The nomination data for the Hugos has been released. You can very clearly see the effects of bloc voting with the Puppy nominees, but there's no evidence of such "clustering" for other nominated works. If there was an SJW voting bloc that just turned out to be not as effective as the Puppies' block, we'd see it in the data. We don't. The bloc just isn't there. And, hell, if the Hugo awards were really "corrupt" the way some of the more strident Puppies claimed -- if it was really a small group of people who just "chose" the nominees -- then the Puppy bloc wouldn't have been successful. A truly corrupt cabal would have just said, "Yeah, whatever, here's your stories about gay marrying dinosaurs."
And, yes, it's absolutely true that "No Award" came in ahead of all Puppy nominees save Guardians of the Galaxy. That's not a sign of a bloc, though, it's a sign of thousands of science fiction fans getting really, really pissed at the Puppies. I'm sorry, but Hoyt's claim boils down to "The fact that Hugo voters didn't give awards to works we gamed the system to get on the ballot proves they were gaming the system all along." No. No, it doesn't. It proves that Hugo voters don't like having the system gamed.
While I agree with the last two sentences, it's worth noting two points which undercut your first two sentences rather dramatically:
(1) Taking BSD-licensed code and making a proprietary fork doesn't make the previous release magically go away; it makes a new fork. If I love the open source editor FooEdit and FooEdit has a vibrant community around it, then somebody else comes along and starts selling BarEdit based on their proprietary, closed source fork, I can either choose to switch to BarEdit and accept the risks, or keep using FooEdit. (And arguably that's not a binary proposition in the first place: I can switch to BarEdit and then switch back to FooEdit.) The worst case hypothetical is that somehow BarEdit's creation kills the FooEdit community, but in reality that seems very unlikely; in practice, I can't think of a single BSD-licensed project that this has happened to. Can you? Yes, it's possible that in my scenario BarEdit would get cool new features denied to FooEdit users, but if you're deliberately choosing your software based on its "openness" then you've already decided to forgo cool features that are only in proprietary software. Furthermore, you can hardly point to BarEdit and say, "those cool BarEdit-only features would be in FooEdit if only it had been under the GPL"; the more likely case is that BarEdit would simply never have existed.
(2) While the anonymous coward who responded with "ROFL" was perhaps unduly acerbic, his point is correct: an end user who can't debug and patch code is dependent on the developers to fix bugs regardless of the license the software she's using is under. As much as people don't like to hear this around these parts, I know an awful lot of end users who look for free software because it's free as in beer.
The RTF spec hasn't stayed simple because Word hasn't stayed simple. I think people have forgotten that RTF is maintained by Microsoft as the documented, non-binary version of Word files, and every time there's a new release of Word it's followed by a new release of the RTF spec.
And you certainly don't have to "reverse engineer" RTF -- you can download the spec from Microsoft. It's proprietary in that it's not an open specification, but it's not the dark mysterious pit of hell that the Word binary format is.
RTF can do (nearly?) everything that Microsoft Word itself can do, and absolutely nothing that Word cannot -- by design. It's Microsoft's own format and was designed to be the plaintext interchange format; they never documented the binary DOC file format, but always documented RTF -- you can get the RTF 1.9 spec from Microsoft's web site, which corresponds to Word 2007. Whether it's horrible is somewhat subjective, but it's certainly not dead.
And the Expose pretty much blows compared to your bog-standard workspace switchers on Linux.
Do you mean Expose or Spaces? Expose isn't a workspace switcher at all, it's just a weirdo visual effect to let you shrink all the windows on your current workspace down and switch between them. Spaces is, well, a bog-standard workspace switcher. Press a function key to see all the workspaces and drag windows between them, use ^1-^4 to switch between the spaces immediately (I only have 4 set, but you can set more if you're so inclined), click and hold on a window title and press the workspace control key to move the window directly there, add a dropdown for switching between spaces to your menu bar with optional names for the spaces, even "assign" applications to open in specific spaces by default.
I find the OS X interface to be mostly consistent and intuitive, but the last Ubuntu I used (8.04, I think) seemed to pretty much have its act together, and to be fair I think Windows Vista/7 does a pretty decent job. OS X is notably less consistent than OS 9 is, but I'd rather stab myself in the hand repeatedly with a fondue fork than use OS 9 for any length of time, so I think it's a fair tradeoff.
PC vendors would love to have Mac OS X on their PCs, and take Microsoft's foot off their neck. Apple won't allow that anytime soon.
This is something I've observed before, but it might bear repeating. Microsoft has a legendarily paranoid attitude toward competition: despite being the 800-ton gorilla they're always assuming any company that's in even indirect competition with them is out to get them, and ones in direct competition must be destroyed any way necessary. Computing history is full of examples of this, most notably relating to competing operating systems--look at DR-DOS and the incredibly restrictive licensing agreements that Microsoft required their OEMs/VARs to agree to, restricting their ability to preload other operating systems on PCs or even requiring OEMs to pay for every machine they sold whether or not the machines were preloaded with Windows if any machine they sold was preloaded. (BeOS' makers sued Microsoft over this a decade ago.)
Right now, Apple isn't seen as being "direct" competition by Microsoft precisely because Apple makes their own operating system for their own hardware, and Apple applications by and large only run on OS X. If Apple starts selling retail copies of OS X licensed to run on any PC, Microsoft's view of Apple changes. All Microsoft applications for OS X would be end-of-lifed faster than you can say "developers developers developers." Yes, that means Microsoft would see that revenue stream dry up--I don't think they'd care. Every technical and legal trick Microsoft can possibly pull to keep Windows from happily coexisting with OS X would get used. New proprietary network sharing protocols, licensing that prevents you from running Windows on a virtual machine on a non-Microsoft OS, you name it.
Am I saying Apple would never under any imaginable circumstance release OS X for non-Apple PCs? No. But I'm saying that Apple isn't going to do that unless they're really fucking sure they can get into an all-out war with Microsoft and win. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.
(And really, do you want it to? If you think Mac users are smug now, just imagine them if Apple did beat Microsoft in that kind of pissing contest.)
But given all *facts* in the story, there's really a world of difference between the chances of an actual JFK conspiracy and the chances of UFOs/bigfoot/whatever.
(A somewhat delayed response due to putting off my taxes until the last minute yesterday...) True enough. I think the real fallout of the Warren Commission's report is that it doesn't matter whether they were deliberately trying to cover something up or just did a rush job to get a sense of "closure" as quickly as possible; they made it all but impossible for anyone to definitively say "this is what happened, case closed," so people may well be puzzling over bullet fragments several generations from now.
The National Forensic Association is an intercollegiate debating organization. I doubt they have anything particularly important to say about the JFK assassination. There was a report by the National Academy of Sciences based on acoustical analysis of crime scene recordings, but it concluded that the multiple-shooter theory was not supported by the available acoustic evidence.
Perhaps you are thinking of a report by a Texas A&M professor of statistics and a retired FBI forensic scientist from 2007 who "conducted a chemical and forensic analysis of bullets reportedly derived from the same batch as those used by suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald." Their conclusion was that the bullet fragments aren't particularly rare and that the matching fragments could have come from three or more separate bullets, and that previous analysis based on bullet fragments "used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed."
The important thing to note here, conspiracy buffs, is that those two reports don't contradict one another. There could be a second shooter that wasn't captured by the acoustic evidence -- but likewise, matching fragments could have come from three or more separate bullets is not an equivalent statement to "matching fragments did come from three or more separate bullets."
It's also worth noting that, in fact, the report was not done by a "national association," it never made the sweeping claim that "the official story was impossible," and the report has been criticized for naive use of statistics and generally poor writing. According to critic John Fiorentino, the paper as finally presented in 2008 was revised to address his rebuttal linked above, and "by making the revisions, the authors have effectively negated their findings just as stated in [Fiorentino's] rebuttal."
There are many criticisms to be made of the Warren Commission's handling of the investigation, and I suspect that because of that there will be people arguing about this two hundred years from now. The problem is the same here as with nearly all Grand Government Conspiracy Stories, though: even if the official story (about whatever event we're talking about) is incomplete and imperfect, that doesn't ipso facto make the official story wrong in either overall scope or final conclusion. It's worthy to question authority and to be skeptical of any official story--but there is a point where skepticism becomes gullibility: someone who automatically dismisses anything The Government says is thinking no more critically than someone who automatically accepts anything The Government says, and is ultimately just as easy to manipulate.
It's only the interactions individuals have with big organizations that go badly that we hear about, because interactions that go well aren't newsworthy. It only takes a few moments of reflection from that point to realize that these bad interactions are, even with organizations that have widely-known terrible reputations (the DMV, Verizon, etc.), a very small fraction of the total interactions those organizations conduct. We tend to ignore the basic math of the situation: if 95% of an organization's customers rated its service as average or higher, if we ran that organization we'd consider that absolutely fantastic. Yet if we have a half a million customers, that means 25,000 people rated us below average.
Slashdot tends to attract libertarians of both the von Mises and the Chomsky sense of the word. The sort of amusing/exasperating thing is that the people who are really on those two ends of the libertarian spectrum are both ready to reply telling me I'm nuts for lumping them together--but it's remarkable how little work it would take with search-and-replace to turn an average rant on paleo-libertarian Lew Rockwell's web site into an average rant on lefter-than-thou Z-Net. Both sides conclude--arguably correctly--that concentrating power over great numbers of individuals in the hands of a privileged few is extremely dangerous to freedom, but one side believes that you fix that by restraining corporations as much as possible and the other side believes you fix it by restraining government as much as possible. Maybe I'm just not enlightened enough, but I'm not convinced either path actually leads to magical ponies.
Do you have any statistics which back up your implicit assertion that piracy is significant enough that it threatens the business of game companies?
I'm absolutely serious here: every game gets cracked by pirates anyway, so DRM is not effective at stopping piracy. It's not even effective at delaying piracy appreciably, from all reports I've seen. Yet game companies seem to by and large stay in business (and when they do go under, piracy is by and large not cited as the reason). It seems fairly evident, then, that
- DRM does not prevent piracy, its stated purpose; - Piracy is not significant enough to threaten the livelihood of game publishers; - DRM does massively inconvenience legal game buyers.
This would suggest to me that the idea that we need to "come up with something better" than DRM in order to "fight" it is fallacious. If DRM is not effective at doing what it's intended to do, but is effective at alienating your product's legitimate customers, there's no good argument for continuing to use it.
A shopkeeper who keeps hitting his customers in the face with a frying pan on the assumption that a non-zero number of them are trying to shoplift is not doing himself any good. "I'll keep doing it until you give me a better way to discourage thieves" is not a rational stance.
I believe the lie that lead to the impeachment was about Monica Lewinsky. Wrong adulterous affair.
In any case, it somewhat begs the question. I think the strongest case conservatives made was, essentially, the "rule of law" argument: our country doesn't have rulers, but has a system of law that no one, regardless of office, can be held to be above.
The question, however, is: do we really believe that, or not? Because the defense of the Clinton administration boiled down to, "Well, these laws weren't broken in any matter that relates to the function of the office," and the conservatives replied -- I think correctly -- that it doesn't matter. Yet the defense of the Bush administration's actions boil down to, "Well, as long as we can make a plausible argument that we're breaking these laws in the service of national security, we shouldn't be held accountable." Would any conservative buy that argument if it had been made by Clinton? His wife? John Kerry? Barack Obama? Unless the answer is, "I would have absolutely no problem giving a Hillary Clinton administration the same sweeping surveillance powers and immunity from oversight," I would argue that's a serious disconnect.
While I don't want to defend Fox News, per se, the "Fox BGH Suit" has nothing to do with the Fox News cable network; that was a local story in the Tampa Bay TV market. Having lived in Tampa Bay while all that was going on, it always struck me that there's somewhat less here than meets the eye. One of the issues that gets lost in hindsight is that the reporters who filed the suit, Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, well... let's say there may have been a lot of personality conflicts involved there with station management. (They go after reporter John Sugg for "smearing" them by writing articles about that, but frankly, if you compare what Sugg actually wrote in the Weekly Planet with what they say about Sugg, it's pretty clear who's really doing the smearing.)
If Fox News, the cable channel, has any serious flaws -- and I think that it does -- it's not because it's conservative, per se. It's because of two decisions they made in creating the network. One, they set out to counter a perceived bias in one direction in the media by actively biasing themselves to the other direction. You can argue about whether the mainstream media has (or had) a liberal bias, but there's a difference between a liberal (or conservative) reporter trying to honestly report unslanted news and letting their world view color that, and a liberal (or conservative) reporter consciously spinning the news. And two, Fox consciously emulated right-wing talk radio by giving over a huge portion of their airtime to opinion shows and giving their news "analysts" and even anchors free reign to editorialize. There's nothing wrong with opinion, but it ain't news. And when it's freely mixed with news, well, there is something wrong with it.
The inevitable result of these two things was creating a network that had the worst aspects of Pacifica Radio and the National Enquirer. And the probably just as inevitable corollary of their success here in Sound Bite Nation was pushing the other cable news networks toward more of the same. (Yes, I lean left. No, I am not particularly enthused by the prospect of MSNBC positioning themselves as "Fox News for the other side.")
$89K is not a high salary in this day in age...it is middle class...medium-low end of it really. The median household income for the U.S. as of 2006 was $48000. The median individual income was $26000. 71% of individual income earners in the United States earned less than $50K; 94% earned less than $100K. In point of fact, someone earning $89K has a higher income than 86% of the rest of the country.
I don't mean to pick on you, but you are pulling numbers out of your butt in a fashion that suggests that you really have no idea what the median income level is like for the vast majority of your fellow citizens. I suspect you pulled the $75K number out of thin air, too, rather than any actual presidential "rederick" going on, but the blunt truth is that to most of America, $75K a year is a whole lot of money.
(Incidentally, the rhetoric tends to be about letting Bush's previous tax cuts, which were written into law as temporary measures, go ahead and expire. Describing that as "raising taxes" is a little disingenuous.)
What's the point of setting up all the shell scripts and cron jobs if you have to babysit them? Maybe the problem with stereotypical conceptions of God is that they tacitly assume he has OCD.
What tech advantage do non-OS tools have to justify their price? I think that's actually the key here. It doesn't matter if the free tools are better than the non-free ones as long as the free tools are functionally equivalent to the non-free ones. If you don't feel like you're losing anything (other than perhaps the learning curve) and the free stuff is, well, free, your motivation to buy the commercial equivalent is severely limited.
There's an interesting corollary in that: for the majority of users, "free as in beer" may be more important than "free as in speech." Most of us don't like to put it that baldly, but if there was some kind of scenario in which using the closed-source software cost us less than using the source-available software, a large chunk of us would likely go for the former. And indeed in cases where the closed-source equivalent makes up for its price in terms of functionality, ease-of-use, and/or support, we see this happen.
Personally, I have no problem supporting closed source shareware authors; I'm reasonably comfortable with both Vim and Emacs, but my editor of choice is TextMate, which (strictly speaking for myself) gives me a good chunk of Emacs' flexibility in what I consider to be a substantially friendlier package. TextMate is an interesting counterexample to the point of this story, in fact -- it's a fairly thriving closed-source editor with a strong community about it, which I attribute in part to having a reasonable price (paying $50 for an editor is one thing, but paying $200 or more is quite another) and in part to having a beautifully designed model for extensions (syntax highlighting through CSS-like markup, easy hooks to let you write new commands and behaviors in any shell scripting language). To me (and obviously others), TextMate justifies its price in terms of usability. I've unquestionably saved more than two hours of time over the last year coding with it instead of Emacs or Eclipse, which means it's already paid for itself. (I might quip that I've probably saved two hours of time over the last year that would have been spent waiting for Emacs or Eclipse to load, but that would be uncharitable.)
(which happened a lot in the sixties and seventies since pedophilia was quite fasionable, especially in high society "artistic" circles) To use a phrase which seems quite appropriate in the context of this discussion, [citation needed]. This is a hell of a claim that, with all due respect, needs a lot more backing up than "oh, everybody knows that."
I suspect I'm engaging in troll-feeding here, but:
I want my pull-down menus at the top of my windows, but they are so confident that being able to bump your mouse against the top of the screen is a better UI design that they absolutely refuse to give me the option. Neither of these approaches are materially "better," they're just different, and it's not as if merely adding a checkbox to a system preferences box for this would be sufficient. There are a lot of implicit assumptions in designing your application windows that change if that window has a menu in it. You may not particularly like the choice Apple made, but they made it over two decades ago, and bluntly, the "menus attached to windows" approach you're used to is because Microsoft made that choice about two decades ago -- in no small part to differentiate themselves from Apple. (And if you're using a Unix window manager newer than, say, twm, it's Microsoft's lead being followed.)
I want a second mouse button, but they know that the second button leads to UI confusion, so they will not give me an option to turn on support for another button. Given that you've been able to "turn on support for another button" on Macs by, you know, plugging in a multi-button mouse for the last fifteen years or so, I'm generously assuming you're not aware that you're speaking out of your butt.
I want to run on hardware that I built myself, but they know I'm better off running on their hardware so they won't let me. One can argue whether it's helpful or harmful for Apple to protect their hardware market share by locking the OS to Apple-branded machines, but that argument has precisely nothing to do with user interface choices, which is kind of what we were talking about here.
Just because something is the "right way" for you, doesn't mean that it is the right way for me. We aren't identical, after all. At some point it's not realistic to try to cater to all users with every possible preference. The original poster is fundamentally correct, I'd argue: part of good user interface design (some would say the most important part, in fact) is knowing when it's appropriate to give a user a choice in UI behavior, and "whenever possible" is not the correct answer. Giving a choice between multiple affordances that have no practical advantage over makes power users happy, but mostly by increasing their comfort level, not productivity, at the expense of having an increasingly confusing interface.
The thing is, though, that's not what's being done here. This isn't taking away options in Pigdin, whether necessary or not. It's changing the UI behavior to no obvious benefit. This isn't really good UI design, either: they're not changing behavior in the pursuit of radical new shifts they think will lead to productivity in the long run (c.f. Microsoft Office's new "ribbon" interface), they're just changing it because enough of the core developers think this is better. It isn't better or worse, it's just different. If the input box had always resized automatically with no manual change ability, and it was replaced with a new text box that was manually resizable but no longer had automatic resizing, we'd still be seeing people pulling their hair out and threatening to fork over it.
Ironically, as much as Apple tends to be the poster child for "our way is the right way" interfaces, they have one of the better mechanisms for this sort of "power user preference" I've seen -- a way to change hidden preferences with a command line tool. The sort of user who wants that kind of change (which I occasionally am) will find it, but the 95% of users who really don't give a damn won't see it.
Yes, if the authorities start doing this routinely -- or even just when someone matches a "profile," or is singled out purely for statistical sampling purposes -- they're going to find illegal material. The question is whether that justifies giving officials the legal authority to run a search algorithm on any and all data that happens to go through a security checkpoint.
Right to search is right to search. That may well be, but it's legitimate to ask whether that rule needs to be adapted to changing technology. JThink about everything that a scan of that hard drive reveals about you. All your documents, all the applications you have, all the images you have, all your bookmarks, even everything in your browser cache. What's this include for you? Correspondence? Personal diaries? Financial records? Evidence of technically legal but "weird" kinks? Your various political and religious affiliations? Your briefcase of twenty years ago wouldn't reveal a fraction of this information -- and now, it's trivial for authorities to make a complete copy of all that information to analyze thoroughly at their leisure.
I'm aware there's a common "you only have to worry about that if you have something to hide" response, but I'd like to turn that around and suggest that you only don't have to worry if you have complete trust in the authorities, all the way up the chain of command, not to abuse collected information.
It can hugely hurt the economy, imposing restrictions that usually do more harm to the environment than good. It demonizes manufacturers, the American people, and any wealthy country. This is an oft-repeated accusation, but here's something to think about: just as the environmentalists have their Deep Pessimists ("nothing we can do will fix the problem we're all going to die," essentially), the other side has its equivalent, which is basically "fixing this problem will cost so much it will destroy the world economy, so shut up." The former group gets knocked about, often rightfully, for their bad predictions, but what about the latter group? I don't know how old you are, but I was around for the 1970s, when we were told that the changes in production required to repair the ozone hole would bankrupt companies and destroy the world economy etc. etc. It turned out, though: not so much. In fact, businesses say "this regulation will destroy our industry" all the time. We've been told that about pollution regulations on power plants and on just about every mandated change in the auto industry, from seat belts to air bags to increased fuel mileage.
The "worst case scenarios" for global climate change may be overstated, but keep in mind that the past track record of the groups saying we can't do anything about this because it'll bankrupt us all! is very, very bad.
Another minor but "thing to think about" point here: the best way to address pollution of all kinds, including greenhouse gases, is to make processes more efficient. Everything that goes up the smokestack or out the exhaust pipe is definitionally waste. In the long run, going green saves businesses money.
I heard on the radio (they speaking about a clip from Dateline NBC) this morning that the socialist Bolivian president plans on filing suit against wealthy countries to make up for the fact that the glacier that they get their drinking water from is melting due to "global warming". And I'm sure Hugo Chavez wants a pony, too.
Don't apologize for the snark; it's actually a very valid question. There are examples of filtering and interpreting evidence so as to favor a given viewpoint in the publishing of even ostensibly peer-reviewed scientific papers, but these examples are nearly always driven by money, not by ideology: a pharmaceutical company or an oil company or a tobacco company funds research on a new drug or on climate change or on smoking, and darned if that research doesn't support the company's position.
However, the idea that there's an irrational, conspiratorial bias against challenges to the theory of evolution is, to be very polite, dubious. Researchers who cast serious doubt on evolutionary theory using the scientific method, producing results that were consistent and repeatable, would surely get a whole lot of flak at first -- but they'd eventually be given Nobel prizes. That's the kind of thing that makes careers. The kind of thing that destroys careers is making extraordinary claims that fall apart under testing -- or, as in the case of intelligent design, making extraordinary claims that can't be tested at all.
In a lot of ways, ID uses the same "logic" as any classic conspiracy theory: searching the "accepted truth" for any (apparently) unexplained gaps and shrieking Ah-HA! This disproves it all! Trying to fight these theories is a tedious and dispiriting proposition; you often have to try to bring your opponent up to speed on knowledge they'd need to have (and accept) to examine the evidence critically, and they're far from a receptive audience. And even if you manage that, there's going to be another "gap" they can find. And another. And if you have to eventually try and explain that data which isn't accounted by the theory is not the same as predicting a specific outcome which turns out to be wrong? Good luck with that.
FNMRM and FNMRR are terrible acronyms! But setting that aside, "LAMP" and its derivatives are basically describing the "OS, Web Server, Database, and Language/Framework" stack. None of what you've mentioned are databases, which is a little ironic when it's coming up in a thread about, you know, a database server.:)
I'm not sure the phrase "inalienable rights" was ever used with respect to the Bill of Rights, specifically. I'm not (just) being nitpicky -- I think the Founders saw these rights as important, but I'm not sure they saw them as something intrinsic to the human condition that the State was bound to recognize.
The Second Amendment in particular I think it's harder to make that case for; people argue a lot over the definition of "militia" and "well-regulated" and even "infringe," but the clearest language in the amendment is its rationale: that it's necessary to the security of a free State. I think an earlier commenter hit the nail on the head when he said the "militia" in the Second Amendment was the polar opposite of the professional standing army we have now: the Second was intended as a bulwark against the imperialism and potential tyranny of having a military state. It wasn't directly intended as a way for the people to rise up against the government; the only federal crime enumerated in the Constitution is, well, rising up against the government. (This isn't to say the Founders didn't recognize the possibility, obviously, but the British government they were rising up against had no equivalent to the Second Amendment. This just isn't something you put into law.)
The big problem on a practical level with this idea of the "people's revolt" is that now that we have a professional standing army with access to weaponry far greater than what the citizenry has access to, they'd better be on the side of the revolution. We tend to romanticize the Minutemen defeating the British Army in the late 1700s, but we gloss over the points that we not only had access to roughly equivalent armament, we had help from other well-equipped, professional fighting forces. And at this point, even a repeat of that help is less likely to either happen or to be effective, given that America outspends the rest of the world combined on military matters. If a future apocalyptic showdown in America was pretty much between the Armed Forces and a wide-ranging collective of gun clubs and "citizen militia" groups, my suspicion is that it would not go very well for the latter.
This is coming across as a bit grimmer than I really set out for it to be.:)
Most Mac owners do, however, know the difference between "populous" and "populace." Helpful tip: when you're trying to blast another group of people for being fools and idiots, make sure the barrel of the gun you're firing is pointed away from your own foot.
Minor nitpick: while I know Monster has excessive cable lines designed to take as much money from you as you're willing to part with, you can buy their standard analog interconnects for $20, and their standard speaker wire (unterminated) for about 60 cents a foot. You can still certainly beat those prices for comparable quality cabling, but this idea that they're the poster child brand for audiophiles gone wild is simply wrong.
And no offense, but anyone who brings up coat hanger wire is welcome to wire their own system with it. I'm pretty sure that in a blind test I'll be able to tell the difference: the one that's got a guy behind it going GODDAMMIT, BEND! STAY IN THAT JACK! NO, CHRIST, DON'T BLOW THE FUSE AGAIN! OH, F--K is the one that's wired with coat hangers.
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The nomination data for the Hugos has been released. You can very clearly see the effects of bloc voting with the Puppy nominees, but there's no evidence of such "clustering" for other nominated works. If there was an SJW voting bloc that just turned out to be not as effective as the Puppies' block, we'd see it in the data. We don't. The bloc just isn't there. And, hell, if the Hugo awards were really "corrupt" the way some of the more strident Puppies claimed -- if it was really a small group of people who just "chose" the nominees -- then the Puppy bloc wouldn't have been successful. A truly corrupt cabal would have just said, "Yeah, whatever, here's your stories about gay marrying dinosaurs."
And, yes, it's absolutely true that "No Award" came in ahead of all Puppy nominees save Guardians of the Galaxy. That's not a sign of a bloc, though, it's a sign of thousands of science fiction fans getting really, really pissed at the Puppies. I'm sorry, but Hoyt's claim boils down to "The fact that Hugo voters didn't give awards to works we gamed the system to get on the ballot proves they were gaming the system all along." No. No, it doesn't. It proves that Hugo voters don't like having the system gamed.
While I agree with the last two sentences, it's worth noting two points which undercut your first two sentences rather dramatically:
(1) Taking BSD-licensed code and making a proprietary fork doesn't make the previous release magically go away; it makes a new fork. If I love the open source editor FooEdit and FooEdit has a vibrant community around it, then somebody else comes along and starts selling BarEdit based on their proprietary, closed source fork, I can either choose to switch to BarEdit and accept the risks, or keep using FooEdit. (And arguably that's not a binary proposition in the first place: I can switch to BarEdit and then switch back to FooEdit.) The worst case hypothetical is that somehow BarEdit's creation kills the FooEdit community, but in reality that seems very unlikely; in practice, I can't think of a single BSD-licensed project that this has happened to. Can you? Yes, it's possible that in my scenario BarEdit would get cool new features denied to FooEdit users, but if you're deliberately choosing your software based on its "openness" then you've already decided to forgo cool features that are only in proprietary software. Furthermore, you can hardly point to BarEdit and say, "those cool BarEdit-only features would be in FooEdit if only it had been under the GPL"; the more likely case is that BarEdit would simply never have existed.
(2) While the anonymous coward who responded with "ROFL" was perhaps unduly acerbic, his point is correct: an end user who can't debug and patch code is dependent on the developers to fix bugs regardless of the license the software she's using is under. As much as people don't like to hear this around these parts, I know an awful lot of end users who look for free software because it's free as in beer.
The RTF spec hasn't stayed simple because Word hasn't stayed simple. I think people have forgotten that RTF is maintained by Microsoft as the documented, non-binary version of Word files, and every time there's a new release of Word it's followed by a new release of the RTF spec.
And you certainly don't have to "reverse engineer" RTF -- you can download the spec from Microsoft. It's proprietary in that it's not an open specification, but it's not the dark mysterious pit of hell that the Word binary format is.
RTF can do (nearly?) everything that Microsoft Word itself can do, and absolutely nothing that Word cannot -- by design. It's Microsoft's own format and was designed to be the plaintext interchange format; they never documented the binary DOC file format, but always documented RTF -- you can get the RTF 1.9 spec from Microsoft's web site, which corresponds to Word 2007. Whether it's horrible is somewhat subjective, but it's certainly not dead.
And the Expose pretty much blows compared to your bog-standard workspace switchers on Linux.
Do you mean Expose or Spaces? Expose isn't a workspace switcher at all, it's just a weirdo visual effect to let you shrink all the windows on your current workspace down and switch between them. Spaces is, well, a bog-standard workspace switcher. Press a function key to see all the workspaces and drag windows between them, use ^1-^4 to switch between the spaces immediately (I only have 4 set, but you can set more if you're so inclined), click and hold on a window title and press the workspace control key to move the window directly there, add a dropdown for switching between spaces to your menu bar with optional names for the spaces, even "assign" applications to open in specific spaces by default.
I find the OS X interface to be mostly consistent and intuitive, but the last Ubuntu I used (8.04, I think) seemed to pretty much have its act together, and to be fair I think Windows Vista/7 does a pretty decent job. OS X is notably less consistent than OS 9 is, but I'd rather stab myself in the hand repeatedly with a fondue fork than use OS 9 for any length of time, so I think it's a fair tradeoff.
PC vendors would love to have Mac OS X on their PCs, and take Microsoft's foot off their neck. Apple won't allow that anytime soon.
This is something I've observed before, but it might bear repeating. Microsoft has a legendarily paranoid attitude toward competition: despite being the 800-ton gorilla they're always assuming any company that's in even indirect competition with them is out to get them, and ones in direct competition must be destroyed any way necessary. Computing history is full of examples of this, most notably relating to competing operating systems--look at DR-DOS and the incredibly restrictive licensing agreements that Microsoft required their OEMs/VARs to agree to, restricting their ability to preload other operating systems on PCs or even requiring OEMs to pay for every machine they sold whether or not the machines were preloaded with Windows if any machine they sold was preloaded. (BeOS' makers sued Microsoft over this a decade ago.)
Right now, Apple isn't seen as being "direct" competition by Microsoft precisely because Apple makes their own operating system for their own hardware, and Apple applications by and large only run on OS X. If Apple starts selling retail copies of OS X licensed to run on any PC, Microsoft's view of Apple changes. All Microsoft applications for OS X would be end-of-lifed faster than you can say "developers developers developers." Yes, that means Microsoft would see that revenue stream dry up--I don't think they'd care. Every technical and legal trick Microsoft can possibly pull to keep Windows from happily coexisting with OS X would get used. New proprietary network sharing protocols, licensing that prevents you from running Windows on a virtual machine on a non-Microsoft OS, you name it.
Am I saying Apple would never under any imaginable circumstance release OS X for non-Apple PCs? No. But I'm saying that Apple isn't going to do that unless they're really fucking sure they can get into an all-out war with Microsoft and win. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.
(And really, do you want it to? If you think Mac users are smug now, just imagine them if Apple did beat Microsoft in that kind of pissing contest.)
(A somewhat delayed response due to putting off my taxes until the last minute yesterday...) True enough. I think the real fallout of the Warren Commission's report is that it doesn't matter whether they were deliberately trying to cover something up or just did a rush job to get a sense of "closure" as quickly as possible; they made it all but impossible for anyone to definitively say "this is what happened, case closed," so people may well be puzzling over bullet fragments several generations from now.
The National Forensic Association is an intercollegiate debating organization. I doubt they have anything particularly important to say about the JFK assassination. There was a report by the National Academy of Sciences based on acoustical analysis of crime scene recordings, but it concluded that the multiple-shooter theory was not supported by the available acoustic evidence.
Perhaps you are thinking of a report by a Texas A&M professor of statistics and a retired FBI forensic scientist from 2007 who "conducted a chemical and forensic analysis of bullets reportedly derived from the same batch as those used by suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald." Their conclusion was that the bullet fragments aren't particularly rare and that the matching fragments could have come from three or more separate bullets, and that previous analysis based on bullet fragments "used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed."
The important thing to note here, conspiracy buffs, is that those two reports don't contradict one another. There could be a second shooter that wasn't captured by the acoustic evidence -- but likewise, matching fragments could have come from three or more separate bullets is not an equivalent statement to "matching fragments did come from three or more separate bullets."
It's also worth noting that, in fact, the report was not done by a "national association," it never made the sweeping claim that "the official story was impossible," and the report has been criticized for naive use of statistics and generally poor writing. According to critic John Fiorentino, the paper as finally presented in 2008 was revised to address his rebuttal linked above, and "by making the revisions, the authors have effectively negated their findings just as stated in [Fiorentino's] rebuttal."
There are many criticisms to be made of the Warren Commission's handling of the investigation, and I suspect that because of that there will be people arguing about this two hundred years from now. The problem is the same here as with nearly all Grand Government Conspiracy Stories, though: even if the official story (about whatever event we're talking about) is incomplete and imperfect, that doesn't ipso facto make the official story wrong in either overall scope or final conclusion. It's worthy to question authority and to be skeptical of any official story--but there is a point where skepticism becomes gullibility: someone who automatically dismisses anything The Government says is thinking no more critically than someone who automatically accepts anything The Government says, and is ultimately just as easy to manipulate.
It's only the interactions individuals have with big organizations that go badly that we hear about, because interactions that go well aren't newsworthy. It only takes a few moments of reflection from that point to realize that these bad interactions are, even with organizations that have widely-known terrible reputations (the DMV, Verizon, etc.), a very small fraction of the total interactions those organizations conduct. We tend to ignore the basic math of the situation: if 95% of an organization's customers rated its service as average or higher, if we ran that organization we'd consider that absolutely fantastic. Yet if we have a half a million customers, that means 25,000 people rated us below average.
Slashdot tends to attract libertarians of both the von Mises and the Chomsky sense of the word. The sort of amusing/exasperating thing is that the people who are really on those two ends of the libertarian spectrum are both ready to reply telling me I'm nuts for lumping them together--but it's remarkable how little work it would take with search-and-replace to turn an average rant on paleo-libertarian Lew Rockwell's web site into an average rant on lefter-than-thou Z-Net. Both sides conclude--arguably correctly--that concentrating power over great numbers of individuals in the hands of a privileged few is extremely dangerous to freedom, but one side believes that you fix that by restraining corporations as much as possible and the other side believes you fix it by restraining government as much as possible. Maybe I'm just not enlightened enough, but I'm not convinced either path actually leads to magical ponies.
Do you have any statistics which back up your implicit assertion that piracy is significant enough that it threatens the business of game companies?
I'm absolutely serious here: every game gets cracked by pirates anyway, so DRM is not effective at stopping piracy. It's not even effective at delaying piracy appreciably, from all reports I've seen. Yet game companies seem to by and large stay in business (and when they do go under, piracy is by and large not cited as the reason). It seems fairly evident, then, that
- DRM does not prevent piracy, its stated purpose;
- Piracy is not significant enough to threaten the livelihood of game publishers;
- DRM does massively inconvenience legal game buyers.
This would suggest to me that the idea that we need to "come up with something better" than DRM in order to "fight" it is fallacious. If DRM is not effective at doing what it's intended to do, but is effective at alienating your product's legitimate customers, there's no good argument for continuing to use it.
A shopkeeper who keeps hitting his customers in the face with a frying pan on the assumption that a non-zero number of them are trying to shoplift is not doing himself any good. "I'll keep doing it until you give me a better way to discourage thieves" is not a rational stance.
I believe the lie that lead to the impeachment was about Monica Lewinsky. Wrong adulterous affair.
In any case, it somewhat begs the question. I think the strongest case conservatives made was, essentially, the "rule of law" argument: our country doesn't have rulers, but has a system of law that no one, regardless of office, can be held to be above.
The question, however, is: do we really believe that, or not? Because the defense of the Clinton administration boiled down to, "Well, these laws weren't broken in any matter that relates to the function of the office," and the conservatives replied -- I think correctly -- that it doesn't matter. Yet the defense of the Bush administration's actions boil down to, "Well, as long as we can make a plausible argument that we're breaking these laws in the service of national security, we shouldn't be held accountable." Would any conservative buy that argument if it had been made by Clinton? His wife? John Kerry? Barack Obama? Unless the answer is, "I would have absolutely no problem giving a Hillary Clinton administration the same sweeping surveillance powers and immunity from oversight," I would argue that's a serious disconnect.
While I don't want to defend Fox News, per se, the "Fox BGH Suit" has nothing to do with the Fox News cable network; that was a local story in the Tampa Bay TV market. Having lived in Tampa Bay while all that was going on, it always struck me that there's somewhat less here than meets the eye. One of the issues that gets lost in hindsight is that the reporters who filed the suit, Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, well... let's say there may have been a lot of personality conflicts involved there with station management. (They go after reporter John Sugg for "smearing" them by writing articles about that, but frankly, if you compare what Sugg actually wrote in the Weekly Planet with what they say about Sugg, it's pretty clear who's really doing the smearing.)
If Fox News, the cable channel, has any serious flaws -- and I think that it does -- it's not because it's conservative, per se. It's because of two decisions they made in creating the network. One, they set out to counter a perceived bias in one direction in the media by actively biasing themselves to the other direction. You can argue about whether the mainstream media has (or had) a liberal bias, but there's a difference between a liberal (or conservative) reporter trying to honestly report unslanted news and letting their world view color that, and a liberal (or conservative) reporter consciously spinning the news. And two, Fox consciously emulated right-wing talk radio by giving over a huge portion of their airtime to opinion shows and giving their news "analysts" and even anchors free reign to editorialize. There's nothing wrong with opinion, but it ain't news. And when it's freely mixed with news, well, there is something wrong with it.
The inevitable result of these two things was creating a network that had the worst aspects of Pacifica Radio and the National Enquirer. And the probably just as inevitable corollary of their success here in Sound Bite Nation was pushing the other cable news networks toward more of the same. (Yes, I lean left. No, I am not particularly enthused by the prospect of MSNBC positioning themselves as "Fox News for the other side.")
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States
I don't mean to pick on you, but you are pulling numbers out of your butt in a fashion that suggests that you really have no idea what the median income level is like for the vast majority of your fellow citizens. I suspect you pulled the $75K number out of thin air, too, rather than any actual presidential "rederick" going on, but the blunt truth is that to most of America, $75K a year is a whole lot of money.
(Incidentally, the rhetoric tends to be about letting Bush's previous tax cuts, which were written into law as temporary measures, go ahead and expire. Describing that as "raising taxes" is a little disingenuous.)
What's the point of setting up all the shell scripts and cron jobs if you have to babysit them? Maybe the problem with stereotypical conceptions of God is that they tacitly assume he has OCD.
There's an interesting corollary in that: for the majority of users, "free as in beer" may be more important than "free as in speech." Most of us don't like to put it that baldly, but if there was some kind of scenario in which using the closed-source software cost us less than using the source-available software, a large chunk of us would likely go for the former. And indeed in cases where the closed-source equivalent makes up for its price in terms of functionality, ease-of-use, and/or support, we see this happen.
Personally, I have no problem supporting closed source shareware authors; I'm reasonably comfortable with both Vim and Emacs, but my editor of choice is TextMate, which (strictly speaking for myself) gives me a good chunk of Emacs' flexibility in what I consider to be a substantially friendlier package. TextMate is an interesting counterexample to the point of this story, in fact -- it's a fairly thriving closed-source editor with a strong community about it, which I attribute in part to having a reasonable price (paying $50 for an editor is one thing, but paying $200 or more is quite another) and in part to having a beautifully designed model for extensions (syntax highlighting through CSS-like markup, easy hooks to let you write new commands and behaviors in any shell scripting language). To me (and obviously others), TextMate justifies its price in terms of usability. I've unquestionably saved more than two hours of time over the last year coding with it instead of Emacs or Eclipse, which means it's already paid for itself. (I might quip that I've probably saved two hours of time over the last year that would have been spent waiting for Emacs or Eclipse to load, but that would be uncharitable.)
The thing is, though, that's not what's being done here. This isn't taking away options in Pigdin, whether necessary or not. It's changing the UI behavior to no obvious benefit. This isn't really good UI design, either: they're not changing behavior in the pursuit of radical new shifts they think will lead to productivity in the long run (c.f. Microsoft Office's new "ribbon" interface), they're just changing it because enough of the core developers think this is better. It isn't better or worse, it's just different. If the input box had always resized automatically with no manual change ability, and it was replaced with a new text box that was manually resizable but no longer had automatic resizing, we'd still be seeing people pulling their hair out and threatening to fork over it.
Ironically, as much as Apple tends to be the poster child for "our way is the right way" interfaces, they have one of the better mechanisms for this sort of "power user preference" I've seen -- a way to change hidden preferences with a command line tool. The sort of user who wants that kind of change (which I occasionally am) will find it, but the 95% of users who really don't give a damn won't see it.
I'm aware there's a common "you only have to worry about that if you have something to hide" response, but I'd like to turn that around and suggest that you only don't have to worry if you have complete trust in the authorities, all the way up the chain of command, not to abuse collected information.
So do you? Completely?
The "worst case scenarios" for global climate change may be overstated, but keep in mind that the past track record of the groups saying we can't do anything about this because it'll bankrupt us all! is very, very bad.
Another minor but "thing to think about" point here: the best way to address pollution of all kinds, including greenhouse gases, is to make processes more efficient. Everything that goes up the smokestack or out the exhaust pipe is definitionally waste. In the long run, going green saves businesses money. I heard on the radio (they speaking about a clip from Dateline NBC) this morning that the socialist Bolivian president plans on filing suit against wealthy countries to make up for the fact that the glacier that they get their drinking water from is melting due to "global warming". And I'm sure Hugo Chavez wants a pony, too.
Don't apologize for the snark; it's actually a very valid question. There are examples of filtering and interpreting evidence so as to favor a given viewpoint in the publishing of even ostensibly peer-reviewed scientific papers, but these examples are nearly always driven by money, not by ideology: a pharmaceutical company or an oil company or a tobacco company funds research on a new drug or on climate change or on smoking, and darned if that research doesn't support the company's position.
However, the idea that there's an irrational, conspiratorial bias against challenges to the theory of evolution is, to be very polite, dubious. Researchers who cast serious doubt on evolutionary theory using the scientific method, producing results that were consistent and repeatable, would surely get a whole lot of flak at first -- but they'd eventually be given Nobel prizes. That's the kind of thing that makes careers. The kind of thing that destroys careers is making extraordinary claims that fall apart under testing -- or, as in the case of intelligent design, making extraordinary claims that can't be tested at all.
In a lot of ways, ID uses the same "logic" as any classic conspiracy theory: searching the "accepted truth" for any (apparently) unexplained gaps and shrieking Ah-HA! This disproves it all! Trying to fight these theories is a tedious and dispiriting proposition; you often have to try to bring your opponent up to speed on knowledge they'd need to have (and accept) to examine the evidence critically, and they're far from a receptive audience. And even if you manage that, there's going to be another "gap" they can find. And another. And if you have to eventually try and explain that data which isn't accounted by the theory is not the same as predicting a specific outcome which turns out to be wrong? Good luck with that.
FNMRM and FNMRR are terrible acronyms! But setting that aside, "LAMP" and its derivatives are basically describing the "OS, Web Server, Database, and Language/Framework" stack. None of what you've mentioned are databases, which is a little ironic when it's coming up in a thread about, you know, a database server. :)
I'm not sure the phrase "inalienable rights" was ever used with respect to the Bill of Rights, specifically. I'm not (just) being nitpicky -- I think the Founders saw these rights as important, but I'm not sure they saw them as something intrinsic to the human condition that the State was bound to recognize.
:)
The Second Amendment in particular I think it's harder to make that case for; people argue a lot over the definition of "militia" and "well-regulated" and even "infringe," but the clearest language in the amendment is its rationale: that it's necessary to the security of a free State. I think an earlier commenter hit the nail on the head when he said the "militia" in the Second Amendment was the polar opposite of the professional standing army we have now: the Second was intended as a bulwark against the imperialism and potential tyranny of having a military state. It wasn't directly intended as a way for the people to rise up against the government; the only federal crime enumerated in the Constitution is, well, rising up against the government. (This isn't to say the Founders didn't recognize the possibility, obviously, but the British government they were rising up against had no equivalent to the Second Amendment. This just isn't something you put into law.)
The big problem on a practical level with this idea of the "people's revolt" is that now that we have a professional standing army with access to weaponry far greater than what the citizenry has access to, they'd better be on the side of the revolution. We tend to romanticize the Minutemen defeating the British Army in the late 1700s, but we gloss over the points that we not only had access to roughly equivalent armament, we had help from other well-equipped, professional fighting forces. And at this point, even a repeat of that help is less likely to either happen or to be effective, given that America outspends the rest of the world combined on military matters. If a future apocalyptic showdown in America was pretty much between the Armed Forces and a wide-ranging collective of gun clubs and "citizen militia" groups, my suspicion is that it would not go very well for the latter.
This is coming across as a bit grimmer than I really set out for it to be.
Most Mac owners do, however, know the difference between "populous" and "populace." Helpful tip: when you're trying to blast another group of people for being fools and idiots, make sure the barrel of the gun you're firing is pointed away from your own foot.
Minor nitpick: while I know Monster has excessive cable lines designed to take as much money from you as you're willing to part with, you can buy their standard analog interconnects for $20, and their standard speaker wire (unterminated) for about 60 cents a foot. You can still certainly beat those prices for comparable quality cabling, but this idea that they're the poster child brand for audiophiles gone wild is simply wrong.
And no offense, but anyone who brings up coat hanger wire is welcome to wire their own system with it. I'm pretty sure that in a blind test I'll be able to tell the difference: the one that's got a guy behind it going GODDAMMIT, BEND! STAY IN THAT JACK! NO, CHRIST, DON'T BLOW THE FUSE AGAIN! OH, F--K is the one that's wired with coat hangers.