GNU tar has been around and available to just about every system known to man for well over a decade. I don't mean to be rude, but cope with modern technology.
"This is your argument. "Don't be evil" in the s-1? Are you fucking serious?"
Yes, quite.
"What does don't be evil mean? It doesn't mean anything, least of all to investors. What is evil?"
I think you're looking at this upside down. You are essentially saying that they are not compelled to comply with their statement.
Well, you're correct of course, but that has nothing to do with what I was saying. It's a bit like the GPL. You are not compelled to obey the terms of the GPL. You can ignore it, and that's fine. You just have to contend with copyright law... and that's the catch.
Google is not compelled to obey their own statement, and it's not really binding because it's too vague. But, the fact that it's in the S-1 (which is damaging to them, though probably not terribly so), indicates that they wished to remove the obligation that they would otherwise have to take any legal measure to enhance shareholder value. If, for example, their ad business starts doing poorly, they could refuse to move to graphical ads on their adword service. Some other search-based ad service COULD NOT DO THAT. They would be compelled by the business plan in their S-1 to do whatever it took, as long as it was legal, to enhance the value to their shareholders.
Of course, Google goes into more detail in specific areas, but this is a very interesting catch-all, and IMHO just as impressive a legal hack as the GPL.
So you see, I'm not claiming that Google WON'T be evil, I'm pointing out that they are the only company that I know of that doesn't HAVE to be evil. That's actually a fairly impressive step in the right direction.
This comes up fairly often, but it's always the same song. No one looks at the curve, they just cherry-pick the current items that are usability hurdles. Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD, etc. They're all "hard to use". The key thing is how quickly their target users can come up to speed and surmount those usability hurdles. The OSS tactic has always been to nail the tech stuff first (because that's our target audience) and let folks like Sun (with their massive contribution to / creation of the Gnome usability effort), Ubuntu, Lindows, Mantiva, etc. work on the usability by mere mortals.
This has resulted in a system which has solid technical underpinnings, and yet has become more and more usable over time.
Today's Linux systems, for example, are far easier to install and use than they were just a few years ago, and that curve continues to improve for the end-user.
gtk-gnutella is a fine client as well. It speaks to the full range of Gnutella networks and has some excellent spam and hostiles tracking. I share a few gigabytes of free music (I like to support artists who share), operaing system ISOs, and various public domain image archives.
"I'll bet you'll see them move banner ads back to first-class status if that's what'll increase growth for them."
I'll bet you that you're wrong.
That's not because I'm a Google cheerleader, but because they made a very interesting play when they went public. They wrote their famous line into their S-1 (AKA "red herring"): "don't be evil".
Now, I know that any company CAN decide to be evil, even if they've written down their intention to do otherwise, but if that were the goal, Google would have written it down elsewhere. Putting it in the S-1 actually hurts them, as it is a warning to investors that they will not do what might otherwise be in the stockholder's best interrests if it conflicts with their ethics. Stockholders generally don't like that sort of thing, and it's safe to say that Google's price, while very high, might be higher if they did not make themselves unique in this way.
When you hear someone say that public companies do the wrong thing because they have to do well for their stockholders, that's not quite true. What they have to do (and often get sued if they do not) is live up to their business plan as described in their S-1. The fact that Google took a (probably small) hit to their value by making that statement in their S-1 tells me that they wish to mitigate the liability that they expose themselves to by doing the right thing.
Ignoring the fact that this is backwards (that's not Google's fault), I don't see why they would have gone out of their way to do this if they intended on doing the wrong thing when the opportunity presented itself.
I feel like I should have Prof. Farnsworth's voice when I say, "Oh my, yes!" Though they claim to have moved out of that business in recent years (keep in mind that their involvement was always considered a national secret), they continue to be one of the major U.S. military contractors. On the public record, the only hardware they supply is aircraft engines today, though they still manufacture nuclear power plants.
"Deadly Deception juxtaposes GE's rosy "We Bring Good Things To Life" commercials with the true stories of workers and neighbors whose lives have been devastated by the company's involvement in building and testing nuclear bombs." -http://www.newday.com/films/DeadlyDeception.html
"Huh? If I google for "sewing machine" and I get some text ads on the right directing me to places that sell sewing machines on the web, that's a Marketer that did that? You're telling me that someone needs to get a college degree to understand that a person looking up "sewing machine" might be interested in stores selling sewing machines? Sounds like Marketing people are vastly overpaid."
<sarcasm> Huh? If I google for "sewing machine" and I get some text ads on the right directing me to places that sell sewing machines on the web, that's a Web developer that did that? You're telling me that someone needs to get a college degree to understand how to put up a bit of text saying "sewing machine"? Sounds like Web development people are vastly overpaid. </sarcasm>
You are, of course, over-simplifying as I hope my example demonstrated. There is far more to marketing than that. Just as an example, if you had $10,000 to spend on marketting and you could choose between sewing magazines, Google ad words, billboards, and radio ads, what would you do? If you need to come up with a logo to market a new product under, what colors are likely to make viewers ignore the product? Are focus groups worth your while? What are the three most important things to provide with your ad copy when going to print? Why is Pantone useful in specifying logos? What are the top 10 words you should never use when talking about a product? When you put together a visual ad, what is the single most important thing that the reader be able to remember, even if they only glanced at the ad (hint: most amateur advertisers think they know, but get it wrong when they design an ad)?
There's so much to learn about advertising that I'll never know half of it. It's a huge business, and most of what I know is now seriously dated as it's all pre-Web (I've been on the tech side during the Web era). Marketting is not evil, however, it is the applied science of manipulating perception. That is clearly ethical grey territory, and it is ever so easy to step over the line.
"So if a company follows the law of a country they operate in, they are free of any ethical considerations?"
Absolutely not! However, look at what Google did.
They have agreed to provide a limited version of their search service to China. They didn't agree to modify the information in any other way.
That's something that I would not be comfortable doing, but it's the only way they can be of any use in China, so it's one of those ugly sorts of situations that you just hope does more good than not.
On the other hand, look at Yahoo! They're activly supporting the government's efforts to discover and jail reporters who tell the truth.
I think Yahoo! has crossed the line between complying with the law and being complicit in state-sanctioned wrongdoing.
Of course, if you're someone who freaked out the moment a company claimed that it would "do no evil" and decided that that was worse than all of the sins of mankind, the China agreement was mana from heaven as it gave you some thin justification for your paranoia.
Ok, now step back, and think about that statement. In a world full of people who build nuclear weapons (e.g. G.E.); research fragrances by injecting bunnies with toxic chemicals; patent genetic sequences; squeeze the third world for cash in exchange for patented, life-saving drugs; grind up tons of sea life per day; build systems to gather all Internet traffic for domestic spying; etc.... this guy chooses to point the finger at people who attempt to sway your opinion about what to buy as the "most EVIL business ever".
Think about that.
And why does he say this? Because it pains the average paranoid to have a large business that spends its time worrying about the impact of its actions.
Keep in mind, Google has:
* Moved the banner ad from Internet dominance to second-class status. * Contributed substantially to open source development efforts. * Countered the growing dominance of Microsoft on many fronts. * Revealed government efforts at privacy invasion (did MSN or Yahoo!?)
Complaints about Google amount to: well, they could do MORE for me!
If Google bothers you, you need to serious look at your priorities. Sure, they're large and public which makes them more of a source of concern than your average convinience store, but there are companies that spend their time and effort trying to KILL PEOPLE. Google doesn't show up on the evil company radar because there's already too many companies fighting for the right to be there.
"I blame DNS. We should have stuck with numbers. In hex."
"Dude, did you hear about 0xa330d24b's new article on the Pentium 0xFF?!"
"No way! I've got to check that out... let's see... what was that? 0xa330d34b?... OMFG! What's that dolphin doing to the... oh. my. God!"
Yeah, so typos can happen anywhere....
Re:Annoyance as a marketing technique?
on
Explorer Destroyer
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· Score: 1
Don't blame the bunnies! Eat the militant PETA people!
Remember, membership in PETA is a strong indicator of vegitarianism, and we all know that the meat of herbivores tastes much better than the stringy, gamey meat of omnivores and carnivores. Yep, PETA stands for People Eating Tasty Activists!
"anything *can* be used as a weapon (which is why we need to recognize this regarding airport security and either design sensible regulations or require that everyone fly nude"
Won't work... remember ANYTHING can be used as a weapon....
Current audio is at the limit of the average person's hearing in terms of quality. Even for those that can tell the difference between an mp3 and a higher quality format, the difference is small enough that they won't notice it on most of their crappy music.
"Did you convert to the record sized laser discs? No? Me neither."
I did, and most of the people who cared about quality did for many reasons:
* Digital audio * Just enough of a quality improvement to make widescreen not suck * Smaller storage form-factor than VHS * Analog video (for some movies LD is still higher quality than DVD for this reason) * More agile FF/RW than VHS * Some high-end vendors were making discs that contained entire scripts, etc. * Many "special editions" and "director's cuts" existed only on LD
"Troll another issue, please."
Citing concerns that you don't agree with is hardly trolling... calling it trolling, on ther other hand....
I imagine that I don't really need to tell you this, but I'll do so for the sake of the improbable case that you have not yet realized it: Slashdot's core "nerds" audience is generally offended by restrictions of any kind, and moreover are fascinated by the concept of the edge case. If you suggested that the contest would give $1,000,000 to all entrants as long as they submitted their entry as a bziped tar file, you would get 100 responses on this page about how unreasonable it is to require bzip over gzip/compress/zip/arc/etc.
There's nothing at all wrong with having made the mandate that continuity be preserved, but that doesn't mean that the bulk of/.ers aren't going to jump all over you for it.
The key element is procmail. Each user's procmail rules filter all spam scoring 10+ into a special folder that is initially defined as/dev/null, but can be changed by the user to a local folder if they wish to review it (in periodic reviews of my own mail box, I have never seen a false positive that scored 10+)
All of the rest of the spam (5+) gets a modified subject line and is delivered normally. My users are quite happy with this arrangement, since almost all spam that is delivered is appropriately marked, but when real mail gets a false positive, they see it.
I also do a few other things after the fact:
1) A script reviews the logs and blocks all traffic from high-volume spam sources (iptables) 2) I use SPF records so that I get a reduced bounce load, and generally to be a better citizen 3) I periodically write my own SpamAssassin rules to recognize newly emerging trends and give them a small bump.
I actually liked the first third or so of Nemesis. I really wish they'd followed through.
As for Nemesis killing the ST franchise... let me remind you: ST:V (Kirk kicks God's ass), ST:VI (Klingons are helpless in zero-G), ST:VII (the Kirk / Picard "it's OK for you to take over" movie), ST:VIII (maybe an overdoes of testosterone will help), ST:IX (horse, beat, repeat).
An of course, there was Voyager and the first three seasons of Enterprise.
No, Nemesis did not kill Star Trek for the fans. Berman did that, and he made it a nice, slow, painful, public death.
If Abrams has enough clout to tell Berman "no", then this movie might work. Otherwise, it's doomed no matter who writes or directs.
I think you can do this. If Spock isn't played by a teenager (he should appear slightly younger than he did in The Cage) and his meeting with Kirk doesn't bloom into the friendship that they obviously established on the Enterprise, then I think it works. Only in the books (yes, I used to read Star Trek books in high school... many years ago) have I seen anything to contradict that setup. Spock should probably not be a standard student, but rather just there to learn how to interact with human military in preperation for becoming a member of Starfleet. T'Pol could be there in a cameo, which would be a nice bridge, as long as they don't dwell on introducing ST:E folks and making a "handoff movie" as they did with Generations.
The real problem is avoiding the old plot formula hell that Star Trek has fallen prey to. They tried to get out of that rut by going macho in First Contact (huge mistake); and even introduced an interesting villain in Nemesis; but in the end, they can't avoid a pat ending that fails to introduce change that could disturb the franchise. Shake it up. Get the new Matrix generation and the Lord of the Rings generation interested in the show. If Abrams does it right, this could be the start of something interesting. IMHO, if they let him do what he does best, you'll walk out of the theater saying, "I don't know exactly what just happened, but I want to see the next one!"
Well, if it's that loosely lifted from another source, I'll live.
The things that this movie needs to do to impress me (and probably enough of the fans to build the groundswell of popular interest that the movie will need... because you know joe sixpack is going to say, "Star Treck? Wasn't that over when the kid got tossed in the lava?"
A story that nods at the history, but doesn't dwell on references, cameos and cliché
Some challenges to the established plot formulae
Actors that have something to offer other than clean skin and perfect hair
The introduction of some new characters who aren't just late teens/early 20s versions of the characters from the show
The complete lack of a deus-ex-machina ending including infamous <tech> technobable
A bit of humor that is understated enough so as not to be slapstick
If anyone can do this Abrams can. He doesn't deal well with finishing a long story arc in a TV show, but he writes pilots that meet all of the above criteria and then some. If he brings that to the Star Trek movie (assuming he is allowed to doctor the script or have one of his people do so, and isn't flooded with crippling notes from Paramount / Berman), it will be worth watching.
I don't think anyone graduating from MIT is under the illusion that they paid all of that money for the course materials. The quality of the instructors, access to the research environment and the opportunities available to someone who is able to graduate from MIT are what you are paying for. The course materials are just the starting point.
Yeah, I have to say that it doesn't take much of tinfoil hat to assume that this guy was stationed in Guatamala as an "aid worker" by the CIA. Such activities were very common in the region between the 1960s and 1980s in an attempt to prevent the region from turning into a foothold for communism in this hemisphere.
Now you have to wonder... if he's CIA and was stationed in Central America during the heyday of U.S. involvement there... what exactly would his agenda for U.S. civil liberties be? *shudder*
He could be a great guy, but given the administration that he reports to, I have to say that the doubts win out for me, and I'm certainly not feeling like my rights were just protected.
A bug in the kernel's behavior caused by some underlying tool is still a kernel bug which the kernel team needs to address. Pushing it off on gcc would have been very un-Linux like, and in fact, Linus wrote a fix (yes, it's a workaround for a gcc limitation... there are many such fixes in Linux).
Sarcastic RTFA comments aside, I think you're looking to have a very Windows-like world where vendor A blames vendor B who blames Microsoft who says that it's an application problem, and they don't support that. I'm much happier in the Linux world where a kernel bug is fixed when it reasonably can be.
"As far as I can tell, any of the arguments used to defend anti-Global-Warming scientists can apply equally well to my babies-come-from-storks argument."
How can a scientist be "anti-" anything? Isn't the goal of science to construct theories and then seek to assail them from all angles to demonstrate their resistance to disproof? To say, "OK, now we're going to accept the prior evidence and continue forward," is to dispose of the scientific method which constantly works to disprove or revise existing theory.
As far as your stork theory... well, if you're an accomplished biologist who has some reasonable defense of that theory, then I think it should be investigated. What's more — and this is key — others should not only be allowed, but funded and encouraged to attempt to disprove your theory. Welcome to the scientific method.
Science is like a sculpture. You don't create something without chipping away at what is established. Einstein could not have done his work if he had been branded an "anti-Newtonian scientist" and cut off from any source of funding. To do this returns us to the time when the church established "truth" and punished anyone who questioned it.
"While you definitely have a point, the simple fact is that where your money comes from will always cause the public (if they know about it) to either believe or disbelieve you."
That's exactly why you have to de-politisize the funding process. When someone has done good work, but the answers are unpopular, you can't yank their funding. If you do, you effectively silence them in the scientific community because the only way they can procede is to get funding from those who are biased the other way.
This is a major failing in the developed world's support of the sciences. We MUST support unpopular theories in order to be able to tear down established theory when/if better data comes along.
If someone could mod up the parent, that would be great.
The fact of the matter is that this precident could affect U.S. common law, as it derives from the same source. For it to apply, someone would have to use it as the basis for their case in a U.S. court, and the court would have to support its use. At that point, it becomes part of the common (or "case") law in the U.S., and other cases can simply reference it. This is why precident is so important in the courts. Much of the law that you think exists in a book that congress published is actually only recorded as common law based on precidents that pre-date the formation of the U.S. legal system.
"Business evil begets business evil. Personal evil dies alone."
Probably more often true than false, I agree. So the solution is to get these folks independent funding sources, regardless of the popularity of their previous results, based only on the quality of the science they wish to do, right? We want to prove or disprove our theories without bias, and only based on facts, right? Why then is the funing for someone who disagrees slashed? Why do way say "all credible scientists..." when many who disagree exist, but cannot secure funding?
Slashdot Mirror
GNU tar has been around and available to just about every system known to man for well over a decade. I don't mean to be rude, but cope with modern technology.
"This is your argument. "Don't be evil" in the s-1? Are you fucking serious?"
Yes, quite.
"What does don't be evil mean? It doesn't mean anything, least of all to investors. What is evil?"
I think you're looking at this upside down. You are essentially saying that they are not compelled to comply with their statement.
Well, you're correct of course, but that has nothing to do with what I was saying. It's a bit like the GPL. You are not compelled to obey the terms of the GPL. You can ignore it, and that's fine. You just have to contend with copyright law... and that's the catch.
Google is not compelled to obey their own statement, and it's not really binding because it's too vague. But, the fact that it's in the S-1 (which is damaging to them, though probably not terribly so), indicates that they wished to remove the obligation that they would otherwise have to take any legal measure to enhance shareholder value. If, for example, their ad business starts doing poorly, they could refuse to move to graphical ads on their adword service. Some other search-based ad service COULD NOT DO THAT. They would be compelled by the business plan in their S-1 to do whatever it took, as long as it was legal, to enhance the value to their shareholders.
Of course, Google goes into more detail in specific areas, but this is a very interesting catch-all, and IMHO just as impressive a legal hack as the GPL.
So you see, I'm not claiming that Google WON'T be evil, I'm pointing out that they are the only company that I know of that doesn't HAVE to be evil. That's actually a fairly impressive step in the right direction.
This comes up fairly often, but it's always the same song. No one looks at the curve, they just cherry-pick the current items that are usability hurdles. Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD, etc. They're all "hard to use". The key thing is how quickly their target users can come up to speed and surmount those usability hurdles. The OSS tactic has always been to nail the tech stuff first (because that's our target audience) and let folks like Sun (with their massive contribution to / creation of the Gnome usability effort), Ubuntu, Lindows, Mantiva, etc. work on the usability by mere mortals.
This has resulted in a system which has solid technical underpinnings, and yet has become more and more usable over time.
Today's Linux systems, for example, are far easier to install and use than they were just a few years ago, and that curve continues to improve for the end-user.
gtk-gnutella is a fine client as well. It speaks to the full range of Gnutella networks and has some excellent spam and hostiles tracking. I share a few gigabytes of free music (I like to support artists who share), operaing system ISOs, and various public domain image archives.
"I'll bet you'll see them move banner ads back to first-class status if that's what'll increase growth for them."
I'll bet you that you're wrong.
That's not because I'm a Google cheerleader, but because they made a very interesting play when they went public. They wrote their famous line into their S-1 (AKA "red herring"): "don't be evil".
Now, I know that any company CAN decide to be evil, even if they've written down their intention to do otherwise, but if that were the goal, Google would have written it down elsewhere. Putting it in the S-1 actually hurts them, as it is a warning to investors that they will not do what might otherwise be in the stockholder's best interrests if it conflicts with their ethics. Stockholders generally don't like that sort of thing, and it's safe to say that Google's price, while very high, might be higher if they did not make themselves unique in this way.
When you hear someone say that public companies do the wrong thing because they have to do well for their stockholders, that's not quite true. What they have to do (and often get sued if they do not) is live up to their business plan as described in their S-1. The fact that Google took a (probably small) hit to their value by making that statement in their S-1 tells me that they wish to mitigate the liability that they expose themselves to by doing the right thing.
Ignoring the fact that this is backwards (that's not Google's fault), I don't see why they would have gone out of their way to do this if they intended on doing the wrong thing when the opportunity presented itself.
"General Electric builds nuclear weapons?"
c k_Welch
I feel like I should have Prof. Farnsworth's voice when I say, "Oh my, yes!" Though they claim to have moved out of that business in recent years (keep in mind that their involvement was always considered a national secret), they continue to be one of the major U.S. military contractors. On the public record, the only hardware they supply is aircraft engines today, though they still manufacture nuclear power plants.
"In 1987, GE was the United States' second largest nuclear power company and third largest producer of nuclear weapons systems." -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric#Ja
"Deadly Deception juxtaposes GE's rosy "We Bring Good Things To Life" commercials with the true stories of workers and neighbors whose lives have been devastated by the company's involvement in building and testing nuclear bombs." -http://www.newday.com/films/DeadlyDeception.html
"Huh? If I google for "sewing machine" and I get some text ads on the right directing me to places that sell sewing machines on the web, that's a Marketer that did that? You're telling me that someone needs to get a college degree to understand that a person looking up "sewing machine" might be interested in stores selling sewing machines? Sounds like Marketing people are vastly overpaid."
<sarcasm>
Huh? If I google for "sewing machine" and I get some text ads on the right directing me to places that sell sewing machines on the web, that's a Web developer that did that? You're telling me that someone needs to get a college degree to understand how to put up a bit of text saying "sewing machine"? Sounds like Web development people are vastly overpaid.
</sarcasm>
You are, of course, over-simplifying as I hope my example demonstrated. There is far more to marketing than that. Just as an example, if you had $10,000 to spend on marketting and you could choose between sewing magazines, Google ad words, billboards, and radio ads, what would you do? If you need to come up with a logo to market a new product under, what colors are likely to make viewers ignore the product? Are focus groups worth your while? What are the three most important things to provide with your ad copy when going to print? Why is Pantone useful in specifying logos? What are the top 10 words you should never use when talking about a product? When you put together a visual ad, what is the single most important thing that the reader be able to remember, even if they only glanced at the ad (hint: most amateur advertisers think they know, but get it wrong when they design an ad)?
There's so much to learn about advertising that I'll never know half of it. It's a huge business, and most of what I know is now seriously dated as it's all pre-Web (I've been on the tech side during the Web era). Marketting is not evil, however, it is the applied science of manipulating perception. That is clearly ethical grey territory, and it is ever so easy to step over the line.
"So if a company follows the law of a country they operate in, they are free of any ethical considerations?"
Absolutely not! However, look at what Google did.
They have agreed to provide a limited version of their search service to China. They didn't agree to modify the information in any other way.
That's something that I would not be comfortable doing, but it's the only way they can be of any use in China, so it's one of those ugly sorts of situations that you just hope does more good than not.
On the other hand, look at Yahoo! They're activly supporting the government's efforts to discover and jail reporters who tell the truth.
I think Yahoo! has crossed the line between complying with the law and being complicit in state-sanctioned wrongdoing.
Of course, if you're someone who freaked out the moment a company claimed that it would "do no evil" and decided that that was worse than all of the sins of mankind, the China agreement was mana from heaven as it gave you some thin justification for your paranoia.
How to detect loonies:
... this guy chooses to point the finger at people who attempt to sway your opinion about what to buy as the "most EVIL business ever".
"the most EVIL business ever... ADVERTISING"
Ok, now step back, and think about that statement. In a world full of people who build nuclear weapons (e.g. G.E.); research fragrances by injecting bunnies with toxic chemicals; patent genetic sequences; squeeze the third world for cash in exchange for patented, life-saving drugs; grind up tons of sea life per day; build systems to gather all Internet traffic for domestic spying; etc.
Think about that.
And why does he say this? Because it pains the average paranoid to have a large business that spends its time worrying about the impact of its actions.
Keep in mind, Google has:
* Moved the banner ad from Internet dominance to second-class status.
* Contributed substantially to open source development efforts.
* Countered the growing dominance of Microsoft on many fronts.
* Revealed government efforts at privacy invasion (did MSN or Yahoo!?)
Complaints about Google amount to: well, they could do MORE for me!
If Google bothers you, you need to serious look at your priorities. Sure, they're large and public which makes them more of a source of concern than your average convinience store, but there are companies that spend their time and effort trying to KILL PEOPLE. Google doesn't show up on the evil company radar because there's already too many companies fighting for the right to be there.
"I blame DNS. We should have stuck with numbers. In hex."
... OMFG! What's that dolphin doing to the... oh. my. God!"
"Dude, did you hear about 0xa330d24b's new article on the Pentium 0xFF?!"
"No way! I've got to check that out... let's see... what was that? 0xa330d34b?
Yeah, so typos can happen anywhere....
Don't blame the bunnies! Eat the militant PETA people!
Remember, membership in PETA is a strong indicator of vegitarianism, and we all know that the meat of herbivores tastes much better than the stringy, gamey meat of omnivores and carnivores. Yep, PETA stands for People Eating Tasty Activists!
"anything *can* be used as a weapon (which is why we need to recognize this regarding airport security and either design sensible regulations or require that everyone fly nude"
Won't work... remember ANYTHING can be used as a weapon....
"Did you convert to mp3pro? Oh, me neither."
Current audio is at the limit of the average person's hearing in terms of quality. Even for those that can tell the difference between an mp3 and a higher quality format, the difference is small enough that they won't notice it on most of their crappy music.
"Did you convert to the record sized laser discs? No? Me neither."
I did, and most of the people who cared about quality did for many reasons:
* Digital audio
* Just enough of a quality improvement to make widescreen not suck
* Smaller storage form-factor than VHS
* Analog video (for some movies LD is still higher quality than DVD for this reason)
* More agile FF/RW than VHS
* Some high-end vendors were making discs that contained entire scripts, etc.
* Many "special editions" and "director's cuts" existed only on LD
"Troll another issue, please."
Citing concerns that you don't agree with is hardly trolling... calling it trolling, on ther other hand....
I imagine that I don't really need to tell you this, but I'll do so for the sake of the improbable case that you have not yet realized it: Slashdot's core "nerds" audience is generally offended by restrictions of any kind, and moreover are fascinated by the concept of the edge case. If you suggested that the contest would give $1,000,000 to all entrants as long as they submitted their entry as a bziped tar file, you would get 100 responses on this page about how unreasonable it is to require bzip over gzip/compress/zip/arc/etc.
/.ers aren't going to jump all over you for it.
There's nothing at all wrong with having made the mandate that continuity be preserved, but that doesn't mean that the bulk of
My path looks like this:
/dev/null, but can be changed by the user to a local folder if they wish to review it (in periodic reviews of my own mail box, I have never seen a false positive that scored 10+)
Reverse DNS check (sendmail) -> SBL/XBL (Spamhaus) -> Greylisting milter -> SPF milter -> SpamAssassin -> procmail -> deliver
The key element is procmail. Each user's procmail rules filter all spam scoring 10+ into a special folder that is initially defined as
All of the rest of the spam (5+) gets a modified subject line and is delivered normally. My users are quite happy with this arrangement, since almost all spam that is delivered is appropriately marked, but when real mail gets a false positive, they see it.
I also do a few other things after the fact:
1) A script reviews the logs and blocks all traffic from high-volume spam sources (iptables)
2) I use SPF records so that I get a reduced bounce load, and generally to be a better citizen
3) I periodically write my own SpamAssassin rules to recognize newly emerging trends and give them a small bump.
I actually liked the first third or so of Nemesis. I really wish they'd followed through.
As for Nemesis killing the ST franchise... let me remind you: ST:V (Kirk kicks God's ass), ST:VI (Klingons are helpless in zero-G), ST:VII (the Kirk / Picard "it's OK for you to take over" movie), ST:VIII (maybe an overdoes of testosterone will help), ST:IX (horse, beat, repeat).
An of course, there was Voyager and the first three seasons of Enterprise.
No, Nemesis did not kill Star Trek for the fans. Berman did that, and he made it a nice, slow, painful, public death.
If Abrams has enough clout to tell Berman "no", then this movie might work. Otherwise, it's doomed no matter who writes or directs.
I think you can do this. If Spock isn't played by a teenager (he should appear slightly younger than he did in The Cage) and his meeting with Kirk doesn't bloom into the friendship that they obviously established on the Enterprise, then I think it works. Only in the books (yes, I used to read Star Trek books in high school... many years ago) have I seen anything to contradict that setup. Spock should probably not be a standard student, but rather just there to learn how to interact with human military in preperation for becoming a member of Starfleet. T'Pol could be there in a cameo, which would be a nice bridge, as long as they don't dwell on introducing ST:E folks and making a "handoff movie" as they did with Generations.
The real problem is avoiding the old plot formula hell that Star Trek has fallen prey to. They tried to get out of that rut by going macho in First Contact (huge mistake); and even introduced an interesting villain in Nemesis; but in the end, they can't avoid a pat ending that fails to introduce change that could disturb the franchise. Shake it up. Get the new Matrix generation and the Lord of the Rings generation interested in the show. If Abrams does it right, this could be the start of something interesting. IMHO, if they let him do what he does best, you'll walk out of the theater saying, "I don't know exactly what just happened, but I want to see the next one!"
The things that this movie needs to do to impress me (and probably enough of the fans to build the groundswell of popular interest that the movie will need... because you know joe sixpack is going to say, "Star Treck? Wasn't that over when the kid got tossed in the lava?"
If anyone can do this Abrams can. He doesn't deal well with finishing a long story arc in a TV show, but he writes pilots that meet all of the above criteria and then some. If he brings that to the Star Trek movie (assuming he is allowed to doctor the script or have one of his people do so, and isn't flooded with crippling notes from Paramount / Berman), it will be worth watching.
I don't think anyone graduating from MIT is under the illusion that they paid all of that money for the course materials. The quality of the instructors, access to the research environment and the opportunities available to someone who is able to graduate from MIT are what you are paying for. The course materials are just the starting point.
Yeah, I have to say that it doesn't take much of tinfoil hat to assume that this guy was stationed in Guatamala as an "aid worker" by the CIA. Such activities were very common in the region between the 1960s and 1980s in an attempt to prevent the region from turning into a foothold for communism in this hemisphere.
Now you have to wonder... if he's CIA and was stationed in Central America during the heyday of U.S. involvement there... what exactly would his agenda for U.S. civil liberties be? *shudder*
He could be a great guy, but given the administration that he reports to, I have to say that the doubts win out for me, and I'm certainly not feeling like my rights were just protected.
A bug in the kernel's behavior caused by some underlying tool is still a kernel bug which the kernel team needs to address. Pushing it off on gcc would have been very un-Linux like, and in fact, Linus wrote a fix (yes, it's a workaround for a gcc limitation... there are many such fixes in Linux).
Sarcastic RTFA comments aside, I think you're looking to have a very Windows-like world where vendor A blames vendor B who blames Microsoft who says that it's an application problem, and they don't support that. I'm much happier in the Linux world where a kernel bug is fixed when it reasonably can be.
"As far as I can tell, any of the arguments used to defend anti-Global-Warming scientists can apply equally well to my babies-come-from-storks argument."
How can a scientist be "anti-" anything? Isn't the goal of science to construct theories and then seek to assail them from all angles to demonstrate their resistance to disproof? To say, "OK, now we're going to accept the prior evidence and continue forward," is to dispose of the scientific method which constantly works to disprove or revise existing theory.
As far as your stork theory... well, if you're an accomplished biologist who has some reasonable defense of that theory, then I think it should be investigated. What's more — and this is key — others should not only be allowed, but funded and encouraged to attempt to disprove your theory. Welcome to the scientific method.
Science is like a sculpture. You don't create something without chipping away at what is established. Einstein could not have done his work if he had been branded an "anti-Newtonian scientist" and cut off from any source of funding. To do this returns us to the time when the church established "truth" and punished anyone who questioned it.
"While you definitely have a point, the simple fact is that where your money comes from will always cause the public (if they know about it) to either believe or disbelieve you."
That's exactly why you have to de-politisize the funding process. When someone has done good work, but the answers are unpopular, you can't yank their funding. If you do, you effectively silence them in the scientific community because the only way they can procede is to get funding from those who are biased the other way.
This is a major failing in the developed world's support of the sciences. We MUST support unpopular theories in order to be able to tear down established theory when/if better data comes along.
If someone could mod up the parent, that would be great.
The fact of the matter is that this precident could affect U.S. common law, as it derives from the same source. For it to apply, someone would have to use it as the basis for their case in a U.S. court, and the court would have to support its use. At that point, it becomes part of the common (or "case") law in the U.S., and other cases can simply reference it. This is why precident is so important in the courts. Much of the law that you think exists in a book that congress published is actually only recorded as common law based on precidents that pre-date the formation of the U.S. legal system.
"Business evil begets business evil. Personal evil dies alone."
Probably more often true than false, I agree. So the solution is to get these folks independent funding sources, regardless of the popularity of their previous results, based only on the quality of the science they wish to do, right? We want to prove or disprove our theories without bias, and only based on facts, right? Why then is the funing for someone who disagrees slashed? Why do way say "all credible scientists..." when many who disagree exist, but cannot secure funding?