Kevorkian led a long life in service of a greater good. What do you propose we as empiricists, spiritual naturalists, rationalists (call us anything other than the unscientific word "atheist" that defines us in a religious context) say to honor the dead and comfort the living? I'm genuinely curious.
IMO, if you have something on hand for that situation, your words are empty. Things like "god bless" and "he's in a better place" are just like "gesundheit" for sneezing. Things that are automatically said because you're supposed to. And since you're supposed to and not doing any thinking, they don't mean anything.
I'd have some trouble figuring out what to say in that situation as well. What I would do is trying to figure out how I can help, and that's going to depend on who I'm dealing with. I don't think there's a formula for it.
Unless they play their trump card, and use the fact that they own the copyrights, and can thusly relicense, so fork for you.
That's not a trump card at all.
Relicensing can't be retroactive, all they can do is to release the new version of OO as closed. And it won't help them any. People will just take the last openly licensed OO release and continue work from there. Meanwhile, the closed license on the new OO will make it impossible to integrate any improvements from LibreOffice.
So from there, who wins is a question of whether Oracle or the community can work faster. Given that Oracle is a huge lumbering company, and the OO open source community seems pretty large, it looks like Oracle would lose quite badly there.
The only real reason to relicense is if they want to turn OO into a commercial product. And that will only work if they can manage to speed up development enough that LO will be left far behind. The problem with that is that OO is a mature product and not a whole lot is missing.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. It's already become legislation, as they already have decided to phase out nuclear power. All he's doing is reporting on it.
Are you perhaps suggesting that the right thing to do about it is to suppress the information and pretend it's not happening? Because that's a biased position as well, and a very dishonest one.
You know, I'd be willing to bet that stories about Apple are mostly submitted by fans or people who hate the company, stories about games are mostly submitted by gamers, and stories about new versions of the Linux kernel mostly come from Linux users.
In other words, people submit stores about subjects they care about, and are almost certainly biased in one way or another.
For instance, why is LOTR still under copyright? Somebody is obviously getting all those royalties, but how does that incentivize creation?
If incentivizing creation is the true goal, then copyright should be much shorter, perhaps the original length of 17 years. Authors should have a good reason for producing multiple works during their lifetime even if they strike gold (especially those, as they proved they can write good stuff), and publishers and similar should be encouraged to find new authors instead on relying on collecting the benefits of works created a century ago.
But copyright keeps getting pushed to an ever longer length, because its current purpose isn't about incentivizing creation, it's about owning as many works as possible and collecting profit from them, which gets easier the longer copyright lasts.
It's a microprocessor on a small board with digital and analog inputs and outputs, a serial port, easy programmability via USB, easy to use IDE and library of useful functions. The board accepts from 7 to 12V, and has pins that output the input voltage, 5V and 3.3V, which is very convenient.
There are different versions of it, but the pinouts are standarized and it's made in a way that additional modules can be plugged on top of it, to provide functions like storage on SD cards or wifi.
Why is it important? Because it allows people with near zero experience in electronics to make something that works.
You can buy a microcontroller cheaply. But you'll need to spend many hours reading the datasheet, understanding how to hook it up, and how to program it. You'll end up working with a huge mess of wires on a breadboard, and need additional hardware for programming it.
With an Arduino, you plug it into an USB cable and in less than 5 minutes you'll have your blinking LED. From there, you can say, buy a wifi shield and a solar panel shield, simply stack them, hook up for instance a temperature sensor to an analog pin, and with a bit of code you can poll that sensor over wifi.
Projects done with it will likely be much more expensive than strictly necessary, but you'll be able to easily do things that would otherwise need a decent understanding of electronics.
I take it that you only use Free Software then? According to the EULA You don't own Windows, the XBox, the Playstation, any of their respective games, and add to the list nearly all proprietary software. Next time, before you click "accept", scroll through and see exactly what rights you're giving up. (At work, I recently clicked "accept" and agreed to waive my company's rights to a jury trial, and allow the software developer to choose the arbitrator.)
That's entirely correct.
I use Linux on my laptop, desktop, server, wifi AP and cell phone (N900). It's not 100% perfect (firmware, BIOS, closed parts on N900), but I'm getting there.
I've not really used Windows since Win2K.
I do not own any consoles, and most of the games I play are open sourced.
Even with the GPL you are giving up some right -- Specifically: The right to use the source code to make a closed source product, and the right to contribute to the software while keeping a non-permissive patent on the contribution. To me, this is an acceptable trade for being able to distribute the Free Software, and I know my competitors will have to make the same concession WRT our contributions.
I write GPL licensed software. I much prefer it to the BSD really. I consider the limits the GPL imposes to ensure my benefit. You can either pay me for a license if you really want to do closed source work, or you can pay me with your contributions.
I recently discovered that several of our large printers will not have drivers released for Windows Vista / 7. The manufacturer has End of Life'd the products several years ago -- Our warranties remain valid for another 4 years, and we may purchase another extension; Thus, mechanically they are fit and will continue to be fit for use.
Heh, the whole reason for the GPL's existence is Stallman's trouble with a printer.
If it's not listed as supported by CUPS, I don't buy it. I prefer things with network connections and PostScript support, but that can be overkill for home use.
I'm actually one of the apparently few people who really likes 3D tech of all kinds, and could have possibly bought it just for that (I don't really play games much anymore). Still I figured it could be fun to play with.
But this crap sucks all the enjoyment out of it. If I'm not going to have control over what I buy, then I'm not going to buy it at all.
It reminds people that tech isn't magic, and that even modern high tech devices contain things that can be messed with on a budget.
From a practical standpoint, this can be useful. Maybe somebody finds that this or a similar device is just the sort of thing they need, except that it lacks the right kind of port. This kind of hack can solve the problem.
People who commit suicide out of spite are, how do I say it, "unbalanced" ?
I don't mean it as the only reason of course, I meant to say that somebody already on the edge might find that to be a reason that pushes them over it.
If you try to commit suicide, but fail, you're now in breach of contract and out of a job. Which means two things: If you're going to try at all, it's best to ensure it succeeds. And if you still fail you've now got an extra motivation for giving it another try.
Then there's that just signing this thing is probably harmful. Somebody could find it to be an additional motivation to commit suicide out of spite. After all, few things are more demeaning than somebody else asserting such control over your own life, and killing yourself anyway is about the biggest statement one could make about that.
Cheap but very inefficient is useless -- no point in covering your roof if it's not even going to power the TV, even if it's nearly free. Installation takes time and effort, after all.
Expensive and very efficient isn't that useful either. It might go on satellites, but 80% efficiency at $20/watt wouldn't make sense for most people.
Now in between those lies the interesting range. And if a technology from the cheap but not very useful kind can be cheaply improved in efficiency, you suddenly could end up with something really awesome.
So is most of the Internet, and everything else really.
But I don't see anybody arguing that an internet connection has little value to it.
I think Kickstarter could be much improved by allowing people to set up filters to search for, and exclude stuff. For instance, I'd subscribe to the following:
project under an open source license, project is a physical product, project is related to 3D printing or arduino.
I'd probably spend even more money that way and I already overdid it a bit.
I despise Sony, but hashes wouldn't have changed all that much.
Hashes are awesome for small systems. If there are 5 accounts, all of which have good, secure passwords, then things are pretty solid.
With 77 million accounts though, there are bound to be thousands of accounts with "password" as their password.
From some googling it seems reasonable that a single pass could be done in maybe 15 minutes on decent hardware. Pick the 10 most used passwords, and in a few hours you'll easily get hundreds of thousands of accounts.
Your enlightened self-interest only seems to go one level deep in the best case.
What you're speaking of here isn't really environmentalism, it's just common decency at most.
It's certainly not too bad, but I don't find it all that commendable. After all, if everybody stopped their thinking at level 1 (themselves), we'd quickly find ourselves in a crappy situation. Take for instance indiscriminately throwing trash into the river you drink from. On an individual level that works out because your contribution is small compared to the river. Yet enough people doing that can easily poison the river until the water isn't drinkable anymore. To prevent outcomes like that we must think of more than the most immediate outcomes of our actions.
I find it interesting that you seem to think further down regarding garbage than regarding CO2. Why do you make a distinction? What is it about littering that makes you not need an economical reason not to do it, that doesn't apply to CO2 emissions?
The "9%" number you pull out of y6our ass is less than half of people for whom fake 3D fails. Plus, your anecdotal "9%" fails to account for the fact that
I pulled it out of this book. I only wish my ass contained interesting information:-)
while lots of people are diagnosed as "color blind" actual, total colorblindness is extremely rare. Very nearly everyone who isn't blind can see color.
So? It's quite a bit more inconvenient than lack of depth perception. Millions of people around the world curse designers and programmers who thought that using pure red, green and blue to convey information was a good idea. Which happens quite often, given the "green = good" and "red = bad" associations.
In comparison, lack of depth perception doesn't seem like a big deal. Maybe it makes sports harder, but other than that it doesn't seem to be required for anything very important.
Yet you're for some reason very concerned about people with no depth perception, but seem to think that color blindness isn't a big deal.
Here is the trick though. current 3D tech doesn't work for something like 15% of the population.
And color doesn't work for 9% of the population, but that isn't stopping anybody from making movies in color.
3D tech is like those magic pictures where if you stared hard enough you saw another picture. the problem is since they are optical illusions a lot of people see right through them.
Fake3D is just that Fake. it is an illusion trying to trick your simple mind into seeing things that just aren't there(depth).
Newsflash: movies with the exception of documentaries maybe, are fake. That's sort of the point of them.
Yeah, I know that I can't walk into the screen in Avatar even if it looks like it. I also know that the Taj Majal didn't explode for real in Mars Attacks.
Looking at things that was just takes out all the fun out of them.
The network is one thing, anybody who gets their hands on my phone being able to see what I'm up to is another.
My phone contains a lot of personal info and I'm rather uncomfortable with the idea of it containing a collection of interesting things about me that I didn't explicitly put there.
IMO this should be taken more seriously, and phones should take special care not to store more personal information than the owner intentionally does.
For instance if you know where I work, where my friends live, and where I attend meetings of the group I'm a member of, then knowing that my location was somewhere inside the block that contains one of those will give you a very accurate guess of what I was up to.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, if you have something on hand for that situation, your words are empty. Things like "god bless" and "he's in a better place" are just like "gesundheit" for sneezing. Things that are automatically said because you're supposed to. And since you're supposed to and not doing any thinking, they don't mean anything.
I'd have some trouble figuring out what to say in that situation as well. What I would do is trying to figure out how I can help, and that's going to depend on who I'm dealing with. I don't think there's a formula for it.
That's not a trump card at all.
Relicensing can't be retroactive, all they can do is to release the new version of OO as closed. And it won't help them any. People will just take the last openly licensed OO release and continue work from there. Meanwhile, the closed license on the new OO will make it impossible to integrate any improvements from LibreOffice.
So from there, who wins is a question of whether Oracle or the community can work faster. Given that Oracle is a huge lumbering company, and the OO open source community seems pretty large, it looks like Oracle would lose quite badly there.
The only real reason to relicense is if they want to turn OO into a commercial product. And that will only work if they can manage to speed up development enough that LO will be left far behind. The problem with that is that OO is a mature product and not a whole lot is missing.
I imagine it still uses a little bit to power some memory to store the page you're on, maybe some filesystem structures and such things.
From http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/25/technology/toxic_waste_cleanup_goo/index.htm
"One gallon of DeconGel nuclear decontaminant sells for $160 and covers between 50 to 100 square feet. "
Where exactly? The story is pretty much quotes from the linked article and doesn't seem to misrepresent anything.
So what's suspect, exactly?
You think that his bias somehow makes Reuters' reporting inaccurate? Would the same link from a pro-nuclear advocate be somehow better?
I'm not sure what you're getting at. It's already become legislation, as they already have decided to phase out nuclear power. All he's doing is reporting on it.
Are you perhaps suggesting that the right thing to do about it is to suppress the information and pretend it's not happening? Because that's a biased position as well, and a very dishonest one.
You know, I'd be willing to bet that stories about Apple are mostly submitted by fans or people who hate the company, stories about games are mostly submitted by gamers, and stories about new versions of the Linux kernel mostly come from Linux users.
In other words, people submit stores about subjects they care about, and are almost certainly biased in one way or another.
So what's the big deal here?
And it fails quite badly at that.
For instance, why is LOTR still under copyright? Somebody is obviously getting all those royalties, but how does that incentivize creation?
If incentivizing creation is the true goal, then copyright should be much shorter, perhaps the original length of 17 years. Authors should have a good reason for producing multiple works during their lifetime even if they strike gold (especially those, as they proved they can write good stuff), and publishers and similar should be encouraged to find new authors instead on relying on collecting the benefits of works created a century ago.
But copyright keeps getting pushed to an ever longer length, because its current purpose isn't about incentivizing creation, it's about owning as many works as possible and collecting profit from them, which gets easier the longer copyright lasts.
It's a microprocessor on a small board with digital and analog inputs and outputs, a serial port, easy programmability via USB, easy to use IDE and library of useful functions. The board accepts from 7 to 12V, and has pins that output the input voltage, 5V and 3.3V, which is very convenient.
There are different versions of it, but the pinouts are standarized and it's made in a way that additional modules can be plugged on top of it, to provide functions like storage on SD cards or wifi.
Why is it important? Because it allows people with near zero experience in electronics to make something that works.
You can buy a microcontroller cheaply. But you'll need to spend many hours reading the datasheet, understanding how to hook it up, and how to program it. You'll end up working with a huge mess of wires on a breadboard, and need additional hardware for programming it.
With an Arduino, you plug it into an USB cable and in less than 5 minutes you'll have your blinking LED. From there, you can say, buy a wifi shield and a solar panel shield, simply stack them, hook up for instance a temperature sensor to an analog pin, and with a bit of code you can poll that sensor over wifi.
Projects done with it will likely be much more expensive than strictly necessary, but you'll be able to easily do things that would otherwise need a decent understanding of electronics.
That's entirely correct.
I use Linux on my laptop, desktop, server, wifi AP and cell phone (N900). It's not 100% perfect (firmware, BIOS, closed parts on N900), but I'm getting there.
I've not really used Windows since Win2K.
I do not own any consoles, and most of the games I play are open sourced.
I write GPL licensed software. I much prefer it to the BSD really. I consider the limits the GPL imposes to ensure my benefit. You can either pay me for a license if you really want to do closed source work, or you can pay me with your contributions.
Heh, the whole reason for the GPL's existence is Stallman's trouble with a printer.
If it's not listed as supported by CUPS, I don't buy it. I prefer things with network connections and PostScript support, but that can be overkill for home use.
Now I'm definitely not doing it.
I'm actually one of the apparently few people who really likes 3D tech of all kinds, and could have possibly bought it just for that (I don't really play games much anymore). Still I figured it could be fun to play with.
But this crap sucks all the enjoyment out of it. If I'm not going to have control over what I buy, then I'm not going to buy it at all.
I like this kind of thing.
It reminds people that tech isn't magic, and that even modern high tech devices contain things that can be messed with on a budget.
From a practical standpoint, this can be useful. Maybe somebody finds that this or a similar device is just the sort of thing they need, except that it lacks the right kind of port. This kind of hack can solve the problem.
I don't mean it as the only reason of course, I meant to say that somebody already on the edge might find that to be a reason that pushes them over it.
It seems to me this provides extra motivation.
If you try to commit suicide, but fail, you're now in breach of contract and out of a job. Which means two things: If you're going to try at all, it's best to ensure it succeeds. And if you still fail you've now got an extra motivation for giving it another try.
Then there's that just signing this thing is probably harmful. Somebody could find it to be an additional motivation to commit suicide out of spite. After all, few things are more demeaning than somebody else asserting such control over your own life, and killing yourself anyway is about the biggest statement one could make about that.
It's still important
There's an use for decent but inexpensive cells.
Cheap but very inefficient is useless -- no point in covering your roof if it's not even going to power the TV, even if it's nearly free. Installation takes time and effort, after all.
Expensive and very efficient isn't that useful either. It might go on satellites, but 80% efficiency at $20/watt wouldn't make sense for most people.
Now in between those lies the interesting range. And if a technology from the cheap but not very useful kind can be cheaply improved in efficiency, you suddenly could end up with something really awesome.
So is most of the Internet, and everything else really.
But I don't see anybody arguing that an internet connection has little value to it.
I think Kickstarter could be much improved by allowing people to set up filters to search for, and exclude stuff. For instance, I'd subscribe to the following:
project under an open source license, project is a physical product, project is related to 3D printing or arduino.
I'd probably spend even more money that way and I already overdid it a bit.
I despise Sony, but hashes wouldn't have changed all that much.
Hashes are awesome for small systems. If there are 5 accounts, all of which have good, secure passwords, then things are pretty solid.
With 77 million accounts though, there are bound to be thousands of accounts with "password" as their password.
From some googling it seems reasonable that a single pass could be done in maybe 15 minutes on decent hardware. Pick the 10 most used passwords, and in a few hours you'll easily get hundreds of thousands of accounts.
Your enlightened self-interest only seems to go one level deep in the best case.
What you're speaking of here isn't really environmentalism, it's just common decency at most.
It's certainly not too bad, but I don't find it all that commendable. After all, if everybody stopped their thinking at level 1 (themselves), we'd quickly find ourselves in a crappy situation. Take for instance indiscriminately throwing trash into the river you drink from. On an individual level that works out because your contribution is small compared to the river. Yet enough people doing that can easily poison the river until the water isn't drinkable anymore. To prevent outcomes like that we must think of more than the most immediate outcomes of our actions.
I find it interesting that you seem to think further down regarding garbage than regarding CO2. Why do you make a distinction? What is it about littering that makes you not need an economical reason not to do it, that doesn't apply to CO2 emissions?
I pulled it out of this book. I only wish my ass contained interesting information :-)
So? It's quite a bit more inconvenient than lack of depth perception. Millions of people around the world curse designers and programmers who thought that using pure red, green and blue to convey information was a good idea. Which happens quite often, given the "green = good" and "red = bad" associations.
In comparison, lack of depth perception doesn't seem like a big deal. Maybe it makes sports harder, but other than that it doesn't seem to be required for anything very important.
Yet you're for some reason very concerned about people with no depth perception, but seem to think that color blindness isn't a big deal.
What exactly is the difference between the percentage of people who can't see 3D, and the percentage of people that are deaf, blind or color blind?
Actually color blindness is very common, about 9% from the statistics I've heard. That's most definitely not "everyone".
And color doesn't work for 9% of the population, but that isn't stopping anybody from making movies in color.
Newsflash: movies with the exception of documentaries maybe, are fake. That's sort of the point of them.
Yeah, I know that I can't walk into the screen in Avatar even if it looks like it. I also know that the Taj Majal didn't explode for real in Mars Attacks.
Looking at things that was just takes out all the fun out of them.
The network is one thing, anybody who gets their hands on my phone being able to see what I'm up to is another.
My phone contains a lot of personal info and I'm rather uncomfortable with the idea of it containing a collection of interesting things about me that I didn't explicitly put there.
IMO this should be taken more seriously, and phones should take special care not to store more personal information than the owner intentionally does.
Not 24/7, but I certainly use it often
Good precision isn't necessarily needed.
For instance if you know where I work, where my friends live, and where I attend meetings of the group I'm a member of, then knowing that my location was somewhere inside the block that contains one of those will give you a very accurate guess of what I was up to.