I'll concede that the OS with largest market share is always the biggest target, especially when the numbers are so lopsided.
I don't. I'd estimate that Unix hosts probably server 75% of the traffic on the Internet, but how often do you hear of LAMP worms infecting millions of machines within a few minutes?
Frankly, I'd much rather 0wn a Unix box with multi-homed DS3s than an XP machine on a dialup. And yet, that's not usually what happens.
why couldn't it have been harvested from insects before synthesis was posssible?
Look at a grasshopper. Any grasshopper. Try to spot one of its tendons. Now, imagine how many of those you'd need to somehow glue together to make a pair of sweatshop tennis shoes.
a "WMD" that is incapable of causing mass destruction is not a WMD, by definition.
So an exploded landmine isn't really a landmine: it's a "previously potential detonator" or "object of prior kinetic vigor". That's bound to be comforting to all involved.
Use openoffice 2 beta, and under save as choose ".doc".
So, use a less featureful office product to generate undocumented, patented files. Yeah. I think you misspelled "worst".
I use OpenOffice every day and love it, but I don't know of anyone who switched to it because they thought it was the superior product. Many got on board because it is gratis and good enough. I picked it up because it's libre and runs on my desktop platform. It's pretty darn good today and only getting better -- but the better suite? Not many people would agree with you on that one.
One common misperception they list is the idea that WMDs were found in Iraq.
The thing is, as a strict boolean value, that is true.
At one point, troops found some artillery shells with trace values of sarin nerve gas. Now, there was very little of the stuff, sure, but there was in fact a non-zero amount. If the pollster interviewed me, I'd be in the "80% of conservative idiots" category, even though they never bothered to ask me how much was found.
Similarly, if a biased pollster asked me if space was empty, and I said no, I'd probably get lumped in with people who failed junior high, even though the reasons for my answer are completely different than those of many others.
It's a much better sound bite, though, to label me as a Fox-watching moron than to try to understand my thought processes.
In order to completely eliminate the $ factor in politics, there should be a strict, equal limit on what a politician can spend on a race. State congressman? $20,000. Gongressman? $50,000. President? $1,000,000. That's it. No loopholes. No third party interest groups.
That's a wonderful idea! So, how do you count third-party spending for a candidate? If I spent $100,000 on ads supporting a presidential contender, does that come out of their $1,000,000? What if I spent it on low-quality, unpersuasive ads for your candidate - does it still count against their limit?
If my candidate spends his $1,000,000, does that mean I'm forbidden from chiming in as much as a simple "me too!" on a blog if I have to pay for its web hosting? What if it's a free web host, but I have to pay for the connection? Does the coffee I have to buy in order to use the local coffee house's terminal count against me? Can I use my cell phone to tell my mom that I like Candidate Smith -- after all, I'd be paying to endorse a contender?
I wish every single Slashbot would get one simple lesson drilled through their heads before opening their mouths: you are minnows playing among sharks. Do not ever allow yourself to believe that you can come up with a plan that will prevent politicians from doing something they want to do. They are far better at this game than you ever will be.
Put another way: unintended consequences. Unintended consequences. Repeat: unintended consequences. Bad things happen every single time someone comes up with a brilliant solution to a complex problem. The real problems come when those consequences are worse than the original issue at hand. Campaign finance reform was a poor idea that created more problems than it fixed, and that horse needs to be taken out and shot.
Remember: unintended consequences. They'll get you every time.
It's not like the public gets to vote, as evidenced by the 2000 election.
No kidding. I was a Missouri resident at the time, and when a St. Louis judge illegally declared that polls in his predominantly Democratic district were allowed to stay open two hours later than elsewhere in the state, it was a strong reminder that my vote was only as important as that judge felt it was.
Surely that's what you were referring to, right? Because nobody's naive enough to believe that either party has a monopoly on dirty tricks, right?
It really should read that consumers are paying Real 750 million dollars. Microsoft isn't going anywhere, hence everyone who buys a preloaded PC or uses services of someone who did will indirectly pay this fine.
How do you figure? Is Microsoft going to raise their wholesale price? If they did, would merchants/OEMs raise their retail price to match? If so, then they would lose a certain amount of customers (everybody has their limit where "and not a dime more!" kicks in), which lowers the demand, which reduces the profits, which would require a price hike, lather, rinse, and repeat.
Companies don't get to magically vote themselves more money my randomly raising their prices. Or, at least, they can't do it for long.
A lot of people here seem to dislike Sony products. I bought the DSC-F505V digital camera in 2000 and have taken over 3000 pictures. It still works perfectly.
So what you're saying is that your camera, which doesn't have the manufacturing error, isn't exhibiting the manufacturing error. That's like saying that you don't understand why people don't like your make of car, since your model isn't the one with exploding brakes and it's been reliable for you.
The world knows no shortage of elitist M.D.s who hate the notion of a patient not obeying their very learned whim.
This is somewhat off-topic, but anyway...
My wife's a doctor who hates the notion of a patient not doing what she tells them, but it has nothing to do with elitism. A recurrent pet peeve is telling a patient not to get their surgical site wet. Why? Two big reasons: 1) water is adept at carrying pathogens into the wound before it heals, and 2) know how your fingers get all pruny when they've been in the water too long? That "maceration" is horribly good at ripping out stitches and causing the wound to re-open.
This is hugely important, but people routinely ignore her orders and go swimming, taking baths, or washing out the hog barn (yeah, I live in rural America) and then scream at her and threaten to sue because pus is oozing out of their gaping incisions.
Don't necessarily assume that doctors are being pushy just for the sake of it. Are you being mean when you tell your neighbor not to open an.exe that a stranger emailed to them? No. Same deal.
Sure, there are jerks in the medical profession. An unfortunate amount of that perception is probably due to simple misunderstandings, though.
If that were the case, it would highlight an incredibly stupid group of people.
To a point, I agree, except to note that it would be amazingly impractical for the government to maintain completely parallel systems for everything they do. It wouldn't make sense, for example, to them to have a separate government-only road system. Of course that's absurd, but at some point you have to draw the line between the systems that make sense to farm out and the ones that you need to maintain internally. Maybe my "CIA field agents" idea wasn't the best example, but surely there are cases where Blackberry's functionality is important enough to use, but not critical enough to re-implement internally.
Also, no, almost all uses of emminant domain are bad uses. It is wholly wrong for the government to just up and steal what you have legal rights to. If they want to fix what they've screwed up in patent law, then that is the right answer. Forcing this company to give up their property is not the right way.
That presumes software patents are legitimate forms of property. An increasing bloc of the population does not hold that belief, myself included. In this case, a reasonable substitute for imminent domain would be invalidating the illegitimate patent (with prejudice, if such a concept exists in patent law).
Now, this is a rather vague guarantee, since the task of deciding if a reported problem is a security flaw lies with Dan Bernstein himself; but it's a start.
In May 2005, Georgi Guninski claimed that some potential 64-bit portability problems allowed a ``remote exploit in qmail-smtpd.'' This claim is denied. Nobody gives gigabytes of memory to each qmail-smtpd process, so there is no problem with qmail's assumption that allocated array lengths fit comfortably into 32 bits.
In other words, "as long as you don't use this software in ways I didn't envision, it is secure." Well, no kidding! By that standard, Windows is mostly secure too, because nobody would ever try to run a.exe file from Outlook Express - that would be silly!
DJB's guarantee is worth the paper it's printed on (note: applies only to electronic formats; real paper may have value) since he will never, ever admit that a bug actually exists. It's much more fun to posture and claim that your competitors old releases were buggy than to fix your own problems.
I'm sorry - why is the government an exception? If you want to except people, how about *existing customers*. I work at a hospital, and just about every doctor here has a Blackberry. I wouldn't be able to ever get answers on any of my questions if they didn't have them - as these doctors are NEVER in their office long enough to sit down.
Guess it depends what they're used for. Suppose the CIA uses Blackberries to keep agents in touch when they go off-campus for lunch so they can notify them in case of national emergency. I could see how deactivating them might be worse for the entire country than you losing a convenient way to contact a doctor in the same physical building you're in.
Or not. But I can imagine reasons why turning off government access could be a bad, bad thing. This seems like one of the best legitimate uses of Imminent Domain I can think of.
You probably don't have brown-recluse, black-widow, or such spiders.
I grew up in southwest Missouri. I've seen a brown recluse or two in my time.
Spiders are useally fairly sedentary, but toss 'em in a tumbling machine, and they emerge pretty pissed off.
What kind of turbo-spiders do you have that can survive trips through loaded clothes dryers? Where do you live so that I may mark it off my "would enjoy the local fauna while visiting" list?
The inside light was one of my primary criteria in dryers as I shopped.... sigh.
Forget price, efficiency, speed, reliability or looks. No, I wash my clothes in an underground cavern, and if I can't eat my dinner by the light emanating from the ol' Kenmore, then I don't want it.
Seriously, man, of all the features I've never desired in a consumer product, that's right up there. What on earth are your requirements that this seems like an important checkbox?
Actually, no, that's wrong. Last I checked, a kilobit is 128 bytes...
...when a byte is 8 bits. This is not always the case. Even modern parity memory stores 9 bits per byte (well, 36 bits per word), even if only 8 of those virtual bits are visible to the user.
It doesn't seem completely impossible that a machine old enough to use core memory might have also had 4-bit bytes, giving 256 bytes per kilobit (yes, kilo and not kibi - you can't make me say it).
That juicy-steak will be mighty tempting; sure they may get a bit sick because their bodies aren't used to eating meat but it would be just like the feeling you would have were you FORCED to actually install and use Windows.
That situation is about as conceivable as an 80 year old nun with birth control pills and a hysterectomy. I doubt a crack addict is going to break in and force me to defrag a hard drive or install spyware at knifepoint, but if that ever happens, BitTorrent and KEYGEN.EXE shall be my salvation.
The carbon nanotubes bend to make connect with an electrode, so something moves. This is usually a bad sign for long-term reliability.
I'm not a materials researcher, but I could imagine reasons why macroscopic phenomena like "wearing out" don't apply to nanomaterials. It seems at least remotely possible that these nanotubes are small enough that their mechanism of movement is completely understood, and there aren't any nonreversible reactions taking place.
If the Windows box is cheaper, why not buy it so that you have a Windows license laying around in case you need one.
I will never, under any conceivable circumstances, ever need it. I have as much use for a Windows license as your average vegan has for a nice, juicy steak - and every bit as much desire to have one delivered to my house.
Maybe I should have said "a few years to muster the courage, then a few months to fight the fight.":-)
Since I have you here, do you have time for a couple of hypothetical question?
1) Would it have been possible to upgrade in parts, such as creating a base stylesheet to handle stuff like fonts and colors and incrementally altering the backend to use it?
2) I understand the reasons you've given for not going to XHTML and won't beat that horse, but if you were decide today that you wanted to, how hard would that be?
Just in the last month alone, we've seen the addition of support for CSS
I love the new CSS layout, truly I do. But the fact that it took a few years to implement it says more about Slashcode than I think we all want to admit. Had it been built on a solid MVC platform, the project should have taken a couple of days. Having to re-write much of the system to generate different HTML isn't exactly a design I'd brag about. And adding Atom when RSS was already working? That should have been a lunch break project.
Clearly you guys manage to make it all work, so it's obviously not totally broken, but neither is it in great shape. I haven't written any megahits-per-day sites lately, though, so take my opinion for what it's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't. I'd estimate that Unix hosts probably server 75% of the traffic on the Internet, but how often do you hear of LAMP worms infecting millions of machines within a few minutes?
Frankly, I'd much rather 0wn a Unix box with multi-homed DS3s than an XP machine on a dialup. And yet, that's not usually what happens.
Look at a grasshopper. Any grasshopper. Try to spot one of its tendons. Now, imagine how many of those you'd need to somehow glue together to make a pair of sweatshop tennis shoes.
That is why you can't just harvest the stuff.
Forgive my ignorance, but isn't ext3 basically ext2 plus a journal? How could you be able to write ext2 without being about to write ext3?
So an exploded landmine isn't really a landmine: it's a "previously potential detonator" or "object of prior kinetic vigor". That's bound to be comforting to all involved.
They hear everything.
Well, them and Canada, but they mainly filter for "hockey+steroids", "operation moose", and "records lows".
I think they meant that in the "release the hounds!" verb sense of "loose".
So, use a less featureful office product to generate undocumented, patented files. Yeah. I think you misspelled "worst".
I use OpenOffice every day and love it, but I don't know of anyone who switched to it because they thought it was the superior product. Many got on board because it is gratis and good enough. I picked it up because it's libre and runs on my desktop platform. It's pretty darn good today and only getting better -- but the better suite? Not many people would agree with you on that one.
The thing is, as a strict boolean value, that is true.
At one point, troops found some artillery shells with trace values of sarin nerve gas. Now, there was very little of the stuff, sure, but there was in fact a non-zero amount. If the pollster interviewed me, I'd be in the "80% of conservative idiots" category, even though they never bothered to ask me how much was found.
Similarly, if a biased pollster asked me if space was empty, and I said no, I'd probably get lumped in with people who failed junior high, even though the reasons for my answer are completely different than those of many others.
It's a much better sound bite, though, to label me as a Fox-watching moron than to try to understand my thought processes.
They made a book out of "Les Miserables"? Heathens!
That's a wonderful idea! So, how do you count third-party spending for a candidate? If I spent $100,000 on ads supporting a presidential contender, does that come out of their $1,000,000? What if I spent it on low-quality, unpersuasive ads for your candidate - does it still count against their limit?
If my candidate spends his $1,000,000, does that mean I'm forbidden from chiming in as much as a simple "me too!" on a blog if I have to pay for its web hosting? What if it's a free web host, but I have to pay for the connection? Does the coffee I have to buy in order to use the local coffee house's terminal count against me? Can I use my cell phone to tell my mom that I like Candidate Smith -- after all, I'd be paying to endorse a contender?
I wish every single Slashbot would get one simple lesson drilled through their heads before opening their mouths: you are minnows playing among sharks. Do not ever allow yourself to believe that you can come up with a plan that will prevent politicians from doing something they want to do. They are far better at this game than you ever will be.
Put another way: unintended consequences. Unintended consequences. Repeat: unintended consequences. Bad things happen every single time someone comes up with a brilliant solution to a complex problem. The real problems come when those consequences are worse than the original issue at hand. Campaign finance reform was a poor idea that created more problems than it fixed, and that horse needs to be taken out and shot.
Remember: unintended consequences. They'll get you every time.
No kidding. I was a Missouri resident at the time, and when a St. Louis judge illegally declared that polls in his predominantly Democratic district were allowed to stay open two hours later than elsewhere in the state, it was a strong reminder that my vote was only as important as that judge felt it was.
Surely that's what you were referring to, right? Because nobody's naive enough to believe that either party has a monopoly on dirty tricks, right?
How do you figure? Is Microsoft going to raise their wholesale price? If they did, would merchants/OEMs raise their retail price to match? If so, then they would lose a certain amount of customers (everybody has their limit where "and not a dime more!" kicks in), which lowers the demand, which reduces the profits, which would require a price hike, lather, rinse, and repeat.
Companies don't get to magically vote themselves more money my randomly raising their prices. Or, at least, they can't do it for long.
So what you're saying is that your camera, which doesn't have the manufacturing error, isn't exhibiting the manufacturing error. That's like saying that you don't understand why people don't like your make of car, since your model isn't the one with exploding brakes and it's been reliable for you.
This is somewhat off-topic, but anyway...
My wife's a doctor who hates the notion of a patient not doing what she tells them, but it has nothing to do with elitism. A recurrent pet peeve is telling a patient not to get their surgical site wet. Why? Two big reasons: 1) water is adept at carrying pathogens into the wound before it heals, and 2) know how your fingers get all pruny when they've been in the water too long? That "maceration" is horribly good at ripping out stitches and causing the wound to re-open.
This is hugely important, but people routinely ignore her orders and go swimming, taking baths, or washing out the hog barn (yeah, I live in rural America) and then scream at her and threaten to sue because pus is oozing out of their gaping incisions.
Don't necessarily assume that doctors are being pushy just for the sake of it. Are you being mean when you tell your neighbor not to open an .exe that a stranger emailed to them? No. Same deal.
Sure, there are jerks in the medical profession. An unfortunate amount of that perception is probably due to simple misunderstandings, though.
To a point, I agree, except to note that it would be amazingly impractical for the government to maintain completely parallel systems for everything they do. It wouldn't make sense, for example, to them to have a separate government-only road system. Of course that's absurd, but at some point you have to draw the line between the systems that make sense to farm out and the ones that you need to maintain internally. Maybe my "CIA field agents" idea wasn't the best example, but surely there are cases where Blackberry's functionality is important enough to use, but not critical enough to re-implement internally.
Also, no, almost all uses of emminant domain are bad uses. It is wholly wrong for the government to just up and steal what you have legal rights to. If they want to fix what they've screwed up in patent law, then that is the right answer. Forcing this company to give up their property is not the right way.
That presumes software patents are legitimate forms of property. An increasing bloc of the population does not hold that belief, myself included. In this case, a reasonable substitute for imminent domain would be invalidating the illegitimate patent (with prejudice, if such a concept exists in patent law).
DJB is an asshat. From his guarantee page:
In other words, "as long as you don't use this software in ways I didn't envision, it is secure." Well, no kidding! By that standard, Windows is mostly secure too, because nobody would ever try to run a .exe file from Outlook Express - that would be silly!
DJB's guarantee is worth the paper it's printed on (note: applies only to electronic formats; real paper may have value) since he will never, ever admit that a bug actually exists. It's much more fun to posture and claim that your competitors old releases were buggy than to fix your own problems.
Guess it depends what they're used for. Suppose the CIA uses Blackberries to keep agents in touch when they go off-campus for lunch so they can notify them in case of national emergency. I could see how deactivating them might be worse for the entire country than you losing a convenient way to contact a doctor in the same physical building you're in.
Or not. But I can imagine reasons why turning off government access could be a bad, bad thing. This seems like one of the best legitimate uses of Imminent Domain I can think of.
I grew up in southwest Missouri. I've seen a brown recluse or two in my time.
Spiders are useally fairly sedentary, but toss 'em in a tumbling machine, and they emerge pretty pissed off.
What kind of turbo-spiders do you have that can survive trips through loaded clothes dryers? Where do you live so that I may mark it off my "would enjoy the local fauna while visiting" list?
Forget price, efficiency, speed, reliability or looks. No, I wash my clothes in an underground cavern, and if I can't eat my dinner by the light emanating from the ol' Kenmore, then I don't want it.
Seriously, man, of all the features I've never desired in a consumer product, that's right up there. What on earth are your requirements that this seems like an important checkbox?
...when a byte is 8 bits. This is not always the case. Even modern parity memory stores 9 bits per byte (well, 36 bits per word), even if only 8 of those virtual bits are visible to the user.
It doesn't seem completely impossible that a machine old enough to use core memory might have also had 4-bit bytes, giving 256 bytes per kilobit (yes, kilo and not kibi - you can't make me say it).
That juicy-steak will be mighty tempting; sure they may get a bit sick because their bodies aren't used to eating meat but it would be just like the feeling you would have were you FORCED to actually install and use Windows.
That situation is about as conceivable as an 80 year old nun with birth control pills and a hysterectomy. I doubt a crack addict is going to break in and force me to defrag a hard drive or install spyware at knifepoint, but if that ever happens, BitTorrent and KEYGEN.EXE shall be my salvation.
I'm not a materials researcher, but I could imagine reasons why macroscopic phenomena like "wearing out" don't apply to nanomaterials. It seems at least remotely possible that these nanotubes are small enough that their mechanism of movement is completely understood, and there aren't any nonreversible reactions taking place.
I will never, under any conceivable circumstances, ever need it. I have as much use for a Windows license as your average vegan has for a nice, juicy steak - and every bit as much desire to have one delivered to my house.
Maybe I should have said "a few years to muster the courage, then a few months to fight the fight." :-)
Since I have you here, do you have time for a couple of hypothetical question?
1) Would it have been possible to upgrade in parts, such as creating a base stylesheet to handle stuff like fonts and colors and incrementally altering the backend to use it?
2) I understand the reasons you've given for not going to XHTML and won't beat that horse, but if you were decide today that you wanted to, how hard would that be?
I love the new CSS layout, truly I do. But the fact that it took a few years to implement it says more about Slashcode than I think we all want to admit. Had it been built on a solid MVC platform, the project should have taken a couple of days. Having to re-write much of the system to generate different HTML isn't exactly a design I'd brag about. And adding Atom when RSS was already working? That should have been a lunch break project.
Clearly you guys manage to make it all work, so it's obviously not totally broken, but neither is it in great shape. I haven't written any megahits-per-day sites lately, though, so take my opinion for what it's worth.