limit, Star Trek notwithstanding (sci-fi would be a bit dull if they didn't have faster-than-light travel). Given that, it is not merely a coincidence that we are used to communicating faster than we can travel.
I would, however, agree that it is somewhat ludicrous to expect that any or all life outside of our planet did, does, or will communicate through radio signals.
Again, what could be better for communication than a signal that travels as fast as anything in the universe can travel? (Why radio waves instead of some other frequency of light waves? I'll let someone correct me on this, but I assume that radio waves have the least problems with interference as they travel through space.)
Seems to me that you're simply speculating that some other intelligence somewhere is not bound by the physical laws of the universe, or that tomorrow we'll discover we were just wrong about the derivation of and confirmation of the physical laws. Yes, it's possible that tomorrow we revise our theories, although it's also very doubtful.
I wouldn't say that the expectation that other life forms are bound by the physical laws as we know them is "ludicrous".
Read the stinking article. I'm not debating the 640K quote, but the 4GB quote is excerpted from the article (omitting an explicit exception mentioned by Gates).
(To be pedantically fair, it's not clear whether Gates is talking about existing applications or possible desktop applications.)
It's fine to be skeptical, but reading the sources of that which you want to debunk is, well, bloody helpful. Unless Gates claims the interviewer misquoted him, there's no controversy here.
I know everytime this quote is used, someone has to debunk it, but there's no reason to perpetuate a false quote by one of the geniuses of our time.
Too easy. Must resist temptation. Must resist temptation. Must resist....
Seriously, it's one big infomercial, only you don't notice because "entertainment news" is a genre that predates our notions of product placement.
I think your history is mistaken. Product placement in radio serials rather predates "entertainment news".
Back in the old old old Edison days, there wasn't product placement. In films characters held bottles labeled 'Beer' and ate from boxes labeled 'Cereal.' Things like that just wouldn't cut it today.
Why the heck not? Even assuming that white cans with black lettering is too distracting for one with attention problems, one can easily create a fake packaging that looks good enough.
But, in any case, what have the products that a character uses to do with realism? Was Minority Report a much more believable movie because Tom Cruise bought a coat in a Gap store (with big names everywhere)? Would the plot have suffered irreparably if he had instead stopped at a non-descript clothing store?
Did you find ET eminently more reasonable because an alien would like a national brand candy like Reese's pieces, and not some no-name snack?
Hell, use real products if you wish, but stop shoving them in my face when I'm trying to watch the movie.
I don't know about Castaway, but the blatant and annoying ad placements in Minority Report caused me to revise my opinion of the film considerably. Without the ads, it might have been a mediocre attempt at sci fi action. With the constant ads (did the faux ironic comments about too many ads in the future world fool anyone into thinking that these product placements were artistic illustrations?), I decided it was an unwatchable piece of shit.
I would've regretted purchasing the DVD if I had paid more than $2 for a Chinese bootleg.
I have to agree with the MPAA on the claim that screeners lead to piracy. Back in June, I picked up a nice quality Two Towers DVD in China (for about $2). The only flaws were:
(1) The English subtitles had nothing at all to do with the Two Towers or any other movie, I think. Though, they did repeat the words "sword" and "princess" regularly, they were utterly incoherent.
(2) The navigation menu is from Lord of the Rings. The chapter titles and pictures give no clue where on the DVD the link takes you (which is never the beginning of a scene).
(3) Every so often, you see a subtitle that this is a release for Oscar judges only and not intended for public viewing.
This is considerably less annoying than that other DVD I have, which helpfully runs a subtitle every so often reading:
"Sale or rental of this disc is ILLEGAL. If you have rented or
purchased this disc, please call the MPAA at 1-800-NO-COPYS."
Very effective, that. I'm sure I would've called, too, but 1-800 numbers don't work from the Netherlands.
That is the *biggest* crock of shit ever, but I hear it time and time again on Slashdot. /home is the most valuable part of the system!
/home is important, but I also suppose that it takes little effort to back up home to some other partition each evening. If my /home directory is trashed by some process with user privileges, then I still can restore it, since that process can't hose my backup.
I suppose that losing
The NY Times article had a surprisingly insightful closing quote.
/. readers, but it's refreshing when a mainstream article makes this point explicit. Slowly, perhaps, the general (non-geek) public will understand open source software and the issues surrounding it.
Indeed, because Linux code is published publicly, it is easier to track what I.B.M. contributed to the operating system. But the issue, of course, is whether SCO's Unix license covered any of the code I.B.M. put into Linux.
Should the SCO suit turn up any offending code, the open nature of Linux â" and the many programmers working on it â" will ensure a quick solution, according to open- source software experts.
Now, that should be old news for
Once again, the News Hour shows that they can present television news like no one else. Consistently, this program provides in-depth analysis of issues that get, at best, a 30 second report with useless graphics and video on other televised sources. Of course, for this, Jim Lehrer and Co. are rewarded with terminally low ratings. Thankfully, PBS accepts these low ratings as the payoff for integrity and thoroughness.
It is ironic that, in order to get a thorough and relatively unbiased presentation of the day's stories, one turns to a program partially funded by the US govt. Say what you will about whether there ought to be public television or not, a point which is obviously controversial. Whatever one's philosophical analysis says, at least PBS (and NPR, too) provide a valuable service in presenting news in greater depth (and with less dumbing-down) than can be found in any commercial enterprise.
I haven't figured out why I should care so much about new users. Now, if Joe Blow wants to write a distro just for new users, and wants to limit their choices so the transition is easier for them, then that's fine by me. But, too often, people want to limit the availability of options in Linux/X/etc. for the same reason.
I have never cared more about new users than I care about me. I want an OS with lots of choices, because I may want different features than other users. I don't want someone else to decide what features I get.
Choice is good, but not at the expense of possible users.
Like hell. Possible users are good, but not at the expense of existing users. I use Linux because I like Linux. It's good if it becomes popular, but I care more about my own experiences with Linux than with the total number of users.
The problem is that few Muslims have actually spoken out against the terrorists.
In fact, it appears that most Muslim countries at least unofficially celebrated the terrorist attacks.
Fucking insightful? Shame on stupid moderators and shame on the poster for such bigoted and plainly false statements.
Few Muslims spoke out against such blatantly evil acts my ass.
But anyways, it's not like the police were going to win against the BBC's high-priced lawyers.
I agree. When it comes to the law, the police don't stand a chance.
I don't think that this is a good example for your case (namely, that Linux clusters are being selected over MS clusters, presumably because of their inherent superiority).
In this case, the corporation had previously used Unix, and so moving to Linux is much less painful than moving to MS. Even if MS was somewhat easier to cluster or gave better performance, one might prefer to move to Linux since porting the existing software would be so much simpler.
So, is Linux better or more popular for clustering? I don't know, but this particular article doesn't give much evidence that it's better.
(I tend to suppose that Linux is superior for clustering, just because of my personal biases. I would personally rather lick razor blades than use Windows, so perhaps I'm not the most impartial observer.)
Okay, so a .com file can be empty. That's still a limit.
.com file with length strictly less than zero. Mightily impressed, in fact.
I'll be impressed if you show that there is a
You can't fool me. Since the set
.com program of size n}
{n in Z| there is a
is a subset of the natural numbers, and the natural numbers are well-ordered, there is a least element of this set. In fact, you indicated that the least such n is 1.
And people laughed at me for studying logic and philosophy in order to do computer science. Who's laughing now?
No, I reckon not. Let's read closely some of the key translated passages.
Some of these people would also benefit greatly from being able to see the source to their programming tools--how they actually work--rather than reading unnavigable gigabytes of manpages, RTFMs, STFWs and HOWTOs documentation to find info on how to work around some obscure bug or "feature" in their tools.
Now, a Linux user can "see the source to [his] programming tools," and so is not obliged to rely on included documentation. Moreover, as you point out, there are many sources of documentation for those tools, from HOWTOs to manpages to info pages (of course, with lots of redundant information and not every bit of software is well-documented). The Windows programmer has to rely on whatever documentation MS provides -- because no one else can see the bloody source.
Oh, wait. I forgot. There's that magnanimous shared source feature. A few others can see the source, but they can't share what they've learned.
Finally, note that the post you're replying to is not advocating Linux, but open source. So is the featured article. In other words, you're reacting to an argument (everyone should use Linux) that hasn't been made -- at least not here.
I like both the dark vision of Batman and the campy 1960s version.
The former sets a good comic tone, and the latter is funny.
Maybe the humor of the camp version would have fit better with an overly earnest hero, like Superman, but from what I've seen of 1960s era Batman comics, this dark interpretation largely came later.
Someone that knows comics better than I do might correct me about the 60s Batman comics.
In Europe just about any DVD-player you can buy is region-free, and it doesn't appear that this will change any time soon.
This is not my recent experience. When I was shopping for a DVD player in the Netherlands, there were a few region free models available, but most were not region free.
In the end, I ordered my player online, because none of the region free players in the stores here support both PAL and NTSC. Curiously, there was a PAL/NTSC compatible player that supported region encoding.
That sort of leads me to an interesting thought: It could likely proove Constitutionally impossible to use DRM technology with broadcast media. By using the public air waves it's likely that your content must be equally public.
If this reasoning worked, then one should conclude that it is illegal to use encryption on your home wireless network. Or do wireless networks use "private" airwaves?
As well, I don't see anything relevant to the constitution here, but I know little about law (I was arrested once or twice, that's about it).
BB King is not a *%+$# "lounge singer", baby.
You know, you have to fight the fight while it can still be won. We are still within our window of opportunity, people.
You're right. We could sit around here all day talking, passing resolutions, making clever speeches. It's not going to shift one ICANN lardass!
So, let's just stop gabbing on about it. It's completely pointless and it's getting us nowhere!
Right!
Yes, there is such a law. House Bill 602P mandates that those who misinform the public about legal statutes may be fined up to 5c per email or incarcerated for no less than 90 days and no more than six weeks.