Tell me about it -- what a mess! I've never understood why us FreeBSD users have to jump through a half-dozen flaming hoops whenever java needs to be installed from the ports tree. It's such a pain in the ass that I avoid Java apps altogether, since you just can't set BATCH=YES and expect the ports to get installed. Instead, you're fed a bunch of URLs and told to fetch the files manually, and then restart your build. (BTW, do Gentoo users suffer this idiocy as well?) I think the *only* app I'm willing to put up with is Open Office, which requires Java (at least for the build. Things like FreeNET, Limewire, etc. I just never bother with due to the crap licensing restrictions Java is still stuck with.
I sincerely hope a fully open license will help in this regard.
Indeed. However, it *is* a good argument against the "community standards" yardstick. A great example of this strategy was used here in Utah a few years back. This is just a logical progression of that defense by way of more current technology.
The data mining that the big corps and government love so much can indeed be used against them at times. This is one such case. You can't say, with a straight face, that local community standards are opposed to certain products (porn) when the online record shows that there is thriving consumer base for those products. I hope that this will lead to it being more difficult to pursue obscenity charges in the future, as it's a huge waste of my tax dollars.
See various labeling laws. I think that some government oversight should be in place, especially when the product is consumed by so many people. Just think what would happen if a major "news" organization falsely reported the outcome of a presidential election. I think that if you label something as "news" then it damned well better be true, or at least some heavy due diligence should be used to claim so and then be punished harshly if negligence is found to be the result of false reporting. That's why these 1-page newsvertisements in print rags and papers must be clearly identified as such.
The problem is, sometimes these corrupt governing bodies won't even let you label the actual truth for certain things. I can't find the reference now, but I recall the US FDA coming down like a ton of bricks on a milk producer because they had the gall to label their milk as not using bovine growth hormone. WTF is up w/ that? If consumers are so stupid that there are alergy warnings on peanut butter jars because it contains (gasp!) peanuts, then why the hell can't something as non-obvious as BGH be on a label?
Most citizens of industrialized nations shit in their drinking water. The flush toilette is evil. So are lawns, for that matter. But make no mistake about it -- every flush of your crapper is 1+ gallons of water that someone could otherwise drink. Pretty lame, eh?
Wait a sec. I thought that due to things like "jitter" and other factors with CD drives made it possible for the same hardware/software rig to rip the *same* track and yet get slightly different results.
In any case, I just tested this by ripping a track 3 times on my machine (cdparanoia on a Plextor drive), and all 3 copies have the same md5 hash. Maybe newer drives have special ripping modes that now allow "perfect" CD audio rips. 10-to-15 years ago, this certainly wasn't the case, as I distinctly remember being tweaked by the test above resulting in 3 slightly different files (though they all sounded the same). Still, I can imagine that enough older (and cheaper, perhaps) hardware is out there in circulation which could result in different files each rip.
Now I'm curious. I'll have to try ripping the same track on the 2 other machines in the house.
Spoken like a man who has never been in a snow storm in his life. Now I'm all for buying smaller cars and hybrids, but I live in the North, near a great lake darn it. I'd like to see your little rear wheel drive make it up any hill between the months of August and March
My home state is Ohio. I was fairly young when I lived there w/ my family, but I seem to recall studded tires and these things called "chains" for cars. Have those been outlawed? Wouldn't surprise me, seeing as how anything truly useful gets outlawed at some point anymore.
I bet a lack of copy protection would also lower the number of calls to tech support as well.
Oh, how correct you are.
I do some admin work for a small software shop. They employ a registration code key system. I keep tabs on support emails to make sure they are getting through to the support system. Maybe half of all support questions are key related. Seriously.
"My new key didn't work."
"I lost my key and need to reinstall."
"I lost my key and need it to order an upgrade."
The list goes on and on. Such a waste of man hours. Rationally, they *know* the system probably isn't worth the time lost for coding the system to begin with and supporting it. However, inertia keeps them using it. I keep waiting anxiously for the day they tell me they'll be doing away with it.
Is the damaged caused by violent video games greater than the harm caused by the gov't stepping in trying to regulate such things?
I'd say (emphatically) no.
Witness the War on Drugs, which has jailed more non-violent, mostly victimless, offenders than any other national policy that I know of. Then throw in the property seizures w/o due process, and the banning/regulation of otherwise legal substances (cough syrup, ephedrine, decent chemistry sets, etc.). I posit that society as a whole has indeed been harmed by the futile regulation on substance use, far more than by those who are forced to clandestinely manufacture and/or use the stuff.
You see, when those in power implement policy based on the latest fashionable boogeyman, then it always seems to lead to greater and greater power grabs and regulation, until nearly anyone could be victimized by the system. Yes, it's a very slippery slope, and should be nipped in the bud.
The system should generously default to as few restrictions as possible, then *harshly* punish those who actually harm others. Watching rape and porn is ok, but a convicted rapist should be behind bars for a very long time (if not for life). Viewing kiddie porn (as distasteful as it is), whether real or not, should not be an offense. However, if you're nailed for producing the stuff or molest children, then you should die via public beheading.
Regarding the laws dealing with children and/or sex, we're heading into the realm of thought crime, and it frightens me. There are laws being considered that you can become a sex offender for visually "assaulting" children (Maine, IIRC). People have been convicted for fictional diary entries about molesting kids (was somehow a parole violation, IIRC), non-nude and non-pornographic images (those gray-area pre-teen "model" sites, for example), and even through no action of their own (a 17-year-old was charged -- and then pleaded/convicted -- for CP after his virus-infested box was traced back to grabbing something like 9 images from Yahoo). Aside from great press and political grandstanding for politicians and LE departments wanting more funding, I truly don't see the societal benefit for such harsh laws and their enforcement. Sure, execute the sick fuckers who rape infants and film it, but this CP/JB possession witch hunt mentality really must stop.
Even if *my* kids were unfortunate enough to be victimized, I would certainly not rally for furthering our society down the road towards a police state.
That's what YouTube and Google Images are for. Watching those women attempt to act kinda spoils the otherwise nice eye candy. Though, I did enjoy Alba in Dark Angel.
You should try porridge, made with toasted steel-cut oats. Now *that* is some yummy oats. Good Eats had an episode about oats, which described the dish.
Wait a sec... Yahoo is a search engine? I thought it was an entertainment hub or sorts. I mean, sure, it *was* a search engine, back in the days when Lycos was it's primary competitor, complete with a lean, clean front page almost as nice as Google's. Now that I think about it, MSN isn't a search engine, either -- just another entertainment hub.
Of course, Google has started down the path of crapware bloat w/ its acquisition of YouTube. At least its front page is still an honest-to-goodness search engine, with clean interface and clean results.
Good soil 60-80% organic material? Check your numbers.. that sounds like a peat bog.
I recently picked up a microbiology book at a thrift store, not terribly new but an edition sometime after 2000. In the first chapter, it stated that recent estimates claim that 50% of the world's living biomass can be found under the land's surface, mostly in the form of (wait for it...) microbes.:) That 60-to-80% doesn't seem far-fetched at all, at least to me. Good soil is largely humus, which is decomposed organic material. This provides breeding grounds for all those good critters mentioned well above this post (earthworms, bacteria, nematodes, insects, etc.).
There's a wonderfully enlightening public domain book from 1911 called Farmers for Forty Centuries, which describes China's pre-industrialization agriculture. While Americans were sustaining themselves on 20-acre plots (at a minimum), the Chinese were thriving on 2 acres. They worked the soil w/o destroying it for 3000+ documented years, while the US was well on its way to over-farming (or paving over) most of its prime arable land. Sad part is, the US (and its big-agriculture industries) have managed to totally screw up most other countries' agriculture in the name of profits, by pushing the "American way" of doing things (spend big money on big inputs and big equipment which is not needed if farming is done right).
Remember, folks, modern agriculture is about making money, not feeding healthy food to the population. That giant farm bill Congress is pushing through is there to help Monsanto and McDonals keep their products selling, not feeding us in any meaningful way. Distributed (grown near where it's consumed), natural farms could feed far more people than we want to admit. But nobody wants a "real" farm with cows, pigs, chickens, pastures and fields near the suburbs. Classic NIMBY mentality.
Not only are home-prepared foods a huge leap in quality over pre-fab foods, but home-raised foods take it yet another notch.
For example, even when the cabbage is not home-grown, sour kraut made from fresh cabbage from the store is phenomenally more tasty than the dead crap that comes in a jar/can on the grocer shelf. If you're not only bold, but also daring, pack a batch of kraut which is 1 part red cabbage to 3 parts white. The color and flavor after a month in the crock will knock your socks off.
One of these days I'll have to try my hand at home-made kimchi. Granted, the stuff you typically find at the store is still alive and "fresh" (insert Homer Simpson drool), but I can only imagine that home-made stuff would be far, far better.:)
That worthless person takes my tax dollars as welfare and jail expenses...
No, that would be the government who takes your tax dollars. A big chunk of the prison industrial complex goes towards housing people incarcerated for victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, possession of CP, etc.). Welfare is, again, another vehicle of state control. Private non-profits/charities could easily cover 99% of most people who truly needed help. Providing a publicly-funded teat to suck on just allows our government to control those who may rely on it. That includes the public education you imply that you rely on.
Sorry about your wife, but crime is not always limited to uneducated hooligans who are worthless and are resorting to crime to put a loaf of bread on the table. In many ways, crimes like what you describe are a more honest theft than, say, taxing the shit out of people at every turn while gaming the system so large corporations profit at the expense of everything else. At least carjackers don't employ the pretense of being for the benefit of society.
Civil liberties are inalienable -- I don't give a hoot if they're from our own (abused) constitution or some UN document. That applies to all of humanity. That our bloated, power-hungry government treats us citizens like consumer cattle to be groomed into passivity in youth and then milked for taxes for 45 years is appalling. I'm surprised a self proclaimed defender of the constitution would regard civil liberties as having such a narrow scope.
Well, that ensures I will most certainly d/l a cracked version. I've got legit copies of a half-dozen PC games from over the past years that I've felt were worthy of spending money on. Spore was one of the games I was actually itching to buy. Screw this internet requirement crap -- they just lost a customer before they even left the gate. What if I want to play on the road? I won't even offer them the same respect I've given a few other mis-guided publishers, of buying the game and then getting the no-cd crack. I'm tired of this shit by game publishers.
Now that I think about it, I won't even bother with even getting an illegit copy. Why even patronize the product at all anymore?
Many movies are rated by a "trusted" 3rd party, so the burden is moved from the theater to the producers of those movies. All they need to do is restrict by age based on the movie's rating, and not play films that are unrated (or admit only adult). Fair enough, I suppose (though I personally despise the arbitrary nature of the MPAA rating system). However, there are an order of magnitude more books published annually than movies. I think costs of rating books would be prohibitive, especially for smaller, independent authors/publishers, which I suspect are in far more abundance than indie film producers.
Plus, like I said before, I think rating content for prose is much trickier than visual, or even audio, media.
Would a ruling on this have a bearing on whether restrictions on other software are valid? You know, stupid stuff like database vendors trying to tell you that you cannot publish benchmarks of their software. If Blizzard looses, this could really hurt other companies -- which would be really nice.
meh! We hardly live a life of poverty. It's called having your finances in order (not having debt and not paying for frivolous shit). Except for maybe TV, my kids want for nothing. We eat very well, thank you, far healthier than most families.
If the extra food were really *needed* by us, then I'd bite the bullet and stand in line at the local government office. Make no mistake about the fact that we take good care of our kids.
What *is* child abuse is feeding them crap that passes for food at schools (or most anywhere else) these days, letting them be programmed by TV, and them hardly ever seeing one (or both) of their parents due to jobs.
It's not about the money -- I'm not maximizing earned income credit, at least not intentionally. If there were no such credit, I still wouldn't take on more hours. There's no need. I claim the credit simply because I've had my much larger paychecks gouged in the past by taxes, so I'm claiming them back. Wars and worthless legislation can be paid for others.
My kids will have the chance to live a normal drone consumer lifestyle once they leave the nest. That's their choice. However, the values we give them will prepare them for potential hard times in their adult years, as well as how to use their money wisely.
Here's a clue... a huge portion of the world's population lives quite comfortably and happily on far less than what we bring in. Once you have your basic needs taken care of, why work yourself to the bone for excess? Silly consumers.
The problem is one of the burden of enforcement by the retailers, not that 12-year-old Jonny needs to get his copy of the latest Danielle Steel novel for fresh wanking material. The man hours that would be required to screen the millions of pulp pages printed each year would be beyond most retailers except maybe Wal Mart.
Plus, it's all subjective, anyway. One person's "explicit" may be another's sexually tame piece of prose.
What goes too far for kids these days? Is the frank discussion of a young girl coming of age in Judy Bloom's Are you there God? It's me, Margaret? too much? I recall checking this book out from my *elementary* school's library, being a fan of Blume's writings as a kid. I recall my Jr. high's library also had Blume's Wifey -- a bit racey, I think, but hey, it was by Judy Blume -- it must be fit for kids, right?
Through Jr. and high school, I must have read every one of Stephen King's books that came out, and some of his back catalog. There's incidental sex in many of his stories. Sheesh -- the scene of the kids all having sex in the sewers of Derry in IT could have one arrested for kiddie porn possession by today's laws.
Just where does one draw the line? Obscenity in prose is a hell of a lot more tough to point out than in visual media, as half of it depends on the reader's imagination! These people need to get a grip.
Slashdot Mirror
I sincerely hope a fully open license will help in this regard.
Motif? What place would a set of GUI widgets have in the "server room" (as you state)?
The data mining that the big corps and government love so much can indeed be used against them at times. This is one such case. You can't say, with a straight face, that local community standards are opposed to certain products (porn) when the online record shows that there is thriving consumer base for those products. I hope that this will lead to it being more difficult to pursue obscenity charges in the future, as it's a huge waste of my tax dollars.
The problem is, sometimes these corrupt governing bodies won't even let you label the actual truth for certain things. I can't find the reference now, but I recall the US FDA coming down like a ton of bricks on a milk producer because they had the gall to label their milk as not using bovine growth hormone. WTF is up w/ that? If consumers are so stupid that there are alergy warnings on peanut butter jars because it contains (gasp!) peanuts, then why the hell can't something as non-obvious as BGH be on a label?
Most citizens of industrialized nations shit in their drinking water. The flush toilette is evil. So are lawns, for that matter. But make no mistake about it -- every flush of your crapper is 1+ gallons of water that someone could otherwise drink. Pretty lame, eh?
In any case, I just tested this by ripping a track 3 times on my machine (cdparanoia on a Plextor drive), and all 3 copies have the same md5 hash. Maybe newer drives have special ripping modes that now allow "perfect" CD audio rips. 10-to-15 years ago, this certainly wasn't the case, as I distinctly remember being tweaked by the test above resulting in 3 slightly different files (though they all sounded the same). Still, I can imagine that enough older (and cheaper, perhaps) hardware is out there in circulation which could result in different files each rip.
Now I'm curious. I'll have to try ripping the same track on the 2 other machines in the house.
My home state is Ohio. I was fairly young when I lived there w/ my family, but I seem to recall studded tires and these things called "chains" for cars. Have those been outlawed? Wouldn't surprise me, seeing as how anything truly useful gets outlawed at some point anymore.
Yup. They also have a TOR hidden service. I don't know if it's an unofficial mirror, or the real deal.
Oh, how correct you are.
I do some admin work for a small software shop. They employ a registration code key system. I keep tabs on support emails to make sure they are getting through to the support system. Maybe half of all support questions are key related. Seriously.
"My new key didn't work."
"I lost my key and need to reinstall."
"I lost my key and need it to order an upgrade."
The list goes on and on. Such a waste of man hours. Rationally, they *know* the system probably isn't worth the time lost for coding the system to begin with and supporting it. However, inertia keeps them using it. I keep waiting anxiously for the day they tell me they'll be doing away with it.
I'd say (emphatically) no.
Witness the War on Drugs, which has jailed more non-violent, mostly victimless, offenders than any other national policy that I know of. Then throw in the property seizures w/o due process, and the banning/regulation of otherwise legal substances (cough syrup, ephedrine, decent chemistry sets, etc.). I posit that society as a whole has indeed been harmed by the futile regulation on substance use, far more than by those who are forced to clandestinely manufacture and/or use the stuff.
You see, when those in power implement policy based on the latest fashionable boogeyman, then it always seems to lead to greater and greater power grabs and regulation, until nearly anyone could be victimized by the system. Yes, it's a very slippery slope, and should be nipped in the bud.
The system should generously default to as few restrictions as possible, then *harshly* punish those who actually harm others. Watching rape and porn is ok, but a convicted rapist should be behind bars for a very long time (if not for life). Viewing kiddie porn (as distasteful as it is), whether real or not, should not be an offense. However, if you're nailed for producing the stuff or molest children, then you should die via public beheading.
Regarding the laws dealing with children and/or sex, we're heading into the realm of thought crime, and it frightens me. There are laws being considered that you can become a sex offender for visually "assaulting" children (Maine, IIRC). People have been convicted for fictional diary entries about molesting kids (was somehow a parole violation, IIRC), non-nude and non-pornographic images (those gray-area pre-teen "model" sites, for example), and even through no action of their own (a 17-year-old was charged -- and then pleaded/convicted -- for CP after his virus-infested box was traced back to grabbing something like 9 images from Yahoo). Aside from great press and political grandstanding for politicians and LE departments wanting more funding, I truly don't see the societal benefit for such harsh laws and their enforcement. Sure, execute the sick fuckers who rape infants and film it, but this CP/JB possession witch hunt mentality really must stop.
Even if *my* kids were unfortunate enough to be victimized, I would certainly not rally for furthering our society down the road towards a police state.
That's what YouTube and Google Images are for. Watching those women attempt to act kinda spoils the otherwise nice eye candy. Though, I did enjoy Alba in Dark Angel.
You should try porridge, made with toasted steel-cut oats. Now *that* is some yummy oats. Good Eats had an episode about oats, which described the dish.
I'm troubled by your statement. I need to take a moment.
Of course, Google has started down the path of crapware bloat w/ its acquisition of YouTube. At least its front page is still an honest-to-goodness search engine, with clean interface and clean results.
I recently picked up a microbiology book at a thrift store, not terribly new but an edition sometime after 2000. In the first chapter, it stated that recent estimates claim that 50% of the world's living biomass can be found under the land's surface, mostly in the form of (wait for it...) microbes. :) That 60-to-80% doesn't seem far-fetched at all, at least to me. Good soil is largely humus, which is decomposed organic material. This provides breeding grounds for all those good critters mentioned well above this post (earthworms, bacteria, nematodes, insects, etc.).
There's a wonderfully enlightening public domain book from 1911 called Farmers for Forty Centuries, which describes China's pre-industrialization agriculture. While Americans were sustaining themselves on 20-acre plots (at a minimum), the Chinese were thriving on 2 acres. They worked the soil w/o destroying it for 3000+ documented years, while the US was well on its way to over-farming (or paving over) most of its prime arable land. Sad part is, the US (and its big-agriculture industries) have managed to totally screw up most other countries' agriculture in the name of profits, by pushing the "American way" of doing things (spend big money on big inputs and big equipment which is not needed if farming is done right).
Remember, folks, modern agriculture is about making money, not feeding healthy food to the population. That giant farm bill Congress is pushing through is there to help Monsanto and McDonals keep their products selling, not feeding us in any meaningful way. Distributed (grown near where it's consumed), natural farms could feed far more people than we want to admit. But nobody wants a "real" farm with cows, pigs, chickens, pastures and fields near the suburbs. Classic NIMBY mentality.
How these asshats ever got granted the Olympic bid is totally beyond my comprehension.
Stephen King is obviously the last unknown cylon.
Not only are home-prepared foods a huge leap in quality over pre-fab foods, but home-raised foods take it yet another notch.
For example, even when the cabbage is not home-grown, sour kraut made from fresh cabbage from the store is phenomenally more tasty than the dead crap that comes in a jar/can on the grocer shelf. If you're not only bold, but also daring, pack a batch of kraut which is 1 part red cabbage to 3 parts white. The color and flavor after a month in the crock will knock your socks off.
One of these days I'll have to try my hand at home-made kimchi. Granted, the stuff you typically find at the store is still alive and "fresh" (insert Homer Simpson drool), but I can only imagine that home-made stuff would be far, far better. :)
Let's give a big cheer for fermented foods!
No, that would be the government who takes your tax dollars. A big chunk of the prison industrial complex goes towards housing people incarcerated for victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, possession of CP, etc.). Welfare is, again, another vehicle of state control. Private non-profits/charities could easily cover 99% of most people who truly needed help. Providing a publicly-funded teat to suck on just allows our government to control those who may rely on it. That includes the public education you imply that you rely on.
Sorry about your wife, but crime is not always limited to uneducated hooligans who are worthless and are resorting to crime to put a loaf of bread on the table. In many ways, crimes like what you describe are a more honest theft than, say, taxing the shit out of people at every turn while gaming the system so large corporations profit at the expense of everything else. At least carjackers don't employ the pretense of being for the benefit of society.
Civil liberties are inalienable -- I don't give a hoot if they're from our own (abused) constitution or some UN document. That applies to all of humanity. That our bloated, power-hungry government treats us citizens like consumer cattle to be groomed into passivity in youth and then milked for taxes for 45 years is appalling. I'm surprised a self proclaimed defender of the constitution would regard civil liberties as having such a narrow scope.
You forgot a big one: OO runs *natively* under more platforms than MS Office.
Now that I think about it, I won't even bother with even getting an illegit copy. Why even patronize the product at all anymore?
Plus, like I said before, I think rating content for prose is much trickier than visual, or even audio, media.
Would a ruling on this have a bearing on whether restrictions on other software are valid? You know, stupid stuff like database vendors trying to tell you that you cannot publish benchmarks of their software. If Blizzard looses, this could really hurt other companies -- which would be really nice.
If the extra food were really *needed* by us, then I'd bite the bullet and stand in line at the local government office. Make no mistake about the fact that we take good care of our kids.
What *is* child abuse is feeding them crap that passes for food at schools (or most anywhere else) these days, letting them be programmed by TV, and them hardly ever seeing one (or both) of their parents due to jobs.
It's not about the money -- I'm not maximizing earned income credit, at least not intentionally. If there were no such credit, I still wouldn't take on more hours. There's no need. I claim the credit simply because I've had my much larger paychecks gouged in the past by taxes, so I'm claiming them back. Wars and worthless legislation can be paid for others.
My kids will have the chance to live a normal drone consumer lifestyle once they leave the nest. That's their choice. However, the values we give them will prepare them for potential hard times in their adult years, as well as how to use their money wisely.
Here's a clue... a huge portion of the world's population lives quite comfortably and happily on far less than what we bring in. Once you have your basic needs taken care of, why work yourself to the bone for excess? Silly consumers.
The problem is one of the burden of enforcement by the retailers, not that 12-year-old Jonny needs to get his copy of the latest Danielle Steel novel for fresh wanking material. The man hours that would be required to screen the millions of pulp pages printed each year would be beyond most retailers except maybe Wal Mart.
Plus, it's all subjective, anyway. One person's "explicit" may be another's sexually tame piece of prose.
What goes too far for kids these days? Is the frank discussion of a young girl coming of age in Judy Bloom's Are you there God? It's me, Margaret? too much? I recall checking this book out from my *elementary* school's library, being a fan of Blume's writings as a kid. I recall my Jr. high's library also had Blume's Wifey -- a bit racey, I think, but hey, it was by Judy Blume -- it must be fit for kids, right?
Through Jr. and high school, I must have read every one of Stephen King's books that came out, and some of his back catalog. There's incidental sex in many of his stories. Sheesh -- the scene of the kids all having sex in the sewers of Derry in IT could have one arrested for kiddie porn possession by today's laws.
Just where does one draw the line? Obscenity in prose is a hell of a lot more tough to point out than in visual media, as half of it depends on the reader's imagination! These people need to get a grip.